Living Out Loud

Working at My McJob

The word Mcjob isn't new as it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on March 15, 2001. The dictionary provides the following description: "A job, usually in the retail or service sector, that is low paying, often temporary, and offers minimal or no benefits or opportunity for promotion.  I didn’t believe that it was an actual word until I saw it listed at www.dictionary.com." Apparently McDonald's wasn’t thrilled about the addition of this word and after six years they still don't approve.

There are many days when I get disgruntled with my so called career and feel like it serves no purpose. I often get frustrated with my workload, co-workers and management; sometimes I feel like I am just working at a glorified McJob.

I started to wonder if there really was a major difference between a Mcjob and a career.  Either path you choose, you still have co-workers and a boss. I guess the only difference is that with a career, you just get paid more to be someone else’s employee. In an effort to disagree with the great scholars at Oxford, I believe that a McJob can still offer many benefits and valuable life lessons.

I would like to revisit my teen years in the late 80’s; back when Michael Jackson, Madonna and big hair ruled the world.  Unless your last name was Trump or Hilton, you probably flipped burgers, bagged groceries, worked in a mall or spent time throwing newspapers in the early morning hours. I was one of the lucky teens that held all four of those McJobs that I just listed.

Yes, that’s correct, I was lucky to have held so many Mcjobs. I spent so much time as a McEmployee that I should be the poster boy for the McJob. After graduating from high school, I went on to college and held down several more McJobs while working to complete my Bachelor’s Degree.

Man Saves Beautiful Woman from Out of Control Sperm

Her boyfriend came along just in time. She was about to be attacked by out of control sperm running loose in downtown Cincinnati. The video of this horrible scene is down below this post. Warning: It's not for children.

After the sperm was captured, the beautiful woman and her boyfriend had a nice dinner at Rock Bottom and then went back to his place where the sperm was indeed welcome by the woman.

Reporting live from downtown, this is….

- Judy Darling,
LOL Blog Reporter

(Photo of beautiful young woman crying because of out of control sperm loose on the streets of downtown
Cincinnati from atlas.colorado.edu)

If I Don’t Stop it, I’ll go Blind

LOL Blog: The lost posts Here's another one that never made it to the LOL archives. This one is from January 3, 2007. We haven't heard from old Nate in a long time. Maybe he's getting some these days. (Larry Gross)

I had a great girlfriend. Her name was Maggie and we had terrific sex, probably did it 15 to 20 times a week.

Now she’s gone – ran off with that P & G executive named Troy. You know the one. The guy’s whose penis is the size of a toothpick.

Maggie’s been gone for almost a week now and I’m horny all the time and when I’m horny I gotta have relief, even when I’m in the office. We have a lot of hot looking women who work there.

When I see Linda walking down the hall with her bouncing breasts, I have to masturbate. I do it in a stall in the men’s restroom.

Ginger has great looking legs and it’s hard for me to stop thinking about them. When I can’t, I’m back to that stall in the bathroom.

Sometimes I see legs and pants down in the stall next to me. I can’t help but wonder if they think it odd be just standing there in the stall. But I’m not just standing there.

Sometimes when I’m at work, I’ll go to this blog and read some of the LOL Girl posts. I think you know what happens – off to the bathroom again.

I’m going to the bathroom now at least 10 or 12 times a day. My boss recently asked me if I was feeling all right, if I need to go see a doctor.

Maybe I do.

Am I the only guy who jacks off during working hours? And isn’t the bathroom the best place to do it?

- Nate

(Photo: spanky.thebiglist.com)

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Hot Sticky Stuff

Warm weather suits me fine but this hot sticky stuff around here lately is a little too much.

In this heat, I try to get by wearing as little as possible when I go to work which, of course, gets me a lot of attention from the guys at the office. Such little boys. Go ahead and look if you want.

When I get home, the clothes go off. The air conditioning in my apartment makes it more comfortable, but I guess I’m a warm-blooded person and I feel much better walking around my apartment naked. I sleep naked – of course.

It’s been a little too hot lately to have a man on top of me pounding away. On warm summer nights, I’ll usually put a box fan fairly close between my legs and masturbate. I like the cool air as I slowly make love to myself.

- LOL Girl

(Photo of sleeping or masturbating LOL Girl from salon.com)

Question of the Week

Is this guy doing a good job when it comes to running our city?

- Joe Locker

(Photo from www.cincinnati-oh.gov)

Top Eleven Signs You Woke Up at a Frat House

LOL Blog: The lost posts: Here's a funny post from C.A. that somehow got lost out of the archives. It's from September 18, 2006.(Larry Gross)

11. You're sleeping on a strangely damp, lumpy futon. Definitely blue.

10.  There's some curly-headed dude sleeping next to you. His baseball cap's still on, sideways.

9.  When you go to the bathroom, in the shower there’s no soap. Shampoo:  Mega Size Pert Plus Shampoo & Conditioner in One.

8. When you go to the sink, there’s an ancient, furry, wide head toothbrush and no paste. But there’s a full bottle of mouthwash and a shot glass.

7.  When you go to the fridge, there’s expired OJ, one moldy pizza slice and one Beast Light.

6.  The sleeping dude’s wearing your socks.

5.  On the floor, there’s a barrel for giant hard pretzels, containing many things, but not pretzels.

4. It is freezing, and there are no blankets, but you’re wearing a thick Kentucky sweatshirt, which makes it better, but the last time you checked, you weren’t in Kentucky.

3.  Some short, buxom chick with old makeup on kicks the door in and starts punching the sleeping guy.

2. On the wall, there are these posters: one of Pamela Anderson, one of the beers of the world, one of The Beatles and/or Jim Morrison, one of an omelet in a frying pan, reading, “This is your brain,” and one of Belushi wearing that “college” sweatshirt.

And the     number one sign you woke up at a frat house:

1. The sleeping dude, now wide awake, says he’s cold. He accidentally brushes up against you as he puts on his Belushi “College” sweatshirt.

- C.A. MacConnell

(Photo found on Mr. Google)

----Continue on to read comments from 9/18/2006)

A Short Cooking Lesson

LOL Blog: The Lost Posts: Not everybody likes us here. Some say that most of the time, we're childish, unfunny, not interesting - whatever. All right, here's a post that's smart. Written by David Gallaher, it somehow got lost in the archives. We're bringing it back to life now. (Larry Gross)

You have a pot on the stove.  It’s boiling over.  What to do?  Easy:  Remove the lid and turn down the heat.

You have violence in Cincinnati boiling over.  What to do?

Most of the proposed solutions–and there have been many lately–fall under the heading of tightening the lid. Hiring more cops and building more jail space are metaphors for tightening the lid.

A minority of solutions has called for turning down the heat. Persons offering this solution are ridiculed by the lid-tighteners as “pie-in-the-sky root causers.”

The first thing Cincinnatians need to ask themselves is: Are we trying to cook beans here? If not, what is the metaphor for heat, and where is the dial to turn it down?

The metaphor for heat is society’s laws that attempt to stop actions that have no victims. For comparison, murder and theft have victims. Drinking a beer while standing on a public sidewalk has no victim. Victimless crimes are commonly referred to as vice laws.

In a democracy, vice laws are for expressing the distaste of the majority for the habits and customs of the minority. Vice laws create heat in many ways: They are impossible to enforce. They encourage anti-government rebelliousness. Because they are impossible to enforce, they incite ridicule of government, which is taken out on police in a variety of subtle and not so subtle ways. They create a vicious cycle.

One category of vice laws causes a disproportionate amount of heat. It’s commonly referred to as the War on Drugs. This war, coupled with racial disparities, has evolved into genocide against young, male African-Americans. Absent a war on drugs, the profit in drug-dealing would decline so drastically that drugs would come off street corners and go back into legitimate retail establishments. Street corner drug dealers would no longer be enticed into pursuing a life of crime; a life they are teaching their children.

If Cincinnatians could agree on what’s causing the heat, the next question should be: Do we look to either the chief of police or the sheriff for answers? No. Why? The job of our so-called justice system is to cook beans. To them, that’s job security. If they were ever to produce the tranquility we all desire, they would be out of a job, and they know it. If producing tranquility in society were an experiment being conducted by scientists, police would long ago have been determined to be as useless as are leeches in curing bodily diseases.

Is it possible that removing the lid could truly help stop the boiling over of violence? Perhaps the natural tendency of society, if there were no government “lid,” is toward tranquility, over the long term? Come to think of it, isn’t that the second law of thermodynamics? Our dilemma is that we will not know; at least not in our lifetimes. That’s because the professionals most of us trust to bring about tranquility happen to be the same professionals who have a vested interest in continuing to apply the heat… as well as the lid.

- David E. Gallaher

(Graphic from Google)

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Weekends Downtown

When I moved to downtown Cincinnati in June, I knew I wasn't moving to a downtown Chicago, New York or even Cleveland - but I'm amazed at how dead it is down here on the weekends.

During the week, I see signs of a real city. I live around Eighth & Main where there is life Monday through Friday and also beyond those streets.  On Saturday and Sunday, finding life anywhere is damn difficult.

Here's some life. Sometimes on Saturday morning, I'll have breakfast at First Watch on Seventh Street and the place is usually packed. Their breakfasts are very good (and expensive) and I’m thinking the place is so full of people because where else are you going to eat breakfast downtown on the weekends?

Wouldn’t it be nice to get a Frisch’s back down here? You can bet that over across the river in Covington Frisch's, the Waffle House and McDonald's are open for that breakfast business - but downtown Cincinnati is too dead on the weekends to support it - and, of course, we don't have these restaurants around anymore, because of that fact. 

I’ll usually wait to go to CVS Pharmacy to pick up a few things on Saturday or Sunday. I do this because there’s no waiting in line. If there is someone ahead of me, it’s usually a person buying cheap cans of beer and who doesn't always have enough money to even pay for it. Many of the people I see buying this stuff are homeless people who can't "get out" of the city during the weekend. How do we find people who want to "get in?"

I get up early on Sunday mornings to catch a bus to Price Hill to do laundry. When I'm walking to the bus stop, if I do run into someone on the sidewalk, it’s usually a person who wants a cigarette or coins from me. I usually give them what they want and I usually don’t even get a thank you. Why do they have to be so rude about it? I'm trying to help and I feel frustrated often.

Downtown is so quiet on the weekends, it's a little scary. Expect for the occasional police siren, it's almost like living in the country. Next week, I'm expecting to hear crickets when I fall asleep.

I like living downtown just fine but here's the bottom line: On Saturdays and Sundays, I find myself wishing it was Monday again.

- Larry Gross

(Photo from www.chromasia.com)

That Was the Week that Was - In Blogs

I'll try to keep it brief this morning as I have to get up to Price Hill and the Alpine Laundry to wash some clothes. Here's a question: Can somebody out there tell me a place to do laundry downtown? Hopping on a bus every Sunday morning is turning out to be a drag.

The Porkopolis Blog reported last week that The Banks developers want more time and money to get the project going – just more typical Cincinnati bullshit. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll even see this started in my lifetime or even in my kid's lifetime. It's embarrassing.

Speaking of embarrassing, The Cincinnati Nation reported last week that The Enquirer is still behind on reporting news and events in Cincinnati. Shocking. No – not really at all. As far as I’m concerned, The Enquirer should shut down to save some trees.

I realize I’m being negative this morning. In an effort to be positive, Real Time with Bill Maher returns to HBO this coming Friday night. It’s about the only television show I watch these days and I become even more negative when it’s off the air.

Gawker reports on the 10 ways women judge your wang. It’s not nice to judge, but Gawker is located in New York City. Enough said.

We had some fun here last week rerunning some old LOL Blog posts on our one year anniversary. In going through the archives, I made a discovery: When we changed the blog to our current software system, not all the old posts were archived. We’ll correct this somewhat in the coming week by putting up a few that got lost along the way. We’ll call this “LOL: The Lost Posts.” Exciting isn’t it?

Price Hill and laundry are calling me away from my computer. Have a good Sunday.

- Larry Gross

(Photo of walking wang from www.pneyman.com)

Skywalk to Nowhere

LOL Blog Birthday Week:  This will be the last in our series of looking back at old blog posts from the past 12 months. This one was written on January 8 of this year. It seems like we have featured a lot of posts from January here -  probably our best month. I haven't made my way over to 525 Vine Street lately, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if these signs are still up. (Larry Gross)

When tourists visit The Queen City and head on over to 525 Vine Street, I wonder if they get confused by the maps and signs promoting the Cincinnati skywalk.

Most of the skywalks have been discontinued here and torn down, but you would never know it from the signs and maps still up.

Here’s a picture of one of the maps at 525 Vine Street promoting the skywalk. The LOL Blog has highlighted in red some of the skywalk that is no longer in operation or has been torn down. For example: You want to use the skywalk to get over to Fifth Third Bank? According to the map, that’s not a problem, but if you physically try to do it, you’re going to fall to your death. The skywalk is no longer there.

Here’s an amusing sign. It states that the skywalk covering Race Street is “temporarily” closed. Maybe I don’t know what temporarily means. This section of the skywalk has been closed for years. When you look at it over on Race Street, here’s what you see right above the highway.

Note how the skywalk comes to an end when you get to the sidewalk. You think the closing is temporary? Of course not. It’s the skywalk to nowhere and it’s going to stay that way.

I have to wonder what tourists think when they visit here, when they get all confused by the maps and the signs at 525 Vine Street. Do they think we’re lazy? Do they think we’re stupid? Does a blogger have to be the one to tell the city to get those maps and signs updated? Isn’t that a little sad?

I could beat this issue to death and talk about the skywalk attached to Saks on Fifth Street and the screwed up maps and signs over there, but maybe you see my point. Even when it comes to these simple things, we’re a city that just can’t get it right.

- Larry Gross

Photos:

West to Convention Center - Sara Beiting
False Map - Brandon Gross
Temporarily Closed - Sara Beiting
Skywalk to Nowhere - Brandon Gross

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