Vending machines hate fat kids.

Vending machines fucking hate me. This has happened too many times to count to me.

I know it’s been a while since one of these, but this was a special request. I hope y’all enjoy it.

I left my MP3 player at my band’s practice space the other week, which left me with quite a dilemma: what do I listen to a work? You see, my office is absolutely FILTHY with noise. At any given time, there can be at least 4 loud conversations hovering around my vicinity. I am the type of person that gets very annoyed by noise when I’m trying to concentrate. Usually, in these types of situations, I put on my earphones and crank up my MP3 player, hopefully to the point where it’s loud enough to drown out other people’s obnoxiousness (and hopefully loud enough so that they can hear it and be annoyed by it).

Unfortunately, without my MP3 player, I am limited in my options. I have a set of headphones at work, but they’ve seen better days. I’ve run them over (on accident) repeatedly with my chair, so that only one ear phone works. The one working ear phone is hanging on by a thread (literally, there’s an extremely thin wire holding the speaker together), so listening to music through is a very delicate process. The bass from a song can, literally, shake my one working earphone apart.

When I am thrust into this kind of situation, I usually dump my entire “My Music” folder into a Winamp playlist, and let it play through. This usually does a decent job of drowning out the foul noise attacking my cubicle. While on such a quest the other day, I stumbled upon some old MP3s I hadn’t heard in a while – demos from a Chicago band called The Detholz!. Even in rough demo form, pushed through a single crappy earphone, these songs are still excellent. Definitely some of the best music coming out of Chicago today.

So, in the spirit of spreading the goodness, I just wanted to bring to everyone’s attention that the Detholz! are playing their ninth annual Jukebox of the Dead show. It’s a Halloween extravaganza, where-in the Detholz tear down and re-construct classically cheesy songs. It may sound suspicious, it’s quite awesome in person. You’ll never listen to Sultans of Swing the same way again.

Anyway, here are the show details:

Jukebox of the Dead IX
“Detholz! FLEX!”
w/special guests Aleks and the Drummer & Hood Internet
Friday, October 31, 2008
Empty Bottle
1035 N Western Avenue
Chicago, IL
Buy tickets at www.emptybottle.com

I came up with the idea for this a long long time ago. I tended to get really bored in high school, and draw a lot in class. I filled up notebooks with drawings. I needed a constant outlet for my creative weirdness. One day, I came up with something similar to this. However, no one got the joke. The other day, I cooked up some chili, and I was reminded by the random creation I had made in high school. So, I was inspired to revise the joke, to actually make it palatable for human sensibilities. I think it turned out pretty well, and very Far Side-ish, at that. So much so, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that Gary Larson had some something similar in the past.

So, last night, I was at Blockbuster, which is located next door to the Whole Foods. I figured I needed some milk, so I went in to Whole Foods (which carries some delicious, although usually overpriced foods). I saw that they had peanut butter on sale for $2 a jar. It was the crunchy variety, which is my favorite. I already had an open jar at home, but I figured I’d better stock up, considering that I’ve been on a PB&J kick lately.

 I cracked open the jar this morning and it was, indeed, quite delicoius. What struck me as ridiculous was the label on the jar, which I’ve reproduced here.

There must be some avid nose pickers back in Japan.

As a side note, my new band has a show on the 23rd at the Mutiny Pub.

Many months ago, I was driving through the wilds of Ohio, and I spotted these odd signs. Some clever bastard had put up signs saying “Jesus Saves.” But, not content at using these great catch phrase, the creater connected the “S” in “Jesus” with the “S” in “Saves.” I’m sure this clever little detail alone saved countless souls. I, for one, was blessed for having seen it, because it lead to this expansion on that idea.

The CTA is run by morons. There is no kind way to put this. No one gets a job at the CTA on purpose. Anyone who works for the CTA fucked up so much that there was no other career path open to them. And this leads to a poorly run, overcrowded system that is constantly scrambling for more money.

I commute to work everyday on the CTA Red Lines. In the morning, it is a parade of slowing moving, packed to the brim trains. A train packed to the brim with morning commuters pulls into the station every morning, and every morning those commuters spill out onto the platform. But no matter how many people leave the train at my station, it is still packed to the brim, and I end up standing ass to armpit for 20 minutes while some genetic reject fails at his/her attempts to maneuver the train down a straight track.

And when the trains are packed with people, there is always the voice of a ghetto woman assuring you over the loudspeaker that there is another train “right behind this one.” Well, I have two questions for you, Mrs. loudspeaker ghetto woman. Why is it that your train is 20 minutes late pulling into the station in the first place, when the train directly behind you seemed to have no problem getting here on time? And why is it that the CTA Drivers that have problems with tardiness are always women?

You might have noticed that I’ve changed this site a bit. I’ve decided to move this site into a bloggy-format. Why? Well, mainly because I wanted people to be able to post comments pertaining to the strips. Let’s see how this works out. Hopefully, it will be awesome. Awesome like strapping two homeless people to your feet and proclaiming yourself the King of Pants.

-Phil