Good Rubbish

HEADLINERS AND ALSO-RANS

2011-04-24T14:51:00.000-07:00

As devoted readers of my precious blog will surely recall, I purchased myself a pickem-up truck some 9 months ago. I've come to call her Dutch, though she might not actually be a woman. Honestly I have no idea, and I don't care to find out the truth of the matter. Regardless, this is what "she" looks like:

Though Dutch is really in pretty great aesthetic shape considering her vintage (1992), the headliner in the cab was starting to sag as a result of occasional intrusions of water from the roof and a constant barrage of gravity from the cosmos, so I decided to call up my go-to automotive repair buddy Danger Dan to help me replace it.

This, as they say in the industry, is Danger Dan. He's a crusty old east coaster. Hails from Allegheny, PA to be exact. Known him a great many years, I have. And one time, he done wrastled himself a whole family of wolverines with just his bear hands, which he'd ripped off a mother grizzly no more than 20 minutes earlier. And that was just with his human hands. Truly a man of great intrigue and consequence, and perhaps consequently a man with great and random stuff. Why, a leisurely stroll around his workspace reveals a whole world of treasures...

Like an engine lift!

And a pile of Mitsubishi rims and fashionable/utterly impractical cast-iron steampunk accessories!

Meticulously organized batteries!

And also one time, he took a drum from an old washing machine and turned it into a backyard grill pit thing.

See???

Anyway, Danger Dan has been an exceptionally good friend to me over the years, but has also served as an invaluable informational resource for me in more recent years, as he knows an obscene amount about automobiles, and I apparently know almost nothing about buying vehicles that don't break down all the goddamn time (though to her credit, outside of a battery replacement and a couple failed hoses, Dutch has been rock solid in terms of reliability). He's taught me how to change my oil, he's taught me how to install a car stereo, he's taught me how to change the tension on a Saab 900's clutch cable, and he's taught me how to safely move and securely reattach my truck's horrendously placed center-console-armrest-storage-unit-thingy (this last project was far more complicated than it sounds and would have made a great Rubbish post, but unfortunately my camera was nowhere to be found that day).

Dan also serves as a great counterbalance to me from a project creation standpoint, as he likes to think out everything that he's going to do on a project before he actually does it, which tends to minimize mistakes and maximize results. This of course stands in direct contrast to my typical building methodology which involves putting whatever I'm working on together via a sequence of whims and notions, then finding creative ways to fix the problems that arise after I inevitably and invariably fuck everything up on it.

Different strokes for different folks, but there's no doubting that for a detail-oriented, meticulous project like replacing a truck's headliner, Dan's creative method is just downright superior to my own.

This...

...is my truck's old headliner. It shouldn't be too tough for you to see the sagging fabric and water stains around the outside of the piece, but this next picture should articulate the problems better still:

I know, gross, right?

Before we go any further, you must first know this: Your standard headliner is made up of two components - the fiberglass molding that gives your headliner its shape and the headliner fabric that gives your car's roof its kissably soft look and feel. But that's really only 66% of the story, as the headliner fabric is actually made up of two components as well - the foam that attaches to the fiberglass molding and the fabric that covers up the foam. This means that there are two adhesive joints in this construct that can fail - the one between the foam and the fabric and the one between the foam and the fiberglass. In my case, the adhesion between the fabric and the foam was failing, which meant that as I peeled away the fabric most of the foam was left behind, still clinging to the fiberglass molding.

Any application of a new headliner would have looked absolutely horrible if I didn't get that foam off of the fiberglass molding first (and apart from that, it probably would have stayed in place for about 12 minutes before peeling off from my car's ceiling, letting off the faint sound of a distant foghorn as it draped down over my truck's interior), so Dan lent me a small metal wire brush (yep, that's the brush alright) and I set myself to scraping off all of this 20 year old (and almost certainly carcinogenic) foam, inch by inch.

This is what it looked like when I'd only scraped off a couple teeny tiny areas of the foam.

And this is what it looked like when I'd scraped off a little more of the foam. And also I'd leaned the whole thing against a hot tub. And I turned it on its side for some reason or another. That's what happened.

And this is what it looked like with all of the foam gone except for a smiley face.

And this is what it looked like with all of the foam gone except for a banana.

And then after that, there was no banana at all.

So it goes.

I bought new headliner fabric at a very cool and somewhat obscure shop in Denver called B-D Company on Broadway, and they recommended that I use 3M brand's "General Trim Adhesive" so I picked up a can of that as well (though in the end it very frustratingly required 1 full can of the stuff plus about 1/64th of a second can to get the job done properly). The trim adhesive shot out like a mixture of silly string, cotton candy, and Spiderman web goo, though somehow I was able to restrain myself from eating it despite the fact that two of these things rank highly on my list of favorite foods.

Here's Dan laying down a liberal but not overwhelming coat of the stuff on the fiberglass side of things.

We put some on the underside of the headliner fabric as well, to really make sure we got a strong bond between the two. We then softly pressed the headliner down to get it firmly into place... if you're trying this at home, imagine that you're kneading a ball of pizza dough that you're utterly terrified of. That's the level of pressure you want to be creating.

Once the middle was secured and somewhat dried, we glued and affixed the corners and other assorted tricky areas, until we were left with something like this:

There were a few wrinkles and dimples left after the fact that we couldn't get rid of for whatever reason (this bothered Dan far more than it bothered me), but things were generally as we wanted them to be so we cut the extra fabric around the sides and wrapped the front end of the fabric (the only end that wouldn't be covered by plastic trim inside the cab) around the fiberglass molding to complete the job. After that it was just a matter of reinstalling the bastard inside the cab, which was FAR more of a pain in the ass than you'd imagine, as it involved removing/reattaching all of the seat belts and plastic trim, and getting the stupid little dome light thing into a position where it would work properly and not fall onto the center console every time I went over a pothole.

But ultimately, and predictably, we claimed victory.

An improvement? Absolutely. A somewhat underwhelming photograph to end a catastrophically long blog post? You bet your sweet ass it is. Tah!!!

FLOODMAGEDDON!!!!

2011-04-01T22:30:00.001-07:00

If you know anything about my history of living in the McHanslaw Manor, it's that it's one chock full of floody goodness and general water-logged-ee-ness. As a matter of fact, in the three or so years that I've lived in this marvelous basement, my earthy possessions have weathered the ravages of three separate floods (the first chronicled here, if you really care to look). That's a fair amount.

The latest of these floods has without a doubt proven to be the most catastrophic of the bunch from a stuff-ruining/life upheaval-ing perspective, but it also had a wonderful cleaning effect on my world. Not only in the sense that it literally washed the holy hell out of all sorts of things that I never have the time or wherewithal to properly wash on my own (my arsenal of sneakers has never looked so bright and shiny), but also in the sense that it forcibly instilled within me some serious "getting rid of shit" momentum, so I decided to ride that wave of righteousness and give the fine folks at some charitable organization a ton of my stuff. We'll call it a floodletting, just to be cute.

While none of my donations could ever be exchanged for earnest American currency, some of the pieces I parted with were half-assed duds from the annals of Rubbishdom, so let's play a little game, shall we? See if you can find the following objects in the picture below!

Framed Racism is Not Funky poster, Vladimir Lenin-themed laptop carrying case, Colorado Buffaloes Starting Lineup action figure, hideous but virtually brand new 30-year-old car-shaped photo frame, Soviet flag, autographed photograph of Heisman Trophy winner Rashaan Salaam, creepy headless tea kettle, pill splitter (from my heavily medicated days... quite the collector's item!), reproduced Richard Nixon campaign poster, pink and white elephant made out of paper mache and sea shells, miniature Denver Broncos football helmet,

'Takin Dumps repurposed Hobby Lobby bric-a-brac, protest signage written in French... and crayon.

Guys from the Healing Minds donation truck, you can thank me next time I see you!

If you've got an especially keen eye, you might have noticed in that shot that I also parted ways with the frame from my Norman Rockwell-esque "Afternoon in Saint Petersburg" piece that I did quite some time ago. It was never my intention to give away with that one, but a large portion of the print was damaged in the flood, so I chopped out a little chunk of it and framed it in a far tinier house than it'd grown accustomed to. Still, I think it looks kinda neat.

In an effort to be as abrupt as possible, I feel it's my duty to express to you that it's currently 12:22am in my world and I'm about 3% of the way through the process of moving all my shit into a new apartment, so I apologize for the lack of humor, life, and interesting anythings in this post. I'll do better next time. Promise.

EBAY SUCCESS REDEFINED.

2011-03-01T16:31:00.000-08:00

The following information has only been shared with a precious few of my most trusted associates and allies, but my basement dwelling within the McHanslaw manor has fallen victim to a flood for the third time in as many years, and as a result I've decided it's finally time to extricate myself from this rent-free near-windowless laminate forest and trade it in for some sort of lease-based "apartment" type dwelling that I (hopefully) won't share with two 60some year old roommates.

Of course, they'll probably go down as the best roommates I ever had, but that's sort of beside the point.

This impending move has warped my spend-thrifty ways into downright miserliness, so when I needed a new jigsaw for the purpose of creating an ornate headboard for a bed frame I'll be building sometime soon (more on that later... like, probably months from now later), I didn't go to Home Despot. Nay, I didn't even go to Amazon. I went to eBay.

Normally I don't take the cheap route on tools - be they electronic or not - as a tool is something I plan to have for a LONG time when I buy it, but I really didn't have the coin available to buy a Bosch machine, or my dream jigsaw from Milwaukee, so instead of getting some middle of the road "adequate but generally unspectacular" machine, I opted to get a bargain basement "wholly unspectacular but generally reliable" unit. In this price range, Black and Decker and Skil are the only brands I found worth looking into, so I tracked a few auctions and put in ridiculously lowball bids on them in the hopes that one of them might pan out.

Then one did. A Black and Decker. A brand new one. For a whopping $1.29 winning bid ($11.18 after shipping).

This was well below the normal closing price for identical saws, so I was somewhat befuddled as to what had gone on here, especially since the auction closed on a Sunday afternoon (word to the wise: If you want top dollar for crap you're selling on eBay, list it to close on Saturday or Sunday, the prices almost always get pumped up on the weekends). But then I took a second listing at the auction, and it all became clear to me. Well... the "why I got it for 11 bucks" part of it, anyway:

Let's go in for a closer look at that little guy, shall we?

"Oh, no wonder," I thought. "I won a jizsaw. That's not what I needed at all."

Oh well, I paid for the item anyway. Hopefully the item I eventually receive will turn out to be a normal jigsaw that just fell victim to a typo (albeit a typo that the auction author exercised TWICE in his listing), and failing that hopefully the item won't give me nightmares or VD.

Then again, there's a lot of guys out there that've paid a hell of a lot more for VD than $11 after shipping, so I guess I'll be coming out ahead either way.

There's no way to write that last sentence without loading it full of unintentional innuendo. You have my apologies.

A BIRTHDAY PRESENT FOR THE WORLD, 5 MONTHS IN THE MAKING

2011-02-22T19:49:00.000-08:00

On September 6th, 1972, my brother, the venerable and oft-referenced Angwart Schmidt Borlovsky, successfully broke free of the treacherous reign of his mother's womb. By an amazing coincidence, exactly 38 years later he, his family, and scores of unseen but undoubtedly present and famished mountain lions assembled themselves at a mountaintop villa to commemorate this most sacred of occasions.

That villa, of course, was the McHanslaw family cabin.

And those mountain lions, of course, are the ones that will eventually eat all of us, including but not limited to former journeyman NFL quarterback Steve DeBerg. We will all be sorely missed.

In my culture, the 38th birthday for a man is perhaps the most important of them all, as it signals the death of the final few shreds of a man's youthful dreams and ambitions, and the birth of a new era of reluctant yet all-encompassing acceptance of his current circumstances. Naturally, I would not allow this rite of passage to go by without bestowing a grand gift upon one of my dearest familial cohorts.

I found this Star Wars cooking apron online several months before his birthday, and ordered it almost immediately. After all, what better gift could a person give to a person who regularly grills and serves hamburgers to people at his house whilst all of them partake in a spirited game of some kind of wizard/dwarf-based fantasy shit?

There is no answer to that question.

Unfortunately, I failed to recognize that this was a new product being offered by the official Star Wars shop, and as such would by default fall under the heading of "things George Lucas has created after 1983," and as such would also fall under the heading of "being a massive, steaming pile of crap that isn't worth any of your money, even if the theater comps you a free popcorn and sensual Swedish massage, and you happen to be in a wealthy neighborhood at the time so you could reasonably expect that the massage would actually be really nice and not just disturbing." Obviously, the warning signs were there. I should have known better.

This is the absurd quasi-garment that showed up at my house some 3 weeks later (great shipping speed, Mr. Lucas!). Note the overwhelming lack of attention to detail. Marvel at the totally unadjustable neckline, and woefully inadequate tying cords around the waistline - hardly big enough to house an average Deep Space Nine aficionado, let alone your standard hardcore Star Wars fanboy. And finally, allow your mind to imagine the saccharine sweetness of running your fingers across the fully-synthetic "fabric" (see: "recycled garbage bags") they chose to make this thing out of. Because hey, nothing says good 'ol American barbecuing like an apron that melts to fit the grillmaster's skin!

My initial impulse was to return the product, but Lucas' return policy would have been laughable if it weren't so infuriating. It's been a while so I don't remember all the details, but I do recall that I was responsible for paying return shipping on the product, and that it was going to take somewhere around a month and a half for me to actually get my money back. There may have been talk of a paper check being involved as well - as in, they weren't going to just transfer the money back onto the card I used to pay for it, but rather issue me a check for the cost of the product, minus the overpriced shipping charge they'd gouged me with when I initially bought this thing, and then physically mail that check to me - but once again, my memory's a bit fuzzy on all this.

George Lucas reigns over an empire that completely sucks, that's all I'm getting at here.

Anyway, considering that my refund after required expenditures would have been about 84 American cents, I decided to just keep the thing (after swearing off ever buying anything from the Star Wars Shop ever again... boy, that sure was painful!) and modify it into something that was at least somewhat useful, so I headed down to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and picked up this legitimate, 100% cotton, devastatingly useful apron for about half the price of the piece of shit Dr. Jar Jar Binks slung at me:

Please take note of the adjustable neckline, and waist cords designed to wrap around a person who weighs more than 140lbs. Such a marvel of fabric engineering I'd never before seen!

I used some fabric glue and Mother McHanslaw's trusty sewing machine (my own machine had yet to manifest itself at this time) and affixed the crappy Lucas creation to the well-designed but unspectacular BB&B apron, and came out with this as my end product:

Improvement? Absolutely. Perfect? Far from it. In fact, this was one of my first sewing projects, so it is the very definition of "good from far, far from good" (uneven glue application, obtuse stitch lines galore, etc) but I busted my butt on making it (the useful apron required a few alterations to fit the size of the Star Wars one), so I had no reservations about giving it to him on that day.

The very next day, he turned 38 years and 1 day old. I gave him nothing.

Now, let us bear in mind that this project was finished a full 5 months ago, and I'm just getting around to writing about it now. Considering this fact, might it be reasonable to assume that I've finished several other projects over this time, but have just been too goddamn lazy to blather on about them for about 12 paragraphs more than is necessary? Why yes, yes it would be reasonable to assume that.

And hopefully my friends, I will soon get to the weighty job of tying a bow around all of these old projects by submitting them to the world of Rubbish, but I make no guarantees on that front. I've just been accepted to some sort of learning-school for humans, and I'm feverishly working towards a goal that seemed totally untouchable a mere 3 months ago (more on that later), so Rubbish time might further dwindle.

Only Time will tell. She's a filthy gossip.

UNPRECEDENTED!

2010-12-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

As long-time readers of this blog will surely be aware, I've had a Good Rubbish shop (www.zazzle.com/goodrubbish) established on zazzle.com for a couple of years now, featuring a medley of t-shirts and other assorted crap that I designed several years ago (it's rumored that a new Ronald Reagan hoodie is in the works, but I can neither confirm nor deny these reports at this time).

Anyway, as you might expect, the Good Rubbish shop has not been drowning in sales over the course of its under-hyped, neglected existence, totaling 16 sales over its first 24 months of business. And, if I'm being totally fair, only 14 of those were legitimate sales, as two of them were accounted for by my own Mother McHanslaw as well as the venerable Artimus Mangilord.

Anyway...

Suddenly, and without provocation or explanation, my quasi-derelict Zazzle shop has started blowing up over the past month, garnering 10 sales over the past 30 days alone. That's one sale every 3 days, which any math major can tell you is a massive increase over my previous average of one sale every 46 days. Yahtzee!

As might be expected, almost all of my sales over time have come from my most morbid shirt design of all, this homage to Leon Trotsky:

But as of late there's been a run on what's probably my favorite design of the bunch, this reusable grocery/tote bag design I crafted several years ago:

Take THAT, Westboro Baptist Church!

For the record, I own a few of the "budget" totes on that God Hates Bags design. And let me tell you, I could not think of a finer Christmas gift for your friends, family, or significant others than that affordable, adorable piece.

Now, I have absolutely no idea WHY my shop is suddenly getting all of these sales, or WHEN this hot streak of mine is going to come to a screeching halt, but I certainly am enjoying it. Of course, I shall keep you all up to date if I ever figure out why in God's name people have suddenly decided to start buying all this crap, but I honestly doubt that a question like that will ever present the world with a legitimate answer.

So yeah, that's it. Shameless plug post over, normal Rubbish post pending. Tah!

ADVENTURES IN PROCUREMENT

2010-12-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

As a frequent reader of this blog, you've probably noticed that a disturbing trend is emerging in the world of Rubbish, as two of my previous two posts have developed under the inspiration of "look at this great crap I bought!" sentiments.

First off, allow me to assuage your concerns by informing you that this blog has never, and will never become a blog focussed exclusively - or even primarily - upon the act of buying things that are neat, interesting, and/or catastrophically spectacular. The purpose of Good Rubbish has been and will always be to showcase the stuff that I've turned into crap, or vice-versa. The previous two posts were merely an aberration.

Secondly, what follows will be my third of three consecutive posts centered around neat stuff that I bought. Without further ado...

The holiday season is upon us once again, and the world of Rubbish is not immune to its excess, my friends. Oh no, it most certainly is not.

This is what Sears looks like at 9am on Black Friday. How would I know? Because I was there.

Take note of the complete and utter lack of shoppers, and then take note of the fact that, once again, this was taken at roughly 9am on Black Friday, the single busiest shopping day of the year. Hey Sears! Get it through your thick fucking skull, no one buys clothes from you anymore! Furthermore, NO ONE is going to buy an engagement band from your jewelry department!!! QUIT BEING SO FUCKING STUPID! JUST CLOSE THE TOP 3 FLOORS OF YOUR STUPID DEPARTMENT STORE AND SELL TOOLS, APPLIANCES, AND HOUSEWARES EXCLUSIVELY!!! IT'S YOUR ONLY REMAINING CHANCE TO RETURN TO A STATE OF SOLVENCY!!!

Sorry, that may have been a bit out of hand, but Sears frustrates me. Best tools money can buy in the worst run corporation money can't fix. Ridiculous.

That said, they did have some smokin' deals (and lots of elbowroom, but there's probably no further need to beat that already beaten dead horse) on Black Friday, so I picked up a few goodies for my war chest.

This 200 piece socket set was marked down 50% and comes with the Craftsman lifetime warranty (which I'm really hoping some other company chooses to honor after Sears inevitably goes belly up within the next 10 years). Took a pretty big chunk out of my checking account, but I think it's worth it. Barring theft, this should be the last socket set I'll ever buy.

I also got this big rolling tool chest, which is something I've always wanted to have, for 50% off as well. I would have loved to put my new socket set inside one of the drawers, but unfortunately I lack the necessary living space to actually use this tool chest for its intended purpose right now, so I'll be using it as a dresser/bureau until the time arrives where I actually have some sort of tool-holding workspace.

See? Tube socks. Pajamas. Bureau.

I had another absolutely epic thrifting run about a week ago, which netted me a number of wonderful treasures, but without a doubt the treasure-ey-est treasure of the bunch was this 1950's or 60's era Health-O-Meter bathroom scale, which only set me back 15 bucks and (somewhat surprisingly) TOTALLY works and is TOTALLY accurate:

How did this marvelous and ludicrously heavy thing end up in a crummy thrift store? I have absolutely no idea, but I'm thankful it did. Similar to the socket set, I don't picture myself buying another bathroom scale any time soon.

Goodness... so much personality.

Also, and in conclusion, my months long search for a sewing machine to call my own has finally (or at least hopefully) come to an end. This was quite the epic journey, as I'd settled on the sewing machine that I wanted to get some time ago (a Janome TB12 Threadbanger edition unit), but the machine was discontinued by the time I'd saved up enough money to actually purchase it. As a result, I had to go digging around for another machine that had as many of the TB12's qualities as possible:

- Metal casing

- Simple, straight-forward design and functionality

- Doesn't look like a bulbous, uninteresting pile of dogshit

Those don't sound like the makings of a very tall order, but let me tell you friends, they really are.

First off, since everything nowadays is made to fall apart about 3 and 1/2 weeks after its already meager warranty expires, no one makes much of anything out of metal anymore. Janome up until fairly recently had several sewing machines with metal casings, but as far as I was able to find ALL of them have been discontinued and replaced with plastic-surrounded models. Blugh.

Also, and this isn't the case with all manufacturers, but most companies seem to want as many selling points as possible for their plastic-lined crap, so they don't come out with sewing machines that sell under the heading of "it only does 3 things, but it does those 3 things really well and will continue to do them until the end of time if you maintain it properly" anymore. Double blugh.

And finally, almost all consumer-marketed sewing machines look like this, this, or this. Or, to put it more bluntly, almost all consumer-marketed sewing machines look like bulbous, uninteresting piles of dogshit. Blugh city.

After doing some very frustrating research on the new model sewing machines available on the market, I ultimately decided to buy an older sewing machine - one from an era of time when important stuff wasn't made out of crappy shit.

Following several failed auction attempts on eBay, I ultimately won an auction for a Husqvarna Viking Classica 105. It was a bit of a leap at $120 after shipping, but it's a very high quality machine and it DOES work (though we'll see how marvelous of condition it's in for certain once I get it in to someone to have it tuned up). She's sort of pretty though, ain't she? At least in a utilitarian, Swedish sort of way...

And hey, it came in its original box, so that's a good thing, right?

And it came with this sparkley sticker commemorating Husqvarna's 300 year anniversary as a company (1689-1989... yeah, this machine's a little old). That's what we in the biz call a "Major Enron Selling Point."

Anyway, had I stumbled across it beforehand I might have given some through to this new Singer sewing machine, which to its credit isn't excruciatingly ugly and isn't made out of plastic exclusively (though there's apparently still a lot of plastic on it), but considering the $200 difference in price I feel pretty good about my purchase. Hopefully I'll feel REALLY good about it once I get it in to a sewing machine mechanic person who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about.

I shall surely keep you posted. Adios!

THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY!!!!

2010-11-13T22:52:00.000-08:00

Two Rubbish posts in two days? My friends, we have not witnessed such efficiency on this blog since the twilight years of the second Bush administration. Clearly, something magical is at play here, though I'll leave you to decide what that "something" truly is.

Here's a hint, though: It's the 45th entry on the Periodic Table of Elements, and it rhymes with "Brodium."

Yeah, you think about that.

Anyway, I made a pilgrimage today to my favorite thrift store in the greater-metropolitan area, as all of the thrift stores in the immediate-metropolitan area have been serving me up hot plates of bupkis, diddly, and jack fucking squat for treasures over the past few weeks, and I'd grown tired of striking out swinging in my inexorable search for more wonderful clutter for my living space.

So what makes this particular thrift store so wonderful? I'll let the pictures do the talking.

The drive to this particular thrift store is one of my favorite vehicular exercises in Denver, as the surrounding area seems to have boom-ded and busted-ed very quickly at some point in the early 1960's. Nothing's been redeveloped or refinished, it's all just standing there almost exactly like it was 50some years ago, but with a few choice modifications. Take the picture above, for example. I can only assume that this building was originally some sort of diner, or perhaps a tea kettle store - really, anything where a giant tea-kettle-shaped sign would be at least somewhat relevant.

Whatever it was, it went out of business long ago, and has since been replaced by a "bible and book store" called The Word. A bible and book store called The Word, that is, with a very large, utterly random tea-kettle-shaped sign. Magnificent!

Unfortunately, over that 50 year period of time, the neighborhood has gotten pretty rough as well, so newer retail outlets that have actually bothered to rework their buildings haven't done the neighborhood any favors in terms of aesthetics. The venerable Artimus Mangilord is a huge fan of Compton Mart. My feelings are mixed at best.

The neighborhood's a peach, but the real treasures lie within the store itself, as I'm sure you'll agree.

You know you're in a good thrift store when there's some utterly random household object on their shelves that is both over 30 years old and still in its original packaging. My old favorite thrift store (the Salvation Army on Josephine and Colfax) used to be NOTORIOUS for this, but then it closed down earlier this year. Naturally, I was crushed, but this enormous panda bear cake mold did much today to dry up those woeful tears for good. Unfortunately, I couldn't justify buying it. I'm just not much of a baker, nor am I all that much of a panda enthusiast.

Of course, this car-shaped picture frame was a totally different matter. I would've bought this thing 18 times over if I had the chance, and that's even if the stock photography inside the car didn't match the pictures on the box. Oh, but it DID my friends, it DID!

My apologies to whichever one of my friends gets married next. This hideous, semi-transparent car will be part of your wedding gift, and there's nothing you nor I can do to change that.

Decided against it.

Framed Star Trek "Romulan Encounter" magic eye poster. Imagined the oft-referenced Angwart Schmidt Borlovsky (an avid gamer and semi-closeted Next Generation enthusiast) staring at it for hours on end, then once again decided against it. Neither he nor I needs to expose ourselves to that kind of trauma.

Funny, that's exactly the image that pops to mind for me when I think of Wyoming.

You can tell from the facial expression. This poor bird isn't holding that candle, it was stabbed by it.

I've been buying up a fair amount of 45's recently, as I've found the record jackets make great decorations for envelope-housed gifts and other mailable stuff. I'll get a picture up next time I have occasion to decorate such a thing.

I don't usually focus much on clothes here on Rubbish (that'll probably be changing in the coming months as I'm getting really into sewing, so prepare yourselves to be bored to tears) but these were two sincerely quality finds. I'm not much of a sweater guy, but that alpaca V-neck from "Lord Jeff" has got to be at least 35 years old, and as for the necktie... well, I don't know who GAF is, but I like the utterly random placement of their branding messages a whole lot. Win/win.

This is THE ugliest goddamn thing I have ever seen in my life. I love it. I'm sincerely glad I don't own it, but sweet mother of mercy do I ever love it.

These next few items require a little explanation: The McHanslaw family's new cabin in Bailey came equipped with a TV and a VCR that we've opted to keep in case we ever get snowed in up there, so I've decided to start stockpiling horrible VHS cassettes to make sure that our cabin fever gets extra terrifying should that unwanted opportunity ever arrive. Prior to today, my only film selection was a copy of Fantastic Planet that I purchased shortly after graduating from college. But after today?

Robocop 2. Yes!

Chairman of the Board. Double yes!

Note: A part of me has always wanted to watch this undoubtedly horrendous Carrot Top vehicle for at least 10 years now, as it unwittingly spawned what is without a doubt the greatest 7 minutes and 30 seconds in the modern history of late night television... it really picks up around the 5 minute mark.

I decided against buying this copy of First Kid staring famed University of Denver Alumnus Sinbad, as I hate those giant Disney clamshell VHS cases.

But you'd better fucking believe I bought THIS copy of First Kid. Hell yes! DU Pioneers represent!!!!

Could we see that bird again?

I gotta tell you, folks... me and this feces bird, we've got some kind of a thing going on here. I don't think I'm ever gonna get tired of looking at this thing, and I don't have a problem with that at all. Not one single, solitary bit.

Alright, I think that's enough drivel for tonight. But when will I post on Rubbish again? Tomorrow? Almost certainly not, but I definitely feel like I'm riding a creative hot streak right now (the magnitude of which is probably poorly reflected by the underhanded anti-zingers I've been dropping on these posts), and I'm going to try to keep it rolling indefinitely. We'll see how it goes.

Feels good to be back, though. Yessir, it most certainly does!

AWESOME EBAY PURCHASE OF THE WEEK - BASEWARS

2010-11-07T20:22:00.001-08:00

A new post classification emerges today in the desolate landscape of this once proud blog, my "Awesome eBay Purchase of the Week."

Why, you ask? Because for every one project I complete I probably buy 30 bizarre trinkets on eBay, and because writing a post about buying something takes about 2% as much thought and effort as writing a post about making something. Really, when you think about it, I had no other choice but to expand my precious world of Rubbish into even more banal realms of banality. Evolve or die, they say, and I'm just not ready for this blog to be dead yet.

Close maybe, but not yet.

Without further adieu, the brass tacks:

ITEM: Original copy of Base Wars for the Nintendo Entertainment System, IN its original box, WITH its original instructions and all included psuedo-Konami paraphernalia.

PRICE PAID: $5.25 after shipping.

BARGAIN QUOTIENT: Out of this goddamn world!

It's a beautiful day for a brawl game!

$23.4 billion a year for a .250 hitter? Baseball salaries in the 24th century have rocketed through the O-Zone! And team owners are rebelling. They've replaced these greedy players with mighty robots programmed for punishment. The result is Base Wars - a bizarre cross between baseball and gladatorial combat. Its heroes are an awesome array of mutant machines. Metallic he-monsters resembling men, half-ton tanks and unidentified fielding objects. But forget about good sportsmanship in the Cyber League. Because in Base Wars winning isn't everything, it's the only things. And these mega horse power sultans of swat are armed to the circuits with enough laser swords, fire guns, and ammunition to spark interplanetary war.

All the elements of baseball are here - pitching, hitting, fielding, and base running. Plus a brutal bonus: One-on-one battle royales for base possession.

Choose and name the teams, set the robot rosters, and start swinging the lumber, Jack. Knock heads with another player or test your metal against the Nintendo Entertainment System. Play single games or set up a league pennant race with up to 10 games. Use the money you earn for victories to make repairs and stock up on every unfair advantage known to mechanical man. Including hyper engines, ultra shoulders, iron gloves, and more. And show no mercy.

Because if you aren't as tough as steel, you'll never make it to the World Domination Series.

The preceding text is what is written, word for word, on the back of the box for Base Wars. I'd tell you how awesome this game is, but after reading that, you already know. Furthermore, I'd tell you what a sentence fragment is, but after reading that.

And when I said this game came with everything, I mean it came with EVERYTHING!

Display box, instruction manual, game cartridge, and the ever-popular nondescript cartridge dust sleeve...

Promotional poster for Rollergames, Mission Impossible, Snake's Revenge, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the single most frustrating game in the history of me throwing controllers at my television), and the dreadfully under-appreciated Ski or Die. I'd make a joke about one of the Kennedy's here but I'm pretty sure I'm not in line for hell right at this instant and I'd just assume keep it that way...

And, of course, a "send in and win" registration card for the Ultra Software Corporation, a subsidiary of the Konami Company (feel free to read the details here if you really give a shit) that apparently used to reside at P.O. Box 11210 in Chicago, Illinois, zip code 60611-0210.

Mailing to an actual street address instead of a P.O. Box would have made the whole experience a lot more enjoyable, but you can rest assured that I solicited a decent amount of pleasure out of filling out and returning that product registration card. And fear not, I shall keep you posted with any new developments related to this aspect of the purchase, particularly if returning this card miraculously results in my receiving a free copy of John Elway's Quarterback.

As for Base Wars itself, the game is only slightly less entertaining now than it was when I used to rent it as a child. As such, on a scale of one to awesome, I'd rate it a ridiculous.

ONE MORE REASON TO EXCLUDE ME FROM YOUR BIRTHDAY FESTIVITIES

2010-10-12T23:01:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday, October 10th of the year 2010 (10/10/10, for those of you who don't shy away from numerology), marked the 87th birthday of a great friend, adequate poet, spectacular dog fondlerer, and longtime ignorer of this blog, the venerable Dr. Christoph Kampfos.

To commemorate this most blessed of occasions, a celebratory junket was arranged in his honor, with the only host's only qualifying request being that any gifts brought to the gathering must fall in line with the 10/10/10 theme in some way or another.

Naturally, I bought him this low-priced, antifreeze-looking concoction:

If any of you are unfamiliar with the concept of MD 20/20 or any of its fortified beverage brethren, I would like to kindly recommend that you visit www.bumwine.com and educate yourself about the most magical element of the universally horrific American large-scale liquor industry. If you'd just like to learn about MD in particular, head here.

Of course, this wasn't in exact line with the theme of the party, as this was after all a bottle of MD 20/20, not MD 10/10, but the joke seemed obvious enough. Or rather, it WOULD seem obvious enough if I could get its label to read "MD 20/20/20" instead.

I started this mini-mod by picking up some mailbox decals from my local Ace hardware store.

Then I cut out a two, a zero, and most of a one (for the "/" mark) and stuck them to the bottle.

Jesus, that was an easy project. I wonder why I even bothered to put this on here? Oh right, because I hadn't posted anything in a month and this is really all I've got right now. Shit.

Still, it doesn't look too shabby, yeah?

Truth be told, this is not the first bottle of Mad Dog that I've given to a friend of mine for a birthday, and despite the fact that I stopped drinking a great many years ago, it probably won't be my last. What can I say? I solicit a profound sense of pride from classing up parties with fluorescent beverages.

Note: No livers were irrevocably harmed during the creation of this post, as no one at the party was stupid enough to drink more than a sip of this vile swill. Ugh.

Second note: One short/dumb post upcoming in the immediate future, a couple bigger/righteous-er efforts to follow a wee bit later.

MERGERS, ACQUISITIONS, UPDATES, AND OTHER ASSORTED BULLSHIT

2010-09-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

Oh what a busy couple of months it's been here at the McHanslaw manor! Of course, you're probably already aware of my famous acquisition of a 20 year old beast of a pickup (currently nicknamed "Big Blue," though I see that name changing within the next 12 months to "Dutch" for reasons currently undisclosed), but THEN my birth parents, Mrs. and Dr. McHanslaw respectively, ran off and purchased a mountain property in the Colorado high country for no legitimate reason outside of whimsy, boredom, economic freedom, and a quest for material fulfillment and/or spiritual enlightenment.

Still, I must admit... it IS a damn fine cabin!

She's got a very striking profile, don't you think?

And a nice ass to boot!

The cabin also came fully furnished with some surprisingly awesome accouterments, for instance:

Oddly righteous 30ish year old coffee cans...

Pretty plants like douglas firs (not pictured), wild rose bushes (not pictured), thistles, porcini mushrooms (not pictured), grass, indian paintbrush (not pictured) and dirt (not a plant), as well as several wonderful man-eating predators like black bears (not pictured) and mountain lions (not pictured, but present... alllllllways present...)

This obscenely righteous, older than a sonofabitch, solid steel nightstand. Also...

...this fully functional, and only partially dangerous (the shattered door handle WILL take off someone's finger before our time in this cabin is through, I'm quite certain of it) 1950's era Kelvinator refrigerator.

The gas stove is more antique than vintage, but that doesn't stop it from making my bladder tingle in a wonderful kind of way. Speaking of bladder tinglings, the cabin also came fully equipped with two, count 'em, TWO ready-to-use and entirely undesirable toilets!

The first is a conventional outhouse that smells every bit as good as it looks:

(you know you've got yourself a good outhouse when the padlock key that opens it is attached to a Buick Riviera keychain)

And the second toilet, which I would gladly wager one million American dollars will never be used by anyone, ever, regardless of how dire the circumstances at that very moment in time may be, is the venerable Sears brand Pak-A-Potti 6000 portable toilet. Delicious!

This cabin can accept at least a small piece of responsibility for my most recent dearth in new post-age (laziness, as always, can shoulder the majority of the blame), as the McHanslaw clan (sans the 0ft-referenced Angwart Schmidt Borlovsky, a mis-titled McHanslaw if there ever was one, who feels most comfortable when surrounded by off-yellow aluminum siding) has been dutifully hammering away at cabin-related projects that, while important, really aren't worth documenting.

For instance, two weeks ago I rebuilt a dilapidated horseshoe pit on the back side of the property. Despite the fact that this took the glut of a full day to accomplish, in the end the only visual transformation that took place was that of a bulbous, oblong, lumpy pile of dirt with a pole sticking out of it turning into a flat, square, and fairly smooth pile of dirt with a pole sticking out of it. Not exactly high drama material.

Regardless, the cabin will surely provide my remaining 2 or 3 readers with some interesting stuff to look at in the months and years to come, as its rustic charm will naturally (as rustic charms tend to do) express a certain proclivity towards occasionally falling apart.

Example:

On that same fateful day that I reworked the horseshoe pit, an antique wooden seat (that was logically affixed to an antique wooden chair) split right down the middle whilst myself and Father McHanslaw were moving furniture around the cabin. I'd brought up my toolbox with me (which fortunately contained Gorilla brand wood glue) to work on the horseshoe pit, but we didn't have our normal assortment of vices and clamps to secure the hold, so we had to improvise a way to press the seat together while the glue set it back into functional shape. Using a ballpoint pen, a small board, a dust brush, some plywood shims, a few pieces of rope, a stick (not pictured) and a wood-marking pencil, this is the solution Father McHanslaw came up with:

I really wish I could take credit for that solution, but I just can't. What can I say? My father was canonized as a Weblo. There's no other way to put it.

You can expect to see a few projects from the cabin showing up on here in the not-too distant future, perhaps the most interesting of which will be the construction of a new concrete and stone fire pit (this will mark my first time working with concrete... and also my first time working with stone) that will be happening either early this fall or sometime in May next year.

MOVING ON!

I'm putting the finishing touches on a reworking of the Stonehenge-esque cabinet that surrounds my speaker media cabinet from way back when. If I remember correctly, I never ended up showing the cabinet in its semi-completed state (spoiler alert: I'd painted it black and slathered it in polyurethane) but you really weren't missing much by not seeing that. Since that time I've covered the outside with some miscellaneous pop art and am now in the process of sealing in and protecting that visual deliciousness so it can age in a manner that I'd like to call "Wayne-Newton-graceful."

The McHanslaw basement flooded for the second time in the past few years, causing the base of my speaker trunk to warp a bit and grow some lovely mold. I sanded the mold away, but for the piece to be structurally sound I had to glue a couple 1x4's onto the base of the piece. As a result, the piece is now about 12% as attractive as it used to be, so I'm going to have to redecorate the outside of it at some point in the coming months.

I'm also working on refinishing an expanding sewing box (structurally similar to this one, though not nearly as ornate or pretty-like) that I'm hoping to have done in the next few weeks. As of now I've taken the thing apart and sanded off enough of its outer finish to know that it would look like absolute crap if I re-stained it, so I'm going to have to just paint some kind of pattern on it and keep my fingers crossed that the stickiness of the latex paint doesn't keep the box from being able to open and close normally. No concrete decisions have been made regarding the pattern, but I'm thinking another flag design could work on this thing... we'll see, though.

MOVING ON AGAIN!

If you've spent any time browsing my archives recently, you may have noticed that the pictures attached to my mid-modern posts (all of those following my seminal piece, "**** You Flikr, You ****ing ****!") have been sporadically disappearing, then reappearing, then disappearing again. I've come to the conclusion that this is because the photo hosting site that I've been using, zooomr.com, is dreadfully unreliable and/or going through the uncomfortable anti-puberty phase between "semi-viable insolvent net entity" and "chapter 11," so I've started using Flikr once again and plan on slowly but surely moving all of my old photos from being hosted on zooomr to being hosted on flikr. This will undoubtedly take an obscene amount of time, but I think it'd be worth it to have the pictures be... you know, visible.

MOVING ON FOR THE LAST TIME!

I've purchased a couple cool new toys for my various undertakings, including a new orbital sander (initial results promising) to replace my old quarter-sheet sander, which proved to be a far bigger headache than it was worth. The new sander makes about 1/4 as much noise as my old quarter sheet sander did, and is about 9 billion times easier to load with new paper. That's what we in the business call a win/win.

I also decided to get a little more aggressive in branding my creations (I figure if you're only gonna finish one project every six months, you might as well take some pride in it), so I ordered a custom-made Enron stamp off of rubberstamps.net for something silly like 8 dollars. About a week later, this little number showed up in my mailbox:

True, they completely butchered the spelling of my name (there's no "rick" in Enron, though to their credit it does start with an E), but I was actually very surprised with the quality of this product. The wood handle is nice and easy to grip, and the rubber stamp feels sturdy and exudes a certain "I'm not going anywhere-ness" that I find very comforting.

I've started tagging my old projects with this stamp, just so future curators will have a definitive logo to look for when trying to decipher whether or not an overly decorated piece of furniture flotsam is in fact an original Enron piece. Thus far I've put it on my 8 track cassette coasters:

as well as my two-tiered coffee table thing:

I'll probably hit the back of most of my projects with this thing as time goes on, but this'll be the last I mention of it on here (let's not kid ourselves here, I'm well aware that my ego doesn't need any further back-patting/non-sexual stroking). Just know that it'll be found somewhere on all my new projects going forward.

Yes... "somewhere." Watching... waiting. Waiting to strike. With non-toxic ink. Mwahaha...

REPURPOSING: HOW TO TURN 8 TRACK CASSETTES INTO 8 GORGEOUS CONCUBINES

2010-07-29T01:26:00.000-07:00

Sweet mother of mercy I wish the title of this post were accurate...

Hi there, remember me? I'm that guy who used to write on this blog all the time, but then he didn't. And then a little later he said he was going to start writing all the time again, but "all the time" translated into "about once every 3 months." Then 3 months became 4, and 4 became 6, and several bald eagle chicks reached maturity, and 12 or so polar bears probably died, and a million jackasses spent their weekends memorizing Thomas Jefferson quotes so that they could spew them at the newly popularized "jackass rallies" that were popping up all over the place. And the planet we call Earth... it turned. Oh, how it turned!

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'm earnestly hoping to do more posts going forward here. Not 3 a week, or even 3 a month, but something sustainable. One a month, I'm hoping. Sometimes 2. We'll see how it goes - no promises, just intentions.

ANYWAY...

I just wrapped up a pretty kickass repurposing project, and I'd like to show and tell y'all about it. Pull up a chair, won't ye?

These are called 8 track cassettes. I've been told that their sound quality is absolutely horrific (I've never had the chance to hear one myself), but I've always thought their appearance deftly toes the line between ugly and interesting, sort of like those evolutionary oddities that emerged during the last great ice age. And really, when you think about it, that's what the 1970's were: The music industry's ice age. A time of transition between the meaningful, revolutionary rock of the 1960's and the meaningless excessive techno pop of the 1980's.

For what it's worth, I'd choose 80's music over 60's music any day of the week.

Anyway, several years ago I went through a fairly short "what can I make out of antiquated objects from the world of recorded music" phase (evidenced here and here) and came up with an idea to turn 8 track cassettes into coasters. As is often the case with me, it took about 2 years for me to turn this idea into a reality.

The first phase of this project required me to get 4 pieces of sturdy Plexiglas that would fit inside the raised plastic "runners" (or "ridges" or "thin, long bumps" or whatever else you want to call them) that run along the top of most 8 track cassettes. Now, normally this would actually require a great deal of time and effort due to the fact that Plexiglas is nearly impossible to cut without a dedicated Plexiglas cutting machine, but fortunately the fine folks down at the True Value hardware store on Colfax and Monaco in Denver (AKA, the single best hardware store in and around the metro area) have a dedicated Plexiglas cutting machine and were more than happy to cut some sheets out for me to my exact specifications.

It's excellent services like these that make me hope against hope that legitimate hardware stores can survive in the age of Home Depot. Unfortunately, the fact that they only charged me 9 dollars for the Plexiglas and the labor involved to cut it down to the sizes I need makes me realize that they probably won't. Uggh.

For the record, I drilled the holes in the Plexiglas myself. Wasn't at all difficult - took about 3 minutes to do all of them. I was initially worried that the Plexi would crack during drilling, but it didn't. Not even a little bit.

I used the drilled Plexi sheets as a guide to drill matching holes into the top of each 8 track cassette, then I just put in some screws to attach the Plexi to the 8 tracks.

I also cut out some small pieces of adhesive felt and stuck them to the bottom of each 8 track to complete their transition from "music-like object" to "coaster-like object."

You know, it's almost a shame that I don't have an 8 track player lying around. I'm sure listening to Christmas for Cowboys and Please Daddy (don't get drunk this Christmas) would make the McHanslaw family Christmas this year all the more memorable.

(Note: proper credit should be given to the venerable Angwart Schmidt Borlovsky for taking notice of the awesome track listing on this particular album)

With the actual coasters completed, I set myself to the task of building something to house these lovely drink pedestals while not in use. I (somewhat understandably) had a couple pieces of scrap plywood lying around the house as well as some fairly thick oak dowels which I'd saved from a botched speaker coffee table project I attempted long ago (if any of you ever wondered what happened to the "brother" speaker of the Fisher that I used to build my speaker media cabinet some 2+ years ago, well... that's what happened. I tried to do something with it, then I fucked up. Then I broke it into pieces and put it in the garbage. The end).

With these scraps from Good Rubbish's proud past I was able to piece together a plausible construct for holding these things in place:

Clearly though, some work needed to be done to get this thing looking even mildly respectable. I started by tracing a line around the outside of the 8 tracks and oak dowels as they were placed in the previous photo:

Next I cut out that shape using Father McHanslaw's Eisenhower-era jigsaw, then traced and cut out the shape on another piece of plywood, thus leaving me with 2 fairly identical-ish pieces of plywood.

You may note (completely up to you, of course) that one of the pieces also has the circumference of the wood dowels traced out on top of it; this is due to the fact that I intended to cut out the shape of those dowels on one, but not both of the base pieces of plywood. So, how did my trusty hole saw and I fare in this venture? The true answer may never be known.

Please do your best to not be repulsed by my freakish hitchhiker's thumb. It's supposed to bend like that. I swear.

Next I glued the two pieces of plywood together using good 'ol Gorilla Glue, then placed the dowels into their proper positions to make sure everything looked hunky-dory from a conceptual standpoint. It did, so I proceeded.

At this point I promptly stopped taking pictures for some reason or another (probably an unexpected impulse of my rarely-seen brevity reflex) as I suffered through several extremely tedious tasks. First I took my miter box and cut angled endpoints into all of the oak dowels (getting all 3 to the exact same length proved more difficult than I'd imagined, and truth be told I never did get them all to be the exact same size). Next I glued the dowels into their final positions before drilling screws into them from underneath the lowest layer of plywood (in case you hadn't figured it out yet, this is why I only cut the shape of the dowels out of 1 of the pieces of plywood - and why I used 2 pieces of plywood instead of just 1 - because otherwise I would have had to screw the dowels into place from the sides instead of from the bottom, which would have made the whole piece a lot less attractive and probably significantly less stable).

After all that I took a razor blade and scraped off the black paint and polyurethane that the dowels were coated in (a side effect of their days acting as hopeful coffee table legs... this step was without a doubt the most time consuming and least enjoyable part of the entire project), and finally I used plastic wood, JB Waterweld and standard wood filler to fill in all of my razor blade/saw gouges before sanding the whole thing down to a relatively smooth finish:

Wait... no, that one was taken before I sanded it down to a relatively smooth finish. The rest of what I said was true through, I swear. Now this next picture, THIS one shows the thing with a relatively smooth finish:

As you can tell from the giant blobs of wood-filler residue on each of the oak dowels, I took some pretty decent chunks of wood out during the razor blade phase. Considering the time it took to get that paint off of there (probably 1.5 to 2 hours) plus the time it took to repair the damage I'd done while removing the paint, I really wouldn't recommend doing this unless you absolutely have to. Unfortunately, since I was going to paint over the whole thing once again, I had to get that polyurethane off of there, so I wasn't left with much of a choice in the matter, and the first method of paint removal I tried (low grit sandpaper) was utterly ineffective. Oh well, lesson in Pyhrric victory learned.

My ultimate goal with this coaster holder piece was to make it look like a single piece of wood, instead of 5 pieces of wood glued together. After applying a few coats of black paint and a singular coat of polyurethane, I don't think I accomplished this end with a level of success that my contemporaries would call "spectacular," but considering that I'm but a simple weekend hobbyist (albeit a devastatingly attractive, chiseled and articulate one) I think I came out looking alright here.

At long last, a shot of the piece in all of its fully assembled glory:

And for the ladies, a shot from the backside:

And finally, we see our new 8 track coaster set alive and well in its natural habitat. Wonderful!

If you've got a moment, take note of the Otter Pop stain that Father McHanslaw left in the exact middle our family's lovely white sofa. Sir Issac Lime, this living room weeps for you.

So that's all I've got for today. Hopefully next time I'll do better... or at the very least, quicker.

BOOYA!

2010-07-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

So your boy Enron just purchased for himself a new means of conveyance - a "whip," if you will - and shall be flaunting his ample machismo from its ampler cabin all over the Mile High City for weeks, months, perhaps even years to come (it's carrying over 170,000 miles on the odometer, so the "years" possibility seems a touch far fetched).

She is a beaut, ain't she? My, just looking at that front end has me craving a stalk of straw to dangle from my front teeth and a pregnant warrph to call my own.

So what does this mean for the dreadfully dormant world of Good Rubbish? Well, with a flatbed truck replacing my old 4 door sedan I'll finally have the means to do all of the really MASSIVE projects I've been putting off for all these years. Now all I'll need is the will and/or free time to make 'em happen.

Don't hold your breath.

(Note: Legitimate Rubbish post to come within the next 2 weeks. And no, reader who for whatever reason still checks this blog even though I update it about once every 6 months, I'm not bullshitting you. It's gonna happen, and you shall be impressed. Call it a personal guarantee.)

3 DOWN, 1 TO (HOPEFULLY NEVER) GO

2010-06-07T22:52:00.001-07:00

It seems like just yesterday that I lamented the loss of my beloved Bea Arthur by wishing that the Gods had robbed us of the occasionally insufferable Blanche Devereaux (aka Rue McClanahan) instead.

Well, now they did, and I feel no better for it.

Rue McClanahan, you may have been my least favorite Golden Girl, but that distinction still entitles you to a place in my heart alongside my least intoxicating cherished childhood memory, my least enjoyable winning lottery ticket, and my least favorite ice cream topping to smear on my genitals. That's select company, Rue, and you absolutely deserve it.

So spread your wings and fly away, Blanche Devereaux, and here's hoping that the afterlife is filled with enough floppy old man parts to sate your character's positively horrifying elderly sexual appetites.

Also, here's hoping that God rethinks the whole "floppy old man parts" thing before I die. The last thing I need is an afterlife that feels like an afternoon at Bally Total Fitness.

THE GREATEST CRAP IN THE HISTORY OF JUNK AND THE SINGLE LONGEST POST IN THE STORIED HISTORY OF GOOD RUBBISH - PART 4 IN MY 14 OR SO PART EPIC

2009-10-17T13:36:00.001-07:00

.
Note: If you haven't already done so over the past few months, feel free to check out part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this beast of a project by clicking the preceding links.

Friends, countrymen, Rubbish-ites of all creeds and colors, what follows should be the first truly spectacular post in the depressingly lackluster modern history of this once proud blog. And why is that? Because, simply put, the object I created during the creation of this post is hands down, bar none, categorically, beyond a shadow of a doubt, without question, exception, or dispute; and undeniably, unmistakably, and unequivocally the single coolest goddamn thing I have ever made. And that's including any and all illegitimate children I may have sired over my many years of labor as an international sex symbol.

Don't believe me? Then read on. Believe me? Then... well, read on also. If you're on the fence though, I'd suggest watching a few episodes of Roseanne on late night Nickelodeon before coming back to the previous paragraph to reevaluate your feelings about the whole thing. I've always found Darlene's saccharine smile to be a most restorative elixir for my analytical capabilities - perhaps you'll find the same to be true for you.

As a side note, a cursory look over Nick at Nite's current programming lineup should lead any pop culture aficionado to realize that something has gone horribly wrong in TV Land. Just think of all the ludicrously awesome classic tv that they could be running on that network - Welcome Back Kotter, Head of the Class, ALF, Hogan's Heroes, Welcome Back Kotter, The Greatest American Hero, Welcome Back Kotter, Welcome Back Kotter, and Welcome Back Kotter, just to name a few - and then look at what they're choosing to actually run: Home Improvement, Roseanne, The Nanny, Malcolm in the Middle (indefensible... positively indefensible), Family Matters, and Everybody Hates Chris. Wait, what? Everybody Hates Chris?? Didn't UPN cancel that show about 2 weeks ago?? What kind of classic TV is that??? Boo to you, Nick at Nite. BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As you may or may not recall, the singular intention of this massive project of mine was to take my oft-ballyhooed Speaker Media Cabinet and make it even awesome-er than it already was. A weighty challenge, no doubt, but one that I felt more than capable of grappling with (particularly after I decided to give myself about 13 months to get the whole thing finished, but we need not venture into the lurid details of my unfaltering laziness).

I'm not sure whether any of my previous posts explained exactly why I decided to redo this project, but just in case they didn't, there were 2 primary reasons for my wanting to rework this beast:

1. The chipped, pitted, and peeling simulated wood grain paneling on the outside of the cabinet made this thing a bit of an eyesore up close. A very cool, functional eyesore, but an eyesore just the same.

2. In my post detailing the original creation of the cabinet, I mentioned that I kept the shelf-supporting L-brackets in place by using epoxy putty to attach them to the inside of the speaker box (pictured in the 4th photograph from the bottom in the previously linked post). While this method of adhesion may have actually worked under less idiotic circumstances, I applied the epoxy and L brackets AFTER applying paint to the inside of the cabinet, so the epoxy putty didn't actually adhere to any wood inside the cabinet, instead it was just holding on to the outermost coat of paint. Surprisingly, the cabinet worked perfectly well for probably 4 or 5 months before, predictably (though much to my surprise at the moment it happened), one of the shelves gave way, causing a chain reaction that ripped out all of the inside shelves save the uppermost two. As such, I needed to reinstall all of the shelves anyway, so this seemed like a prime opportunity to redo the whole thing from the ground up.

We'll get to rectifying the ugliness factor in a minute, but for now let's bask in the glory that is my new shelf alignment, as it's functionally delicious:

As you can see, the new shelf alignment features 5 shelves (the original cabinet only had 4), and the shelves were secured by driving nails and screws into the shelves from the outside of the cabinet, so they're not going anywhere this time (the shelves are only 1/4" thick, so as you might imagine it was a pretty monumental pain in the ass to get the nails in there without having them splinter out the top or bottom of the shelves they were being driven into).

I wanted to paint the whole cabinet black (white was actually my original choice, but I didn't want to deal with the whole "polyurethane makes this paint look like someone peed on it" problem that I detailed in my second toilet shelf post), so after getting the shelves in place I took some low grit sandpaper and roughed up the fake wood grain paneling on the outside of cabinet to make it accept paint a little better.

After that I painted it. It was fascinating. True story. Normally I would have provided a photo of this portion of the cabinet after it received paint, but I lacked the foresight to take a picture of the cabinet at this stage of development. Ah well.

With the back end of this project taken care of (ZING!) I turned my attention to modifying the aesthetic qualities of the cabinet's door. Now, the painting on the front door was going to be far more detail-oriented than the "cover it in as much black paint as you can find" method that I used on the back of the cabinet, so (as I originally showed you in a post from several months ago) I couldn't just scuff up the paneling then paint over it. Oh no my friends, I had to strip it off ENTIRELY.

I first attempted to do this by scraping it off with a razor blade in the same way you'd try to remove a bumper sticker from a car, but that only proved to be mildly effective at best, primarily resulting in particle board burns on my knuckles and long, thin bruises on my thumb and forefinger from strenuously gripping onto the end of the razor blade like it was the only thing keeping me alive. After that I decided to put my power sander to good use and just methodically sand away the fake wood coating. While one sheet of sandpaper would only clear about 6 square inches of paneling, this method proved to move things along at about 40x the rate of the razor blade experiment.

Oh, I also filled in 2 holes on the front of the cabinet with some scrap lumber I had available. The first of these holes was where the smallest of the 3 speakers was mounted (this speaker came into my possession partially dilapidated and really contributed to the overall eyesore-ness of the cabinet, so I decided to just get rid of it), while the second was... well, it was just a hole that was built into the speaker for some reason or another. Presumably for air flow, I guess? I don't know, but this much is certain: You can always count on your boy Enron to not know dick about speakers, that's for damn sure.

Once everything was cleared off, the speaker door looked a little something like this:

Please take note, as this is the part of the post where things go from being utterly boring to ludicrously awesome without any warning whatsoever. Except of course for this one, but I'd like to think of this passage as less of a warning and more of an example of me participating in self-targeted foreplay before stroking the bejesus out of my ego.

I had a few ideas for how I wanted to paint the door of this thing (one of which, as always, prominently featured Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev), but ultimately I decided to paint the door into a giant American flag, as I am one of the foremost patriots of my generation and doing so would have absolutely no ironic value whatsoever.

First I did some basic geometry and mapped out the stripes and where the center of each of the stars needed to be (though in an effort to not end up shooting myself in the face in mathematically deficient frustration I just free handed the actual star shapes)...

Then I carefully painted in each of the stars.

I initially tried to fill in the blue around the stars, but I soon realized that this was giving me a visibly inconsistent coat of blue paint, so I decided to put some masking tape over the top of the stars, then just paint right over the top of the tape.

Following several coats of blue paint...

And now after carving out/peeling back the masking tape from the top of the stars...

After that it was just a matter of alternating coats of masking tape, then painting in the red and white stripes. The rest of this should be pretty easy to follow, so I'll just lay out the pictures without commentary:

Ta dah!!

After the paint dried, I put the speakers into their appropriate positions, but something just didn't seem right about the whole thing. Sure, it was fairly cool looking and all, but it wasn't quite cluttered enough for my liking. All of that surface area at the top was really bugging the hell out of me.

See what I mean? It's the very definition of "good, but not great." Of course, I've never been the type to strive for greatness, but just this once I decided to make an exception.

First I created some stencils using an Olde English typeface, then - using the large cone speaker as a general guide for the ark of my message - taped the letters G O D B L E S S A M E R I C A across that vast range of oh-so obnoxious open space.

After that I used my x-acto knife to carve a groove around the outside of each letter, then hand painted each letter using a fine tip brush (normally I opt for the rat hair "15 brushes for a buck fifty" painting supplies at Hobby Lobby, but because of the importance of this project I bought an 8 dollar brush at a hoity-toity art supply store solely for the completion of this step). As for the color, I decided to go with a few coats of Testor's gold enamel paint. Could I have gone with any color other than gold for this critical step? In a word, no. No I could not.

Now THAT, you must admit, is fucking awesome. But you know what's even more awesome than that?

This.

As you can see, I added a horizontally aligned handle to the front of the speaker, then affixed the door to the cabinet with 4 sets of hinges (the original cabinet only had 2, but this seemed to be insufficient as the bottom of the door would always get stuck against the cabinet when you'd try to open it - I can only assume this was because the hinges were bending under the weight of the door).

Of course, form means nothing if it's not followed by function, so exactly how well does this revamped contraption act as a media storage cabinet, you ask?

Quite well indeed, my friend. Quite well indeed.

So that pretty much wraps up this preposterously long post, but this project is NOT YET OVER! As you may recall, there's the little matter of the newly-built surrounding cabinetry for this monstrosity, an aspect of this project that I only recently completed and will surely showcase at some point in the coming weeks. Will that post be anywhere near as impressive as this one? No. No it will not. But I've always been a man who appreciates a good anticlimax, so I shall revel in its mediocrity with great delight, I can assure you of that.

Thank you most expressibly for your patronage, and I hope you have a lovely day.

BO JACKSON AND THE QUEST FOR 10,000 YARDS - A TRULY EPIC WASTE OF TIME

2009-09-29T14:22:00.000-07:00

Note: Before we get down to business, allow me to be perfectly frank with all of you: This post isn't terribly enjoyable. It's not funny, it's not interesting, it doesn't result in anything neat to look at, it's pretty much just a celebration and articulation of the horrifying reality that is "the way I choose to spend much of my free time." That said, it's new Rubbish material, so you might as well waste a few minutes with it, right? Right.

But seriously, if you're not a fan of early 90's football or late 80's video game consoles than you're probably not going to enjoy any of this. I'm 100% serious.

Spend a little time rummaging through the expansive archives here at Good Rubbish and you'll undoubtedly find at least a few finished projects that I'm truly proud of - the speaker cabinet, the two tiered coffee table, this... thing, and round 3 of retooning immediately jump to mind for me - but I've yet to showcase anything on here that I'll waste away my golden years telling my future grandchildren (plentiful as they shall certainly be) about.

That, my friends, has just changed. A little history...

A little over 2 years ago I picked up a copy of Tecmo Super Bowl for the Nintendo Entertainment System (inarguably the greatest football video game of all time) as I had copious amounts of free time on my hands and had grown weary of filling that time with an exclusive diet of Mike Tyson's Punch Out and Mega Man 2. Well, to call the diet "exclusive" is probably outside the bounds of the whole truth, but trust me on this one, you don't want to hear about the nonexclusive diversions I picked up around that time. Uff... ugly days.

Anyway, it wasn't long after I picked up Tecmo Super Bowl (henceforth to be referred to as TSB) that I started chasing various statistical milestones within the game. I started out easy: Recording 100 sacks in a season with former Denver Broncos great Simon Fletcher, throwing for 600 yards in a game with John Elway (a tougher task than you might think, as the programmers made Saint John inexcusably horrible in that game), and so on, but eventually I got bored of pursuing these pedestrian conquests. That's when I hatched a plan for something big: Rushing for 10,000 yards in a single season with the most dominant running back in the history of professional football, TSB Bo Jackson.

Any who doubt or are unfamiliar with the greatness of this particular TSB player are strongly encouraged to view the following video before continuing on:

Also, you should probably watch this somewhat unrelated video of TSB Christian Okoye massacring the Indianapolis Colts, because it's badass.

The quest for 10,000 yards in a 16 game season (that's 625 yards per game for those of you who are interested... which I feel incredibly safe in assuming is "none of you") seems difficult enough at face value, but for me the journey was even more perilous due to some complications that an uninformed reader such as yourself might not expect:

1. The TSB programmers slacked off on the statistic-keeping end of their software development

Truth be told, it's actually impossible to rush for 10,000 yards in a single season of TSB... or at the very least it's impossible to rush for 10,000 yards in a single season of TSB and have the game recognize you for your weighty accomplishments. This is due to the fact that the game only keeps rushing statistics for a player until he rushes for the utterly random number of 4,095 yards. After that the game will continue to tabulate rushing attempts, but the season total for yards will remain static (this problem exists in other statistical categories as well, most notably touchdowns, which cuts off at 63).

This proved to be the biggest impediment to my completing this incredible journey at some point closer to where I started it (2+ years ago) than where it actually ended (2+ weeks ago), as once I neared 4,095 yards I would have to start recording my weekly rushing statistics on a piece of paper, then add them up at the season's end. But it never ended up working out this way... one way or another, I'd always end up losing the piece of paper before completing a full season (while this post should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am a complete moron, I'm actually full of redeeming qualities... one of which being that I can only play 5 or 6 games worth of Tecmo Super Bowl before growing incredibly tired of it and needing to take a 2 or 3 week long sabbatical, during which time I'd usually clean my living space and accidentally part ways with my rushing tabulations).

That's why for my last attempt, the one that will undoubtedly go down in history as my single greatest athletic achievement in this life, I created a spreadsheet to chart my progress.

That's right, a spreadsheet. Nintendo Entertainment System, meet Microsoft Excel.

2. In the world of Tecmo Super Bowl, player speed is a variable. Not a constant.

In week 1 of a TSB season, Bo Jackson moves at about 45mph while any and all defenders move at about .005mph. By week 8 of a TSB season, Bo Jackson moves at about 2mph while any and all defenders move at about 900mph. This abrupt shift makes running for 600some yards a game considerably more difficult (pore over my fascinating spread sheet for evidence of this - 53.5 yards per carry in week 1 suddenly drops to 18.9 by week 5? Unthinkable!)

3. I'm a Denver Broncos fan

Fuck the Raiders. Pursuing this conquest made me feel Nick Nolte dirty.

So my unapologetically anticlimactic spreadsheet has already revealed the fact that I succeeded in my quest, but we might as well delve into the photographic record, because yes, I did in fact take pictures of myself playing video games. Like I told you before, I am a moron. This sort of behavior comes with the territory.

Did I fail to mention the fact that I hooked up my Nintendo to a 72 inch flatscreen? Because that's what I did. Jeff Jaeger's never looked so goddamn good.

Bo rushes to glory - breaking the 10,000 yard mark - during his week 16 matchup with the New Orleans Saints.

Let's give a little credit to the venerable Dr. Enron McHanslaw here as well... playing a video game with one hand while taking a picture of it with the other is no easy task (TSB lacks a conventional "pause" function).

This happened frequently. 116 times to be exact.

Dear God, look at that offensive balance!

Howie Long enjoyed a decent season as well. Not thrilling, but successful nonetheless.

Veronica Vaughn ain't got nothin on the TSB halftime show. Sweet maria...

Out in the AFC West, we spell domination "RAI"

Oddly enough, the Broncos and Oilers met for real during the actual 1991 playoffs, resulting in a 26-24 victory for the Broncos behind what was perhaps the 2nd greatest comeback of John Elway's career. Fascinating, right?

For failing to live up to the standard of dramatic excellence set forth by the actual 1991 playoffs, Bo dispatched Warren Moon and his precious Houston Oilers with a vengeance, then tacked on another 5 touchdowns during an AFC Championship romp over the mighty Buffalo Bills.

The long suffering Minnesota Vikings, owners of a paltry 9-6-1 record during the regular season, were a surprise Cinderella story (as opposed to an expected Cinderella story) coming out of the NFC after toppling the mighty San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game.

The tension was thick for the opening coin toss. Can you feel it?

The incredibly crappy halftime entertainment most certainly could. But let's not kid ourselves, here. With Bo running the show, the outcome was never in doubt:

Uggh, I can't look at that headline... it's just... it's just not right.

Much better.

Anyway, the final tally, including playoffs:

634 Attempts

12,352 Yards

19.5 Yards Per Carry

130 Touchdowns

Complete domination? I think so.

Be sure to tune in 2 weeks from now - THAT'S RIGHT, TWO WEEKS FROM NOW - when I get another Rubbish post all up in your face, with extra mustard. I know how you loves your mustard...

SEE?

2009-09-15T06:29:00.000-07:00

I told you I'd post again in under 5 weeks.

Legitimate Rubbish to follow shortly.

-Enron

ODDS, ENDS, AND A REVISITED TOILET SHELF

2009-08-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

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I'm typically not the type to directly address reader queries in the public arena, but just last week Jouda Shawn - perhaps Good Rubbish's most celebrated of readers - posed a question so masterfully worded, so devastatingly forthright, that he really left me with no choice but to dedicate half a post to it. And I quote:

Enron, Are you gonna be like my first daddy and only visit once a month now?

For the record, that was actually only 1/10th of what he wrote in his question, but the rest of his rambling commentary was deemed by myself alongside an army of objective observers to be morally repugnant and wholly unfit for public consumption. 13 or so years ago we came to the same conclusion regarding Whoopi Goldberg's performance in the film "Eddie", so there's a track record of reliability established here. You can trust our judgment.

Anyway, the truth of the matter is that I'm going through a bit of a Rubbish-reluctant phase right now, and I'm not sure when (or, I suppose, if) it's going to end. When I first started this blog it was an absolute passion of mine, but over time I've grown quite weary of the whole process - not so much doing the projects themselves, I still enjoy that to the nth degree, but having to stop all the time to take all of these fucking pictures, and then putting together these ridiculously long winded posts... I mean, it's just started to suck the fun out of the whole process for me. As I was explaining to Mother McHanslaw the other evening, my relationship with the world of Rubbish has reached a point where I often feel as though I'm trapped in a classic loveless marriage with this blog, requiring me to roll over and "perform" once every month or so to keep up the illusion of a functional relationship. Afterward I feel far more relief than accomplishment, though surprisingly no guilt. So at least I've got that going for me.

So then why bother to perform? Clearly stepping back from an authorial chair at the head of an obscure blog is a lot less perilous than backing out of a longstanding marriage, so why not just shut the blog down and call it good?

Well, the second piece of truth here is that I am a fickle son of a bitch, and it's not a purely voluntary thing. My interests and - when I can find them - passions change all the damn time, and rarely with any warning whatsoever, so while I'm a bit burned out on Good Rubbish right now, I know full well that there's a good chance I might suddenly find myself wanting to do 2 posts a week again at some point 6 months from now. Or maybe even 6 days from now. 6 hours seems pretty unlikely. 6 minutes is completely out of the question. Regardless, the point here is that I'm not going to make some big production out of retiring the blog "for good" when I'm quite confident that I'll be directing more of my attention to this blog again somewhere down the road.

So to answer your original question Jouda Shawn, yes, I suppose I am going to be like your first father and only visit once a month, but unlike the situation with your father this should only prove to be a temporary arrangement. Also, I'm not going to make you cry every time you stumble across a rerun of Silver Spoons on Nick at Nite, so really the similarities between myself and your birth father really don't hold up under much scrutiny.

Alright, that's enough explanation from me, don't you think? Mmm. Yes. Quite.

PHASE 2: LEGITIMATE RUBBISH MATERIAL

Devoted followers of this blog will undoubtedly recall the devastating achievement of innovation that was my painfully practical toilet shelf, though even the most accomplished of Rubbish connoisseurs probably won't recall the fact that I took my "final" shots of this project before I applied any polyurethane to the contraption, as I was well aware that doing so would turn the gleaming white shelf surface into a dreadful yellow-ish/white-ish sort of hue. As I said at the time...

Truth be told this project wasn't completely finished at this point, as I'd yet to waterproof the thing with polyurethane (kind of an important step for something that sits within 6 inches of a sink that's used by a sloppy, sloppy man). I only took the pictures at this step because when you put polyurethane over a white paint it dries to look kind of yellow and gross, like someone peed on a tile floor and didn't bother to wipe it up (not that I'd know anything about that). So yeah, as much as I hate to break it to you this way, the shelf as it exists now does not look nearly as good as the shelf in the picture you're looking at.

Some of you may have not believed me about the whole "looking like someone peed on it" thing, but allow me to assure you, that's exactly what this thing came to look like. Actually, "someone" doesn't do the pee-factor justice. It came to look more like "some family" peed on it. "Some very large Armenian family" if you want to get really technical about it. Anyway, it was gross, that's all you really need to understand here.

See?

(The odd white stripe will be explained in a moment...)

First things first: After ruining this lovely shelf with my polyurethane ways, I learned from an associate at my local hardware store that high gloss and semi-gloss paints (the white in this project was high gloss) don't need to be coated in polyurethane to be waterproofed, as they come premixed with a plasticizing agent (this is what provides them with their semi or high gloss shininess) which renders them quite capable of fending for themselves within an indoor environment as long as they're given 30 days of drying time to fully harden. Lesson learned.

The rest of things second, third, fourth, and so on: Instead of just painting over my layers of polyurethane with a few more coats of white paint, I decided to cover the shelf surface with a thin layer of wood, as I thought it'd look super dapper.

To accomplish this end, I picked up a couple 1/4" thick pieces of poplar from my local Home Despot, then cut them to fit the general shape of the shelf space. Due in large part to the inconsistent curve along the front edge this was not an exact science, but with a little persistence and an assload of sanding I was able to come out with a couple of planks that were quite passable.

Unfortunately, once I laid them in place I came to the horrifying realization that the pieces I'd cut would not cover the full span of the shelf surface.

Now, at this point I could have crafted a thin strip of wood to run between the two existing planks, but instead I decided to just round the inward-facing edges of the two planks I had, then use the open groove between them to hold some of the smaller vanity devices I like to keep at the ready (tweezers, nail clippers, etc). I also decided to paint the exposed shelf space between the two planks black, which required me to sand off the polyurethane in that area so that the paint would adhere properly. This, for the record, is half the reason why there was that weird strip of polyurethane-free white paint in the first couple of pictures of the shelf. For those of you that are interested, the other half of the reason has to do with my not remembering to take pictures of the thing until I had already started to do work on it.

After painting the groove area of the shelf black, and for the purpose of maximizing wood glue adhesion, I took one of the coarse sanding bits on my rotary tool and carved a grid of grooves into the paint and wood beneath where my poplar planks would be.

Has anyone here noticed that my old camera, which was ugly and cumbersome, took considerably better pictures than my new camera, which exudes considerably more sex appeal than most newly christened 18 year old gymnasts? I sure as hell have.

Anyway, after putting the poplar planks in place and letting the glue dry, it was just a matter of laying on some polyurethane (clearly I learned nothing here) before calling this project done. Err... redone.

And look, it still works! HOO-RAY!!!

Alright folks, I'm heading out to New York next week for reasons undisclosed, but I'll make you this promise: Barring a catastrophe, my next post will not show up 5 weeks from now. It shall arrive sooner. And with gusto. But that, as always, is a given.
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GOOD RUBBISH PROUDLY ANNOUNCES NEW BENCH MARK FOR AUTHORIAL NEGLECT!

2009-07-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

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Dear friends, nearly five full weeks have passed since last we met, and while I don't normally grapple with "current" (those quotation marks are pretty weighty at this point) events on this blog, what a positively insane five weeks it's been:

ITEM!

BILLY MAYS PERISHES, YOUR BOY ENRON FAILS TO MUSTER THE STRENGTH/INTEREST TO COMPOSE A PROPER OBITUARY UNTIL SEVERAL WEEKS LATER... ALSO, I THINK THE MURDERER WAS HIS BEARD

As you're all undoubtedly aware, the world of snarky, self-obsessed, passively anti-consumerist bloggers such as myself lost a true friend 2 weeks ago when TV pitchman extraordinaire Billy Mays was found dead at his home in Tampa, Florida. As some of my longer-tenured readers may recall, Mays Mighty-Puttied his place into my heart some 6 years ago when an autographed picture of the man somewhat serendipitously fell into my lap while I was serving as a counselor at a summer camp. As much as I abhor the concept of what Billy Mays made his millions doing (shoveling truckloads of mildly usable crap down the throats of those too stupid to defend their checking accounts), I've got pronounced and well documented soft spots both for people who choose to scream instead of talk and for folks who can manage to take themselves 100% seriously despite the fact that no one else does, so I'll miss the shit out of the guy. I really will.

Quoting Mays' Wikipedia page:

Mays' funeral was held on July 3, 2009 in his hometown of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania where he was buried. The pallbearers for the funeral wore blue shirts and khaki pants at the funeral, much like Mays wore when he advertised his products. According to KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, he was buried wearing a shirt with the OxiClean logo on it.

I speak without an ounce of sarcasm in my voice when I say that I earnestly hope my obituary reads exactly like that when I die... though somehow I doubt that OxiClean shirts will still be readily available in 2114. Shit.

ITEM!

KING OF POP DIES AT LEAST 3 DAYS EARLIER THAN HE WAS SUPPOSED TO, INDIRECTLY FUCKS THIS BLOG'S AUTHOR OUT OF $120 BUCKS

True story: On June 23rd yours truly won a copy of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker for the Sega Genesis on eBay for the shockingly low price of $16 after shipping, which I immediately paid for.

Before continuing, allow me to first apologize to those of you who actually know me as a real human being, because you've almost certainly already heard this story no fewer than 45 times (if you aren't up for a 46th retelling, feel free to skip ahead 3 paragraphs, though you'll be missing out on a pretty decent zinger in the sentence immediately following this one). As far as the rest of you are concerned, I think it's best that you first understand that this purchase was the culmination of literally years of utterly sporadic attempts on my part to procure a copy of this game for under $20 (we McHanslaws are a frugal bunch - it's written into our genetic code, right next to the parts about webbed toes and genitals that look like Alfred Hitchcock's silhouette). I'm not sure whether the relief of finally getting a copy of this game outweighed the glee of knowing that this sort of hot hot video game action would soon be playable in my own house, but the point here is that this turn of events rendered me both relieved and overjoyed. And chiseled like a goddamn slab of marble, but let's not kid ourselves here, that's a given.

Anyway, as you may have read in the papers, a mere 2 days after my triumphant eBay victory the King of Pop up and decided to provide irrefutable proof of his mortality following a 20+ year long battle with being batshit crazy and dreadfully unhealthy (I'll say no more on the subject, as I'm well aware that I have little room to talk here). Yes, it was a sad turn of events for the music community as well as society as a whole, but you know what was even sadder? That asshole that I won my game from on eBay immediately relisted the game that I technically owned and sold it three days later for something like $120!

Negative feedback feels like such a limp-wristed form of revenge in a situation like this (probably because it is), so I've got my fingers crossed that karma cooks up something really special for my unscrupulous eBay salesman in the coming months. Like maybe he'll lose a finger after it gets pinched in the clamshell case from a copy of NBA Jam. I don't know, I guess I just hope its at least somewhat creative.

ITEM!

EVERY OTHER CELEBRITY IN HOLLYWOOD EXCEPT FOR KIRK DOUGLAS DIES UNEXPECTEDLY WITHIN THE SPAN OF 9 DAYS

Seriously God, what the hell are you doing here? Celebrity deaths are supposed to come in 3's, not 18's. Ridiculous.

ITEM!

I HAVEN'T SAT DOWN TO WRITE ANYTHING LONGER THAN A TEXT MESSAGE IN WELL OVER A MONTH - I'M RUSTY AS FUCK OVER HERE

But you were already well aware of that.

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That chain of asterisks was mean to signify a break in the content of this posting, as we'll now be moving on to the legitimate Rubbish-related material.

We've now officially ventured into month 3 of my quest to uparmor my old speaker media storage cabinet, and I am officially starting to hate this goddamn cabinet with a passion. I understand that artists often experience this same phenomenon when they've worked on a painting for too long, and maybe there's a parallel or two to be drawn from that comparison, but while artists find frustration in their quest to create something beautiful, I'm finding my frustration while questing to create something that I'll gleefully admit should be (once completed) the most tacky, godawful piece of furniture that man has ever created.

Now, I've already outlined my plans for this monstrosity, so there's really no reason for me to preface the following photographs in any great detail. Here, I'll prove it:

I'm all about giving credit where credit is due, but I'm also all about maintaining anonymity. With those two thoughts in mind, here's a shot of a circular saw, the mostly-finished pieces of my cabinet, several pairs of snowshoes, and the left arm of Father McHanslaw (the man who actually constructed these things).

Once arranged in the shape I intended for them to assume, any unbiased observer can plainly see that this thing is going to be obscenely large.

A shot from the side...

And a shot from the other side...

To cover up all of the exposed edges of plywood (which look like absolute crap), I picked up some small corner molding from Lowe's and meticulously wrapped it around every corner and crevice to give it a much cleaner look. For the record, this took a heinous buttload of time to accomplish.

And once again from the side...

I took a hole saw and cut some holes out of the back for cables to run through (this beast is intended to house all of my old school video game equipment, after all). Fascinating, yes?

I also cut some smaller holes into the bottom of the top piece...

And then stuck some pegs to the top of the bottom pieces, so that the 3 massive chunks of this beast would interlock together for the sake of stability and sexiness. But mainly stability.

Once all this was completed I set myself to the monumental task of sanding and staining this thing, but that my friends will have to be another story for another time.

Hugs and kisses!

-Enron

DESIGNS FOR DELICIOUSNESS - THE LONG AWAITED 2ND CHAPTER IN MY 14 OR SO PART EPIC

2009-06-07T22:52:00.000-07:00

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I'm not going to provide any excuses or explanations for my most recent near-month-long dearth in new posts, nor do I plan to provide any for the relatively massive gaps in new material that will undoubtedly arise at certain (though as of yet unannounced) points in the future - the simple fact of the matter here is that when a person such as myself is trying to find a compromise between the fact that he's working full time with the fact that he's always been an unabashedly lazy mother fucker (complicated by the fact that he's picked up several new un-Rubbish-like pursuits in life), there often just isn't all that much time left over to work on random projects.

All of that said, the continued existence of this finely crafted crapbox of a web-based destination does keep me devoting at least a few hours every week to working on utterly random this-ses and that-ses, so you can rest assured that this blog isn't stopping anytime soon... it's just probably going to take a while longer than we originally expected to get wherever the hell it was going, that's all.

Facts:

I got a bit ahead of myself a few weeks ago when I laid out part one in my 14-or-so part epic on the subject of refurbishing my repurposed speaker media cabinet. You see, this post - the post you're reading right now - will outline my basic plans for taking my modestly sized and relatively understated speaker media cabinet and turning it into an utterly enormous and unabashedly loud/obtrusive structure that I probably won't part ways with for the rest of my life (unless of course I at some point experience a house fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, the return of Christ, or the emergence of a significant ladyfriend who owns so much fucking shit that all of my stuff gets thrown in storage because I'm far too laid back to get into a big "thing" about it... and also she's super attractive, which is key. But really, what are the odds of any of that happening?)

To put things simply, this post should have been part 1 of the 14 part series and the previous post should have been part 2, but what's done is done. Tragic as it may be, this post will have to remain part 2 in title but part 1 in spirit for all of eternity. Ah well.

So my governing idea behind all of this is that I wanted to take my media storage cabinet and turn it into the centerpiece of a far grander entertainment center. To accomplish this end I drew up plans for a 3-piece wooden structure that, when connected properly, will surround the media storage cabinet sort of like one of the standing stone structures from Stonehenge (or "like an upside down U" if you want to sound like an uncultured ass). These plans, which shall be revealed shortly, were then handed over to the venerable Father McHanslaw, who had accepted as his charge the task of transforming these crudely drawn plans into real, usable, full-size objects as a present for my most recent birthday.

Measuring 40" tall, 13" wide and 14" deep, the speaker media cabinet will come to be bookended by these meticulously designed pieces of cabinetry (the one that will reside on the left side is pictured here, the right side one would just be a mirror image of it). The dotted line across the top of the structure indicates where a board runs through the middle of the shelving, simultaneously acting as the back of the front side shelves and the right wall of the side shelves. That made sense, right? "No" you say? Perfect.

Resting across the top of the two standing columns (and suspended over the top of the speaker media cabinet) will be this 48x14x12.5" additional piece of shelving, which is about 87% less complicated to explain than the side columns, as is evidenced by the length of this paragraph.

Once completely put together, the end product will look 80,000x better than this...

...but you get the idea.

I'll be moving the shelving inside the speaker media cabinet so that it can house ALL of my retro video game crap - that shall be its sole purpose in life from here on out. Four of the boxes on the piece of shelving that lays across the two columns will be used to house my 4 video game systems (original Nintendo, N64, Sega Genesis, and a Playstation 2), while the other 16 front-facing compartments will be used to hold roughly 250 or so music cds, of which I currently own about 50 or so.

Yeah, that's right, I buy cds. You got a problem with that? Well you shouldn't, because they're way awesome and the rise of mp3's has rendered them virtually worthless, so I've bought almost all of them for less than $3 apiece - a small price to pay for getting to act all self-righteous around people who download their music illegally (these "people" are most generally referred to as "everyone who is currently alive and doesn't live in a 3rd world country"). Three cheers for the digital revolution, I say!

Anyway, I think that wall of music will create a really sharp visual effect (particularly if I only buy good music, which is proving to be a difficult task... God damn you Hulk Hogan and your precious Wrestling Boot Band), but I guess time will tell on that front. Half the shelves will be removable, so I'll have some options if I decide to put DVDs or random pieces of assorted ugly statuettes and other crap (a well documented specialty of mine) in there instead at some point down the road.

I have no idea what I'm going to put in the side cabinets, but I'm sure I'll think of something.

Once this is all done, I plan to stain and seal the whole structure, cover all of the exposed edges with trim, then (though this is only tentatively planned, I'm not sure whether this will end up happening or not) wallpaper much of the exposed wood on the stonehenge cabinet with pictures from old cd inserts and cutouts from some movie posters I have lying around. Army of Darkness paraphernalia figures to play a prominent role in this phase should I ever get there.

Oh, and in the words of the great Peter Falk, there's just one more thing:

The door of that speaker media cabinet you all know and love? Yeah, I'm gonna paint that to look like a giant American flag (subtlety usually isn't my thing, but what can I say? I'm just bemused by patriotism at the moment). That's why I filled in several holes on it and smoothed it all out, as was pictured in part 1 of this epic post stream.

Now, I have to admit that I've already finished the American flag painting portion of this project (come now, who could wait to do something like that?), and I can assure you that it is not only fucking awesome, it is certifiably mother fucking awesome, mother fucker. I'm not normally one to give advance screenings, but considering that anyone who's still reading this blog after 3 weeks of non-activity has to be pretty devoted to the cause, here's a sneak preview of the flag insanity as it existed at about 80% of completion:

Go ahead and marinate on that for a minute. I'll be back soon enough.

RETOONING ROUND 4: THE 3RD REVENGE

2009-05-20T23:12:00.000-07:00

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I was hoping to get at least 2 or 3 consecutive posts into my 14-or-so part epic before deviating to a side project, but I just got this absurdly fashionable new digital camera the other day and to be perfectly honest I'm terrified to take it out of the box until I get the whole thing covered in protective clear plastic sheets. Like any rational human being, the last thing I want to do here is destroy the device's intrinsic sexiness by slathering a greasy thumb print all over the viewing screen thingy, so I've really got no choice but to present a camera-free, scanner-intensive post this evening.

That can only mean one thing my friends - it's time for some retooning.

Oh, and just for the record, I realized the other day that the "14" estimate in my proposed "14-or-so part epic" on the subject of refurbishing my old speaker storage cabinet is nothing short of a gratuitous exaggeration of the truth. If that epic (and it WILL be epic, I can assure you of that) makes it past part 5 I'll see to it that a pig actually does fly AND I'll stop sending Phylicia Rashad naked pictures of myself on a bimonthly basis.

Keep those fingers crossed all you want Mrs. Cosby, it ain't gonna happen.

Back to the matter at hand... I sincerely doubt I'll ever top the retooning effort I put forth a few months ago (an entry that met with ravenous critical acclaim, as evidenced by the whopping zero comments left on that post by my loyal readers), but I think I've come up with a pretty decent batch here today, especially considering the fact that I only had 4 days worth of newspapers to work with (normally I pick and choose the best targets out of a couple weeks worth of casual comic browsing).

As always, the rules here are simple: Get your hands on a decidedly unfunny newspaper comic strips (this shouldn't be difficult, as these type of comics make up roughly 97.8% of the so-called "funny" pages), erase the captions with a normal pencil eraser, then fill in the caption spaces with something that might actually be considered somewhat humorous. The possibilities here are endless... well, at least until the whole of the newspaper industry collapses upon itself and takes the comic illustrators of the world down with it, at which point the possibilities will instantaneously become quite limited, so get in on this hot hot comic-modifying action while you still can.

We'll begin our retooning adventure today with that lovable little scamp Dennis the Menace - a young man whose un-funniness has sullied the reputations of literally millions of newspaper puzzle pages and Dairy Queen cups over the past half century.

An unfortunate twit of a human being once told me that Dennis the Menace brings out the kid in all of us. Well I don't know about that, but he certainly brought out the sex-joke-obsessed middle schooler in me. God bless you, Dennis!

For those of you wondering at home: No, the mental image that comic now provides could not be any funnier. Thanks for asking.

We'll now be moving along (with substantially less laugh-soliciting success, I assure you) to everyone's favorite four legged troublemaker, Marmaduke. Now, I'd always been under the impression that every Marmaduke comic followed the same formula: Marmaduke is knocking something over or has already knocked something over, mustachioed man or waifish woman screams "Marmaduke!", and... that's it. Repeat for 50 or so years, and/or until gratuitously wealthy.

I'm sure you can imagine my surprise upon learning that this isn't the case at all. As you'll clearly see below, sometimes instead of knocking objects over Marmaduke just oafishly rubs himself against people, and almost always the people involved say something other than simply "Marmaduke!" I know, I'm as shocked as you are.

While I normally revel in being proven entirely wrong, I think I'd honestly prefer the comic to be constructed in the manner that I always thought it assumed. Wouldn't it be a grand showing of creativity to always have the caption be the same word? I mean really, how long could a comic strip writer keep something like that fresh? A week, a month, perhaps even a decade? I'm not sure, but I know I'd read it every day to find out.

Witness this very old dog's new trick: Mind blowing trisyllabic versatility.

As you can clearly see, in panel 1 we have the murder mystery-esque "...Marmaduke?!?!", followed by the timeless classic "Marmaduke!" that we've all come to know and love, and then my personal favorite, the simple and understated yet confusing and excellent "Marmaduke." The last one's a curveball. You throw something like that in there once every 2 months or so just to make sure the readers are still paying attention. It's called good journalism, look into it.

In our final stop tonight, we'll be paying another visit to the Family Circus. They're our first repeat customer in the world of retooning, but what can I say? The fam makes an easy target.

This modification hit a little close to home for me, and I'm sure it would have hit close to home for Mother McHanslaw's army of cats as well were it not for the fact that they're incapable of reading and (on a somewhat unrelated note) unwilling to stop throwing up all over the goddamn house.

I couldn't agree more.

MY NEW MEDIA CABINET - PART 1 IN WHAT WILL PROBABLY TURN OUT TO BE A 14 OR SO PART EPIC

2009-05-11T01:10:00.000-07:00

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Friends, neighbors, dearest associates, I have neglected you once again. It's been 2 weeks plus since my last post (seems like about 3 and a half days, but I guess time flies when the Denver Nuggets are backhanding the everloving crap out of every opposing ball club that steps on the court with them), and to be perfectly honest I really have nothing of significant merit to share with you today either.

Shocking, I know.

Anyway, part of the reasoning for my absence can honestly be attributed to the NBA playoffs and the aforementioned Denver-Nuggets-based domination that's been happening all over the floor (this is not what those in the sports world would call a "common occurrence" in the history of the Nuggs), while another part can be written off to the fact that I'm working a lot these days, but the REAL root of the problem here is that I'm working on a project of significant size and complexity, and it's taking me a long time to get it done.

As such, I think it would only be appropriate to milk the hell out of the project and get at least 8 or 9 posts out of it. Don't you agree? Of course you do.

I'll be keeping this first post brief as it's about a quarter after 2 in the morning right now and blogger is shutting itself down for site maintenance in 15 minutes, so here's the brassest of all tacks:

1. I'm redoing and expanding my speaker media cabinet - a project which would have to be seen as the single most successful project this site has ever seen in terms of popularity.

2. I stripped all of the simulated wood grain paneling off the front door of the speaker, and plugged 2 of the holes on that panel with wood. Why? I'll tell you that later when I'm feeling funnier and more awake, that's why.

Here's a picture of one of the plugged up holes (overflowing with the always appreciated liberal dosage of Gorilla Glue), surrounded by partially stripped simulated wood grain paneling:

And here's what the front facade looked like once both holes had been plugged up, all of the simulated wood grain paneling had been removed (partially by razor blade, partially by low grit sand paper), and the whole thing had been smoothed down to mimic the texture of an infant's ass, assuming of course that said infant is made out of particle board manufactured in the 1970's:

Here's that same shot, only slightly more epic looking:

So what are my plans for this newly exposed door? For that my friends, you'll just have to wait and see. Should be unbelievably delicious though, like a bowl full of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, except instead of normal milk there's Strawberry Quick.

Mmm. Now that's good.

WORST BIRTHDAY PRESENT EVER.

2009-04-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

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As some of you may be aware, today (April 25th) is the joyous day of my birth. So outside of the lovely material possessions my fine family bestowed upon me, what did the universe bestow upon me in all of its infinite wisdom?

1. Crappy weather.
2. The death of my second favorite Golden Girl, Bea Arthur.

NOOOOO!!!!!!

Seriously God, I know I made this pretty clear during my obit to Estelle Getty aka Sophia Petrillo last July, but if you have to take any of our precious Golden Girls away from us, Blanche is the one we don't absolutely need around here. QUIT DEPRIVING US OF ALL THE EARNESTLY FUNNY GOLDEN GIRLS!!!

Rest in peace you siren of the small screen, rest in peace indeed.

TAKING GOOD RUBBISH TO NEW HEIGHTS... AND DISPENSING REALLY FUCKING ATROCIOUS PUNS ALONG THE WAY

2009-04-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

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The sheer number of photographs lined up to make an appearance in this post guarantees that it shall be nothing short of a monstrosity, so let's just get down to bidness right off the bat.

This, my dear readers, be my desk:

Also appearing in that lovely photograph be my sittin' sphere, my faithful goliath of a moderately outdated printer, and a small portion (probably about 10%) of the vitamins, homeopathic tinctures, and protein powders that keep yours truly primarily in tact and generally functional on a day-to-day basis.

Really, it's not such a bad set up considering the space I'm working with, but unfortunately the top of the desk I'm using just-so happens to stand a paltry 2 and 1/3rd feet off the ground. For a person of average stature this wouldn't be much of a problem, but I am not a person of average stature. Nay, I may be the single most lanky human being West of the Mississippi, and thus need to enlist a slightly more vertically oriented desk apparatus if I hope to preserve my spine's current not-hunched-ness for the next couple of decades (for the record, this rampant lankiness of mine is also the reason that I use an inflatable sphere instead of a normal chair for my day to day sitting - the dual bladed meat cleaver of a posterior that I've been dealt slices comfort-ruining ass grooves into foam chairs like a well oiled comb through Ted Danson's hair).

To remedy this situation I decided to build a 4-sided box to elevate my laptop another 7 or 8 inches above my desk, allowing me to maintain good posture while typing without glaring down at my laptop from above like the eye of sauron.

That's right, this post shows you how to make a box out of wood. Prepare to be amazed.

I started by getting some plywood cut at the single greatest hardware store in the state of Colorado, the True Value hardware on the corner of Colfax and Monaco. Seriously, I cannot recommend these guys enough... they have all of the stuff you'd expect a normal (somewhat smallish) hardware store to have, but they actually offer services as well, which is a rare thing to find in this day and age. They'll cut wood and plexiglass for you to exact measurements. Their staff knows things about stuff - they actually make worthwhile suggestions quite frequently. They'll refer you to other fantastic businesses that you've never heard of who can do things/sell stuff that they can't do/sell. Basically it's the anti-Home Depot. I love the place - I always make sure to buy something I didn't intend to buy every time I go in there... I consider it a charitable donation, as it'd really be a shame (and a massive pain in my ass) if they ever went out of business.

Anyway, they cut those wood pieces up for me to the tune of about $2.50 or something ridiculous like that. Once I had them back home I glued the pieces into the shape I wanted them, then countersunk some screws along all the edges to make the whole thing nice and sturdy.

I countersunk the screws because I didn't want them visible in the end product, so to complete that goal I filled in all the screw holes with some wood filler, then sanded the whole thing down.

As you can see from that picture, not all of the edges were completely flush, so I had to sand down a few corners pretty heavily. Be sure to take note of that, as this will come into play later... with sexy consequences.

I decided to use both wood stain and latex paint to decorate this thing, as I'd never used the two together before and I wondered how (if?) it would work. To start, I just laid on a couple layers of red oak stain around the outside of the box:

Once that dried I made a design on each side of the box using masking tape. This is where the extra sanding I had to do earlier came into play, as I wanted to enlist designs that wouldn't draw attention to the scarred corners and edges of my box that serve as painful reminders of my shoddy measuring/gluing skills (this would be accomplished by covering those areas entirely with black paint). So just how sexy were the consequences of my half-errors? Judge for yourself.

Please note that I have been living with my 60+ year old parents for almost 5 consecutive years now. I no longer possess any concrete idea of what the word "sexy" means, let alone what it might look like.

After that I slathered on a couple coats of black latex paint, which as you might expect made my box look exactly like it did before, only far blacker.

Once the paint dried I ran an x-acto blade around the outline of my masking tape (if I hadn't done this the latex paint would have peeled off like a slab of sunburned shoulder skin), then pulled the masking tape up. Much to my delight (I get excited about these sorts of things), the paint/stain combo worked almost exactly how I had hoped, though I did have to spend a little time scratching back some excess paint from areas where it had leaked under the tape. Regardless, 2 coats of polyurethane later I had my finished product:

Kinda pretty, yeah? Well, it's functional anyway.

In the last picture you can also see two little half-holes that I cut into the bottom of the box to get cables and what not through. I would have brought this up earlier but the shifty bastards were nearly invisible in all of my other photographs.

Check the piece in action:

Ahh yes, much better. Plus it gave me some storage space under my monitor for my external hard drive and my speaker-volume-controlling-mabobber.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what would be a funny picture to have on my desktop for that last shot. Honestly, I have no idea why I went with Dennis Franz in a tuxedo.

So I guess the only question that remains at this point is what will I do with this laptop-elevating-thing once I eventually (presumably) move into a larger space and no longer have to use this crappy miniature particle board desk that I got off craigslist for $5 for my everyday computing needs? Well, after much careful thought and deliberation, I've come to the conclusion that I'll use it as the manger in a nativity scene that I'll build from scratch some number of years from now. I really can't divulge too many details right now as I've only laid out a few VERY preliminary sketches, but I'm pretty sure that one of the 3 wise men will be played by the cleanly-picked remains of a cornish game hen.

Until next time, English. Mmyes.

A WORD OF WARNING

2009-04-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

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Just a little heavy-handed, overblown message of caution for all for all of you out there with an appreciation for power tools and custom fabrication: Never do anything, it will kill you.

Thanks to Artimus Mangilord (by way of Tinybald Archibolduc) for the heads up on this masterful piece of cinematography.

BACK FROM MY UNANNOUNCED VACATION... AGAIN.

2009-04-09T22:32:00.000-07:00

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There will likely be no surprises later this year when Good Rubbish releases its official list of the greatest obstructions to Enron getting off his ass and writing new posts. The early favorites:

1. Enron's new job
2. Enron not not having a job
3. Internet pornography

Whatever the reason, I've once again managed to go well over 2 weeks without releasing any new material. This is what we in the biz call "establishing a new status quo", though here's hoping that I'm able to reverse the trend next week by actually writing something substantive and on time (as opposed to this week's offering, which I am quite certain will be hastily constructed, uninteresting, and well over 7 days late).

Here's half of an utterly banal story: A couple months ago this one lady approached me and asked if I could figure out a way to fix a sign outside of her office on the cheap, as one of the letters had fallen off and it looked kind of stupid.

Here's the rest of that utterly banal story, told in tiny fragments followed by the lazy-man's punctuation mark of choice, aka "..."

There will also be pictures involved.

The first thing I tried to do was make a pencil rubbing of the space where the missing letter used to be, as I figured the glue fragments that were still there would give me a good measure of the letter's proper size...

This plan didn't work.

Instead, I had to do my measurements the old fashioned way - with a ruler. And a cotton gin. Nothing's more old fashioned than a cotton gin.

Once I had my measurements I headed over to Hobby Lobby and bought a thin rod of some kind of non-balsa wood. I can only assume this stuff is normally used for the construction of dollhouse furniture...

I done chopped it up into pieces with my rotary tool. That's what's in the piccher right there.

Once I had my pieces cut down to the proper size I glued them together with some normal wood glue, then began coloring the wood with a silver paint pen...

Shortly after beginning to color in the wood with a silver paint pen, I finished coloring in the wood with a silver paint pen...

In the hope of making this stopgap solution at least slightly waterproof I coated it in a couple layers of polyurethane, though the polyurethane for whatever reason acted as a solvent on the dried silver from the paint pen, causing it to lift off the wood and smear around like a carrot-laden poo in a baby's diaper. Fortunately I wasn't emotionally involved with this project in the slightest, so I was able to adopt a firm and unmovable "whatever" stance with relative ease.

With my letter replacement fully constructed, all I had to do was glue it into place.

Sure, from up close it's painfully obvious that 5 of the letters are made out of brushed aluminum while one of them is made out of wood, BUT...

...you gotta admit, from a distance that mutha fuckah doesn't look half bad.

This is the end of my post. It was a shitty post, but hopefully I'll try to do better next time. Why only hopefully? Because, in the words of the great Shawn Kemp, "I don't make promises, I just make babies."

Word.

GOOD RUBBISH SALUTES THE 164TH BIRTHIVERSARY OF MOTHER MCHANSLAW

2009-03-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

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Before we begin, allow me to sincerely apologize to my faithful reader(s) for my recent hiatus in Rubbish post-age. As some of you may already be aware, I was actually able to find a job about a week ago (according to my local Action News Team, I'm apparently one of only 8 people nationwide who have accomplished this feat in March) which subsequently led to me working far more hours (forty) than I had grown accustomed to (zero). My sleeping habits have suffered, my ass-scratching habits have suffered, several Somalians have almost certainly suffered, and my blog has clearly suffered as well. For the latter-est of these points, you know... my bad.

And now on to the matter at hand:

As some of you may recall, last year I made Mother McHanslaw a downright dapper silverware tray for her birthday, resolving what had been nothing short of a kitchen-based calamity in our silverware drawer. Well, with that time of year rapidly approaching once again (her birthday, not kitchen-based calamity season) I set myself to the task of finding another problem around the house that needed some solving.

With that finely crafted introduction in place, allow me to introduce you to the McHanslaw Manor's primary sittin' couch:

If you'll notice, there's a large Starbuck's mug precariously perched atop one of the arms at the far end of that couch, like a playing piece in some sort of high-stakes game of coffee Jenga. This is the exact location where Mother McHanslaw chooses to keep her coffee every morning as she reads the paper.

As you can see from the shadows in the first photo and the rings in the second, this tapered cube of a couch leg is barely wide enough to support the girth of that mug, though I must give credit where credit is due: Operating with a margin of error of less than 1/16th of 1 inch, my dear mother has never once spilled her beverage while trying to place it upon this most miniature of impromptu coffee tables. Though we're best known for our recessives, accuracy is most certainly a dominant gene in the McHanslaw line.

Despite her incredible aim, this off-label use of our couch has always irked the other 3 members of the primary McHanslaw cluster (myself included), so for her birthday this year I decided to retrofit our couch to make it a little more stable for this sort of use.

After getting the measurements of the couch legs, I picked up some nice beech wood for about $3.25 a board foot (this is apparently different than a linear foot, though I lack the mathematical skill and interest needed to figure out exactly why) from Paxton Lumber, which is a really cool and supremely useful low price (though extremely high quality) hardwoods shop over near the intersection of I-70 and Colorado Boulevard, for those of you that live around the Denver area. After drawing out the cuts I needed to have made, I ran them down to my favorite local True Value hardware store (who I'll probably plug gratuitously at a later date) to have them make my cuts for me with their mitre saw, as beech is a ludicrously dense wood and... well, I didn't want to devote 2 hours of shoulder-destroying overexertion to making all the cuts with a hand saw.

Once back at the homestead I glued the pieces together in the formation I wanted, a 5 sided box with the top slightly recessed inside the 4 side walls:

Like I said before, this beech I was using is a very dense wood. It's also not a very porous wood, so I didn't have much faith in the glue that I had on there. To remedy this psychological problem of mine, I drilled some holes along all the joints between the wood pieces, hammered some nails into them, countersunk those nails with a nail setter, then filled in the divots with some wood filler.

A little before and after shot, for your viewing pleasure:

I did mention that I made two of these things, right? No? Oh, well I did. When it comes to high occupancy seating, there's nothing I find more infuriating than a lack of symmetry.

Once those were sanded down, we were left with something that looked a little like this:

PRETTY!

Now at this point I had a choice, as I could have just left these boxes in their current form and they would have been functional enough (after staining/sealing them, of course), but by happenstance I noticed that some coasters that have been in the McHanslaw family for ages just happened to almost fit perfectly into the tops of these boxes I'd made, so I decided to use my rotary tool to carve out a bit of the side walls to hold these coasters on top.

This ended up being an excellent idea, but unfortunately I got a little overzealous with the rotary tool on one of these boxes and had to fill in the sides with epoxy putty. See if you can tell which one it is:

Still, they both held their coasters just fine after the rotary work was done (actually, the epoxy one was probably a little sturdier than its more attractive sibling):

With the construction work out of the way, I set myself to hit them with some stain and polyurethane. I had no way to tell what stain was used on the couch originally (though that really wouldn't have helped all that much, since I was working with a completely different wood), so I took a guess and added a few globs of Minwax's "Red Oak" to a bowl full of their "Cherry" stain then slathered it on (results of this experiment to come shortly).

Since I didn't need to stain the inside of the boxes I kept my project perched atop some clear Solo cups during this process. Not only did this keep them from sticking to newspaper and other crap that might be lying around during their drying process, it also gave me the opportunity to take impressive, almost 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque, low angle photographs of my precious project:

Once the polyurethane had dried I lined a couple sides of the inside of the boxes with some stick-on felt to protect the surfaces on the couch (I'd originally planned to line all 5 sides with the felt, but the thickness of the felt threw off the fit of the whole thing, so I had to take most of the felt out).

After that, we were finished. How finished? Finished finished, that's how finished.

Ohh!

Ahh!

Delicious!

And, as you can see from this last photo, if you get the flash to behave just how you want it to... well, the stain came out pretty damn close. I was pleased. As was Mother McHanslaw.

Oh happy day!

COME MARVEL AT MY STAGGERING ERGONOMIC ACUMEN

2009-03-12T22:42:00.000-07:00

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We've been going at this whole Rubbish thing for well over 13 months at this point - I think it's time we make a concerted effort to move this relationship forward in a meaningful way.

With that in mind, I present to you a photograph of my bathroom:

Admittedly, this basement-based 4x6 cubicle of a poop repository isn't too impressive in terms of stature, and yes the pipes freeze up anytime the temperature drops below 20 degrees outside because there's absolutely no insulation surrounding the plumbing, but you know what? It gets the job done. It's a good, honest, working man's bathroom, which is more than slightly ironic considering that I've been out of a job since December and my overall levels of goodness and honesty would surely be debated by anyone who went to high school with me.

Regardless, you'll be pleased to know that while this bathroom falls well short of adequacy in terms of size and warmth, it makes up for these shortcomings by offering almost no storage space whatsoever. There's a small medicine cabinet on the wall, but the only open shelf space comes in the form of the two 2" x 2" soap platforms on the back end of the sink. That's barely enough room for a toothbrush and toothpaste, let alone my totally not horrible smelling Axe body spray and the 35 separate Nivea For Men products I use on a daily basis, so I decided to build a little shelf space on top of my toilet to handle the overflow.

I started by cutting out a piece of wood to match the same size as the TOP of the toilet lid (this is an important, caps-lock-worthy distinction because the lid was tapered from the top to the bottom - if I'd traced around the bottom of the lid my shelf would have ended up being way too big).

After that I took some thin slats of wood that I picked up from the Home Despot and glued/nailed them around the three straight edged (hardcore) sides of my lid-shaped piece, like-a so:

For those of you that struggle with basic logic, I centered the slats on the main piece of wood so that there would be both a large rim around the top of the shelf to keep my toothbrush from falling into the toilet AND a large rim around the bottom of the shelf to keep it from moving from side to side while sitting on top of the lid.

Now, the front edge was going to be a bit more tricky on account of its general curved-ness. I toyed around with a couple of ideas as to how I might be able to get a single piece of wood to bend like that (all of which almost certainly wouldn't have worked), but ended up cutting 15 individual 1" slats of wood to accomplish the job instead. Once they were laid end-to-end and nailed into place, my shelf looked something like this:

Yessir.

The only problem with this solution was that, as you'll see below, it left a lot of fairly large cracks in the external facade of the shelf:

To remedy this problem I first countersunk all of my nails with a nail punch, then proceeded to slather the everloving living shit out of this thing with wood filler:

Stop staring at my hand. And no, I don't have arthritis.

Following a spirited bout of power sanding, we're left with something that's starting to look not only halfway decent, but most of the way decent. That's pretty good, for those of you that weren't already aware.

Next I applied a couple coats of white paint to the base of the shelf:

Then I applied some black paint around the outer rim, at which point I promptly forgot to take a picture. Oh well.

You may have noticed this in the first picture of my bathroom (though I have to question your emotional stability if you really gave the shot that much attention), but the top of my toilet has this goofy decorative scoop taken out of the middle of it which could really cause some significant stability problems for my shelf, so I put some wax paper on top of the toilet lid then smushed a couple globs of Waterweld epoxy putty onto the bottom of the shelf before putting the shelf in the position I wanted it to be in for the long haul. Once the epoxy putty dried I was left with 2 custom-fit support trusses for my project:

Mmm... epoxy teats.

Without further ado, the final product:

And look, it works! HOORAY!!!

Now, truth be told this project wasn't completely finished at this point, as I'd yet to waterproof the thing with polyurethane (kind of an important step for something that sits within 6 inches of a sink that's used by a sloppy, sloppy man). I only took the pictures at this step because when you put polyurethane over a white paint it dries to look kind of yellow and gross, like someone peed on a tile floor and didn't bother to wipe it up (not that I'd know anything about that). So yeah, as much as I hate to break it to you this way, the shelf as it exists now does not look nearly as good as the shelf in the picture you're looking at.

Had I a larger budget I would have bought a decent piece of wood for the main slab of this shelf then stained it to a natural color instead of painting it white, but alas I was trying to get this all done for under $5 so I had to go digging through the cull bin for my lumber and all I came up with was this piece of scarred and pre-treated pine. Had I attempted to stain it I can assure you that it would have come out looking FAR worse than the "did you pee into this thing?" inducing piece of furniture I currently have in my possession.

As it always does, that mythical phrase "oh well" rules the day.

Oh well indeed.

VIRAL FACEBOOK FADS : MORON TESTED, FUCKING IDIOT APPROVED

2009-03-01T22:55:00.000-08:00

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Over the past few weeks the unconscionably stupid, unfunny, uninteresting, and obnoxious image pictured below has become a bona-fide viral phenomenon on the social networking site known to many as "Facebook." No really, it has. I'm not kidding.

If you aren't a Facebook user and are wondering how something as exceptionally unentertaining as that image could possibly become a widespread obsession among social networking aficionados, I can offer you no explanation beyond stating that a lot of people (see: morons) apparently derive a great deal of excitement and/or pleasure from "tagging" their friends as being represented by one of the 30 or so blobbish caricatures pictured in this decidedly unfunny image. Those friends then reply to the image by saying something like, "OMG, I m so not teh jock!" after which point the initial party responds by saying either "ROFL!!!1!!#@" or "dude ur so good @ sports, I rely respetc that about u." Regardless of which route the tagging party chooses to take, the circle of artificial social interaction/half-hearted praise is typically complete as of this point.

Not that we were in short supply of evidence of this fact, but you can rest assured that this image's recent popularity serves as irrefutable proof that 99% of internet users are 100% fucking stupid.

Anyway, I had a slow Friday night this weekend (some might refer to it as a "typical" Friday night, but there's no need to listen to the treachery of such charlatans), so I made my own non-sucking version of this asinine image... well, it still sucks, but it doesn't suck as much as the first one. It's what the ancient Greeks would have called "a definite improvement over the original piece of shit."

All you Facebook users out there can feel free to steal this new image of mine and tag your own friends in it - I assure you, if your friends are anything like mine they'll find the gesture to be confusing, underwhelming, and a perfectly good reason to continue ignoring you.

In other Rubbish-related news, longtime friend of the blog Shawn AKA Jouda Mann clued me in to the existence of this towering monstrosity of deliciousness via email (that's goodrubbish@gmail.com, to any of you folks out there who might be interested in such information). Even after investing a staggering 5 to 8 minutes of research into the beast I have absolutely no idea what it's supposed to do, but does functionality even come into consideration here? I don't care if it administers lead paint colonics, it's badass-edness and generalized superb-osity simply cannot be contested.

A SCANT 8 MONTHS OVERDUE, GOOD RUBBISH PROUDLY PRESENTS RETOONING: ROUND 3

2009-02-22T21:52:00.000-08:00

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I've found myself in uncharted waters over the past few weeks as I actually have several completely finished projects lying around my house just waiting to be immortalized as Good Rubbish posts (it should come as no surprise to regular readers that normally I find myself scrambling to throw some awful piece of shit together at the 11th hour just to have something to write about). Despite this fact, I didn't have much to do this past weekend so I thought I'd get a little proactive and build a new post from scratch just for the hell of it. Couple this mindset with the fact that I haven't done a retooning post in almost 9 months (seriously?), and the fate of this week's Rubbish post was all but sealed.

For those of you who don't remember the rules of this vile one person game we call Retooning (originally introduced to me by the late Seamus O'Tilliger, may he rest in peace), all you have to do is take a normal pencil eraser and remove the captions from any of your local paper's decidedly unfunny comic strips, then write in your own captions in their place. Believe me when I say that it truly is oodles of fun for the whole family... and by "oodles of fun" I actually mean "mildly entertaining," and by "the whole family" I actually mean "you and that ratty tube sock you just befouled 5 minutes ago."

I think it's time we move on.

Our first retooning strip comes to us from the world of Fred Basset - one of those endearing comics of yesteryear (a la "Blondie" and "Prince Valiant") that makes people in their 30's and 40's feel all nostalgic inside for an era that they never actually lived in.

As much as I hate to use poop jokes in consecutive retooning posts, I was really left with no other options here.

I really need to work on my poop drawing skills at some point in the near future - if I'm going to keep using this as a fallback joke I might as well learn to illustrate the stuff properly. Maybe I'm a bit too critical of myself, but that looks a lot more like a severely charred squirrel to me than anything else.

Our next subject comes to us from the world of Bound and Gagged. I really didn't know anything about this unapologetically generic strip, so a decided to do a little bit of research on them. A cursory look over their wikipedia page has led me to conclude that I have no interest in allowing this comic strip to babysit my children at any point in the near or distant future. Simply repugnant to say the least... how this sort of trash gets printed in a daily newspaper is absolutely beyond me.

I must admit that this comic solicited a half hearted chuckle from me in its original state, if for no other reason than for the fact that the perp in question appears to either be one of the ghosts from Pac-Man or Richard Nixon with a form-fitting lycra bag wrapped around his face and jowls. Still, it wasn't nearly funny enough to exempt it from the wrath of retooning.

Now watch closely... erase those jowls, then do a little bit of cut and paste work, and what do we get left with?

Why, it's a piece of social commentary that Spike Lee himself would be proud of. Hooray!

note: Many thanks to the University of Minnesota for their contribution to this fine post

Our final retooning subject comes to us from the frightfully unfunny world of Crankshaft, though it should be mentioned that the crotchety old man often featured in Crankshaft is in fact SO unfunny that he occasionally crosses over into "so awful it's fantastic" territory - a land typically dominated by strips from Marmaduke, Cathy, and The Family Circus. It's a rare occurrence, but it does happen from time to time, and I feel it should be mentioned that I find this quality in him somewhat redeeming.

Anyway, I found this comic last week in the Denver Post:

There's a lot to look at in this strip, so if you'd like to look at a little larger version of it before proceeding you can click here.

Now, I'm not going to accuse "Tom Batiuk" or "Chuck Ayers" of hanging out at raves or under bridges all the time, but something must have inspired them to draw their flight attendant in the manner that they did. Just look at those soulless eyes, her ineffectual, malaise-riddled facial expressions - clearly this woman is a basehead. Plain and simple.

She reminds me of a feminine version of one of my favorite baseheads of all time, the homeless guy from 1996 Oscar snub Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinkin' Your Juice in the Hood:

Please note that I would have normally noted the cheeseburger-wielding basehead from Menace II Society as my inspiration for this retooning effort, but linking to clips from that movie would have almost certainly stepped over the line that separates "funny" from "earnestly disturbing."

Anyway, my inspiration in tow, I moved around a couple of the cells on that crappy Crankshaft comic to serve as a fitting tribute to all the great drug addicts of the cinema:

Once again, if you'd like to check this one out a little closer up you can click here.

Good Rubbish is a site for the whole family, and obviously this cartoon was always intended to be run in the newspaper, so I decided to use "$#@*!" in lieu of the slang word for "dong" that usually goes at the end of that quote. Upon further review, I really shouldn't have started my mess of exclamatory characters with a dollar symbol, as it kind of looks like she's saying "man, I will suck your shit," which is definitely not the intended message I wanted her to be getting across, but whatever. What's done is done. Just like this post.

Tah!

DESKTOP ORGANIZER? MORE LIKE "PIECE OF CRAP." YEAH. TAKE THAT, TARGET.

2009-02-11T22:35:00.000-08:00

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I recently found myself in need of a way to organize my ever-growing pile of file folders, so I headed down to my nearest The Container Store in the hopes that I'd find something cheap, usable, and not horribly ugly to put on my desk for however long "until I break and/or ruin it" happens to last. I'm pretty sure that my last trip to a The Container Store predated my coming to understand the concept of money, as I soon found myself completely blindsided by the fact that everything they sell in that place is a massive, shameless, unequivocal rip off. My sincerest apologies if you disagree with me on this point, but I just don't find a $22 cardboard box to be a particularly great bargain.

On my way back home I decided to swing by a local Goodwill store, as I figured there was an off chance that I'd find something usable that could save me from having to build my own file organizing box from scratch. Sure enough, a few minutes later I stumbled across this little beauty:

Its marvelously preserved original retail tag boasted that this so-called "desktop organizer" was made of "real wood", and that it originally cost "30 American dollars minus 1 American penny" at Target retailers nationwide (that last quote was paraphrased). Goodwill was asking $6 for this wondrous piece of real wood, which is usually well outside my price range for a thrift store (I'm pretty sure this single purchase doubles the amount of money I've ever spent on any one item at a secondhand retailer), but I was still quite shaken from my sticker shock experience at The Container Store, so I went ahead and bought it.

Unfortunately, when I got home I soon realized that this desktop organizer was apparently designed by someone whose desktop was not organized at all. In fact, it's safe to assume that their desk was little more than a large pile of collected literature from Jeff Foxworthy and Bill O'Reilly, because they were a complete and utter moron. Observe:

What you've just viewed is a normal sized file folder fighting valiantly, but ultimately failing, to fit itself inside an oppressive, woefully undersized desktop organizer. Ridiculous.

You would think that at some point during the design phase of this thing one of the workers would have said to his boss, "you know boss, if we extended the walls out a mere 1/4" or so this thing would be able to hold sheets of paper AND file folders, wouldn't that be keen?" But apparently none of the workers said that, or maybe they did and the boss replied "NO!!!! MY CONSUMERS WILL ONLY KEEP LOOSE LEAF SHEETS OF PAPER ON THEIR DESKS, NO FOLDERS OR LEGAL PADS ALLOWED!! GAAAAHHHHH!!!!!", after which point the boss beat the worker over the head with a rotary telephone. Or maybe that extra 1/4" of materials would have destroyed their profit margins (after all, this thing was made out of real wood... that stuff's not cheap). I suppose their methods or rationale for creating the product they did is of little consequence - all that matters is that Target did in fact make and sell a product that sucked massive balls, and I was unfortunate enough to purchase it second hand. Clearly, renovations were in order here.

The rest of the McHanslaw clan (who to the best of my knowledge rarely read this blog nowadays) were out of town at the time of this most vile of fiascos, so I was able to do the majority of the work on this little philly on my kitchen counter. A welcome change of pace from having to brave the elements outdoors in January, you can rest assured (though if I remember correctly temperatures around Denver got up into the 70's that weekend, so maybe I was just lazy. And by "maybe" I actually mean "stop judging me, asshole").

I started by taking a handsaw and cutting out the side walls of 2 of the rows of pockets (the middle divider thing just popped right out once those were removed). I decided to leave the front pocket intact both for the sake of structural stability and because, though 3 pockets for holding loose leaf paper is downright stupid, 1 pocket to hold printer paper is fairly useful.

The remaining walls were pretty roughed up from my occasionally erratic handsaw usage, so afterwards I had to sand down the inside and take my rotary tool to smooth down a few gnarled edges where I made my cuts. After that I used Gorilla Glue to put the middle divider shelf back in place.

At this point it was just a matter of putting on paint and polyurethane, then leaving it to dry in a secluded room for about a month until the aforementioned polyurethane stopped emitting noxious fumes. Fortunately, this waiting period gave me plenty of time to take all sorts of action shots of my new project, ultimately culminating in what I would have to believe is the single most exciting photograph of an inanimate object that man has ever taken:

Damn. That's good.

You may have noticed in the earlier shots that this formerly crappy/currently servicable desktop organizer has three little picture frame things on its front facade. I spent a lot of time debating over what I should put in there, but ultimately decided to turn it into a sort of clerical homage to Vincent Price. Why? Because Vincent Price is the fucking man, that's why.

And now, without further adieu, let's drop that last action shot. Really tie the whole post together:

Mmm. Yeah, that's nice.

As you'll notice, it earnestly would not have taken more than an extra 1/4" of wood to make this thing a perfectly usable file holder, though I suppose if it hadn't been designed improperly I never would have gotten my hands on it in the first place, as the original owner probably wouldn't have gotten fed up with the borderline useless 3-tiered printer paper holder on his desk. Circle of life my friends, circle of life.

GOOD RUBBISH CELEBRATES ITS FIRST BIRTHDAY... THEN PROMPTLY FORGETS ABOUT IT

2009-02-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

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This is a glorious day my friends, for on February 2 - a mere 8 days ago today - this fine blog celebrated its first birthday. HOORAY!

Perhaps fittingly, no one seemed to notice this turning of the electronic odometer (least of all yours truly) so our poor friend Dr. Rubbish ended up spending its birthday languishing in obscurity all by itself, though one can only assume that it quelled its loneliness by staring at its burgeoning hit counter, which hit 15,000 hits at some point last week (perhaps even on the same day). Naturally, no one noticed this milestone either.

I said damn. I must be slipping.

Legit post to come later this week.

CHRISTMAS IN FEBRUARY!

2009-02-01T22:53:00.000-08:00

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An easily identifiable practice of unemployed 20-something year old males and preschoolers alike, I "made" (see: didn't "buy") Christmas presents for several members of the McHanslaw clan this past holiday season. Seeing as how I should probably cover this time-sensitive subject matter before the snow melts in Fargo, I'll be profiling two of these yuletide projects on this fine internet destination today.

Well, actually that's not entirely true. I'll be profiling one of these yuletide projects on this fine internet destination today, while the other one of these projects will receive no recognition outside of a photograph and a brief, factual, and wholly uninteresting blurb of explanatory text. Come to think of it, we should probably just get that one out of the way now:

It should come as no surprise to all of you that I did not craft the ornate metal base of this table (currently residing in Father McHanslaw's study), nor did I have anything to do with the creation of the bear statue, miniature globe, or stately desk lamp. No, I just bought that end table base of craigslist then cut, sanded, and treated a top for it. I was able to find a big sheet of oak plywood at Lowes (the rebellious carpenter kids call it "Blowes", but I've never cared much for them) for something like $14, then just did some angled cuts with a jigsaw (because I'm awful with a circular) to get a good shape, and then I stuck some short dowels on the underside of it to fit into the four pipes that run up the length of the base. Nothing terribly complicated, but it certainly gets the job done. And handsomely at that, if I do say so myself.

Alright, on to part two:

Following the stirring success of my first two tiered coffee table refurbishment, resident Good Rubbish enthusiast Artimus Schmidt Borlovsky brought this marvelously delapidated pile of crap over to the McHanslaw manor in the hopes that I'd refurbish it. I was less than enthused, but then again I feel that way quite often, so I really can't say whether Dr. Borlovsky created my condition or merely aggravated it.

Regardless, originally the plan was that I'd spruce it up within a couple of weeks in exchange for some form of paper currency, but that was before I got this wicked hangnail on one of my fingers that kept me really entranced for months on end, so it became a surprise freebie Christmas gift. Actually, I believe the above "before" photos were taken in my house's living room before the infamous flood of early July, 2008, so that should give you a good idea of exactly how long I scratched my ass on this one (or perhaps more appropriately, "obsessively pulled the skin out from under my fingernail like I was peeling a flesh banana") before actually getting around to working on it.

The table had some obvious structural flaws that I was going to need to address at some point, but it was pretty obvious that I needed to strip the outer wood-like synthetic coating before moving on to anything else, so that's what I did:

The pleasant surprise with this table (a surprise that flew in the face of my earlier two tiered table's construction) was that under the cheesy synthetic wood-like coating there actually lied some pretty decent looking real wood. The bottom legs appear to have been ravaged by pine beatles or befouled by a man coated in creosote, but as far as the two table surfaces were concerned, staining was definitely an option here. And as the sheets on my twin sized bed can surely attest, when given the opportunity to do so, I choose to stain.

Wait... was that a bedwetting joke or a masturbation joke? Hmm.

Anyway, you might be able to tell from the two "before" pictures, but the wood at the edges of the tables was notably warped and frayed, so I had to glue/clamp those areas back together then fill in the remaining gaps with wood filler before sanding the whole thing smooth.

I could have gone a couple different directions with the paint/stain on this one, but seeing as how it was a gift and not something for my admittedly unconventional (some might say "clown-like") personal collection, I opted to go a little Ethan Allen with the whole thing. Apart from this, Dr. Borlovsky specifically requested that I try to make the end product match the speaker cabinets I had done for him a while back, so I decided to stain the table surfaces with a red oak treatment, then cover the legs with black latex paint.

Oh, just for the sake of complete disclosure, there's actually a set of photographs missing from this part of the project where I set up this really elaborate mess of newspaper and string on a fence at my house, then suspended all of the table legs from said string and spray painted them, then became enraged with the fact that I once again proved myself to be completely incapable of spray painting anything without it ending up being covered with enormous globs of dripping paint, then had to resand all of the legs, THEN got to recover them with a conventional brush-applied paint. Yeah, it happened. Then this is how things looked:

I'm not really sure why I included that photo. Basically it just shows the position everything was in when I painted it... not terribly interesting, unless you've really got a thing for masking tape. Whatever, here's what things looked like once everything was reassembled:

If you're interesting in the timeline of this project, that picture was probably taken at about 8:30pm or so on December 23rd, leaving me with JUST enough time to get a few coats of polyurethane on before Christmas morning:

Sweet mother of God, that table is HOT. Damn!

Unfortunately, your friend Enron happens to be really allergic to heavy fumes, so the fact that I didn't finish coating my two Christmas tables with polyurethane until about 11pm the night before Christmas, coupled with the fact that I was housesitting 45 minutes away from my homestead at the time, created a nasty cocktail for my lungs. Well, more my brain than my lungs really... I made the whole drive that day with all the windows of the car down (not a pleasant proposition in its own right in late December in Denver), but that didn't stop me from getting a schyster of a headache along the way. Also didn't stop me from drinking about 40 glasses of water once I got home in a desperate attempt to clean those fumes out of my system. Also didn't stop me from... eh, nevermind. There's room for a really gross joke here, but I'm not gonna make it.

I hope you've enjoyed your stay at Good Rubbish, please enjoy the rest of your day.

JUST WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECTED IT...

2009-01-21T23:10:00.000-08:00

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...I bring to you the long awaited sequel to the Ronald Reagan shirt fiasco - Part 1.

For the sake of immediate transparency, let it be known that I am more relieved than thrilled with the final results. Whether it is merely "done" or it is truly "done well", the important thing here is that it is done at all - my treacherous whore of a white whale has been slain, so finally I can get on with my life and maybe, just maybe, get some quality content coming back up on this site.

Alright, let's get on to the meat of this here post:

As some of you may recall from my first post on the subject of this Reagan shirt, about 4 or 5 months ago the oft referenced Artimus Mangilord approached me with a request to reprise my "Tear This Roof Off" design that was originally unveiled in late April of 2008, but to replace the awkward and generally stupid design I'd created with a black and white adaptation of Reagan's iconic cowboy hat photo:

As my original post from a month or so ago details, the process of converting this image into black and white proved itself to be a certifiable pain in the ass. Feel free to reread the original post if you want all of the excruciating, long winded, and entirely unnecessary details, but the long story short here is that after simplifying and cleaning all of the lines in a black and white version of that particular photo (which is really all I do when creating one of these designs), you're left with an image that looks very little like Ronald Reagan and very much like a hybrid of a serial murdering clown and that Andre the Giant "OBEY" image that all the kids with ludicrously expensive denim pants are always talking about:

I probably went through about 5 or 6 attempts at this design that all ended up looking roughly like that (sometimes slightly better, often significantly worse... unfortunately those attempts are lost to history) before I eventually gave up. Temporarily, at least.

Late one night in early December I found myself with little to do, so I took another look at the image of Ronnie I'd been working with to see if I could figure out a resolution to this looming spectre of a problem. I looked at him, and he... well, he just looked right back.

And that's when it hit me: I'd been going about this one all wrong. All this time I'd been trying to simplify the image, to clean it up to its most basic state, so that there were large, clearly defined blocks of black and white with little interruption between them, but this photo demanded a different approach. It's a Western photo... a John Wayne shot really, so it only makes sense that it needs to retain a certain level of grittiness. It doesn't work as a clean, streamlined image - every wrinkle, pock mark, crow's foot, liver spot and over sized pore on Reagan's face (and there are a lot of those things) needs to be held in tact, otherwise the photo just won't look right. It won't look rugged. It won't look American, damnit.

Basically what I decided to do was just trace over the black and white image that I have pictured above - cutting out a couple of unnecessary lines here and there, but generally just tracing over and refining all of the imperfections instead of removing them (for the record, had I not done this the image would have come out looking very pixelated and blurry when printed on a shirt, by tracing over the image the lines come out crisp, like a delicious Triscut). What I ended up with was an image that looks much better when viewed in a large format, so I'm going to post it on here in the normal size and provide this spectacular link to an uncomfortably enormous version of the image:

Mmm... gritty. With that finished I just needed to find a good font for my text, but I really didn't have any non-hideous western fonts on my computer, so I searched around on the "world wide web" a bit and found this site with some pretty good free fonts on it, and this site with only one free font on it... but it was a damn good one. I chose the "Fusty Saddle" font from the second site, then plopped it onto the image and just like that this horrible shirt project came to a decidedly anticlimactic though unduly satisfying end:

As you can see I made a couple more revisions at the 11th hour... I cut off the top of the image around Reagan's hate to create sort of a Denver Nuggets circa 1987 motif, and I switched the text color to be white, as I think this image plays a lot better on a dark shirt. Oh, and I tried to see if I could lick the outside of my elbow with my tongue, but I couldn't. In light of all my recent achievements, I must admit that failure was kind of deflating.

If you'd like to see the exciting, tantalizing, and totally buy-able final product feel free to check it out over at my shop on zazzle.com (though considering how it turned out, I think you might be off the hook for this one, Dr. Mangilord). Like I said before, I'm more relieved that this project has come to an end rather than thrilled that it ended really well, so... I don't know, up your nose with a rubber hose.

The preceding Good Rubbish closing paragraph was brought to you by the many episodes of Welcome Back Kotter that are permanently etched into my frontal lobe. The end.

CAFE PRESS ENCOUNTERS THE BUSINESS SIDE OF MY SLAPPIN' HAND

2009-01-16T22:25:00.000-08:00

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As of press date, Good Rubbish's longstanding courtship with the moderately adequate people over at cafepress.com has come to an abrupt, and long overdue, end. I just couldn't validate spending $7 a month to run a shop on cafepress when competing websites offer better features, more products, and a more attractive and intuitive interface for the low low price of "free."

What competing websites, you ask? Well, zazzle.com is one, and... well, that's actually the only competing website I'm referencing here. Not coincidentally, zazzle.com is also where I've moved all of my crappy t-shirt designs to (though some cuts to the merchandise catalog have been made, as a fair number of my shirts had become entirely irrelevant and/or upon further inspection proved to be incredibly stupid).

So without further ado, please feel free to meander over to my shop on zazzle and check out the new digs. While you're there, be sure to take significant note of the piss poor html job I turned in when trying to center the good rubbish logo on my page. Beautiful!

For the record, zazzle.com as a website is pretty sweet. Compared to cafepress their selection of customizable products is absolutely massive, and the variety of ways you can customize shirt designs is pretty impressive as well, so if you're thinking of running off your own shirt designs I'd highly recommend them from a user interface standpoint (and they have a good money back guarantee on their products so I can only assume that the stuff they print is pretty decent quality-wise). My only grievance thus far is that they don't carry any red shirts. I mean really... 30 different shades of light blue, but no normal red? What fucking country do they thing they're catering to here, Bulgaria? Ridiculous.

In closing, I'm planning on really busting my ass on some projects this weekend, MAYBE even getting a couple finished, so hopefully over the next few weeks you'll be seeing posts coming at you once or twice every week instead of once or twice every month. Change? Yes it is, but change is good. An Afro-American President told me so.

OH THE HUMANITY!

2009-01-04T21:37:00.000-08:00

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Longtime readers of Good Rubbish will undoubtedly fondly recall my post from last February on how to turn random glassware into a bird brothel. Well my friends, I come to you today bearing bad news, as the bird brothel is no more.

The old girl had been doing her job marvelously on the back porch of the McHanslaw manor - theoretically serving bird seed to the neighborhood birds while in reality exclusively fattening up the neighborhood squirrels during the coldest of the winter months - but a few days ago it ran afoul of a particularly clumsy, perhaps severely disabled, squirrel who thought he/she could best access the aforementioned sunflower seeds if the bird brothel were lying on its side... preferably at the base of the 4 foot tall table it was resting upon. Mission accomplished, though I doubt those bits of sunflowery goodness were quite as tasty after being mixed with microscopic shards of cheap glass.

I understand that this phrase holds great historical and cultural significance and should not be bandied about lightly, but for me the trail of tears lies in my own back yard, and it's paved with sunflower seeds.

And with that we say goodbye to one of the founding fathers of the world of Rubbish. Farewell my friend, best of luck to you in cheap crap heaven (a subsidiary of doggie heaven).

REPURPOSING: HOW TO TURN A PERFECTLY GOOD HOUSE INTO AN ABOMINATION

2008-12-24T23:02:00.000-08:00

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For the past week I've been holed up in my hometown of Parker, Colorado dogsitting a couple of incredibly rambunctious golden retrievers for some lovely ultra-liberal associates of the McHanslaw clan.

It's been a nice change of pace, and the income has acted as a nice stopgap measure for my dwindling financial resources, but the amount of nostalgia inherent to this quasi-vocation is absolutely staggering. As I write this fine post, I am sitting no further than 150 yards from my 3rd grade classroom and a mere couple of miles down the road from my childhood home. As such, I thought it would be most appropriate for me to do a McHanslaw family history themed post while I'm out here, as with any luck I'll never be living out here ever again.

With that rationale firmly in place, I proudly present to you a comprehensive tutorial on how to turn an attractive, understated rustic home into an unapologetic perversion of American culture - An abomination, if you will - in 5 easy steps. Enjoy!

STEP 1: GATHER YOUR MATERIALS

To complete this project, we're going to need a house. Not just any house will do though, make sure to pick one out that doesn't make your eyes bleed when you look at it, as the end result won't have the desired effect if it already looks horrible when you purchase it. For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be using my childhood home, which looked something like this when we left it 6 years ago:

Admittedly, when the McHanslaw clan resided here the home was markedly less photoshopped and didn't have that monstrous black specter lurking on the northern edge of its property, but you get the general idea. Trees, bushes, dirt roads, bricks, everything's painted the same color... you could almost say it looks like a natural part of the landscape. This, my friends, must come to an end.

STEP 2: TOPPLE UNIFORMITY

If you're working on a property that has an attached house and garage, go ahead and skip this step. If you've got a detached garage, or even if you've got a storage shed or any other free standing structure outside of the house itself, then read carefully.

The first thing you're going to want to do after moving into a house like this (and I do mean the FIRST thing... as in, you should probably get this done within 1 or 2 weeks of your move in date) is cover up the wood exterior (honestly, who uses wood on the outside of their house? Yuck!) on ONE of the buildings with high quality, easily washable, and infinitely attractive aluminum siding. Why only one of the structures instead of both? Because this way you can have a green garage and an off-white house, which will stand out far more than if both structures were the same color. After all, regardless of where your home is located you want your house to be as sore-thumb-like as possible, otherwise the mailman might never find it.

This also acts as an initial assault on the senses of your neighbors - one which will hopefully put them into a state of shock that will render them completely incapable of raising any objections against your actions in the coming months. Think of it as a blitzkrieg approach to battling any nearby HOA's that might have intentions of bothering you.

STEP 3: YOUR ROAD TO SUCCESS

Build a large driveway that leads up a hillside (make the driveway paved if your driveway is dirt, make it dirt if your driveway is paved) to a large clearing, then wait. Don't put anything on or near that clearing for as long as you can hold out, just leave it as a road to nowhere.

Why do something like this, you ask? Because that's how the game is played, my friends. That's how the game is played. You want any neighbors with kitchen window views to your property to utter the phrase (with dread dripping from their voice) "what on earth are they doing over there?" no fewer than 80 to 120 times before you actually show them the new edition you're planning for your property. Before we get to that new edition though, let's take care of a brief sidebar.

THE EVERPRESENT OPTIONAL STEP: INTERIOR DECORATE ACCORDINGLY

Seeing as how at this point you're just waiting around for your neighbors to reach whatever "what on earth are they doing over there?" quota that you've set for them, now might be a good time to make the interior decorum of your home match its svelte new exterior. For certain, you're going to want to emphasize garish floral garlands, wood grain wallpaper, and Anne Geddes posters; and you might want to throw in an impractically large gun rack or two just to make sure you're getting your point across. Be creative here - we get far too few chances in life to truly flaunt our dizzying lack of aesthetic taste, do NOT waste this opportunity.

Please note that I cannot provide any sort of assurance that the pictured home's current residents actually decorated in this manner, but let's not kid ourselves here... we all know what's happening on the walls in that house. Alright, now let's get back to that "new edition" you're about to install...

STEP 4: HOLY FUCKING CHRIST, YOU PAID MONEY FOR THAT?

Now we've reach what is probably the most critical step in the abomination-crafting process, the step where we voluntarily erect the single most obtrusive object known to man smack dab in the middle of the property. Not near any trees, not behind any hills, not particularly close to any of the other structures on the lot, just right out in the middle of nowhere, all by its lonesome. Hell, I'm even going to retire the floating red arrow for this picture, as I have a slight hunch that you'll be able to figure out what I'm referencing on your own:

A couple things we need to point out here: First, perhaps most importantly, the barn-like leviathan structure (henceforth to be known as the BLLS) is yellow, so we've officially achieved the highly sought after and extremely rare tri-color residence. Also, notice that the BLLS is structurally ambiguous. What is it? Is it a garage? It's kind of big for a garage... do they keep semi trailers in there? Wait... maybe it's a barn. But if it's a barn, why does it have a garage door? No, it's got to be a guest house - look at that awning, it's definitely a guest house. But once again, why the garage door?

These are the conversations your neighbors will be having over the next few years as they watch their property values fall directly through the floor. Let no one ever tell you that you lack the power to change lives.

STEP 5: THE ICING

Four words: Twenty. Foot. Flag. Pole.

Fifth word: Sweet.

And with that my friends, I have taught you all their is to know about ruining attractive houses and sullying the childhood memories of well intentioned bloggers the world over. And though it might be a cliche' in these modern times to say so, no, I am not at all bitter about this.

Adieu.

A VERY M.C. ESCHER CHRISTMAS

2008-12-17T22:57:00.000-08:00

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Adhering to the proud American tradition of destroying as much nature as possible whenever presented with the opportunity to do so, it's always been understood in the McHanslaw family that two Douglas Firs are to be felled on any Christmas tree cutting voyage.

The first - a towering, robust, symmetrical beast of pine-borne largess - is to be the center of the family's Christmas festivities over the coming weeks. It's where lights are strung, ornaments are hung, presents are carefully placed, and where we all come together on the evening of December 25th to remember the day some 2,000 years ago when Santa Claus was nailed to a pine tree for his beliefs by three apostles in a manger made out of rock salt. Praise be to Claus.

The second tree - a diminutive, sparsely populated, undernourished, dilapidated blackhead on Mother Nature's carefully manicured pores - has generally come to be known as the "requisite Charlie Brown tree", a reference to a former servant at the McHanslaw manor (and a tragic figure at that), not the beloved "Peanuts" character of the same name.

As an aside, if I were to name a tree after a Peanuts character, I'd pick one with really curly needles and name it Schroeder. Then I'd put a miniature grand piano in front of it. Then I'd wait.

This was to be Requisite Charlie Brown 2008. It's a bit healthier than I would have liked, but I assure you that it looked incredibly sick when I originally cut it down. Perhaps it solicited some sort of sick, life affirming pleasure out of being felled.

Regardless, at some point during the past 5 years my family switched from being a group of people who owned 2 Christmas tree stands to being a group of people who owned 1 Christmas tree stand, so I had to figure out a way to make a legitimate piece of Christmas decorum out of this Requisite Charlie Brown tree without just leaning it up against a wall (though I must admit that in retrospect, leaning it up against a wall would have been a pretty awesomely nonchalant solution to my problem).

I lacked both the lumber and the ambition to fabricate a stand from scratch, but what I didn't lack was a closet door with a bathrobe hook on it:

Being that I suffer from occasional bouts of contrived creativity, and being that I had really been dragging my feet on part two of last week's Reagan post so I needed something quick and easy to fill in the ever-growing gap in Good Rubbish content, I decided to hang my tree upside down.

I thought this process would take about 1/16th of the time that I ended up expending to make this somewhat lame idea into a reality, but that was before I realized that I needed a way to provide water to the tree while it was hanging upside down, otherwise I'd be left with nothing but a pile of dead needles below a dangling stick come Christmas morning.

As awesome as that might have been, I decided to try and devise a water source anyway.

A rarity in my world, my first idea ended up working perfectly well. I took an x-acto knife and cut a hole in the bottom of a fairly thick plastic cup (far more robust than the red Solo cups I'd become so familiar with during my 5 year bout of post secondary education), then jammed it down over the end of the tree. After that, to seal the gaps between the cup and the tree trunk, I slathered some aquarium sealant around the bottom of the cup, creating a totally hardcore and radical watertight seal:

After allowing the glue to dry overnight I just wrapped the trunk with some twine and hung it from the aforementioned bathrobe hook. I poured some water in the cup at this point to check the seal, and sure enough it didn't spill a drop.

Over the course of the 2 days that have passed since I took this photo, the water level has dropped down below the trunk of the tree. The floor below the tree is bone dry, so I can only assume that the tree is in fact drinking up the water despite its abnormal gravitational orientation. Exciting, I know.

As you can see in that last shot I did decide to put lights on the thing, but Christmas lights really don't work all that well on upside down trees, as the branches are all condensed and streamlined instead of being stretched out like they are on a right-side-up tree. Really, it looks a lot more like a flavor saver made out of pine needles than the top of a tree, but whatever.

I wrapped the lights around the trunk only (they just fell off when I tried to put them on the branches), then just left the excess in a big pile at the bottom. That's just how I do Christmas lights, alright? You got a problem with it, then take it up with my biceps, which I have cleverly nicknamed "M" and "Anagement", respectively.

Happy Holidays, oh proud flag bearers of my dwindling readership! Happy Holidays indeed!

DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK

2008-12-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

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Note: This is the first time in a good six weeks that I've tried to write anything of substance, so please excuse me if this post ends up being dryer than the back of Bea Arthur's ankles.

Greetings adoring public... long time sans sight, eh? Well, I assure you it's been a mightily eventful month and a half since I last blathered upon you, but most of the goings on are tied up in the enigmatic nature of my internal composition, so I'll spare you the intimate details and just provide the Cliffs Notes:

I did not end up getting my gallbladder removed, but don't let that fact fool you into believing that the little guy's decided to start working properly again. Also, last Tuesday I got laid off from my job. The end.

As you might expect, I'm none too excited about either of these facts, but they're mine to live with so I guess I'll... well, you know, live with them. The new found joblessness is of far greater concern for me than my gut problems, as I really am not sure how I can go about looking for work at this point. I've been on a detoxing diet for about a year now, and as a strange side effect I've grown ABSURDLY sensitive to perfumes and colognes, to the point that I can smell the perfume of someone entering my house from 2 doorways and a steep flight of stairs away before the front door even shuts behind them. Worse yet, instead of just getting a rash or a cough from exposure like a normal person, the effects of my being around perfumes goes directly to my brain, putting me in this really panicky/uber-irritable state that takes hours to wear off and can really do a number on my sleep.

I suppose it's kind of a neat trick, this super smelling of mine, but in terms of being capable of working in your run of the mill office building in America it's nothing more than a certifiable pain in the ass. I was very fortunate that at my last job none of the people I worked with were vain enough to carry around any scents other than Pert Plus and Dial soap; and even if someone was hired on who had a strong hand lotion or something like that, it was a small enough workplace that I could discreetly inform them of my hyperactive olfactory system, at which point they would politely express sympathy for my situation and return to work the next day not smelling like a taxi cab air freshener and/or Liza Minelli.

Will I have much luck in finding a virtually scent free working environment going forward? Seems unlikely, but certainly far more inexplicable things have occurred in the past (I'll provide the celebrity status of Dane Cook as exhibit A), so I'm not about to rule out the possibility. For the record, the over/under on "the number of times your boy Enron will walk into an office, encounter an interviewer who's draped in Liz Taylor's musk, then simply say 'nevermind' before sprinting out of the building" is currently set at 2.5 - place your bets accordingly.

Alright, that's enough bitching from me. I'd hate to see this once proud blog turn into a "please enjoy reading about all of my personal problems" website like the Drudge Report. Let's move on to something resembling a project, shall we?

PHASE 2: RONALD REAGAN REDUX

Frequent browsers of Good Rubbish may recall that a while back I crafted a Ronald Reagan shirt for my shop on cafepress. The response to this design has been lukewarm at best (assuming that "lukewarm" and "zero shirts sold" can be used interchangeably), but Artimus Mangilord, the oft-est referenced of all Good Rubbish's associates, was quite taken with the shirt's tagline, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear off this roof." He requested that a second shirt design be commissioned under this same tagline, this time featuring a more simplistic/less stupid image - that of Reagan's trademark "Dutch in a cowboy hat" photograph:

Now if I remember correctly, this request came in about 3 or 4 months ago, and I've been working on the design intermittently ever since. To call this image a real son of a bitch would be a gross understatement - simply put, I have never had so much trouble converting an image to black and white in all my life. Allow me to explain why, while simultaneously providing a tutorial on how to make your own spectacular black and white t-shirt designs that will sell slightly better than the plague...

The primary method I use for converting photos to black and white is the "threshold" filter in Adobe Photoshop, which takes a color photo and converts it into a 2 color image (if you have Photoshop and would like to know how to find this filter email me at goodrubbish@gmail.com, though bear in mind that my copy of Photoshop is quite literally 8 years old, so my instructions may not do you much good if you're using a less archaic piece of software).

Usually the threshold filter works just swimmingly, assuming that the photograph you're using is of a decent size. To provide an example, let's assume that I wanted to craft a t-shirt that would showcase the awesomeness of silver screen magnate Gary Busey, as shown in the following photograph:

7 seconds later, following an application of the threshold filter, that picture magically becomes...

Boom. Perfect. Now all I'd have to do is go in with the lasso tool to clean up the lines (this usually takes far longer than you'd expect), add a tagline for the image (perhaps "batshit motherfucking crazy" or simply "TEETH!") and I'd be ready to roll. Unfortunately, not all photographs make the threshold leap as cleanly as Dr. Busey just did. The classic "Dutch in a cowboy hat" shot just happens to be one of these photographs. Here's the closest it can come to being a decipherable image after applying the threshold filter:

Admittedly, you can still probably tell it's a picture of Reagan, but you can't tell that he's wearing a cowboy hat and it appears that he's either just crawled up from the set of Backdraft (has that pop culture reference become terribly obscure yet? If no, will it ever?) or he's going through a George Hamilton circa 2013 sized bout of melanoma. Either way, it doesn't appear to hold much relevance to the "Mr. Gorbachev, tear off this roof" line, now does it?

To combat this "cavernous abyss in the middle of Ronnie's face" problem, I had to chop the photo up into about 8 pieces, then run the threshold filter on each of those individual pieces (doing this allows me to add more light to certain areas of the picture and less light to others), then put those pieces back together over the original picture to create a complete and cogent (albeit a bit grainy) image. Observe:

Not perfect, but pretty decent considering the circumstances, right? Well this is the point I'd reached as of about 6 weeks ago - all that remained was for me to go back in and clean up all of the grainy shit on the picture to come out with a somewhat polished and only modestly disappointing end product. Unfortunately, this is where I stalled once more. There seemed to be no way to clean up all of the grainy pixelated crap on this photograph without losing all of the picture's character... every time I'd try I'd just end up creating a black and white picture of what appeared to be an extraordinarily wrinkled clown, and that really wasn't the image I was going for. That's when I experienced nothing short of an epiphany that may or may not have led to this project's long-awaited conclusion.

What was this epiphany? Did it in fact lead to this project's conclusion? How unapologetically does the final product in fact suck balls? Tune in next week for the thrilling answers to these and many other questions... you know, after I actually complete the work on this fucking thing.

PLACEHOLDER POST

2008-11-30T22:33:00.000-08:00

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'Cause I'll be damned if I'm gonna go through the whole month of November without a single post on my precious house of Rubbish.

Legitimate post (a hybrid grupdate/project fiasco of delicious proportions) to follow shortly, and for once by "shortly" I don't mean "3 weeks from now."

Yep.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM GOOD RUBBISH

2008-10-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

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Clearly pumpkin is not a preferred medium for me. And no, I didn't take that picture on top of my toilet. Don't be ridiculous.

Oh, one more thing...

Vote thumbs up. Yes, vote thumbs up indeed.

A GRUPDATE OF MODERATELY UN-EPIC PROPORTIONS

2008-10-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

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Well friends and neighbors, as you may have guessed by way of the recent dearth in new posts, something is amiss in the world of Rubbish.

Breaking with tradition, the root cause of this most recent gap in top-quality internet content isn't laziness on my part. Oh no, this time I'll instead be evoking my second most popular excuse: Bizarre health problems.

For about the past 5 or 6 weeks I've been fighting off this on-again off-again gut problem which, as far as anyone can figure, appears to be a bacterial infection of the gallbladder. Prerequisites for this condition are usually defined as "The Four F's," those being:

1. You're a Female
2. You're Fat
3. You're over Forty
4. You're Flatulent

Let it be known that I only fit one of these four requirements, but I do so with gusto. Room clearing gusto.

Anyway, far be it from me to question an unconventional diagnosis for myself, because let's not kid ourselves here, if I had a dime for every time I've proven to be an outright medical anomaly... well, I'd probably be paying my soon to be newly acquired Gastroenterologist in cash. And leaving a sawbuck for his secretary. She helped me read the new issue of Ranger Rick.

Here's the end game: I'm growing really tired of running a mild fever all the time and generally feeling like crap, so I'm either going to have surgery to remove this vile bile contraption (something I've been trying my damnedest to avoid this whole time by eating a ludicrously bland diet and taking a number of supplements), or it's going to magically get better sometime within the next week or so (one of these potential resolutions is more likely than the other, but I'll leave it up to you to decide which one that is). Regardless of how things turn out, I probably won't be producing any new material until it IS resolved and I'm fully back on my feet, so if I seem to be laying low for the next couple of weeks... well, that's why.

Word.

-Enron

TOTE BAGS THAT MAKE YOUR MOUTH SCREAM WORDS AT STUFF FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER

2008-10-16T22:04:00.000-07:00

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I'll keep this brief as my brain is a certifiable non-functioning entity right now (feel free to accept this post's title as evidence of this), though I'll probably be reprising this post once the fog lifts. So yeah, bask in the glory of these muddled words I write today, for their time on this frail internet planet may be short... short indeed.

Or maybe I'll just get lazy and leave this post as is. Excuse me, "continue to be" lazy... there's no "get" about it.

Anyway, for reasons I shall hopefully disclose at a later date (UPDATE: I'm clearly not going to ever revisit this post - what's done is done, learn to accept it), I have created a series of delectably delicious canvas tote bag designs so that you can finally have a practical means to flaunt your replete awesomeness while shopping for produce that you can no longer afford. Dig them shits:

Wow, those really look incredibly small. Well, I assure you they look a lot better once they're actually on the bags, an assertion which you can easily verify by visiting my scrumtulescent merch page on zazzle.com

What, you didn't click on that last link? Then click on this one.

That, my friends, is what we in the biz call "an effective sales technique."

Alright, like I said edits coming to this post (hopefully, and by that I mean not actually) later, for now... I don't know, do something other than reading. It's bad for you.

AAAAAANNND WE'RE BACK... KIND OF.

2008-10-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

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Just a brief update for my friends and neighbors: I appear to have this gut infection up against the ropes at this point, but the son of a bitch is damn good at blocking haymakers. I'm hoping for a KO in the next round here, but I've been saying that for the past 8 or 9 rounds, so who knows? Normally at this point I'd request that the referee stop the fight, but I'm pretty sure that aspect of the analogy would translate into one of my internal organs being removed, so I think I'll just keep swinging until I'm completely out of gas (figurative or literal? I'll leave that decision up to you).

No new projects finished this week (well, I actually did finish one project, but it ended up being no more exciting or creative than you'd expect a normal, functioning desk to be, so I'll spare you the details on its construction), but I've got a couple requested shirt designs I'm hoping to finish up over the weekend, so those should be moseying their way onto this fine blog early next week. With commentary, of course. Hopefully humorous commentary, but Vegas currently has the line set at Bland -14.5, so I'm not too optimistic about the whole thing.

In other Rubbish related news, possible serendipity befell your boy Enron earlier today, as a thoroughly unglamorous trip to Advance Auto Parts for a replacement head lamp happened to leave me parked right outside of a Salvation Army that I hadn't visited in several months. The pickings, as you might expect during our current economic debacle, were slim, but there was still some absolutely horrid crap to be found:

Both of those objects, even that monstrosity of a cheerleader that weighs at least 5lbs, cost me the pittance of a dollar apiece, and I didn't even have to pull the old pricetag switcharoo to obtain this marvelous pricing (though the cashier all but accused me of as much on my way out the door... he claimed "these are worth a lot more than a dollar." I disagreed. In this case, I represented the majority of rational American consumers).

Anyway, I'll probably be messing with those fine objects in the next few weeks with or without reader interaction/interference, but if you've got any suggestions as to how I should repaint those fine sculptures please feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email at goodrubbish@gmail.com.

One side note: If at all possible, I'd like to avoid turning the monstrous cheerleader into a free standing rape joke. Lame, I know, but maybe I could turn it into a reference to something funnier than rape... you know, like Dane Cook. Wait, bad example...

SYSTEM ERROR.

2008-10-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

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So I've been fighting off some sort of dastardly internal infection for the past week, and it's yet to release me from its clutches (tragically, my already constricted diet was the first to feel its wrath... I've been living almost exclusively on steamed broccoli and unbuttered sweet potatoes for the past 4 days - never underestimate the lengths a man such as myself will go to in the hopes of avoiding surgery).

Anyway, for obvious reasons I haven't spent a whole lot of time working on arts and crafts projects recently, so I'll have to maintain the unfortunate status quo of crapulence, irrelevance, and and verbal incontinence on this blog for at least another week. This hurts me far more than it hurts you, I assure you of that.

In the meantime, please enjoy the following Dennis the Menace cartoon that I recently stumbled across:

Correct me if I'm out of line here, but couldn't the artist have tried a little harder to make Dennis and his newfound black friend look like they at least belong to the same species? For God's sake, these two bear about as much resemblance to one another as Ernest Borgnine and a diseased ferret. Scratch that - a verile, healthy ferret.

Regardless, it's become quite clear to me that there's just nothing to laugh about when the ravages of affirmative action take over the funny pages... of course, I guess there really wasn't anything to laugh about when the ravages of comics took over the funny pages either, so perhaps my point here is rendered moot. Circle of life.

In closing, Artimus mangilord sent me this link earlier today. It's well work looking at, though please refrain from doing so if there's any history of epilepsy in your family.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go eat something extraordinarily bland before it gets cold. Mmm.

LEST WE FORGET...

2008-09-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

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The Good Rubbish shop on cafepress.com has posted losses for 8 months running now... with your lack of help, we can make it 9! Dream the impossible dream, my friends!

Anyway, I just spent the past few hours navigating the tedious expanses of cafepress.com, uploading a couple of my Sarah Palin shirt designs from last week. You remember those designs, right? They were the ones no one liked. Three cheers for me turning a blind eye to widespread consumer disinterest! Hooray!

I went ahead and uploaded some stuff with the "Uggh" design and the "Do Not Want" design printed on them, as those were the only designs whose lameness quotient, while still unquestionably present, didn't actively offend any of my readers. Do I expect you to buy any of this stuff? No. But do I expect you to at least follow these two links to look at the stuff and confirm for yourself that these graphics really aren't all that fashionable? Yes. Yes I do.

I'm in the midst of a larger than normal project right now, so this will probably be the only post this week... though I might do a bit more putzing around with my cafepress shop over the weekend. I'll be sure to keep you posted if that ends up happening. Otherwise, expect to find something worth reading early next week, though considering my recent track record I would encourage you to not expect to find that "something" on this blog.

Breast wishes,

-Enron

SARAH PALIN QUOTES THE GENERAL PUBLIC: THESE SHIRTS ARE MEDIOCRE AT BEST

2008-09-18T23:31:00.001-07:00

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A none too brief disclaimer: It's currently 12:38am on Friday the 19th of September, and I've been forced to use broken toothpicks to pry my eyelids open long enough to write this post. As such, I hope you'll forgive me if my syntax is more disjointed than normal and I spall srveral werds improperlymassivepenis.

Normally I'd just put this whole thing off until tomorrow, but unfortunately my boss (who is earnestly one hell of a guy, by the way... I feel the need to note this as I'm not entirely sure whether or not I ever forwarded him the address to this fine web destination of mine) felt obligated to work within the friendly confines of our almost comically small office today despite the fact that he was violently ill - a decision which directly resulted in my breathing in more airborne pathogens than most Cambodian poison control centers could provide. I am the mother of all coal mine canaries when it comes to infectious diseases, so I'd say that there's about a 97% probability that I'll wake up tomorrow feeling like miserable crap (despite my overindulgence in herbal tea this evening), and that would translate to a 99.99999% chance of my not getting this post done until next Monday, if not later.

Condensed translation: If I don't get this shit done now, it's not going to get done for a long time. So despite the fact that my brain is currently about as clear as a slab of concrete, we're going to press through this goddamn post, not because I'll be able to craft lucid and enjoyable zingers along the way (I almost certainly won't), but because it's what any good American would do, damnit.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled post, already sullied by overwhelming mediocrity:

You may not be aware of this, but apparently a few weeks ago the GOP selected this woman named Sarah Palin to run for the office of vice president alongside John McCain. And by that I of course mean "the GOP selected this jingoistic caricature of a woman to give Pentecostals a large enough collective hard on that they'd forget that they're actually voting for John McCain for President." Well, mission accomplished. Our good friend Sarah has rallied the base, belittled community leaders, and brought the cult of personality Republicans back from the farthest reaches of the American landscape, where I can only presume they spent the last 4 years keeping their ears plugged while people yelled "I told you so" at them for voting for George W. Bush in 2004.

"Whatevurr... he schhtill's a whole bunch bettur than whut Kerry woulda dun." Yeah, capital argument my good man, and considering how well the past 4 years have gone, it's one rife with validity and logic as well. Good show!

For the record, I have no problem with people who support economic conservatism, I merely have a problem with people who claim to support economic conservatism and yet still vote for the modern Republican party. Considering how the GOP has operated for the past 8 years, voting for that party because you don't like government spending is like cutting off your kid's fingers because you want him to clean his room or eating your own poop because you like the taste of filet mignon.

But I digress...

So this Sarah Palin character... I don't like her. Actually, it's more than that. I have never had such a bad feeling about a person in all my life as the feeling I have about Sarah Palin at this point in time. Forget crawling, that woman makes my skin enter a dead sprint. She has made me vow to tune out all news outlets from here until the election, as the mere introduction of a Palin sound byte into my daily routine can turn an otherwise peaceful day into a celebration of dis chord and cold sweats. She's like the political version of Star Jones for me, it's just not a good thing.

Anyway, I'm trying to refrain from spewing purebred vitriol at this point in my life, so when the urge came over me to write a searing, soaring, and entirely senseless diatribe about the woman, I decided I'd just make up a few shirt designs with her as the subject instead. A couple of weeks later (seriously, even with the aid of computers this woman's head is a pain in the ass to draw) I've got a few designs finished and ready for your approval. Truly, this could be one of the all time great moments in passive aggressiveness.

Also please note that these are for all intents and purposes rough drafts, so if you have some suggestions as to how to make them better please feel free to let me know

That said, these rough drafts should still be showing up soon in my shop on cafepress.com fairly soon. I'd get them up there tonight, but getting stuff set up on there is a remarkably large pain in the ass, so it probably won't happen until sometime late this weekend.

Without further ado...

This first design is really the ultimate representation of my feelings towards Sarah Palin. If you'd like to test this claim, feel free to approach me at any point during the day and say the words "Sarah Palin" as part of a sentence. That's the noise I'll make. "Uggh." It's a guttural knee jerk reaction, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. Feel the same way? Then buy the fucking shirt. It's not a complex equation, my friend.

Another fine selection from my onomatopoeia collection, though this one is intended to have more to do with the widely propagated though absolutely ridiculous claim that Sarah Palin is some sort of certifiable sex symbol. Look people, this woman is not that attractive. Yeah, she's pretty by politician standards, but you could say the same thing about Rumer Willis, Chaka Kahn, and RuPaul. Take me to any suburban Colorado grocery store on a Saturday afternoon and I could direct you to no fewer than 18 40+ year old women that look just as good as Palin, if not far better (and depending on the neighborhood we're in, I'd probably feel safer with 17 of those women running the country instead of Palin).

In summation, here is my response to the "Palin is hot" allegations: "Eh." Eh at best. It's the ultimate in flaccid statements, and therefore it could not be more appropriate in regards to the subject matter.

This one's in response to the multitude of "DRILL BABY, DRILL!!!" chants that rained down on Palin, Guliani and McCain during the RNC. Yeah, that's another reason to feel really good about the prospect of another Republican administration: Not only will we rape the shit out of nature, we'll do it with massive doses of hubris! I just hope I can be there when the last wild polar bear dies from losing its habitat. Hopefully the nearby Inuits will be willing to start up a "USA!! USA!! USA!!" chant with me right then and there. That'd be kick ass. Then they could teach me how to fashion the polar bear carcass into a canoe. That'd be even better.

And with this design we have officially ventured into, "yeah... I don't know if this one's gonna work" territory. This is supposed to be a reference to Palin's repeated claim that she said "thanks, but no thanks" to the notorious "Bridge To Nowhere" that was being planned for construction in Alaska 2 years ago. Mind you, she not only makes this claim, but has turned this claim into one of her primary speaking points during her speeches, despite the fact that overwhelming evidence has arisen showing that she in fact did not say "thanks, but no thanks" to this "Bridge To Nowhere," but instead said something along the lines of, "Thank you most sincerely, kind sir, I would be quite interested in advocating for the construction of this thingy," then changed her position on it when she had no other choice but to do so.

You've got to hand it to the woman, politicians are renowned for their ability to lie, but you don't see many politicians who make lies (like this one, for example) the keynotes of their public addresses. That takes some serious sack.

I call this one, "dreadfully uninspired."

While I call this one, "awful isn't the right word... but this one could be funny as hell." If you have any suggestions on what this one SHOULD say, of course, I would love to hear them. I've always been a big fan of "more like" jokes. Selma Hayek? More like Sell My Kayak!!! Baaa ZING!

Alright, I am certifiably delirious from lack of sleep right now, and my throat feels like a ferret just spent the past 2 hours fashioning a bed out of it. Yep... I'd say that probability of waking up feeling like heinous crap tomorrow is now up to about 99.2%. Marvelous.

Enjoy your day, miscreants, for soon winter shall be upon us. The winter of our discontent? Perhaps, but I would prefer to refer to it as "the winter when you got that huge boil on your ass."

Yeah... that ending seems just about right for this time of night.

SORRY FOR THE DELAY...

2008-09-15T00:22:00.000-07:00

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Dearest readers, please accept my sincere apologies for the dearth of content you've had to suffer through for the past week and a half. What can I say? Sarah Palin's head is really hard to draw.

That's what we in the business call a "teaser."

God damn, I am adorable.

-Enron

GOOD RUBBISH PROUDLY SERVES ITS 10,000TH CUSTOMER!

2008-09-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

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Poorly of course, but hey... they did get served. That's gotta be worth something, right?

A lesser man might take this opportunity to craft an exceptionally obvious "You Got Served" joke. I am not a lesser man, but I do have a propensity towards taking the easy way out of almost any situation I'm presented with, so here's my joke on the subject of that film: You Got Served was fucking terrible.

ZING!

Anyway, at some point during the past 36 hours the always reliable Good Rubbish hit counter ticked its way over the 10,000 visitor mark, a momentous occasion that did much to warm the innermost cockles of my cold, shriveled heart. And by "heart" I actually mean "colon." Heaven help me, I really need money for surgery.

It should probably be noted that my hit counter records every time any page on here is visited, so at least in theory I could have just been sitting here for the past few weeks refreshing the home page over and over again to achieve this astonishing numerical accomplishment, but let's not kid ourselves here folks, it's not like I've got enough spare time to do something like that.

::awkward silence::

Regardless, I am quite grateful to all of you fine folks that stop by from time to time to bask in the inconsistent glow of my intermittantly divine and dreadful prose. I thank you kindly, sirs and madames, and please rest assured that I do appreciate your company on here.

By now you may be wondering whether I'm going anywhere of merit with this post, and let me be the first to assure you that I most certainly am not. I've been listening to speeches from the Republican National Convention all week, and as such my brain is currently functioning at about 4% of its normal capacity, so all I can really muster is a rambling, aimless, worthless quasi-diatribe much like the one you're currently reading.

That said, I have come away from the convention with some worthwhile realizations, so I'll share those with you now:

1. Executive experience is far more valuable than valid experience. As such, when I run for president in 2036 I'll be assigning the night manager from my neighborhood Arby's as my VP.

2. The stories of Sarah Palin's alleged hotness have been blown WAY out of proportion. Yeah, she's not actively bad looking, but for God's sake people, do we really need to act like the nation is nursing some sort of collective hard on over this woman? She looks like every soccer mom the Colorado suburbs have ever produced - certainly adequate, but in no way thrilling.

3. She's also arrogant as all hell and I'd trust her about as far as I can throw one of Margaret Cho's thighs. There, I'm done with Sarah Palin. No more.

4. I heard she eats babies though. Not saying it's true, just saying I heard it.

5. If the 2008 version of John McCain represents change, than I represent the American Association of Men with 40 Foot Long Cocks.

6. The following three videos should be watched by one and all, as they are as delicious as they are delectible (and yes, I really am that much of an idiot - apparently I'm entirely incapable of embedding anything that isn't based on youtube).

Barack Obama: He Completes Us

Grizzled Old Man Steals John McCain's Thunder

And seriously, if you haven't already seen this beauty, you really should:

The Sarah Palin Gender Card

God bless you, God bless Good Rubbish, and God Bless America.

THIS JUST IN: I'M STILL LAZY

2008-08-27T22:29:00.000-07:00

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Dear faithful readers,

So it's Wednesday night and we (and by "we" I mean "I") have reached a critical juncture in the brief history of this fine blog: Either I can bust my ass until 3 or 4 in the morning to create some sort of digestible/mildy worthwhile project for you to look at, or I can hastily lay down a couple of sentences, give an appreciative nod to my slothly ways, suffer through approximately 2.3 ounces of guilts, and get to bed before midnight.

Would anyone care to guess which route I'm going to take here? I'll give you a hint: It rhymes with "criticsbedamnedIamfeelinglikeonelazymuthafuckarightaboutnow."

Of course, I wouldn't leave you hanging without anything to occupy some of your downtime at work, so I'll present you, my choicest of readers, with the following:

Did you happen to take a really good look at this confusing abomination of a website that I posted last week? Well, that fine online document got me thinking whether or not I'd ever seen a more worthless/overwhelmingly stupid website than that one. That's when I remembered THIS gem, forwarded to me by the infamous Dr. Mangilord well over a year ago.

A couple of important notes regarding that website:

1. Yes, that really is a real live law firm.
2. Yes, that really is their primary website.
3. Think that one rotating stick figure man is absurd? You should have seen the site when there were 4 of him bouncing around on their home page (I'm not kidding).
4. Do the rest of your life a favor and click on the "extras" tab. You shant be disappointed.
5. Yes, if I ever end up in legal trouble I will absolutely be hiring the Allison Law Group, regardless of the magnitude of the crime. Honestly, who wouldn't?

So here's the gauntlet I'm laying down before you today: If you know of any unintentionally spectacular websites akin to the two I've linked to here today, PLEASE let me know of their existence via the comments area or my infinitely lovely email inbox (goodrubbish@gmail.com). My bookmarks list shall be forever grateful, I can assure you of that.

Also, if you could figure out how to squeeze one more colon into this post, I'd really... oh man, what's the phrase I'm looking for here? Oh yeah: Appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Enron

P.S. I'll be heading to Invesco Field at Mile High tomorrow night to hear some political guy talk about something or other... but to be honest, that's not really why I'm going. Care to check the 7:00-8:00PM slot? That's right, the venerable John Kuniholm followed by the one and only MICHAEL FUCKING MCDONALD!!! WOOOOO!!!! USA!! USA!! USA!!!!

LARRY CRAIG LOVES THE CARTOON COCK

2008-08-17T21:30:00.000-07:00

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About a month ago (and by "a month ago" I actually mean 2 American months ago... Good Rubbish functions on metric time) I asked for your help in figuring out what to do with this ghastly frame I found during some low level scavenging at a local thrift store:

To the surprise of many people associated with this blog, most notably myself, the response was actually pretty good. A couple of excellent email submissions were received, oft-referenced quasi-contributor Artimus Mangilord provided me with his usual sage wisdom, a pair of Kevins stopped by to aid in the cause, and resident omni-commenter Shawn laid out a litany of exceptionally bizarre suggestions that made me even more fearful of the day he shows up unannounced in my backyard during a rainstorm with mascara running down his face and a crumpled photograph of Connie Chung in one of his hands, a half eaten banana in the other.

::shudder::

Though this effort from the masses was both hearty and humbling, I ultimately felt as though I needed to go my own direction with this project. I wanted to fill this frame with something that would be both intellectually honest and emotionally intense. I wanted a seven course feast for the eyes that would make the ears bleed with envy. I wanted nothing short of perfection. As it eventually turned out, what I wanted was a picture of Larry Craig on vacation with an overjoyed cartoon penis.

If you aren't familiar with the most notable handiwork of Senator Craig, please refer to the man's wikipedia page. If you aren't familiar with the most recent handiwork of Senator Craig, please watch the following video:

Honestly, this man is a national treasure... that's really all I have to say about that.

Alright, so to get this photo project moving, I first needed a picture of good 'ol Larry. This one, his official portrait I'll have you know, seemed to work fine. Next, I needed to find some clothes for the penis to wear, as I thought it'd look kind of weird to have Larry posing for a picture with a completely naked penis. After all, just because it's a sex organ doesn't mean it lives a life devoid of decency or shame... but this raised an interesting question: if penises were the size of people, and wore people clothes, what kind of clothes would they wear?

I suppose that question is as old as time itself, and it's one that everyone can devise their own solution to, but for me the answer was clear: A turtleneck sweater. Yeah, think about that for a second. In my opinion, the only other rational choice would be "one of the legs from a pair of stretch pants," but to be honest that just seems a little impractical. Like I said though, you're free to come up with your own ideas about anthropomorphic penis apparel. That's what America is all about.

A quick google image search for turtlenecks led me to this photograph, which comes from what has to be one of the most unintentionally ridiculous web pages I've ever seen. As its title suggests (well, not "suggests" so much as "plainly states"), it's a tutorial-ish document on how to dress for cold weather, but its seemingly legitimate reason for existence belies the massive cache of incredible stupidity that lies beneath. A couple of choice quotes:

Mittens are warmer than gloves. Mothers put mittens on young children for this reason.
Caution: The disadvantage is that it is difficult to pick things up while wearing mittens.

Wear a sweater over a shirt or a sweater over a turtleneck, even try two sweaters together (really!).
As parents all over the north say to their children – if you're cold, put on a sweater.

Yep, that one's definitely gonna stay on the old bookmark list for a good long while. As an aside, whomever wrote that piece has masterfully outlined the reason that I no longer travel to the frozen north - I fucking hate being told to put on a sweater. Come up with a new remedy for cold weather already, assholes!

Moving on...

So we've got Senator Craig and we've got some dick clothes, now we needed a setting. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any good pictures of a Minnesota airport bathroom, but I was able to find this picture, which I feel works just about as well. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we needed a cartoon penis (for the record, I chose to use a cartoon penis for this picture instead of a picture of a real penis for several reasons, all of which should be plainly obvious to anyone who hasn't been bludgeoned over the head with a hammer at any point in the past 30 seconds).

The cartoon penis proved to be an elusive conquest, as there just weren't any out there that vibed with the picture I was using of Senator Craig. There was this lovable little scamp, this patriotic offering, lots of these, and plenty of stuff like this, but nothing that really fit the bill for what I was trying to accomplish here. I slowly came to the realization that I was going to need to draw this beast on my own. Would I be up to the challenge? Only time would tell.

4 minutes later...

Challenge: 0, Enron: 1. Also, dig the reservoir tips our penis friend is sporting on his elbows. Classy, yeah?

Now that I had all of my pieces, I had to get them into their right places. Following a few minutes of fiddling, I was left with this:

A nice start (I particularly like how the woman's shoulders give the subtle impression that the sweater is masking an absolutely ENORMOUS set of testicles), but clearly the anthropomorphic penis (who has no name by the way, feel free to provide one if you feel so inclined) was in dire need of some coloration. I had never used photoshop to color in anything before, so I was a bit apprehensive about how this was going to turn out, but once I found the right fleshy base tone and got comfortable with the burn tool things really fell into place nicely. How nicely? Mother fucking nicely, if I do say so myself.

Print print print, cut cut cut, glue glue glue, etc etc etc...

Home sweet home.

I suppose I could use a word other than "spectacular" to describe how I feel this project turned out, but you know what? I'm not gonna.

Spectacular. Fucking spectacular.

Mmm... pride...

I COME FROM A LONG LINE OF PROLIFIC HANDYMEN

2008-08-10T23:10:00.000-07:00

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Ever since we moved into the home over a year ago, the external appearance of the McHanslaw manor has been sullied by the presence of a rather obtuse window-mounted air conditioning unit located off the side of the master bedroom on the second floor. Father McHanslaw in particular had taken a distaste for this device which we never used, so this past weekend he took it upon himself to thoroughly inspect the appliance in the hopes that he might be able to figure out a way to get it down from its lofty perch.

Anyone care to guess how this ended?

That's what I call the, "oh shit, I just dropped this 100+lb metal block out of this fucking window" bird's eye view of the situation. That's our neighbor pictured there, he's assuming a rather casual form of the classic "Thankfully my spine was not crushed this afternoon" pose, first popularized by... I don't know, probably some jackass piano mover or something.

The contraption fell from the second floor window pictured here on the side of our house, and crashed down behind those bushes (you can see the edge of it poking out from behind the leaves there). I was going to crudely circle these two areas in the hopes that doing so might help this picture make some measure of sense, but my marvelous copy of Windows Vista crashed when I tried to open Photoshop. Have I told you all yet how much I love this operating system? Because I really do. It's just fucking grand.

You can also see one of our really nice storm windows in that last picture, though honestly I don't know how effective it's going to be in lowering our energy bills come this winter. One more carnage shot, just for good measure:

Exemplary. God bless you, Father McHanslaw... you're an inspiration to us all.

MY NEEDLE AND THREAD'S LIKE A BLOW TO TO THE HEAD - BOW DOWN.

2008-08-04T21:38:00.000-07:00

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This posting's title is what I'd like to call "Enron's ill-fated attempt to draw a middle ground between Good Rubbish and 1990's gangster rap group Westside Connection." I hope you enjoyed it. Now let us never speak of this again.

Things have been complicated in the world of Rubbish as of late, as I have not only been frantically trying to downgrade my new-ish computer (it's a refurbished replacement machine Dell sent to me because they were too lazy to fix my old computer) from Windows Vista to XP, but I've also switched cell phone carriers and have had to trudge through all of the expected crap that goes along with such a venture. Have I learned anything from all this? Why yes, yes I have... two things in fact:

1. Don't bother trying to downgrade an Inspiron 1520 from Vista to XP, unless you REALLY know what you're doing. You will fail several times, then you'll feel like an ass, then you'll give up.

2. Do not, under any circumstances, buy this phone. I only had that thing for about 20 hours before returning it, but you have my word that Nokia's 6555 is the single most counterintuitive piece of technology that I've ever encountered (please note that I'm making this statement despite the fact that I've been forced into using Windows Vista for the past few days). Beyond that, it was loaded up with about 20MB worth of entirely worthless game demos (see: Play them for 35 seconds, then get asked to pay 10 dollars for the full version) that are impossible to erase from the phone. Awful.

Anyway, those are my excuses for not posting anything substantive last week, but seeing as how I have no remaining excuses in place for this week, I suppose I should get an actual project up here, eh?

First things first: This image has been photoshopped. Why, you ask? Because the marvelous operating system that is Windows Vista arbitrarily corrupted the "this is what this thing looked like before I started fucking around with it" image I was going to use for this post, so I had to photoshop one of my later photos to make it function as though it were the first photo. Did that make any sense? Of course not, but let's not let that stop us from moving on to the next paragraph.

So that doctored photo above is a picture of my hat. I like that hat. It's white, so it doesn't clash with anything, and it's just the right size for my deceptively enormous head. It's made by Hurley, which is a clothing brand I have no problem supporting as they're about the only company left in America that makes polo style shirts with 3 buttons on the collar instead of 2 (the three button collar is of vital importance to lanky men like myself, as it helps us disguise the appearance of our spindly necks and massive, protruding collar bones). In all honesty, it could be one of the best hats I've ever owned... the only real problem with it is that about 8.5 million enormous douchebags (ranging from your typical northeastern guidobag to your less notorious but equally repugnant mountain climbing denverbag) also own that hat, and wear it with frequency. Because of this fact, I had grown terribly reluctant to wear this hat of mine, so I decided to try my hand at modifying it by turning the "H" logo into an "E," thereby making the whole piece of headwear a little more "me" and a whole hell of a lot less "them." Makes sense, right? Right.

So I had two options in doing this project, I could either cut away portions of the right side of the Hurley logo to make an E, like this:

Or I could do the same thing, but connect those remaining portions of the right side of the H to make a more traditional E, like this:

Personally, I thought the disjointed E looked a lot better than the traditional one, plus it required about 40% less sewing, so I called it a win/win situation and decided to go with that route.

The hat deconstruction process was quick and easy, as in the past few years I've grown extremely adept at undoing embroidery by removing the breast pockets on my collared shirts (breast pockets are another thing lanky people such as myself look terrible in, as our lack of meat in the shoulder region tends to leave those pockets floating an inch or two above our waists, instead of on the pectoral region where they're supposed to be). I initially tried to undo the embroidery in a way that would leave the parts I needed for my end product in place, but I failed miserably at this attempt, so I was left with this:

I'm sure there's a joke about sickle cell anemia that could be made here, but I REALLY don't want to be the one to make it. I guess this must be part of this obnoxious "process of growing up" that I keep hearing so much about. Lame.

Anyway, it was easy to tell where the outlines of the removed embroidery were on the hat, so I just used those lines as a guide and sewed horizontally over the middle, top, and bottom portions of my E, until those areas were pretty much covered entirely with a single layer of thread (I had a picture of this in between phase, but my lovely operating system saw fit to corrupt that file, too).

After that, I sewed back over those same spots, but this time I ran the thread vertically. This method brought with it an unintended consequence of stylizing the text a lot more than I was planning, but it came out looking not horrific, so I'm not at all displeased with the end product (in all honesty, this was the first time I'd ever tried to sew something that wasn't a button or the cuff of a pair of pants). Dig:

And a bit closer view:

Yeah, so on the whole I feel pretty good about this venture. The hat is once again wearable in my mind, though I am a bit concerned that the text came out looking kind of old english-ey... like something you'd see plastered to poorly tinted windows on the back of a lowered Ford F-150, next to a massive silhouette of the virgin mary.

Oh well, life goes on, as they say. Obla dee obla da. Here's lookin' at you, Corky!

PLEASE HOLD FOR A MOMENT... ENRON WILL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY

2008-07-30T21:42:00.000-07:00

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I've found myself wading through a sea of red tape and rage triggers as I try to "downgrade" my new laptop from Windows Vista to XP. This process is not so simple as the IT guy at my work made it seem... true to form I suppose, he's always seemed a bit treacherous.

Anyway, new blog posting later this week (the project's done, for the record - procrastination is no issue here).

I have no interest in turning this notice into the 8 billionth blog posting on the subject of how Windows Vista sucks massive amounts of poop-covered man hog, so instead I'll just put up this marvelous picture and call it good. My apologies for the lack of timeliness, but I didn't discover nataliedee.com until just a couple of minutes ago... but then again, I suppose America being awesome plays well in any month of the year.

Hell yes.

I WAS FAR LESS ATTACHED TO RUE MCCLANAHAN

2008-07-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

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No matter how many people beg me to do so, I swear to each and every one of my readers that I will NEVER allow this blog to become an online obituary service. That said, a maiden of Estelle Getty's caliber only dies once every 2.5 thousand years, and as such I would be a fool to let the day of her passing go by without contributing my thoughts:

Estelle Getty was the definitive shit. I'm way sad that she died.

I become very terse when I get upset.

Stop or My Mom Will Shoot? More like Stop or My Mom Will Grow Big Fucking Wings and Fly Up to Heaven to Drop a Vintage Sophia Petrillo One Liner on Ernest Hemingway Before Bitch Slapping the Mother Fucker.

Godspeed you goldenest of girls... godspeed.

NEBRASKA SUCKS - AN EXERCISE IN COMMON KNOWLEDGE

2008-07-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

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A little over a week ago, the odometer on Grandma McHanslaw (actually it was Grandma Strouselberg, reflecting my mother's maiden name) was scheduled to roll over to 90, so living relatives were summoned from all over the country to descend upon the sprawling metropolis of Peoria, Illinois for a weekend of geriatric revelry. Most McHanslaws, Strouselbergs, Gambolos, and Borlovskys (inbreeding was outlawed within the McHanslaw line over 40 years ago, so much to the chagrin of a few undersexed elders, our family tree has sprouted several new branches as of late) opted to make the journey in airplanes, though myself and Father McHanslaw opted to drive there instead of fly, as we are spendthrifts of the highest pedigree.

Mmm, yes. Quite. Hurrumph.

Anyway, I thought this ground-based sojourn across the midwest could give me great fodder for a blog post, so I brought my camera along in the hopes that I'd be able to take some humorous snapshots of a few of the hundreds of thousands of morbidly obese human beings that live in this part of the country. Unfortunately, I didn't plan for two fairly obvious problems with this scheme of mine:

1. Being that we were driving across the country via interstates for 99.8% of the travel time we logged during this trip, I rarely caught sight of any people, regardless of girth, who weren't sitting in their cars. Now, I don't know if anyone else has ever noted this, but unless you happen to be driving next to Mark Mangino, it's pretty difficult to look at someone driving a car and think to yourself, "wow, that guy is ENORMOUS!" (what with the doors acting as obstructions and all). It's even more difficult to take a picture of a potentially massive human being driving a car, then show that picture to another person and convince them that the man/woman in the photograph is indeed as large as you claim - as such, and to conclude my circuitous point, photographs of this nature would undoubtedly make for poor blog material (though all of that said, this interstate revelation leads me to extend my first official piece of advice for overweight Americans who are trying to make themselves look slimmer: Wearing vertical stripes doesn't work, wear a Toyota Camry instead).

2. The odds of catching sight of a true goliath at a rest area or highway gas station (the places where I spent the remaining .2% of my travel time) are pretty slim, as the true monsters of the Midwest logically spend most of their time lying in waterbeds at their place of residence, not driving out to the middle of nowhere to take a whiz in a public bathroom. This should have occurred to me long before we left, as science clearly dictates that people don't become unthinkably large by going places and doing things, they become unthinkably large by not going places and not doing things (or catching a really bad break in the genetics department). Still, I didn't think this would be an issue until we stopped off at our first truck stop in Nebraska, where I saw a couple of men milling about who were, at least by city standards, impressively rotund, but not a single citizen who fell into the "Holy mother of God, how the hell did THAT happen??" variety. Disappointment reigned supreme.

Note: I'm aware that I could have just photographed the impressively rotund men and posted those photographs on here, but that course of action would have brought with it a decent probability that some deceptively fast former offensive lineman who doesn't like having his picture taken would end up trying to destroy me, resulting in a scenario strikingly similar to the dinosaur park chase scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure (the only notable differences being that I wouldn't have been wearing a bowtie and my massive assailant would have probably smashed the dinosaur bone, or more likely a tire iron, over my head instead of over his knee).

Anyway, since I wasn't able to get the photographs that I was hoping for, I decided to take a stirring array of photographs during the 8 hour drive across the state of Nebraska, because I'll be damned if I'm going to make a cross country road trip in 90 degree heat without getting a freebie blog posting out of it. So, without further ado, please accept the greatest sights Nebraska has to offer:

I thought this was pretty neat. See, it's a flat plot of land with stuff being grown on it... very rare in this part of the country, or so I've been told. In the side view mirror, you can see that another car was following me at this time. Was the driver trying to kill me with his thoughts? I suppose we'll never know.

In the upper left quadrant of this photograph you can clearly see two alien spacecraft. Why would they choose to come to Nebraska, you ask? Five words: Great Prices On Tapered Jeans.

Here you can see a truck. Trucks are bigger than cars, and they go fast! VRRROOOOOMMMM!!!

True story: I went to the bathroom not more than 80 seconds after this picture was taken. Also, at this time I feel somehow obligated to link to this classic, because it still is, and always will be, one of the greatest articles of all time.

Finally, I would like to close with what I would consider to be the quintessential Nebraska photo:

I have titled this one, "Who would have thought hell could be so green?"

God Bless America.

CAPSIZE DESIGN INTRODUCES ME TO THE BACKSIDE OF THEIR SLAPPIN' HAND

2008-07-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

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I've never really been the type to gush over the accomplishments of others (I'm usually too busy staring into mirrors and meticulously grooming my chest hairs to notice anyone else's contributions to society, let alone comment on them), but every now and again I find myself introduced to a piece of artwork or construction that is so undeniably excellent that I am left with no choice but to heap praise upon the piece's creator in a manner that could only be described as "embarrassing," "shameful," and "degrading to black women the world over."

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to probably be the first to introduce you to Capsize Design - a premier custom furniture manufacturing outfit type thing in Denver, Colorado that just happens to be run by 4 good friends of mine from my collegiate years. Well... that's not entirely true, it's actually run by 3 good friends of mine from college and one guy that I've briefly talked to on probably 40 separate occasions, but I believe we had to exchange names and handshakes prior to each and every one of those fleeting conversations so somehow I get the impression that we really aren't all that close.

Anyway, here's the story of Capsize Design as I see it, because I'm almost certain that you really give a shit: Following their graduation from the University of Colorado, these four fine young gentlemen each independently set out to make a name for themselves in the working world, and were fairly successful in doing so (if I remember correctly one of them did well as a book salesman, another a chef, the third presumably became some sort of business man, and the fourth, the last time I saw him at least, appeared to be making the rounds as a professional impersonator of either Kenny Rodgers or the Gordon's Fisherman). Some time later they decided to collectively pursue a passion which they all shared (that being furniture building, I cleverly didn't mention this passion earlier in the story as it would have totally given away the ending), so they scraped together some tools and finances (with no aid from venture capital, I might add) and started their own custom furniture company out of their home in central Denver. From those recent modest beginnings they have seen their client list and notoriety grow exponentially, and have been featured in all of the major newspapers around the Denver area, which I think is pretty neat in a "yeah, no one reads newspapers anymore, but whatever" sort of way.

A couple more important things to note about these guys: Much like many of my friends from college, I have not seen these guys in well over a year, and they have no idea where I live. Also, the fact that these guys design and build furniture for a living and keep their financial heads above water while doing so has rendered me RIDICULOUSLY jealous of them, and I have no qualms with admitting that fact. Combine those two elements together and you've got a recipe that ends with your boy Enron lobbing cheap shots at Capsize like they're a furniture building effigy of Mussolini, so please understand that any underhanded compliments or outright sucker punches I may throw at them in the preceding or following paragraphs are born only out of my incredibly petty nature. Clear? Clear. Let's proceed.

So I've been receiving updates through the Capsize mailing list for quite some time now, as I've always found their more conventional projects to be very interesting on a structural level (this one and this little guy are two personal favorites of mine), but just last week I received notice that they had just completed a spectacular repurposing project - one which I soon learned puts my finest work to shame roughly 3000x over.

::PROJECT SUMMARY::
because it's 1:30 in the morning and I'm too goddamn tired to come up with a smooth transition between paragraphs.

As things often transpire in the world of design where the designers actually get paid for the work that they do, the guys from Capsize got together with their client (who I believe is Pure Brand Communications, an advertising agency in Denver, though I'm not certain of this) who happens to have quite the fancy for repurposing/dumpster diving/recycling-based projects and industrial designs. After partaking in an extensive creative jam session the Capsize crew headed down to a large industrial scrap yard (they did not specify to me where this scrap yard was, presumably because they knew I'd either abuse the hell out of it or attempt to live in it) where they collected about 17 separate pieces of industrial flotsam containing the precious metal plates, bolts, conveyor pins, and odds and ends which would eventually become their end product. After completing their build, the piece was broken down into three sections before being reassembled on site.

End project summary, begin project pictures:

Don't even try to kid yourself here, that is one fucking cool desk. I particularly like how they left the conveyor pins on the lower half of the desk exposed, so if the secretary gets pissed at her computer she can forcefully roll it off her desk without putting too much stress on her arms, back, and shoulders. That's what we in the business world call "Effective Risk Management" folks, you should look into it. If you'd like to see some more pictures of this wicked sweet project, you can check them out on Capsize's website here. If however you'd rather look at a picture of a really cute kitten drinking a mai tai, you can click this link. I can't blame you for choosing the second option just then. You're only human.

In closing, I'd like to thank the fine folks at Capsize not only for letting me use their photographs for this post, but also for making all of my repurposing efforts look like total shit. There really is no greater gift a man can receive than a feeling of sincere inadequacy.

The end.

I WOULD RELUCTANTLY ACCEPT BEING PUBLISHED.

2008-07-08T22:50:00.001-07:00

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Right now the fine people over at instructables.com (for those of you not in the know, instructables.com is a how-to site of epic proportions whose users often showcase a significant bent towards repurposing projects) are in the midst of compiling a book of some of the best stuff that's been posted on their site over the course of its existence. As a blatantly half-hearted effort to get their user base involved with the content of the book, they've opened a contest to their users which will allow some of those users to get their projects printed (or at least "mentioned", to use their terminology) in this upcoming publication.

A while back I converted a few of my Good Rubbish posts onto instructables to drive traffic to this blog (I went through a short lived period of time where I obsessed over my hit counter to a degree that could only be described as... well, obsessive), and have recently decided to enter one of those converted projects (my Speaker Media Cabinet conversion) into this contest of theirs.

Anyway, I'm a few weeks behind the curve on getting my project into this contest so I doubt I have any chance of winning it at this point, but I still think it'd be pretty keen of you to vote for my old project anyway. If you feel so inclined, you can follow this link, and then click on the aptly titled "vote" tab at the top of the project page to cast your vote in favor of your boy Enron. Of course, if you'd like to nab some revenge for how mediocre this blog's content has been for the past couple of months... well, not voting for this project would probably be a good way to passively achieve that goal. You lazy, petty bastard. Ridiculous.

In unrelated news, tomorrow night (well, it'll actually be about 4am Thursday, but I'd hate to be one of those people who describes 4am as being "in the morning"... it's still a part of the night before, you semantically inclined jackass) myself and father McHanslaw will be packing up a fraction of our belongings and driving across the country to spend an extended weekend amidst the movers and shakers that live at my grandmother's retirement community ("movers and shakers" may not be an ideal term to describe these folks, but no one can deny that the people who live at this joint do in fact move a little bit and shake an awful lot). Seeing as how I will likely have absolutely nothing to do while I'm there, expect another Good Rubbish post this Thursday or Friday night. It'll be just like old times... only undoubtedly less funny and probably more focussed around me bludgeoning myself over the head repeatedly with a rubber mallet.

So in conclusion, my sincerest thanks for your vote or non-vote, and my grandmother is old and lives with other old people. Yep, that just about covers everything. Tah-tah!

UPDATE: As of the morning of Friday, July 11th (date, live, infamy, etc...) my media cabinet post on instructables is slowly but surely climbing up the vote getter chart, and has apparently accrued enough hits in the past couple of days to be moved over onto the column of "popular" instructables that's displayed on the site's front page. Thanks for your help, broseffesses (that's the proper plural form of "brosef"), and keep up the good work!

WHAT'S DONE BEEN GOIN' ON

2008-07-02T22:59:00.000-07:00

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Goodness gracious, what a hectic week it's been in the McHanslaw Manor. Allow me to provide you with a summary:

After waking this last Saturday morning (well, this was honestly probably around 1pm, but that's morning enough by my standards) I rolled out of bed and stumbled my way down the well trodden path that lies between my bed and my laptop, but after only a few steps I could tell that something just wasn't quite right. Following a minute or two of semiconscious investigation, I came to the startling conclusion that my feet were submerged in about an inch and a half of standing water. Marvelous.

As it turns out, the night before this involuntary foot washing exercise my neighbor had been out watering her garden and had forgotten to turn off her faucet before heading in for the night, which resulted in her hose blasting the side of my family's house with a steady stream of water for about 8 to 12 hours. That water slowly found its way through my basement's foundation, then through the base of the drywall, and finally onto the carpet covered concrete that I was walking on, where it collected and (presumably) plotted its next move.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that this unplanned mess took a significant chunk out of the time I had available to work on miscellaneous projects over the weekend, as I had to spend the majority of the following 2 days running a Shop Vac and later a Rug Doctor back and forth over the substantial reservoirs that were festering in my family's basement's exceptionally uneven floor (the house was built in 1910... apparently the plumb bob had yet to be invented at that time, because our basement foundation has all the surface predictability that you'd expect from a 2nd rate fun house mirror). Once Monday rolled around it became painfully obvious that our carpet and walls were growing in a hefty supply of mold, so we had to call in a team of specialists to rip all the carpet out of that room and run some frightfully large and noisy dehumidifying apparatuses down there for the next 3 days.

(by the way, the neighbors that caused this fiasco apologetically and promptly offered to pay for the costs we've incurred as a result of their sloppy hose management, so no worries on that front)

Anyway, all of this activity has left our living room (which is typically my primary workspace) looking like this:

Regular Good Rubbish readers will note the presence of my Bush/Reagan art project thing hanging on the wall in that shot... yeah, I honestly haven't found a better place for that thing than right there. Oh, and you see that nice flat panel tv hanging on the wall there? That stopped working properly about a month ago. What can I say? The McHanslaw clan is on a roll.

Complicating matters even further for me, we had to move all of the furniture from that living room into my already horribly cluttered bedroom, leaving me with a living situation that looks something like-a this:

As you may be able to gather from this photograph, my bed has rather abruptly become an impregnable fortress, so I've spent the past 5 nights sleeping on a hardwood floor in a sleeping bag upstairs. I actually woke up feeling quite refreshed the first night, but let's just say that the honeymoon period between myself and the early 20th century flooring in my home has come to a definite close.

Anyway, with all of this zaniness going on I still managed to finish up work on the "Best Friends Forever" photo from last week (thanks to all of you who submitted ideas/photos, by the way), BUT I can't find the frame right now (it's buried in one of the many boxes that were hurried away from the flood waters when they were first discovered) so you fine folks won't be seeing the final product until I stumble across that thing again.

So yeah, for the time being this garbled narrative of a post will have to pass for genuine Good Rubbish material. That said, I have another post all lined up for early next week which should be pretty sweet, so be sure to look forward to that (but only if your life is almost entirely devoid of joy and/or merit).

Enjoy your 4th of Joo-lie people. Amurrica rules.

P.S. You wouldn't happen to be good at drawing crude, cartoonish, anthropomorphic penises using only horribly simplistic and/or outdated programs on your computer, would you? If so, please email a sample of your work to goodrubbish@gmail.com

FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY - GOOD RUBBISH NOW TAKING SUGGESTIONS

2008-06-25T22:41:00.000-07:00

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Remember last week when I said there'd be 1 and 1/2 post this week, as I was planning to do 2 posts but one of them was going to suck? Well, guess which post this is???

Oh, and while you're at it you might as well guess which post probably isn't going to show up until next week. I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with "the post that doesn't suck." Apologies, condolences, and etc, but you'll presumably live, and so shall I. Circle of life.

Anyway, this is sort of corollary to the "Fun With Frames" post that I did last week (normally I'd link to that entry, but I feel you're big enough now to scroll 10 inches down my blog's front page on your own). As I mentioned last week, I was able to find 2 mildly acceptable items on my most recent trip to several greater Denver area thrift shops - one of these was the uber-tacky baby frame that I ruined last week, and the other was this fine item that I've yet to do anything with:

If this picture frame had a mouth, it would say "please put an incredibly ironic photograph inside of me, I am begging for that sort of treatment." Kind of a bland statement, but that's how picture frames talk. If they were engaging conversationalists they wouldn't be picture frames at all, but rather desk lamps.

Anyway, I've been trying to think of the perfect picture to put in this thing for the past couple of weeks, but despite the fact that I've come up with quite a few ideas that I'd deem either "good", "acceptable", or "mildly humorous", I've yet to come across that one image that immediately elicits a "YES! That is IT, I am SOOO using that" reaction from me. That's where you (hopefully) come in.

Got any ideas for a good picture to put in this frame? Then lay 'em on me. Feel free to propose ideas from the world of politics, pop culture, sports, history... really, anything and everything is open to consideration here. A few ideas I've come up with, just to get you started (these would be my "funny, but not that funny" concepts):

A Bush family member with one of their Saudi oil magnate buddies, Whitney Houston with an anthropomorphic pile of crack cocaine, Mark Mangino with a novelty sized hamburger, disgraced Senator Larry Craig with a... well, let's not get into that idea, let's just get in to your ideas instead.

Fire away, oh huddled masses.

FUN WITH FRAMES!

2008-06-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

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Before we get down to any Rubbish related ramblings, let me just be perfectly clear about something: I am well aware that this post features the single lamest title that I could have possibly come up with for it, but you know what? Sometimes the easiest answer is the correct one. Yeah, you think about that. You think about that real good.

So as we're all well aware, Good Rubbish has found itself mired in a sizable rut for the past few weeks for a number of reasons that I've mentioned in previous posts (mysterious illnesses, laziness, an inopportunely timed Designing Women marathon on the Lifetime network, and so on), but looking back I've failed to mention that I've also been on an agonizingly long hitless streak at Denver area thrift shops as of late. I don't know if I've gotten too snooty or if the right kind of crap just hasn't been on their shelves, but regardless of the cause I just haven't been able to find anything worth purchasing over the past few weeks.

Well... to be perfectly honest, my thrift store dry streak only partially came to an end this week, as I was able to find a couple of items at the Boulder branch of Savers that I deemed worth purchasing, but I probably wouldn't have felt that way had they cost more than .99 cents apiece. Regardless, the first semi-decent trinket I came across was this ludicrously sappy box frame:

(if you can't clearly see the writing on the frame's glass it reads "Dear Little One... May your little footsteps set you upon a lifetime journey of love. May you wake each day with His blessings and sleep each night in His care. And as you grow older May you always walk in His tender love.")

Couple of things here: Am I the only one who finds the phrase "walk in his tender love" a little perverse? I mean, if you stood in front of a congregation of Methodists and expressed your intentions to "walk in Christ's tender love" (I'm assuming the word "His" refers to Christ in this frame and not Steve Guttenberg), don't you think you'd get more than a few confused stares?
Then again, I suppose a few confused stares are a given whenever you're addressing a group of Methodists. OHHH! Take that, you ambiguously defined subset of the protestant reformation!

Also, noting that the frame was nailed shut and not designed to be opened and closed, what sort of person would be inclined to buy this shit? I mean, I could see if it were a frame that was designed to have a picture of YOUR baby put inside of it, but this is just a frame designed to have a picture of an entirely random baby inside of it.

"Oh Carol, I just love this picture of your son... how old is he now??"

"Oh no, that's not my son. That's just stock photography - we'd like to have kids, but George is sterile"

"GOD DAMMIT CAROL, DO YOU HAVE TO TELL EVERYONE ABOUT THAT DAMNED TEST??? I swear I'd have left you years ago if you hadn't given me all this VD... it's kinda hard to get a steady girlfriend when your genitals look like they've spent the past 5 years making love to a shoebox full of fire ants!! SHIT!!"

After that the husband would go up into the study and slam the door, and I bet someone would clear their throat, because there'd be all of this awkward silence and they wouldn't quite know what to say. Dinner would go pretty well though, surprisingly enough.

Getting back on subject for a moment (don't worry, it'll be a short moment), I suppose if a nauseatingly large number of Americans didn't love having pictures of random babies in their house the career of Anne Geddes never would have gotten off the ground, so... I don't know. I guess I've just got issues with babies in general. Call me a cynic but I just don't find them all that useful.

Anyway, as soon as I saw this thing I thought it'd be really funny to cover up that baby picture with a really lewd photograph from a gay pride parade. One of those marvelous shots of a frighteningly hairy man 50 year old man in assless chaps that makes even the most socially liberal of Americans question whether the whole "gay rights" thing is really such a great idea. So I did a little searching and came up with this photo of a Brazilian transvestite (photo courtesy of abc news), which seemed about perfect, but then at the 11th hour I found a picture that was just SO much better (this shall be revealed shortly).

So after disassembling the picture frame, I printed out a copy of this marvelous mystery photograph, glued it over the sleeping baby picture and prepared to put the whole thing back together, but I noticed that both the outside and the inside of the frame's glass were really dirty (lord only knows how dirt managed to get inside of this stupid thing), so I decided to give it a quick blast of windex before putting it all back together. This proved to be a mistake.

It took no more than one wipe, ONE SINGULAR WIPE, with a damp paper towel for ALL of the writing on the frame to come clean off. This was not something I was expecting, nor was I at all pleased with this turn of events, for you see I was now left with nothing more than a plain old box frame with a disturbing picture in it, which, if the frame had been hung in plain sight of any rational human being, would make me look very little like a man who appreciates dark humor and very much like a man who masturbates while watching the Antiques Road Show:

I've got 20 bucks that says something really really REALLY awful happened during that guy's childhood, any takers? Anybody? Come on, it's just 20 bucks... live a little...

Anyway, at this point I needed to either further modify the frame or throw it away, and the trash can was really far away from me, so I took the path of least resistance and jazzed up the end product a bit.

The glass/camera mixture is doing some kind of fun house mirror trick with my scribblings, but when you're looking at this hideous object in person it pretty clearly says, "Dear Jesus, please do something about this guy, he's making me uncomfortable. Thanx! Enron" I don't normally spell thanks with an x at the end, but as I understand it that's how the new Lord's English works. Apparently he's been texting a lot recently.

Regardless, even with the scribbling I did on the frame's glass I'd have to estimate that there's still about a 98.7% chance that I'll end up throwing this thing away, and soon at that, but I'll be damned if I'm going to mess around with a project without at least getting a Good Rubbish post out of it.

Alright, that's it for now. I'm hoping to get at least 1 and 1/2 posts up next week (one of them will undoubtedly suck, and for this reason will be docked half a legitimacy point), so keep an eye out for that. Also, keep an eye out for Whoopi Goldberg. That bitch is not to be trusted.

Word.

YOU FLICKR, YOU ING !!!

2008-06-18T22:18:00.001-07:00

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Good news, Rubbishites: A new post will be upon you tomorrow, and it'll at least be somewhat valid. Three cheers for a break from recent tradition! HOOORAY!!!

Of course, I would have had a new post for you today, but it appears that Yahoo has purchased flickr (the photo hosting site that I've used throughout the life of Good Rubbish) and has decided that it made good business sense to render flickr entirely unusable by a person such as myself. You see, the fine people at Yahoo! are saying that if I want to access the photos in my flickr account I'll need to merge that flickr account with the junk email account I set up on Yahoo! when I was a freshmen in college. Unfortunately for them, I have absolutely no interest in doing that as then I'd be mixing business (Good Rubbish) with pleasure (millions upon millions of penis enlargement emails), and that's never a good idea.

This is the part where a representative from Yahoo! would say, "well if you don't want to merge your flickr account with that Yahoo! email, you can absolutely set up a new Yahoo! email address to merge with your old flickr account." To that representative, I would like to extend the following message:

Fuck. You.

I am not going to set up some crappy and borderline unusable email account just so I can upload photographs (a task I could accomplish using any number of similar photo hosting websites), so you Yahoo! and flickr people can collectively kiss my pasty white, borderline malnourished ass, because I'm done with you mutha fuckas.

As of right now, your boy Enron is setting up an account with Zooomr.com, which seems to have more of a craigslist vibe to it than flickr, but also unfortunately seems to have more of a "we don't have nearly enough hardware to accommodate the number of people who are using this site right now" vibe as well, so we'll have to wait and see how this goes. If you have any suggestions as to other sites I should try out please let me know.

And like I said, assuming that I get myself set up with a functional photo hosting site in the next 24 hours (which I feel is a pretty safe assumption to make), there'll be a new relatively legit post coming at you tomorrow, so... I don't know. Guard your grill or something.

I HAVE BEEN FELLED BY THE GOBSTOPPER VIRUS

2008-06-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

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You know how most people get cold/flu bugs that knock them completely on their ass for 3 to 10 days, but then they get better and everything goes back to normal? Yeah, well unfortunately my immune system showcases little interest in such conventional ailments, for it appears that I have instead contracted the dreaded Everlasting Gobstopper Virus, a rare disease that brings about relatively mild but extremely annoying symptoms for weeks on end and is (presumably) spread by prolonged exposure to make out sessions with 30 foot tall blond Scandinavian women. All things considered, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I contracted this vile parasite...

In all honesty, I can't get a bead on what my immune system is doing right now. Three weeks ago I was hacking up more lung butter than Phyllis Diller, then my lungs cleared up but my stomach was tied in knots, then my stomach got its act together but my sinuses got clogged, then my sinuses unclogged but I lost every ounce of energy in my dilapidated jalopy of a body. In short, every time I seem to rid myself of one layer of crap another one immediately shows up, hence the "Gobstopper Virus" title. God only knows what specific ailment I've got in my system right now... all I know is that my joints hurt like the dickens and I've been farting out something that smells like an ash bin at a hotdog crematorium for the past 18 hours, despite the fact that I probably haven't eaten a hotdog in about 2 years.

Quick question: If you were a hotdog, wouldja eat yourself? Well... woudja?

Anyway, I've made certain that nothing serious is going on, and my symptoms have never been bad enough that I've had to (or had good reason to) miss work, but they've been pronounced enough that I'm completely wiped when I get back home at the end of the day, leading me to consider working on Good Rubbish projects for about 3/10ths of a second before opting to instead take a nap or snort lines of echinacea out of a hollowed avocado shell. This is a big part of the reason that my production has been so dreadful in recent weeks (bigger part of the reason: laziness, but you were already well aware of that), but I assure you folks that I do have some really good stuff in the works right now (including a couple more grand-scale speaker projects, if you're into that kind of thing), I just need to get my feet back under me before I can wrap them shits up.

I can guarantee you of this right now: Next week I will have some sort of project up on here, though its scale and overall deliciousness is going to be contingent upon how much energy I can scrounge up over the next 5 days or so. Here's hoping it goes well... also, here's hoping that growth on your leg is benign.

That is all.

Good Rubbish

HEADLINERS AND ALSO-RANS

FLOODMAGEDDON!!!!

EBAY SUCCESS REDEFINED.

A BIRTHDAY PRESENT FOR THE WORLD, 5 MONTHS IN THE MAKING

UNPRECEDENTED!

ADVENTURES IN PROCUREMENT

THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY!!!!

AWESOME EBAY PURCHASE OF THE WEEK - BASEWARS

ONE MORE REASON TO EXCLUDE ME FROM YOUR BIRTHDAY FESTIVITIES

MERGERS, ACQUISITIONS, UPDATES, AND OTHER ASSORTED BULLSHIT

REPURPOSING: HOW TO TURN 8 TRACK CASSETTES INTO 8 GORGEOUS CONCUBINES

BOOYA!

3 DOWN, 1 TO (HOPEFULLY NEVER) GO

THE GREATEST CRAP IN THE HISTORY OF JUNK AND THE SINGLE LONGEST POST IN THE STORIED HISTORY OF GOOD RUBBISH - PART 4 IN MY 14 OR SO PART EPIC

BO JACKSON AND THE QUEST FOR 10,000 YARDS - A TRULY EPIC WASTE OF TIME

SEE?

ODDS, ENDS, AND A REVISITED TOILET SHELF

GOOD RUBBISH PROUDLY ANNOUNCES NEW BENCH MARK FOR AUTHORIAL NEGLECT!

DESIGNS FOR DELICIOUSNESS - THE LONG AWAITED 2ND CHAPTER IN MY 14 OR SO PART EPIC

RETOONING ROUND 4: THE 3RD REVENGE

MY NEW MEDIA CABINET - PART 1 IN WHAT WILL PROBABLY TURN OUT TO BE A 14 OR SO PART EPIC

WORST BIRTHDAY PRESENT EVER.

TAKING GOOD RUBBISH TO NEW HEIGHTS... AND DISPENSING REALLY FUCKING ATROCIOUS PUNS ALONG THE WAY

A WORD OF WARNING

BACK FROM MY UNANNOUNCED VACATION... AGAIN.

GOOD RUBBISH SALUTES THE 164TH BIRTHIVERSARY OF MOTHER MCHANSLAW

COME MARVEL AT MY STAGGERING ERGONOMIC ACUMEN

VIRAL FACEBOOK FADS : MORON TESTED, FUCKING IDIOT APPROVED

A SCANT 8 MONTHS OVERDUE, GOOD RUBBISH PROUDLY PRESENTS RETOONING: ROUND 3

DESKTOP ORGANIZER? MORE LIKE "PIECE OF CRAP." YEAH. TAKE THAT, TARGET.

GOOD RUBBISH CELEBRATES ITS FIRST BIRTHDAY... THEN PROMPTLY FORGETS ABOUT IT

CHRISTMAS IN FEBRUARY!

JUST WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECTED IT...

CAFE PRESS ENCOUNTERS THE BUSINESS SIDE OF MY SLAPPIN' HAND

OH THE HUMANITY!

REPURPOSING: HOW TO TURN A PERFECTLY GOOD HOUSE INTO AN ABOMINATION

A VERY M.C. ESCHER CHRISTMAS

DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK

PLACEHOLDER POST

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM GOOD RUBBISH

A GRUPDATE OF MODERATELY UN-EPIC PROPORTIONS

TOTE BAGS THAT MAKE YOUR MOUTH SCREAM WORDS AT STUFF FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER

AAAAAANNND WE'RE BACK... KIND OF.

SYSTEM ERROR.

LEST WE FORGET...

SARAH PALIN QUOTES THE GENERAL PUBLIC: THESE SHIRTS ARE MEDIOCRE AT BEST

SORRY FOR THE DELAY...

GOOD RUBBISH PROUDLY SERVES ITS 10,000TH CUSTOMER!

THIS JUST IN: I'M STILL LAZY

LARRY CRAIG LOVES THE CARTOON COCK

I COME FROM A LONG LINE OF PROLIFIC HANDYMEN

MY NEEDLE AND THREAD'S LIKE A BLOW TO TO THE HEAD - BOW DOWN.

PLEASE HOLD FOR A MOMENT... ENRON WILL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY

I WAS FAR LESS ATTACHED TO RUE MCCLANAHAN

NEBRASKA SUCKS - AN EXERCISE IN COMMON KNOWLEDGE

CAPSIZE DESIGN INTRODUCES ME TO THE BACKSIDE OF THEIR SLAPPIN' HAND

I WOULD RELUCTANTLY ACCEPT BEING PUBLISHED.

WHAT'S DONE BEEN GOIN' ON

FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY - GOOD RUBBISH NOW TAKING SUGGESTIONS

FUN WITH FRAMES!

**** YOU FLICKR, YOU ****ING ****!!!

I HAVE BEEN FELLED BY THE GOBSTOPPER VIRUS

YOU FLICKR, YOU ING !!!