Gift-Giving Tips

It is the time of year where giving is better than receiving and some such shit.

But what do you do if you’re stuck buying a gift for the person a) who has everything or b) you know very little about or c) I’m bored right now.

Here are some fantastic suggestions:

For the wine connoisseur and/or alcoholic:

Comes with $25 off coupon for Promises Rehab center.

For the water enthusiast and/or strangler

Waterproof stangler gloves.

For the sportsfan and/or person for whom life has no meaning:

For the time stickler and/or person you hate quite a bit, but are passive/aggressive about it

Only $2 at Walmart.

For the art collector and/or the person who posts inspirational posts constantly on Facebook

Other possible “f” woods: failure, forlorn, feeble-minded, fuck, fucknut, fart, fartnozzle, etc.

For the outsdoorsy sort and/or person who has trouble deciding on whether the knife or gun is the best murder weapon

And for the person who poops:

Merry Consumerism to all and to all a good buy!

*Thanks to the LTD Commodities website for providing all these fantastic gift ideas.

Speaker7 is nearly done with this daily posting nonsense and will soon find peace with her reindeer toilet paper holder. 

Only 91 Shopping Days until Halloween

It’s easy to lose track of time in the hustle and bustle of daily life. I spend so much time taking care of my family and obsessing about Jennifer Aniston’s alleged baby bump that I nearly missed Halloween.

Luckily the local grocery store put up its Halloween candy display on July 31.

I want to applaud the store for getting a jump on the holiday because seriously it would have looked like a giant wang-hole if it had waited until Aug. 1. By then, I’m completely out of the Hallow’s Eve mood, and ready for winter.

Although I appreciate the steady drumbeat of consumerism, I’m having difficulty deciding on my Halloween costume. Normally this is locked down on June 15 so I have enough time to plan my Saxophone Day activities (Nov. 6, only 97 shopping days away!!!!!!).

I wanted to portray my favorite superhero:

But I fear that it may have the shelf life of a pumpkin carved on Aug. 2 (Pumpkins should be carved on July 5, silly). And there’s a good chance that another politician will be embroiled in some other scandal that will eclipse Weiner’s wiener.

I’m feeling the pressure, a pressure that can only be relieved by ingesting 40 pounds of candy corn.

Unfortunately now that it’s Aug. 2, the local supermarket has moved on.

Christmas Crap-a-looza

Another Black Friday has come and gone.

Maybe you weren’t able to pummel someone in the face to get your hands on a $4.99 version of this:

Does it make sense that the model is not wearing her hair in a ponytail?

And for that I’m truly sorry.

But there still are some great deals to be had. And they’re all conveniently located in one spot: The LTD Commodities catalog!

Recently I received mine in the mail, and picked out my favorites, which I cut out and mailed ransom-note-style to Santa. I made it quite clear if I don’t receive these items, I will cut his bowl-full-of-jelly belly.

But I wasn’t just thinking of myself, I was thinking of you, and I wanted to share my knowledge to help you find the perfect present for that acquaintance you got stuck with in the secret santa drawing or a “loved” one.

What do you get for the man in your life or total stranger coworker who enjoys sitting on a tree stump to drink his coffee, but thinks outerwear is too cumbersome?

Men’s Performance Thermal Sets.

Maybe the man in your life or total stranger coworker is more of an indoorsy sort.

Have you ever witnessed a loved one or random coworker bite into an egg sandwich and just get the bread. And the loved one or random coworker was like “Fuuuuucccccckkkkkkkk!!!!!!! Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”

Well, life just got better for this person. I give you…The Microegg™:

Maybe your loved one or random coworker likes to hunt, but does poorly because he covers his shaving accidents with Dora the Explorer band-aids.

This person desperately needs these:

Maybe your loved one or random coworker is more of a brainiac type who enjoys puzzles and boring you with facts about Star Trek convention hook-ups.

Then The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions is the ultimate gift of ultimateness.

Maybe your loved or random coworker is a girl and finds tools all icky and hurty-like because “ow…my manicure.”

Then there’s this:

Maybe your loved one or random coworker is football fan, but not just a normal fan–one who borders on obsessive. Like when his team plays, he doesn’t just paint his face, he paints his balls in his team colors, and you know this and you die a little every day.

Then get this person this:

Maybe your loved one or random coworker is filled with pep and zing, always cheering your minor accomplishments like your ability to do a number 2 in the workplace.

Get back at this person with this:

Yup. You might know someone who would actually put this in his house and that’s okay because someone has to, I guess.

The boot lamp.

Maybe your loved one or coworker is really stressed out and stressed for time so this is the perfect combo gift:

Or maybe your loved one or random coworker is someone you don’t know very well so you just go ahead and get something Christmas-related because what the fuck else are you going to buy.

Dearest Reader: Speaker7 is attempting to write a post every day in November so she doesn’t have to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). She wrote this post in the dim light of her cowboy boot lamp. 

Give Thanks…for Sauna Pants

Thanksgiving is that annoying little holiday that gets in the way of me pitching a tent outside Target in hopes of buying this:

Yes, there are only four shopping days left until the consumer frenzy that is Black Friday. What better way to cap off a day expressing your thanks for family, friends and health then by elbowing someone’s else grandma in the face to get this great deal at Walmart:

I don’t know about you, but I am extra excited this year. This year the stores are opening at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day!!!

That means I can have this in my mouth four hours earlier than I thought:

Thankful.

That means I can spend the remainder of Black Friday on actual Friday wearing these:

And using this:

You know with Black Friday intruding earlier and earlier into the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s only a matter of time before we forget Thanksgiving existed all together, and instead transform it into Black Friday Eve.

FYI – this is what I want for next Black Friday Eve…pssttt! It’s at K-Mart!

And then we don’t have to even worry about cooking a turkey for future Black Friday Eves.

Give thanks.

Dearest Reader: Speaker7 is attempting to write a post every day in November so she doesn’t have to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). She would feel more inspired if she was wearing sauna pants while she did this…hint…hint…

We Had a Good Run, America

In a few days, it will be a new year, and some believe this is the year the world ends.

I’m not convinced. I consulted both my box of bones and magic eight ball, and they tell a different story, a story I’m not willing to share so close to Christmas (only 364 shopping days left!).

What is certain, is that America is done. Over. Kaput. Pfffttttttttt……..

Scientific proof:

Even looking at it hurts my ear drums (credit: saddest photographer in the world).

Roads and bridges are falling apart. Our food and products are filled with high fructose corn syrup and plasticized high fructose corn syrup-flavored corn syrup. Our schools are failing, and our children are so morbidly obese, their fingers get mistaken for hot dogs by the pack of wild dogs roaming our foreclosed suburbs. Even truck nutz look more shriveled than ever.

photo credit: world's saddest nutz sackz photographed by the world's second saddest photographer.

We had a good run…..well, except for slavery, Jim Crow, the extermination of the native people, the subjugation of women, stirrup pants, American Idol and celebrities who are famous for sex videos.

That’s it? We’re over just like that? I can change.

I don’t know….I feel like I’ve heard this from you before, America, and then you made me watch Bristol Palin on Dancing with the Stars, Season XXVIICCXXMM.

Give me a second chance.

This is more like your 477th. I’m still pissed about this:

Okay, here are a few things you can do to clean up your act. Consider them your New Year’s resolutions:

1. Fix shit. Remember how Wall Street f***** you over and made billions while everything crumbled? Still happening. Unlike you, they don’t want to change….ever.

2. Refuse to let John Boehner be a congressman until he does something about the orange hue of his skin and his incessant crying. Oh, and his horrible awful vomit-inducing grand-standing and scorched-earth policies. . . I’m amending this to refuse to let nearly every politician be an elected representative, and advocate for the election of Sesame Street muppets in their place.

3. Immediate deportation of anyone who uses the expression “Just sayin'” after they just f****** said something. “I think 9/11 was pretty bad, but tacos are yummy. Just sayin.'”

We’ll start here, and see how the year goes.

Of course this could still happen:

 

Miraculously Miraculous

Christmas is a time of miraculous miracles that miraculously mystify through their miraculousness.

The Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus who grew up and now lives forever at the North Pole under the moniker “Santa Claus.”

A hefty bag gave birth to many tiny hefty bags that were assembled together into a life size replica of Bo, the White House First Dog.

credit: Washington Post

And the Today show had a feature on how retailers are thrilled by the joy people spread through the firing of bullets, the stabbing of knives and the trampling of feet to obtain products that people can wear on their feet while they fire guns, stab and trample on others.

I guess some new sneakers came out, and they supposedly turn you into Michael Jordan when you wear them or maybe Lil Bow Wow, who starred in the movie Like Mike about a boy who finds a pair of old sneakers that make him play basketball like Michael Jordan. That–or they look cool so that’s why someone stabbed that guy seven times to get ahead of him in the line outside the mall.

Nike was none too happy (but kind of secretly happy) that people were literally trampling over toddlers to jam their feet into $180 shoes. They released this statement:

But there is a silver lining in all the attempted murdering–consumer confidence is up, people are spending and they are buying smart, says some smiling Today show guy in Florida. He smiles through his spiel about the tension people can feel when a gun suddenly goes off in a crowded sporting goods store before segueing into how people are using their trigger fingers to diddle their smart phones looking for the best deals and best ways to murder.

Christmas.

Around 25 percent of the population started buying their tangible displays of love this week, the Today show guy statisticizes, and 54 percent surveyed said that 80 percent of news stories that contain 63 percent of statistics make them sound 103 percent more scientific than stories that use less than 12 percent of surveys and 3 percent of reporting.

Shopping so close to the climax of the consumerism orgy fills Sheila Lopez with the Christmas spirit.

“I have to buy clothes,” she says in a spirited monotone befitting of one of the zombies in Dawn of the Dead.

Sheila then goes and bites the face of the nearest person carrying a Nike bag containing Air Jordans.

Miraculous.

It’s A-Okay!

I learn so much as a human being who has eyes and ears and occasional numbness in my pinky toe. But I had no idea how much I repressed what I said until I saw this on Facebook:

I wept silently into my Old Glory hotpants for about an hour. But after my crying jag, I felt liberated. Clearly Christmas is under attack. Why else would Christmas decorations go up Oct. 25 when they should be up after July 4th? The intention is to rip this holy commercial holiday right out of baby Jesus’ tiny baby hands and beat the crap out of it with baseball bats emblazoned with the slogan: “Happy Holidays from Al Qaeda!”

But guys.. did you know it’s okay to say “Merry Christmas” and “God Bless America” without being struck down by the iron fist of straw men?  I feel like a giant weight made out of air has been lifted off my shoulders.

However this got me thinking: what else is it “okay to say” that for some reason or other I wasn’t saying because it was not beautifully set against a backdrop of a waving flag?

Get ready for some freedomy freedom being freedomed your way:

And lastly my favorite:

Vultures are AMAZING.

While I roast some chestnuts on the fire and move the pieces of the Nativity scene around so that Mary is lying down because she just had a baby for cripes sake, I ponder what Christmas means to me.

I quickly become bored and open up my laptop and check Facebook where I discover what one of my “friends” thinks about Christmas.

There are many things that confuse me about this status update. First, why did I read the whole thing and then take a screen shot of it? And B, was Santa Claus, Rudolph and those Coke-swilling polar bears at Jesus’s birth? And second, does it really bother you when some underpaid, abused retail clerk mumbles “Happy Holidays” rather than making the sign of the cross and saying “HO HO HO Merry Christmas. . . is that what’s really ruining the holiday, not the people who pepper spray other people for a $2.95 Forever Lazy®? And lastly, why are you yelling? The yelling hurts my eyeballs.

Believe me, I would totally be on the same page with you if sh*t was going down like it did when Nero was Roman emperor, and Christians were torn apart by dogs and set on fire. That is some hardcore persecution right there. But this? Some person ringing up your FisherPrice Imaginext 2 Foot Dragon World Fortress™ at the local dollar store, mumbling “Happy Holidays” as s/he tries to avoid getting cancer from exposure to the products made out of asbestos and arsenic?  I don’t think your “persecution” is going to land you on the Christian martyr list.

Here’s the thing, “friend.” You can scream or write in caps lock “Merry Christmas” until your lungs burst or you have carpal tunnel and no one will really give a mistletoe sprig (well unless it’s at 4:30 a.m., but that’s why noise ordinances are enacted). That is because in America–for now–you are free to practice or not practice any religion you want. I don’t know if things will change now that the U.S. Senate has voted to allow the military to arrest Americans and detain them indefinitely.

Merry Christmas.

But as it stands if I want to practice the religion of Speaker7ism where I believe Speaker7 is omniscient and omnipresent then praise be to Speaker7.

Now I am by no means a history scholar, but I’ve been able to cobble together some knowledge from Snapple bottle caps, Chinese restaurant menus and the labels on Molson Canadian Light. I have learned that vultures can fly for six hours without flapping their wings and that the founding fathers did not want to repeat the problems in England by creating a state-sponsored religion. It never seems to go well for the people in the religious minority.

Really no one can take your belief away from you unless you let them. And your belief should be that Speaker7 is the light and the way.

Or else.

Santa Claus is Kind of a Dick

I’m not a big fan of St. Nick and his twinkling dimples and his obvious cocaine addiction (Visit all of the homes in the world in one night? Yeah, that’s the cocaine talking). But what really cemented my dislike for the jolly red-suited jerk was the way he behaved in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. 

I loved that show as a kid and looked forward to seeing it air around Christmas time. I then saw it as an adult, and discovered the truth about Santa: He is kind of a dick.

He does not have the best reaction when catches sight of Rudolph without the prosthetic brown nose Donner makes him wear.

The subtext is clear: you better be a conformist brown-noser. This opens up the poor little reindeer to taunts and ridicule and his expulsion from all the reindeer games. Sure, Rudolph resembles the patient from the Operation board game, but it’s just a shiny red nose. It looks just like Santa’s after a trip to the bathroom.

Santa does nothing to discourage the bullying, and in fact seems to hold the worldview of “brown nose good, red nose bad.”

So what choice does Rudolph have, but to leave the home he’s only known and travel to New York City where differences are not just accepted, they’re completely ignored.

He meets Ratso Rizzo with the hope that Ratso can help him become a hustler. He meets up with Hermey who has also been ostracized for his unwillingness to work in Santa’s sweatshop.

Together the two travel to the Island of Misfit Toys where toys that did not meet Santa’s standards are sent to die. You know who Santa’s beginning to sound like right? Yeah, I’m going to say it…Martha Stewart. She is a dick.

Rudolph ekes out a living in the wilderness and a few months later decides to return home. He arrives in the middle of a blizzard. Santa is flipping out that he won’t be able to perform his one-day a year job, and talks about canceling Christmas Eve. Santa then has a brilliant idea.

So everything is now hunky dory because the freak reindeer can actually be useful. Great message, Santa. Well done.

Don’t even get me started on the whole naughty-or-nice nonsense especially since Santa’s character judgment is a bit sketchy. Oh, and a piece of coal for those who are naughty? Yeah, how did you get that coal Santa? Removed a few mountaintops in West Virginia? Next you will be doling out vials of hydrofracked wastewater.

It’s going to be generic hydrox cookies this year, buddy.

Two Front Teeth Would Be Preferable

The holiday season is upon us–actually it began seven weeks ago so if you haven’t started your shopping yet, you’re basically %$%!&. With the holiday season comes the joy of spending money on marvelous gifts for marvelous people you marginally like….ahem..marvously like.

I love shopping. Love, love, love it!!! The movie Confessions of a Shopaholic was completely based on my life although I cannot say that with the utmost certainty having never actually seen it. I’m that person who tramples over that other person to buy that StirChef™ Hands-free Saucepan Stirrer every Black Friday at every Walmart in the country. I don’t just shop till I drop, I drop other people while I shop because I want me some delicious crap made by the tiny, tiny hands of children in foreign lands.

Wait a sec…..oh, yes, that’s right. I hate shopping. Hate, hate, hate it!!! The movie Confessions of a Nonshopaholic would be a movie based on my life if it was written and directed by me and then sold to a studio and distributed nationwide.

I think why I hate shopping, and in particular holiday shopping, is because I never know what to buy other people. What do you mean you don’t want a Thigh Glider®?

This year may be different, thanks to LTD Commodities. They sent me their catalog because they must have known I needed help or possibly some website I shopped at sold my personal information to them–six of one, half-dozen of the other.

And this catalog is a white Christmas wonderland of non-island-of-misfit-toys splendor. So so much to chose from. Let’s take a walk down Candy Cane Lane together, shall we?

Shot Gun Shell Shot Glasses

Shot Gun Shell Shot Glasses – the name just rolls off the tongue especially when you have downed several shots of whiskey. This is marketed as “ideal serveware for your hunting lodge” and I couldn’t agree more, but it would be also perfect for every day use, baptisms and shotgun weddings.

Mom & Dad sweatshirts

D.A.D.D. & M.O.M.S Sweatshirts

The D.A.D.D. sweatshirts stands for Dads Against Daughters Dating and the M.O.M.S. for Mothers of Marvelous Sons. These are  “humorous.”  Yes.

On a side note, I appreciate that the catalog has labeled both the mom and the dad in the picture.

Call of Duty® Fleece Throw – Nothing softer or cozier than war.

“We’re Watching You”

Instructional Eye Shadow Sets – Learn smoky eye or experiment with your own color combination under the surveillant eye of Big Brother.

Smells just like fried chicken

Paula Deen Scented Candles – Captures that perfect Southern-fried Crisco scent.

Peace Sign Tables – Give peace a chance… to hold up your Paula Deen scented candles.

This is by no means a tired worn-out expression

Man Cave Stool – Allows one to “mark his male territory.” It will be easy to clean up any urine that hits the vinyl seat as one is marking his territory on the floor around the stool.

Football Team Bedroom Ensemble – To guarantee that you will never, ever score.