Demon Clown Baby

So I have a costume party to go to, and I was going to put on my robe and wizard hat, except that costumes having to do with supernatural or religious elements are discouraged. I’m religious but I don’t have a problem with fiction, but some people do and I don’t disrespect that.

I couldn’t come up with anything else that I both liked and thought practical. Constraints were that it couldn’t be too hot (small house, lots of people), and couldn’t be too bulky (I’ll have a lot of baby wrangling to do).

So I ruled out my Matrix coat (which really only looks good while carrying a sword, hard to do indoors) and my Renaissance cloak (look, I don’t dress like this year round, so don’t get judgmental because I own these items from previous years!).

That left my Dr. McNinja costume from 2 years ago. I hadn’t wanted to do it again because I didn’t want to have to cover my face the whole time.

But I have a better Ninja mask now. My previous one didn’t fit and wasn’t made well, a cheap Halloween kid’s mask actually, and I ended up using velcro stuck to my forehead and cheeks to actually keep in in place, so my hair didn’t show and my face was kept hidden. It meant it was sorta delicate and needed readjustment a few times, especially because it was actually in two pieces, a hood and then a face mask, almost just a veil.

Anyway, I got a better once since then, which fits, and is all one piece, so I will be able to pull it down quickly and eat something and it’ll snap back into place, without compromising my secret identity.

So that’s what I’ll be for the party, anyway. There’ll be a lot of kids so I won’t carry my real sword, but I’ll have a bokken.

But while my wife was trying to help me pick a costume, she found a Renaissancy type shirt and said with a little work I could have a pirate costume. “But… I can’t be a pirate… pirates are my mortal enemies” I told her, completely straight, with just a touch of whiny. She proceeded to fall face first on the bed and try to suffocate herself. “But the Internet told me so…” I continued to whinge, and she only pressed her face down harder.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a ninja.

Note to husbands: sneaking home from work, coming in the back door while your wife is in the other room, placing the baby on the floor to make it seem like she fell out of bed, then going back to work to wait for your wife’s frantic call: Not Funny.

The Firehouse Grill in South San Francisco, CA. They have twice sent fax spam to my company. Fax spam! And it’s not advertising penny stocks or Viagra or whatever. It’s just a real spam for their stupid restaurant, just a few miles away.

What kind of idiotic people run that restaurant, that they think it’s acceptable to send unsolicited FAXES to local businesses?

Send us regular postal junk mail, I don’t mind throwing it away. I might even read it. I don’t mind postal mail, because there’s usually not that much of it and it doesn’t cost me anything.

But email spam isn’t paid for by the sender. It’s paid for by all of us. ISPs have to have more mail servers, more techs, and spend more time dealing with it. I know people who spend an hour a day fighting their spam.

Fax spam actually steals paper and ink from people! (Not us, we have a computer answer the fax machine, ha hah.) Why in the world would I give money to a business that tried to cost me money in the form of paper and ink?

And you know what? They weren’t even faxing a coupon. Just a “here’s how great we are” letter somebody threw together in Wordpad or something.

I wrote “Fax spam is bad!” and faxed it right back to them.