Happy Easter

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.
. . .
Then Simon Peter came . . . and went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself.
. . .
Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, "Peace be with you."
Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing."
Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!"
Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

from the Book of John, chapt 20

Right idea, wrong vehicle

If Courtney Stodden is trying to get into the movies, she's supposed to be washing Michael Bay's Ferrari, not some crappy Jeep:

And for the record . . . that's the dumbest looking bikini top I've ever seen. Seriously, it's a posed photo shoot honey, you're not going to fall out of it. Sheesh!

And Boucher's gone

The Tampa Bay Lightning which started out smokin' hot with a 6-1 start, inexplicably collapsed into a 7-16 freefall which today cost talented head coach Guy Boucher his job.

Local sports tool Tom Jones of the Tampa Bay (formerly St. Pete) Times blames GM Steve Yzerman for the underperforming team.  But it's not Yzerman's fault that new goalie Anders Lindback isn't coming into form quickly enough or that back-up Mathieu Garon has turned into Dwayne Roloson all of the sudden.

Jones faults Yzerman for not stocking the team with top flight talent, but conveniently forgets that the Bolts couldn't afford to spend money like the Yankees.

All the way back to the Jacques Demers days, this team has had a bizarre habit of not staying with a winning formula.  Even after winning the Stanley Cup, the next season the guys seemed to forget everything that John Tortarella taught them about schemes and such.  I cannot remember how many times Torts would be in the paper or on tv talking about the players not playing the system.  They would buy back in and start winning.  Then abandon it and start losing again.  They've done the same thing to Boucher this season.

Bummer

Top speculation to replace Boucher has either former Buffalo coach Lindy Ruff or AHL Syracuse coach Jon Cooper.  Coop may have the slight advantage as he has worked with a lot of the young players now on the Bolts squad when they were in the minors.  Also, like Boucher when he was in the minors, Cooper is on everyone's "next big thing" radar.  If they pick up Ruff and sign him to a long term contract, which Ruff will want, they will probably lose Cooper to another team.

This sucks

And to Boucher . . . thanks for all you've done here, I for one would have liked you to stay on.

Haminator, part 2

Or, what Mary Katherine Ham doesn't know about the Post Office could fill a book . . . and probably should.

In a recent post, MKH expressed her dismay at the Post Office continuing to function with six day delivery.  Also saddening to her is the fact that conservative budget hero, Paul Ryan's own proposed budget "...spares the Postal Service from vehicle fleet reductions imposed on other agencies despite the fact that mail volume has been steadily decreasing." 

What the Haminator doesn't know, because she didn't bother to check, is that the decline in volume seems to be leveling off.  When coupled with a 15% increase in parcels (we delivered 35.6% of FedEx's ground shipments last fiscal year...yeah, she doesn't know that either), it's not like our trucks are going on the street empty.  We're also not losing deliveries, so we actually still need the mail trucks honey.

Though the Post Office has reduced the number of city carriers by over 28% since 1997, we are functioning with a vehicle fleet that is over 20 years old.  My own truck has over 80,000 miles of stop & go city driving on it.  Starting and shutting off hundreds of times a day.  Driving through flooded streets . . . you know, that whole "wind, rain, dark of night" business.  Basically, we can't afford to just toss old vehicles away because there's always the chance we have to replace one that can no longer be repaired.

MKH also doesn't have any idea what the current business plan is within the P.O.  So far this year, we've hired over 30,000 part time carriers, the new CCA's, and management's idea is to flood the offices with part-timers to pick up all the overtime.  It sounds good on the surface, but the idea has been tried before and has failed miserably.

Let's look at a hypothetical office with 20 routes.  If it's like my office (I work 10 hours a day, six days a week . . . yeah, I'm exhausted) you'll have about 20 hours of overtime a day to pick up.  So figure 5 CCA's to pick up four hours each.  Why like that?  Well, first off, Scotty doesn't just beam you from route to route, so there's driving time between "pieces" plus you've got to get your stuff set up, etc.  Plus that whole pesky federal law about a 10 minute break every four hours, a lunch at six or more . . . oh for the glorious days of forced labor and sweatshops, right Mary?

So four hours in pieces takes about six hours.

Secondly, these subs cannot do the route pieces as fast or as accurately as the regulars.  Just a fact.  As I mentioned in the other post, we send this dude out to do a route that we're expected to finish by 3:45 and we have to send 5 guys out to rescue him just to get him back by 5:30.  We carriers may be trained chimps, but we're the Dr. Zaius chimps.

So one sub . . . 4 hours in pieces.

Anyway, what are these CCA's gonna drive?  If we need five subs, we need five trucks.  Can't reduce the fleet if we need more vehicles for all these overtime-wiper-outers to drive.  And you can't just suggest they drive our trucks when we get back.  The Post Office has adjusted these routes to eight hours a day or more already (mine is adjusted to 8 hours and 7 minutes out of season), and is in the process of gaming the numbers to make the routes even larger.  If 4:00 is our end tour, we're just getting back a few minutes before that.  And neither we, nor the subs, can be on the street after 5:00, that whole "window of operation" thingy that is supposedly about safety but is routinely violated by management directive.  So there's no time for these subs to take our trucks out and deliver our overtime.  Unless you're going to hire 20 guys and have them waiting for us to get back, just to jump in our trucks and finish our routes for us.  Now there's some real efficiency for ya!

You see, it's a bit more complicated than just striking through numbers on a balance sheet.

Movie review -- Dredd

Caught this on pay-per-view the other night and found it to be thoroughly enjoyable.

In 1995 the first Judge Dredd movie was released starring Sylvester Stallone at the peak of his steroidal box office drawing power. That movie was a mash-up of Blade Runner, Demolition Man, and other flicks that some purists (I'm not one as I'm only peripherally familiar with the Dredd character) decried as too far afield from the original comic source. Though it did have hottie Diane Lane in a body suit going for it, so that was nice.

I'm assuming the success of the Nolan/Frank Miller Batman trilogy convinced someone that Dredd could be rebooted if it was "gritted up" properly, so we get this new version released in 2012. I'm hearing it was planned as a trilogy which sort of validates my assumption here.

Anyway, we have Karl Urban cast as Dredd in this version. And since Dredd does not remove his helmet in the film, Urban is probably the best choice for him, since he should have his scowl patented. Much like Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta, Dredd's entire range of emotion (such as it is) has to be portrayed in body language and lower half facial expressions. I cannot think of anyone better to do this than Urban.

The movie opens with Dredd chasing some criminals through the streets of Mega City. Once they kill a pedestrian, Dredd goes into full judge mode, using his motorbike's (a more practical looking bike than Stallone's version) machine guns to crash the van they're driving. With two perps dead, Dredd stalks the third guy into a mall where the dude has a woman hostage. Dredd gives the guy a choice, life in Iso-cubes or death. When the baddie refuses, Dredd gives the first of several nice one-liners: "Negotiation's over." then shoots the guy dead. Unlike typical cop movies, the woman doesn't scream at Dredd for being a fascist or risking her life, but sincerely thanks him.

Returning to the precinct house, Dredd is given a new assignment -- a one day evaluation of a rookie who barely failed at the academy. Cassandra Anderson, played by petite Olivia Thirlby, is the most powerful psychic the force has come across and the higher ups want to see if she can make it anyway. My understanding is that Anderson is a much beloved character in the comic, so this is an appreciated nod to the fan boys out there.

A nice touch here as once they get going, Dredd defers to Anderson in almost all situations. As a training officer at the Post Office, I get three days to train new carriers. The first day, I drive, mostly explaining things and nuances about my route. The second day, I only drive the most difficult parts. But the third day, it's all them. I let them make all the mistakes and only point out what they're doing wrong and the consequences of those mistakes -- so they'll learn. The writers did this with this script and it hit home with me. Another minor style point that I don't know many would appreciate.

Anderson decides they should investigate a triple homicide in a building named Peach Trees -- one of the mega structures of the new world. A mile high mixed usage building housing businesses and living quarters. Like all engineered societies, it's a slum, like the one Anderson grew up in. A place where she wants to make a difference.

Here's where we get a couple more important plot points. The building is run by a gang -- the Ma Ma Clan. Ma Ma is a former hooker named Madeline Madrigal played with greasy goodness by Lena Headey. Scarred and demented, Headey plays Ma Ma as a serpentine psychotic -- understated, drugged out, totally ruthless . . . it's a fabulous performance.

The clan produces the movie's signature drug -- Slo Mo, something ingested through an inhaler that tricks the mind into feeling like time is moving at one percent its normal speed. The inhaler is pretty cool, with a glass tube on the top with lava-light like viscous fluids inside.

Dredd again defers to Anderson who decides they should find the drug dealer's apartment and apprehend the assumed suspects. Outside the apartment there's a great exchange between Dredd and Anderson. After asking Anderson if this is her first live fire situation, Dredd points out that Anderson has forgotten her helmet. Anderson explains that the helmet might interfere with her psychic abilities. Dredd deadpans that "... a bullet to the head might interfere with them more." heh

The shoot out inside is a eye popping scene. The dude's are all high on Slo Mo, so it is shot in hyper slo-motion. We see bullets ripping through bodies and the concurrent impact waves, blood droplets flying . . . amazing. The movie was released in 3D, so I imagine this looked awesome on screen. But during the "arrest" Anderson realizes that they've apprehended one of the killers in the triple homicide, who also just happens to be one of Ma Ma's top lieutenants. When they try to leave, that's when things get crazy.

The mega towers are equipped with blast doors and shutters to survive nuclear war, she seals up the building and attempts to hunt down and kill the two judges. This is the bulk of the movie and it is well done and believable, at least as much as any movie is. We get to see Anderson grow from a tentative rookie to a remorseless Judge who kills without hesitation.

Urban plays Dredd like a shark -- a deliberate, relentless, lethal destructive force. Like I mentioned earlier, he does an excellent job of portraying various emotions through only scowls, grimaces, pursed lips and body language. We get the mission variable sidearm -- the Lawgiver, a more practical uniform (another nod to Nolan's Batman reboot), some pretty cool field dressing for gunshots, a nice touch of Dredd reloading his firearm and securing more ammunition (a often overlooked bit in the infinite firepower guns in most movies) and a clever finale.

As previously noted, I believe the movie was planned as part one of a trilogy. I don't know what the parameters to green light the sequels are, the flick cost $35 million to make and only grossed $13 million according to Imdb. But I'd like to see two more of these. It's so hard to get decent adaptations of comic books (don't get me started on the X-Men or Wolverine, ugh) these days, but this is a series that deserves to be made.

If you haven't seen Dredd, I highly recommend it.

---

And as a bonus, here's some pics of the wonderful Lena Headey from a recent issue of Esquire:

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Did you find this review helpful? Check out my other reviews for my thoughts on the flicks and the occasional gallery of hotness that accompanies them:

So now it's Mary Katherine Ham's turn I guess

Over at Hot Air  there's a new posting about the USPS staying with Saturday deliveries, this time by Mary Katherine Ham.  The Haminator joins the other postal service haters at the site in taking a superficial swipe at the service bolstered by little more than reading what others have written and commenting on it.  Not the most accurate way to disseminate info to your readers.

She regurgitates the data about fiscal 2012's losses, but fails to note that 80% of those losses are due to pre-funding mandate imposed by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.  Missing from her post was that the first quarter of fiscal 2013, the Post Office had a $100 million operational profit!  Sort of an important bit of info, don't you think?

But only if you're trying to give the whole picture, which MK is not.

She might also point out the $50 - $75 billion in pension costs overcharged to the Post Office since 1971 that the federal government refuses to return.  That is because those funds count as income for the fed and for Congress to permit a refund it would be forced to either make cuts (a Dem no-no) or raise taxes (a Rep no-no) the equivalent amount.  And that ain't happenin' anytime soon!

The Haminator points out that Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) both complained about Postmaster Donahoe's accounting in his claims about a $2 billion savings by cutting out Saturday deliver, but says those concerns were answered by a letter from the Postal Regulatory Commission.  Problem is that even in their letter, the Commission notes that "...we caution that the methodology to estimate revenue loss resulting from a lesser delivery frequency suffers from material flaws.  As a result . . . the estimate . . . may not be reliable."  

Yeah.  You see, honey, the Regulatory Commission isn't the Post Office.  They're an outside group who rely on data provided to them by the post office to make their recommendations.  There is no outside accounting of the Post Office.  Anyone, even the unions, who ask for information, simply have to take what is given to them by the PO to work out whatever it is they're working on. That's sort of like going to the guy who's embezzling money from the bank and asking him for the books to catch the embezzler.  Pretty much not gonna work.  

Those, like Ham, who say the unions are the hold up here, number one, woefully overestimate the influence the feckless unions have on the post office.  But secondly, the unions have been actively offering suggestions to cut costs and help keep the PO viable.  One idea is to allow the PO to become a government owned corporation.  This would free the USPS from micro-managing and crippling regulations and allow it to freely explore revenue raising options like new products (no, not that odious clothing line), index stamp prices, etc.

Lost in all this common sense about delivering only packages on Saturday is exactly how that would be accomplished.  No one ever thinks about that.  If you're going to have your entire work force working anyway, why not deliver the mail at the same time?  Duhrr.

But of course, unbeknownst to these blogging clowns is that the PO's idea is to have CCA's do the Saturday deliver.  CCA's are the new part-timers we have.  We've got one at my office.  Nice kid.  When we send him out to deliver a route, we have to send five guys out to look him up to get him back by 6:00!  How the f*ck is he going to deliver a city's worth of parcels?!  

I would imagine Saturday's would be like this -- a supervisor, at least two clerks to sort the packages, and one CCA for every two routes.  So that's 10 people at work on Saturday.  Eight trucks on the road for eight hours (at least).  How is that saving $2 billion per year?!  Plus the PO estimates that being open Saturday brings in about $5 billion a year in revenue, so some or all of that would be lost.  Because you know FedEx and UPS will be jumping to grab our Saturday parcel business.

So eight part-timers misdelivering parcels to create a net loss of $3 billion per year.  Am I missing something here?  I'm no brain scientist, but I'm thinking that ain't good business.

Pity the Haminator didn't take a little time to dig into this instead of going for cheap traffic and comments.  But I don't expect any better from the trolls at HotAir. 

Calvin and Hobbes animation...Yay!

'Cause I miss them so much . . .

Happy St. Pat's!

Happy St. Patrick's Day to my one or two regular visitors.

Next to New Years, this is the worst day for drunk driving and amateur drinkers in the year. Please be careful and come home safely from your fun and frolic.

Short track racing

So NASCAR is at Bristol Motor Speedway this Sunday for the race. Bristol is one of three short tracks on NASCAR's circuit, the others being Martinsville and Richmond. These tracks have a long illustrious history in stock car racing and are considered some of the sport's top draws for fans.

Problem is, the racing isn't what it should be because of the quantum leap in the race cars since these tracks were first opened. In the old days, you were lucky to hit 60 or 80 mph on the straightaways. Pole sitter, Kyle Busch had an average lap speed of over 123mph and was turning laps in just over 15 seconds!

On a half mile track like Bristol, with 43 cars in the field, the guys in the back will barely be up to speed when the front pack cars are bearing down on them after the green flag. Five minutes of racing and the drivers at the rear are already a lap down. That's hardly fair.

It is not a rare at all for a driver to have a problem free day and still end the race a half dozen laps down simply because he couldn't get out of the early hole dug in each restart throughout the race.

Update: Okay, it took 35 laps for the last place to get lapped in the race, but I think my point is still valid. Plus something else, Tony Stewart cut down a tire and could not get down through the continuous line of cars to reach pit road and ended up crashing. Now he's about a dozen laps down and effectively out of the race. Like I said . . . too many cars for the size of the track.

What would I do about it? Glad you asked . . .

Divide the race field into two packs of 21 or 22 cars. Have a half length race with each pack, one on Friday and one on Saturday. Or perhaps even both on Saturday. Then take the top 10 cars from each "heat" plus the fastest of the two 11th place cars and put them in the field for Sunday's full length feature race.

21 cars on the track would allow for better racing and I believe would still lend itself to the bumpin' and bangin' and rubbin' is racin' style that fans want to see.

What's that you say? Fans wouldn't stand for two or three days of racing? Hmmmm . . . Let me introduce you to a little enterprise called drag racing. No, not Ru Paul's nonsense, but the real thing.

I used to go to the GatorNationals down here every year. Four days of drag racing and milling around the pits. Thursday and Friday are packed with fans. Saturday it's crushed. Sunday is a total shoehorn situation! No problem getting four days worth of fans for that. Why not my idea? They do twin qualifiers at Daytona. This is a workable idea. It wouldn't hurt to try it once.

And you know who else thinks my idea is a good one:

Yep. Rosie Jones likes my idea. Or she would, if I explained it to her. At least I think she would. Wonder if she'd give me the chance?

Rule 5 Sunday -- random hotness edition

I haven't done a Rule 5 post in a while so here's some random hotness -- swimsuits, see-thru's, sort of NSFW's, teases and other examples of the work of art that is the female form.

*click on the thumbnails for full-sized images*

Rule 5 Sunday suggested by this.

Hat tips:
Jake Finnegan
The Daley Gator
The Classic Liberal
Say Anything Blog
Proof Positive
Reaganite Republican

Kenseth wins at Vegas

Matt Kenseth won the Kobalt Tools 400 today in Las Vegas.

Working his way steadily through the field, Kenseth finally got in front via some cautions and held off hard charging Kasey Kahne to get the win. Kahne definitely had the best car, but Kenseth put on a blocking school for the young driver and got the victory.

A few thoughts on the race, the broadcast, and NASCAR itself:

With three races in, one thing is clear -- the Gen 6 cars do not lend themselves to any sort of drafting. Expect NASCAR to tweak the aero package at some point because the races have become not unlike road course outings. Once you get in front, no one can pass you unless you make a mistake. The tipoff should have been at Daytona, when uber crew chief Chad Knaus had driver Jimmie Johnson working on solo speed instead of practicing drafting. Knaus somehow figured out ahead of time that the cars wouldn't draft. Without fixing that, racing is going to be sort of dull.

The broadcast was pretty decent until Michael Waltrip made a verbal gaffe about strategery and then likened the gaffe to a faux Palinism.

*groan*

That was quickly followed up by Chris Meyers making a joke about "seeing the finish line from Russia"

*double groan*

Give it a rest, boys. Leave the Palin jokes to liberals. Okay?

During the race they had a commercial for NAPA, featuring the talking "NAPA know how" cans. The first one of these was fairly mild, but the one today had me laughing out loud. Patrick Warburton as the voice of the dueling cans -- one for NASCAR and one for NHRA, arguing about who's a real racer then turning on Michael Waltrip and telling him his can is old . . . I was laughing so hard I didn't even hear what the third can was saying. That was a better commercial than anything that popped up at the Super Bowl :-)

So, I guess it's over

Kathryn R. Turnbull
A year and a half ago, a co-worker named Kathie threw herself at me. Literally. She had been texting me all day in frantic panic. Having gone out and gotten drunk on her lunch break, a typical lunch for her btw, she was freaking out over having to close out our office for the first time in years.

I told her to be calm, I'd help her out when I got back. When I got back to the office, she jumped on to me. Snaking her right leg around my left, she was practically dry humping my thigh. Her arms up under my shirt front and back, she pressed her face hard into my chest. She was on me like a starfish trying to open a clam.

While I'm trying to pry her off of me, she's going on about how it's always been me, she's always known we would/should be together, she wants to go home with me and never go back to her husband, and so on.

Technically, she was married at the time. To a douchebag named Dale. That she had seduced years ago into dumping his wife for her. Of course, if you ask Kathie about it, they simply just happened to start taking lunches together. You know, like what single women always just happen to do with married guys.

And then, of course, they just happened to fall in love, etc. And Dale, being the douchebag he was, didn't hesitate to throw his wonderful, adorable wife to the curb because he had a right to, in his own words "Go for the gusto" with the office slut.

And yes, he actually said "go for the gusto" in front of me and several other gobsmacked employees.

I wonder if I was the only one who wanted to punch him in his fucking mouth for saying something like that?

Well after 15 years of supposed marital bliss with this jackass, Kathie decided she had had enough. So she began a year long affair with one of our greasy maintenance guys, Ritchie. Ritchie was, of course, married himself (getting a sense of a pattern here?), and Kathie did her best to make sure everyone found out by making a spectacle of herself during their meetings at the bar down the street from our office.

It took a year, as I said, for them to be found out. Dale was humiliated in front of the entire city, and his office in particular since Ritchie was the maintenance guy that worked at his office, and Kathie got the door open to get away.

And that's where my dumb ass came in.

You see, I had known Kathie for nearly 17 years at that point. And for all that time, she had been flirting with me. Hard. Through two marriages and the brief single time between her second husband and her third -- douchbag Dale, she had been coming on to me in subtle and not so subtle ways.

Now I'm a man, and I've got the requisite amount of testosterone and urges and such, so it's nice to have a woman act interested in me . . . you know, in that way. But my own marriage ended because my wife cheated on me, so I'm hyper sensitive to that scenario and being part of it again. Especially from the wrong side.

And that was part of the conundrum I faced with Kathie. She had been coming on to me for years. Then she divorced her second husband after they had had two children together. And then she walked right past me, a single guy she had been flirting hard with, and destroyed another marriage to hook up with this pasty inbred looking fucker, Dale.

I just never understood that. And neither did others in the office, who voiced the exact same confusion to me directly.

But now, all these years later, her latest marriage is in a shambles. I'm still single, and have made my peace with spending the rest of my life alone. And here's this gal I'm attracted to physically, who's been coming on to me for 17 years, hanging all over me, telling me she wants me so badly that she doesn't care if anyone sees her dry humping me in the office. And I'm thinking "Huh, maybe God's throwing me something at the end of my life."

And while I say that I'm physically attracted to Kathie, it's important to understand that she's not really attractive in the conventional sense.

She's not pretty. She has thin lips and no eyebrows, just these tiny tufts of hair where her eyebrows should be. She draws them on with an eyebrow pencil daily. I haven't seen that since my grandmother was alive. She's got sort of a rough complexion, not smooth skin at all. Her teeth are really weird. They look like she bit down on a sanding disk or something. They're perfectly flat across and sort of odd shaped. It may explain why she doesn't smile like a normal person.

Her neck, well, she doesn't have a normal neck, the skin goes in a direct line from the point of her chin to her collarbone. There's no contour back along the jawline and then down along the throat like normal people. It's really quite odd and sometimes makes her look like her face is melting downward.

Sort of flat chested. But a nice ass that looks really good in a pair of tight hip huggers. And she goes out of her way to make sure everyone notices that. To the point that several of the women in the office have commented to me over the years that Kathie was "all about that ass" on multiple occassions.

But her lack of attractiveness partly made me believe my feelings about her were legit. I convinced myself that I was seeing beyond the physical to something deeper. Something true about her. I was sure that made it real.

Man was I wrong. Because there's nothing true about Kathie Turnbull except the bad stuff. Because all she does is lie. About everything. Even the little things like what she likes to sleep in. Everything she had told me about herself for the last 17 years was a lie. She told me whatever she thought I wanted to hear in order to make me like her. And she does that with every guy in the office . . . she's one thing to one guy, something different to another. And she plays a part for the women too. She likes to say that her life is an open book. Yeah, but it's a book full of empty pages, because she's nothing but lies.

We started dating, and right from the get go, the signs were there that things weren't what they appeared. I just refused to see them.

We couldn't tell anyone we were dating. Even after Dale moved out and she stopped wearing her wedding ring (and made sure everyone noticed she wasn't wearing it, btw). We couldn't go anywhere together, especially down at the beach or at any postal functions. We could do stuff up in the north county where I live, but that was it.

I couldn't call her on the phone. Ever. She wouldn't introduce me or even let me speak to her son or daughter. It was one great big secret. When she finally moved to her own apartment, she wouldn't tell me where she lived. Her own boyfriend. She even stopped coming out to my truck when I loaded up in the morning. She'd go out to every other guy's truck and hang around, flirting with them, but me, her actual boyfriend? Nope. "Mary might see me with you." She's say. And I'm thinking Who fucking cares! You're my girlfriend! Why are you so ashamed to admit that?!

Of course it wasn't shame. It just took me way too long to figure out what was really going on.

And then there were the fights. Well, not exactly fights. That implies some back and forth. Basically my phone would start blowing up while I was on the street. She'd be ripping me nine new assholes for . . . something, I never really understood what she was upset about. She was simply creating things to get angry about and then lash out at me over them. I'd get torn to shreds over her imagined outrage and then she'd break up with me.

I had tried to subtly warn her when we began dating that I had already made my peace with living the rest of my life alone, so I wasn't looking for a lot of drama in this or any relationship. I wanted a mature relationship with another mature adult. I had hoped she would get that message. Maybe she did and was just trying to test me.

Every time she broke up with me, I let her go. Then after three or four days of her walking around the office looking like she was going to break into tears each time she saw me, my phone would blow up again.

"Babe..." "Babe I need you" "I'm sorry" "I'm an ass" "Where are you? I want to be with you right now. I don't care who sees us" yada, yada, yada. Then she'd turn up on my route, drunk off her ass and beg me to take her back all the while trying to embarrass me in front of my customers with some sort of scandalous performance.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I once told a friend, that Kathie was a hand grenade rolling around the deck of a ship being tossed around in a storm at sea. The pin is hanging on by the last little burr. It wasn't a question of if she was going to explode, but when, and how much damage she would do when she went off.

And that's how it went for a year and a half.

We did that dance so many times I coined a name for it The Push-Pull. She laughed. Oh my God, she said, that's so perfect, that's exactly what it is. To which I replied that I wasn't trying to be funny, I didn't like what she was doing. She didn't care.

Another time after a break up, she met me out on my route. Dry humping my thigh -- and I mean that, she made a big production of grinding her pussy on my leg so that anyone who saw us knew exactly what she was doing -- she emplored me Don't ever leave me again. I told her "Stop pushing me away." And she just smiled a naughty little smile. And it finally was driven home -- she's just playing a game with me. Dumbass me.

She finally broke it off for good the other day. In the same way she dumped her husband, she simply ignored me until I got the message. She wouldn't reply to text messages (I wasn't allow to call her after all). She would lock herself in the bathroom when I walked over near the hamper area where she was working. Or she'd run, literally, out the side door. Or run up front by the window service.

I managed to corner her where she couldn't run away. I told her I missed her, missed us. She shrugged. I asked if that was it, if we were over. She shrugged again and then laughed in my face. Had she been a man, I would have knocked the fucking teeth out of her mouth. As it was, I gave her what she wanted -- I walked away.

I could fill pages about what a reprehensible person Kathie Turnbull is. The affairs. The drunkeness on the job. Leaving her teenage daughter with a pedophile that had threatened to rape Molly when she was only sixteen simply to get her out of the way. Standing out behind my postal truck with her jeans down around her knees, her bare ass and pussy hanging out for anyone passing by to see and refusing to cover up as I begged her to do so, all in the name of trying to humiliate me in public.

And so on.

The bottom line -- Kathie Turnbull is trailer park white trash. My friends at work all told me I dodged a bullet by getting away from her. They're probably right. I was a fool. I wanted to believe in her. Wanted to believe I had found something at the end of my days. I found something all right -- a sick, shallow, despicable human being.

Good riddance, bitch. I derive some solace in knowing that there's a special place in hell for people like you.

Late night hotness . . .

I think it makes it worse when you pull on it. Just sayin' . . .

See, it could have worked

Some former stuntman scraped together $3500 to create a faux trailer to show off his directing chops. Using singer/actress Nina Bergman, he created this totally hot Wonder Woman teaser:

And just think, Adrienne Palicki could have been rocking that hot ass outfit on television every week if producers hadn't screwed it up.

*sigh*

If Garry Trudeau weren't such a socialist propagandist...

... his strip yesterday might have read like this:

It wouldn't be worth complaining about except for the fact that we have an entire generation of idiot voters that get their "news" from Comedy Central and the comics pages of the paper.