Marsupialized wrote:There's a girl here, I spied her throwing perfectly good unused white sheets of paper straight out of the box into the recycling bin. This is like the third time I've seen her do it when she didn't think anyone was looking.
I asked her why she's doing it and she said she's trying to help the environment by recycling more than just what she would normally throw in there during the day.

I was about to tell her what's wrong with her plan to save the Earth there, but I just said 'Ah, ok that's very nobel of you. Most people wouldn't do what you are doing' and went back to work.

She insisted I don't tell anyone what she's up to, I agreed.

You should start blackmailing her.

I hate to call anyone stupid or dumb. We've all done dumb things in the present and past, but for some reason this thread makes me think of one of my friend's roommates and his minstrelsy.

I once knew a tiny dude who was called Axel Wegman by his friends and family. He worked the nightshift at wegmans, which is a grocery chain in upstate NY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wegmans_Food_Markets . He wore jovi boots.. He sang like his namesake Axel Rose, but 90% of the time he sang like a hyper-operatic version of dickinson from maiden at open mics in the local bars. He had some original prog-metal originals that he sang with the gale-force of a full-on choir of castrati.

His lyrics, in a nutshell, favored the darker side of phantasmagoric goblin lore which were also richly imbued with ancient native american imagery. He also had the habit of saying "I love you man!" to his girlfriend. He stopped being friendly to me and took some serious wild-eyed offense when I suggested "Crouching patrons, hidden talent" as a potential name for his solo act. The even crappier "Motley Crouton" was similarly rejected and then revived years later by his unimaginative hesher buds.

In one particular occasion he used a mirror to help him see if his homebrew tattoo of the words "JACK DANIELS" over his right deltoid looked right. He took a break from the arduous tattooing process and realized that he got all the letters of the word "JACK" backwards except for the capital letter A. He was focused for "DANIELS" which came out alright.

Last I heard, he ran to the florida hills to immerse himself in their death metal scene. His style will definitely stand in sharp relief and serve as a palate cleanser of sorts to the cookie monster vocal stylings of the genre. His piercingly shrill cri de coeur will definitely cut through any subsonic double-bass rumblings and miasmic sonic turgidities that lay before him. Shit, this is too nerbly-like... If you ever see a wild-eyed long hair with a "Jack" tattoo in your rear-view, you're probably in florida and it's most likely this dude.

When I was a senior in high school I had a friend who worked at the Crow's Nest, the only record store in Joliet at the time that carried a decent selection of independent-label records.

She was into the "Brit-punk" look, which means she wore a leather jacket and ripped clothing, had spiky multicolored hair, etc. Her favorite band was The Cramps. She wasn't particularly stupid but one of her co-workers was a dim-witted metalhead burnout of maybe 22 years of age, who worked in the "smoke shop" department (surprise, surprise) at the back of the store. We used to have fun messing with him because he always took everything we said so seriously. When he was around we'd discuss punk rock shows we'd attended, and we'd always sensationalize and hyperbolize everything into shocking and grim "war stories," just to freak him out. He'd tell us we were crazy to run around in a crowd like that. "If one of those punks ever tried to slam-dance into me, I'd kick his faggot ass!" was a typical response we'd get. Oh yeah, he was also rather homophobic.

One day I was hanging around chatting with my friend while she stocked some records. Judas Priest came on the store PA system and the metalhead guy (let's call him "Lenny") immediately began singing along as he priced the bongs and dugouts. She grinned at me then turned to him and said, "You know the lead singer of Judas Priest is gay, don't you Lenny?" Lenny replied, "Yeah, I know. I didn't believe it at first, but I guess it is true." I asked him if he liked WASP and he said "Hell yeah, man." Then of course I brought out the old "We Are Sex Perverts" myth. My friend nodded in agreement. "Yep. They're all gay. Every single one of them. They're known for trashing their dressing rooms and hotels with these big gay orgies after their shows." Lenny grimaced and said "That's disgusting! But you know, I think I heard that somewhere too... And they do wear a lot of makeup. That's too bad though. They rock pretty hard for a bunch of queers."

Of course, my friend then took the game to the next level. She asked him, "Hey, you know who else is gay?" Then she looked me right in the eye while she said, "David Lee Roth." I had to hold my breath to keep from laughing. A few seconds passed as we stood there waiting to see if he'd bite. He turned to us with a confused look and replied, "No fucking way," and went back to his work. But then after a few minutes he suddenly looked up and added, "Yeah you know, David Lee Roth really does try pretty hard to overcompensate with all that macho stuff. He's really gay, huh? Wow."

From then on, that became one of our favorite things to do at the store. We'd break the grim news to Lenny about another macho heavy metal musician who was in reality a poncey, pole-smoking, butt-ramming homo. Strangely, he never argued with us or tried to defend his heroes. I don't know if he realized we were just fucking with him, but if he did he never called us on it. I'm pretty sure he believed it because he'd act all disappointed and mopey afterward. Then again, maybe he was just stoned.