Don’t Mind If I Do…

Don’t Mind If I Do…

This past week, I was asked to write a short “Life Bio” by a lovely lady at the Great Plains Technology Center in Lawton, OK. The reason she asked for this bio was because she was nominating me for the “Young Entrepreneur of the Year” in Oklahoma. I was actually taken aback when she asked me to write the bio below; nevertheless, I was even more honored. I had a serious problem though; I suck at writing about myself. I didn’t even know where to begin! Do I start from birth? Do I start when we opened our shop (my father and myself)? Since it’s a business thing she probably wants to hear about my business centered life. Right? Wrong. I wrote a bio the night before it was due to turn in to the board and went straight to bed when I finished. When I woke up and immediately regretted everything I wrote on that page. It was only about 600 words the first time around and every word was regrettable at best. Those kinds of papers are the reason I steered away from writing for so long, because I would write it, sleep on it, think about it, hate it and, in the end, wad it up into the tiniest ball possible and throw it into the sun.

On the way to work the next morning, I was talking to my dad about the paper and what I needed to do. It had got to the point of thinking about this paper so much I feared turning in anything at all. I didn’t even want the award at this point. He gave me some advice and a few kind words about what I could write about and how I could compliment myself and I completely rewrote that paper in my head on the 45-minute drive to work. Every word, comma, period, semicolon, etc. When I got to work I set my laptop out, shut my office door, and typed the whole paper in about 30 minutes. 1100 words of bragging, talking myself up, and ass kissing later, I had my secretary proofread it and send it in with 1 hour to spare until the deadline. As I previously stated, there was a point when I had no desire to win this award. That time has passed, and I now want to destroy my competition with thermonuclear weapons.

Below is the actual life bio I sent in to the Great Plains Tech Center for my entry into the contest. Hope you like it!

Life Bio

I grew up in my dad’s machine shop around his workers in Tyler, TX when he owned King Manufacturing and I was the mascot of the shop. I learned the terminology, how the machines work, helped measure parts, packaged parts and helped with shipping. Whatever they asked me to do, I was there with a smile. My work ethic was never questioned. When we moved to Wichita Falls in the middle of my high school career, he got me a job at the CNC machine shop he was managing at the time as a trainee on some of the new CNC equipment. Within months I quickly worked my way into a machinist position. This experience and exposure to the world my father worked in gave me the base knowledge I needed to begin building the career I had ahead of me.

I am Daniel Perry, I am 20 years old, and I am Operations Manager of Cozart-Perry Industries, inc. in Lawton, Oklahoma.

Our company has been open since October of 2013 when my father, Danny Perry, came out of retirement after he won his battle with cancer. My father, his best friend and business partner Wes Cozart, and myself leased a building on F Avenue in Lawton to start our venture. This occurred just three months after I was offered a choice; either a full ride to Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, TX to pursue a business degree or start a machine shop with my father who had been in business all his life and get a chance to work next to him every day. The decision was easy, and at the same time quite difficult. I was about to turn away from everything I had worked so hard in high school for; the excellent grades, test scores and honor awards I had collected; to start a business venture I had high hopes for, but was ultimately unsure of. In 2012 I graduated from Wichita Falls High School and we began our search for a building. The leap of faith I took and the trust I put in God paid off more than I could have ever hoped and today we are still standing strong.

For the last two and a half years we have worked to build a successful manufacturing business around a system of quality and personal service unknown to the Lawton area of manufacturing. I am responsible for our two large customers, Goodyear Lawton and Map Oil Tool based out of New Iberia, Louisiana. Both of these companies have consistently increased the amount of work they do with our company, and each year we hit new milestones. My responsibilities have grown with the increase in size of the company and our roles with our different customers. With the title of “Operations Manager” comes quite a bit of responsibility, but not without equal authority. I am the supervisor of all of our contract labor inside the plant at Goodyear, where our skilled workforce keeps the plant’s non-powered transportation running at full capacity. As of now, we have four teams inside the Lawton plant totaling nine people with zero lost time incidents or injuries and double the production of previous companies in the same position.

Another of my responsibilities at the company is all hiring and termination of employees. Anyone working for us currently, I have had a hand in hiring. The group of people under me has been hand picked by my managers and myself. They are a team I would stack against anyone. I oversee all purchasing that happens in the shop, as well as all sales that go out the door. If there is a job that comes across our desk for pricing, I handle all job bidding with a very high success rate. I visit customers, talk to engineers about new and current projects, and work with companies that have problems that need fixing that requires our shop’s special skill set of precision machining and fabrication. I coordinate with any and all customers and vendors to make sure the operation runs as smoothly as possible, which is the definition of an Operations Manager. Some could call it “General Manager in training”.

One of the things that’s helped steer me to success in management is my martial arts training. At a very young age I started karate under my father as my head instructor. In karate class, much like at the office, there was a separation of family and business. He was the instructor and I was the student. In business, he is the GM and I am his Operations Manager. I have heard many stories about father-son relationships deteriorating in the workplace, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth in this situation. My martial arts training also bred an attitude of discipline and assertiveness that has helped me in my training with the company as well as my sales success and attention to quality and detail with our customers.

That attitude was definitely tested along the way. Before our business venture began, my father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. The doctors in Wichita Falls told us he was terminal, and at the time of his diagnosis gave him about three months to live. My father asked for a second opinion, and went to MD Anderson where they promptly started treatment. One of the caveats of the treatment was that he had to live in Houston for the duration, and required someone to take care of him. He and my mother moved to an apartment across the street from the hospital, and I was left to care for my brother and sister when I was 16. For someone my age to take care of his younger siblings was difficult to say the least, but I rose to the occasion to become big brother and parent at the same time. When my parents came back from Houston I was a different person. I had grown mentally and emotionally from not only taking up the role as “Man of the house”, but also balancing school and work at the machine shop in Wichita Falls. This created, or further instilled, a much disciplined attitude in me. This time in my life created a way of thinking that has carried me far in my current position: that if you only have one option or the choice is clear, it is very easy to do what you have to do. You just have to be strong enough to carry through. I hope that I can continue to be strong enough to carry this business we have started on my shoulders all the way. To be able to start and nurture and maintain my own business has been such an eye opener to me of what others before me have struggled with, and few succeeded. I hope to be constantly growing as a person, as well as in business for years to come, and bringing jobs to Oklahoma for as long as I am able.

-Daniel Cole Perry,

Operations Manager, Cozart-Perry Industries, Inc.

 

In all honesty, I do want to win this competition. The actual ceremony is the 26^th of June, and I will be attending with high hopes. I would appreciate any thoughts or prayers on the subject, and may the best man win.

I wrote this whole thing a few days early because I’ve been feeling really productive lately. I believe its because I’ve been drinking a smoothie and eating a lot better and drinking nothing but water with lemon every day. I’ve had to make huge changes in my lifestyles lately after noticing the decline in my physical shape. I’ll be starting a work out routine this next week in which I will attempt to regain sexy beast status (who are we kidding, I never lost that). 3 days a week on a treadmill at a minimum of 1 mile and pushups/situps every night before bed goes a long way. To anyone trying to do the same thing, I understand the struggle is real, but at the same time it is worth it.

In other unrelated news to the other 2 unrelated subjects, my baby sister graduated last Saturday and she was a specimen of beauty. She’s planning on going to college here in Wichita Falls so she can pester me for a few more years before moving away and forgetting all about me. Pictured below is the post graduation meal at red lobster.

Written 100% to my wedding playlist I have been working on for the last few months trying to fine tune. That is going to be a glorious day when I get to dance with the woman of my dreams as my wife for the first time. August 8^th can’t come fast enough.

Until next time my friends, stay safe. Stay awesome. For the love of God stay cool, because this sun is trying to melt us.

-Daniel “THE” Perry

I’m Open To The Idea That There May Be An Island In The Pacific With Dinosaurs….

Finally some sun has come through the looming clouds to rejuvenate the Texas soil! The land flowing with whiskey and salsa (not a fan of milk and I only like honey fresh from the hive)! Maybe now that the sun has found its way out from behind the clouds summer can begin! It’s sad that when I was a kid summer meant I got to spend time at my discretion and now it means flex-hour traffic in Garland. Flex hours mean people go in earlier so the traffic that I once beat at 6am now greets me with a giant middle finger.

Speaking of summertime, I’ve composed a list of things coming up this summer for which you can look forward! This list includes some movies, books, and whatever else I could find. So here’s to summer!

Books

I only have a couple of books that I’m looking forward to this summer but they are some sure-fire best sellers!

1. Go Set A Watchman By Harper Lee

Yes, that Harper Lee, the author of her literary classic, bestselling, and only other book, To Kill A Mockingbird. TKAMB was first published in Jully 11^th, 1960 and now, 55 years and two days later on July 13^th, 2015 she releases the sequel Go Set A Watchman. The novel follows an adult Scout Finch who travels from New York to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her father, Atticus Finch, 20 years after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird. According to the publisher, Scout “is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.” Go Set a Watchman includes many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird.

2. Hostile Takeover By Shane Kuhn

This is the sequel to his widely successful first action novel, The Intern’s Handbook. I read it and it was fantastic. There aren’t many books out there that get me to read 100 to 150 pages without getting up for some Gatorade or pizza but The Intern’s Handbook is certainly one of them. I highly recommend anyone who likes assassins and action read it. Now the sequel will be released on July 14^th, 2015! I’ll have a lot of reading to do in July!

[SPOILERS FOR THE INTERNS HANDBOOK]

Professional assassin John Lago faces off against his deadliest adversary yet—his wife—in Hostile Takeover, the exciting sequel to Shane Kuhn’s bestselling debut The Intern’s Handbook, which the New York Post called “a sexy, darkly comic thriller.”

At the end of The Intern’s Handbook, John tracks down his nemesis Alice but instead of putting a bullet in her head, he puts a ring on her finger and marries her. Together, they execute a hostile takeover of Human Resources, Inc., the “placement agency” that trains young assassins to infiltrate corporations disguised as interns and knock off high profile targets. As HR’s former top operatives, they are successful until conflicting management styles cause an ugly breakup that locks John out of the bedroom and the boardroom.

But when Alice takes on a new HR target, John is forced to return to the office battlefield in a role he swore he would never play again: the intern. What starts out as a deadly showdown turns into the two of them fighting side by side to save HR, Inc.—and their marriage.

MOVIES

These movies go in no particular order but they are movies that everyone should definitely be rushing to the theatre to see these blockbusters!

1. Masterminds (August 7)

In this movie we meet, once again, our quirky old friend, Zach Galifianakis being himself with Kristen Wiig. Check out the trailer below.

2. Ted 2 (June 26)

Every little boy’s best friend is all grown up and getting hitched! Trailer Below!

3. Spy(June 5)

A desk-bound CIA analyst volunteers to go undercover to infiltrate the world of a deadly arms dealer, and prevent diabolical global disaster. With Melissa McCarthy and Jason Statham, what is there not to love?

4. Jurassic World (June 12)

Let’s all face it, this movie is going to blow everyone away. Chris Pratt was phenomenal in Guardians of the Galaxy and was pretty damn good at fighting off aliens. Now let’s see how good he is with dinosaurs!

5. Southpaw (July 24^th)

July is going to be a huge month for me! Two books AND Southpaw. I’ve been waiting for this movie since 2010 when Eminem announced he had his hand in another Movie. However, Eminem stepped out and gave the direction over to Kurt Sutter (probably the best move of his life). Kurt Sutter wrote, created, and directed Sons of Anarchy another favorite show of mine. This movie is going to be a masterpiece. Check Out the trailers.

Now, if you didn’t find this post interesting then go play outside. Enjoy this video below on me!

#BeUnlimited

Until next time, keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your ass

-THE Hunter Ansley

Sonder If You Will

So there I was, sitting at a red light on a Tuesday morning. I was drinking my coffee like I always do in the morning on my way to work. I remember it being exceptionally good coffee that morning for some reason, and I don’t for the life of me remember what I did to make it so damn good…whatever. I was on my way to work, sitting at a stop light at Seymour Highway and Brook Ave in Wichita Fal. As I wait for this stupid light to turn green (honestly, I get caught at this thing every day and it serves no purpose in the morning when no one is on the road) when I happen to glance over to a man sitting in a silver Nissan Altima, also enjoying his morning coffee, talking on his cell phone (actually he looked like he was yelling at someone) and going on about his morning.

  
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks, like its done a thousand times before. He makes a car payment on that Nissan. He makes a phone payment for that cell phone. He made that coffee! To some of you, I am babbling. “Of course he made that coffee, duh”. “Yeah, everyone has a car payment”. That’s not what I mean. I mean sitting in that Nissan on that Tuesday morning, was a man that had a complex and vivid life just like you or I. He had friends, family, a job, bills, habits, vices, pet peeves, you name it. He was a normal person with a normal life, and it blows my mind that everyone on the planet is the same way. Everyone you pass in the mall, or drive by on the highway, or work with, or befriend on Facebook has their own life.

There’s a word for this!

Sonder-the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Which to me sounds a little more like poetry than a definition, but that’s because “Sonder” isn’t a real word. I pulled it out of, believe it or not, a tumblr post! After delving a little further into the internet I found this blog called “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”, and it’s all about different made up words that describe feelings we have all the time that we might not have actual words for. Every one I have looked at deserves real word status. The blog is based on John Koenig’s “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” (total coincidence I’m sure) and is just badass. The link is below:

http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com

I was on a site that was explaining the origin of the word as I explained above, and he posted a link to someone asking why it actually had to have a word. Link is here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1f4s1l/what_is_the_biggest_eyeopener_you_have_achieved/ca6v25j

I believe as humans, we need to be able to explain thing to other humans. Most of us cannot put that phenomenon into as well as Mr. Koenig and need a word that has meaning behind it to describe it. What is a word? “A word is made up of two parts: a form and meaning. To think of it in programming terms, variable name and variable. The form of a word is the pointer or reference, so this can be either the written or spoken form. This form references a concept or the meaning in your brain. Concepts are complex. That’s why synonyms like frightening and terrifying probably relate to very similar concept boundaries but differ slightly.” That passage was written by Neil…uh…there’s no last name to reference so he’s just Neil. His whole post is below:

http://nieldlr.com/2013/06/curious-case-word-sonder/

However, that was beside my original point. People, a lot of the time, get hung up on themselves. We believe ourselves to be the most important thing in the world. To us individually this may be true; I am definitely on my own most important list. However, the passersby aforementioned above probably have a different list than you do. You are in some cases a body filling space in someone else’s personal little world. You are a body with no face, hanging around for no more than a few seconds. Interestingly enough, my co-blogger and I were talking about memory a few months ago. I wont bore you with all the math, but a shocking 4% of what happens to us and around us in our life is in our permanent memory bank and can be recalled without prompt. Which means the other 96% is either requires special stimulus to bring to the front of our minds, or is cast into the abyss of forgotten things. To those passersby that sit next to you at a stop light in a silver Nissan drinking their coffee, you are a distant thing from a memory.

The complexity of this world never ceases to amaze me. When I think about all those people with amazing life stories, it makes me want to talk to people and ask them about their life. Everyone is a separate book in an inconceivably big book series that all happens at the same time. Kind of like the movie Pulp Fiction, where there is multiple stories going on at the same time, but they all go together and all end up in the same spot. It’s just different people playing different parts in the world around each other. At this exact point in time, what are the other 7 billion humans on the planet doing? They’re doing something. Just like you’re reading a blog post, they were occupying their time with something else. Can you just take a few minutes and actually try to picture and comprehend that?

Something my co-blogger is known for is being a giant quote library. He’s got quotes for everything, by just about anyone. One of the quotes he listed when talking about this subject was by the famous artist Vincent Van Goh. “There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one comes to warm himself by it, and the passersby see only a wisp of smoke”. The man had a way of illustrating words.

The other is by Plato, and it goes like “Be kind to all for everyone is fighting a hard battle”. Which is along the same lines as what I’ve described today, Plato is just telling you to be nice to the extras around you. I try to live by a similar…yet not so similar rule of life. Be kind and courteous to everyone you meet, but have a plan to kill them if the need arises”.

I like mine better. 🙂

This post was written while listening to Disciple’s album “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades”. And it was posted an hour late because I fell asleep listening to said album last night. Hope you enjoyed it though!

Until next time, my friends, stay safe!

Daniel “THE” Perry

Common Sense…So Rare, It’s a Super Power (Other Stories From My Childhood)

So there I am standing over the kitchen sink trying desperately to fit a butane can nozzle into the intake valve on my cigar lighter. It’s not working, butane is dripping everywhere and it doesn’t smell pleasant. I guess I was missing the straw that transferred the fuel from the can to the valve but I didn’t know that yet. Butane is dripping into the kitchen sink, I’m getting frustrated. I just bought the damn thing and can’t even use it yet. So I set it down and, yes I knew I could just wash the butane fluid down the drain but what fun is that, right? So I go and get the matches and…some of you are ahead of me. I had lit lighter fluid, kerosene, gasoline, diesel, paint thinner, and even mineral spirits on fire before and it wasn’t that big of a deal, usually just a slow burn. However, none of those are like butane. Butane is like damn napalm compared to any of those. As I grab the matches I vaguely hear Chelsea say, “Don’t light that butane on fire, Hunter…” but I’m far too excited about this to care. After all, what does she know about fire, she’s a girl, right? I make toward the kitchen post-haste and (yep, you guessed it) strike a match. It didn’t even let that son of a bitch get fully lit and the fumes ignited in the kitchen, I stumble back, throw the still-lit match in the corner somewhere, attempt a silent little girl scream, and watch the 2½ foot flames in both sides of my kitchen sink dance about while they eat up the butane fumes in the air and liquid on the bottom of the sink. I quickly run over and turn the water on (I still don’t know how I reached through the fames to do that) and quickly douse the inferno that I had created. I go over and stomp out the match that is slowly burning a hole in our kitchen floor mat and try to catch my breath. This all happens in literally 3 seconds max. Chelsea walks in just as I’m counting how many patches of belly hair I’m missing from the explosion and trying to figure out exactly at which point the hair on my left hand went missing. True story.

My kitchen when i lit on fire hahaha

You may being asking the question, “Okay, Hunter, were you drunk or were you a kid?” Unfortunately, friends, I was neither. That all happened in January of this year, 2015. I’ll be the first to admit that common sense and street smarts are not my forte. You can bet your sweet ass I can tell you the temperature of absolute zero and total absence of heat is –273.15°C or –459.67°F. I can, in absolute certainty, tell you that sighting in a 30.06 Winchester Model 70 at 0 at 25 yards will make it 2” high at 100 yards. I can even tell you the opening line to the literature classic Moby Dick is “Call me Ishmael” and I’ve never read the damn book. The point is, I know a little bit about a lot of things, but common sense, to me at least, is a complete mystery. My wife, Chelsea, on the other hand literally asked me if the United States had a capital city once, but she is one of the smartest people I know when it comes to common sense, reasoning, and street smarts. Thank Jesus I ended up with her because she keeps my head on my shoulders. God knows I would jump in the ocean with an anvil shackled to my ankle, reach the bottom only to find out that I forgot the key on the dock. So thank you, Chelsea for keeping me alive once I moved out of my parents’ house.

Saved Your LIFE!!!

My mother raised two boys and is about half way through with the third one. Three boys. The story above is just about one of them, and a full grown one at that! My brother Brent and I (before Kalen was born) really didn’t get into a whole lot of trouble; not only because we were generally good kids but were also very skilled at not getting caught when we did do things that we knew we shouldn’t be doing. We usually lived under the rule of “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission”. We had a friend once who had an old barn on his property that was full of old tractors, swathers, plows, and the like and we’d go in there and play. Like little boys do, we tried to get to the highest place we could in this barn which, naturally, is the loft. All of a sudden, we get this brilliant idea: with all of that hay on the cement floor of this barn, we could jump off the 20 ft. loft into the hay! Being small, fairly uncoordinated, and having no knowledge of physics I figured, “Why not, right? I can jump from this high, land on my FEET, fall in the hay, get up and do it again!”. Me, Brent, Greg Morris and his sister Tamara line up on the edge of the loft and we jump. I’m guessing Greg and Tamara had done this before and had figured out it wasn’t a smart decision to land on their feet. However, as I said, I didn’t have a full understanding of physics and that when you’re free falling and your feet hit the ground and stop, it doesn’t mean that the rest of your body stops as well. Again, dumbassery raises its ugly head. I jump off the loft, land on my feet, my body quickly bends forward, and my eye socket and knee cap became quick friends. I guess friendships are easily made when one is embedded into the other. I fall on the floor of the barn, clutching my eye and I’m sure I was crying like any eight year old boy would. It ended up I had a huge black eye, not just a bruise under my eye or around the general area of my eye but the entire eye socket was black with a bruise, my eye lid was sliced open from the impact, I had a cut along my cheek bone. However, all of that was nothing compared to how many time I had to hear , “Wow, I’d hate to see the other guy if you look like that!”. I was 8, I had no idea what that meant, I just kind said a quiet “Yeah..okay” until they went away. Another true story.

I guess boys will be boys and mothers shouldn’t ask too many questions about things that have happens. You may not like the answers. I know there are plenty of things that my mom doesn’t know, and even more things that she doesn’t want to know about things we did when we were younger running around. Any mother of boys, especially multiple boys, should just look at her kids at the end of the day, amongst the bruises, cuts, scrapes, and black eyes, sigh, and say “Well, they’re still alive. They made it through another day. Nothing I can do about it now”. I think that’s how my mother stayed somewhat sane. She can’t remember her own name sometimes, or where her car is in the parking lot, or that chocolate chip cookies aren’t supposed to come out of the oven looking like Oreos but she understood that we could always manage to stay alive through out the day. I’m sure if my boys (yes, I know I’ll have a boy. I’ve spent years teaching my female swimmers to swim backwards) are anything like me, I’ll get what I’ve got coming to me.

Two more stories and then I’ll wrap it up. Kalen was only about two years old, maybe a little bit less and he loved to be pushed around in the wheel barrows, no matter how many times we crashed he’d get back up, get back inside, and hit the sides with his little stubby arms until either me or Brent ran as fast as we could around multiple holes, toys, and dogs in the backyard. One day another brilliant Idea pops into Brent’s head: Kalen loves the wheel barrow and he loves the slide so I’m positive he’d love the two together. Double the ride, double the fun, right? So I go and help Brent lift Kalen and the wheel barrow atop the slide and position it so that Brent could push it forward. My mother must have seen what was about to happen inside the house because just as she runs out the door and shouts (in slow motion) “NOOOOOOOO!!!”, Brent lets go of the wheel barrows and Kalen, laughing all the way, comes flying down the slide inside the wheel barrow. Well, wheel barrows aren’t built to glide with the terrain, when the wheel hits something the wheel barrow just stops instantly (if you’ve ever ran into a hole in the backyard with a wheel barrow full of dog shit you know what I’m talking about) and whatever is inside the wheel barrow flies forward…including two year old boys. The wheel barrows hits the end of the slide, catapults Kalen into the air, he does a strange flip and lands face down in the dirt about 5 feet from the wheel barrow. The whole back yard goes silent. Me and Brent are in shock that we killed our little brother and quickly looking for ways to run out of the back yard before my redheaded mother sees us and realizes she’s still young and can have more children to replace the two who “mysteriously went missing”. Then, like in Gladiator, Kalen roles over and starts just laughing hysterically. Brent and I erupt in cheers and applause! Mother is laughing and we pick Kalen up and everything went back to normal. Needless to say, we didn’t do that again…but only because my mother was outside. Kalen is one tough little kid. I’m twelve years older than him and Brent is nine years older so we put him through a bunch of stuff. Spinning him around in office chairs and watching him fall all over the place once he got out of it, fling him down the hall in the same office chair to see how many different objects it could hit until it fell over, shooting him with air-soft guns as he ran around the house through a gauntlet of small arms fire. He took it, and still does, like a champ. He also gives back just as good, or better, than he gets. The kid can dish it out.

Once again, me with fire. The year: 2005. The day: July 6^th, two days after Independence day. I go over to my friend Jake Lane’s house and he had a ton of fireworks left over. It’s July in Texas! Rain doesn’t exist in Texas during July (it might this year, dear Lord above I’m so tired of rain). However, artillery shells seem like a good idea. You know artillery shells? The ones that go up in the air, make a big explosion, and shower down a trillion sparks. His parents, to this day, think that Ernie (his now deceased dog) knocked over the shoot tube causing the artillery shell to shoot into a very dry field and start a fire. This, however, is not the case. Jake had it in his hand and tell me to the light the fuse, I swear I had no idea what he was going to do but I did it anyway (no common sense, Jake was a dumbass as a kid and I knew it). He throws it into the grassy field beside his house and we wait…more waiting…and yet more waiting until we get bored, decide it’s a dud and start to walk away. Just as we turn we hear and ear splitting explosion. I done thought the Russians had come to kill us all. I thought it was Red Dawn all over again. I’m looking for Patrick Swayze. The artillery shell had exploded sending dirt, dust, grass, and, yes, sparks in every direction including 50 feet in the air. We thought that was the most badass thing we’d ever done. We had just revolutionized fireworks…until tall flames start to rise in the next field over. Jake rips off his tee shirt and starts beating the grass, I run to get the water hose and it only reaches about ¾ of the way to the next field. I fill a small bucket and run it over there. Have you ever seen that scene in the little rascals where they fill it a bucket and start passing it down the line and it keeps spilling, by the time it gets to the fire it only has about ½ a cup of water left? I relived that scene. My water didn’t do anything but sizzle and evaporate. Long story short, we burned about three acres and half of a 200 year old oak tree. The real fire department came and put it out and we got a big talking too. He was grounded from his big New York City trip and I..well..I didn’t get any punishment at all because no one died and my parents were cool. Later we started saying, “we only have one memory of fireworks…and it went up in smoke”.

In summary, boys will be boys. I’m at my office listening to Eddy Murphy’s RAW stand-up and I can’t believe I’m 23 years old. I didn’t include so many things that we did. I got knocked out cold sledding once and Brent just went inside to get hot chocolate leaving me for dead, Brent jumped off a swing and caught himself with his bottom lip on a railroad tie (thanks to that railroad tie, Brent still has a lip that enters a room three days before he does). My dad said, right after he busted his lip for the fourth time, that we could paint Brent black and, with the help of those big lips, everybody would think we’d adopted a little black boy. However, we lived, we’re still here. Me and Brent did a lot more running around when he got to be a teenager but I can’t seem to recall any stories I can tell in public *wink wink*. Ask me and I’m sure I’ll have you rolling soon enough. By the way, I have some pictures of some of the incidents that occurred; I’ll try to post them up tomorrow if I get time. I may just put them on my Instagram. To the mother of boys, let us get into trouble, don’t ask to many questions, and don’t baby us. America is already trying to bring up a generation of wimps. Boys Scouts aren’t allowing water balloon fights and squirt guns anymore because “squirt guns promote violence and water balloons aren’t safe”. Seriously. Boy Scouts of America can shove it. Get a cut? Pour some beer on it..always worked for me.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK!!!

Until next time, keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your ass. Be Unlimited!

-“The” Hunter Ansley

Pissed Off Wind

Pissed Off Wind

That’s what I call it. That wind that moves round and round in circles wiping out everything it touches on the ground. That wind that you can hear before you see most of the time. Everyone I have ever talked to about seeing one describes it the same way, like a freight train. “It sounds like a freight train coming to get me”. When I see trees blowing at a 45-degree angle, I start looking for a hidey-hole.

Hidey-Hole- A place in the ground, usually in the form of a basement or storm cellar, to hide from danger and protect your self.

I first heard this term when I was a small tike from my father during the first bad storm I remember. There was a tornado warning for Smith County in East Texas and we were preparing the bathtub for the occupation of tiny people (My siblings and I). Since then, anywhere I can hide from storms is now graciously referred to as a hidey-hole. While writing this, we are currently in another of the already half a dozen tornado warnings this year for Wichita County (I live Wichita Falls), TX. As we speak, my father and brother are preparing their section of the hidey-hole, which in this particular case is our basement. (Yes, everyone is responsible for their own area of the hidey-hole).

Tornadoes are right up at the top of my fears list. I am terrified of the destruction they can do in a matter of seconds to the world around me. When I moved to Wichita Falls, I just resigned myself to the fact that a tornado would probably kill me. I figured I would move up here and within a week it would be 1979 all over again. For those of you reading that don’t know what I’m talking about, 1979 is when Wichita Falls was laid to waste by the 5^th most deadly tornado in Texas history. A mile and a half wide F4 tornado wiped out 3000 homes, hundreds of businesses, damaged a school and a shopping center and claimed the lives of 42 people. This event came to be known nationwide as “Terrible Tuesday”.

 

To my relief at the time, the jet stream was changing paths just as I was moving up here taking the bad weather with it. That has changed this year and, because of that change, this has been predicted as a record tornado season for this part of the United States. My part of the world is currently living up to the expectation, so my hidey-hole is prepped and ready. I will not be killed by pissed off wind.

Tornadoes are rated on what is called the Fujita Scale. Rating starts at F0 (moderate damage) and goes all the way to F5 (Incredible damage). The scale pictured below is probably a better representation of the Fujita Scale.

A tornado, by definition, is a violently rotating column of air in contact with both the surface of the earth and also in contact with a cumulonimbus cloud. They are literal death spirals. These phenomena form when cold air moves toward the earth at the same time hot air rises and is sent into a spiral by a very strong wind current. If you see a huge dark grey or blackish cumulonimbus cloud moving fast with some equally dark and scary funnel clouds hanging down (they remind me of dementors from Harry Potter) and any of this looks at all circular, you should find a hidey-hole.

 

From start to finish, from the wind up to the pitch, these things terrify me. If you see weather like I’ve described, and it starts hailing all of a sudden, and the trees start whipping around in different directions, and you get any kind of news alert saying “Tornado Warning”, then you should take cover immediately. If you don’t have a basement or storm cellar, get in a room in the middle of your house with no windows with a bunch of pillows and blankets to soften things up a bit. This way if a tornado does hit your house you can die comfortably. Kidding. Mostly. However, if things do get hairy you don’t want to be bouncing around a hard tile room. Get in the bathtub of your bathroom or a centralized closet so you can put as much between you and the tornado as possible. Debris is the leading cause of death and injury in tornadoes. They throw shit around at a high rate of speed and frequency so being outside is a major no-no.

There are some places that are natural hotspots for tornadoes. If you live in one of these areas and more than one major tornado has happened this year, please get your head checked for tumors in the Prefrontal Cortex (the decision making part of the brain). Maybe you love where you live, but where you live is trying to kill you. Basically the only bright side to the whole thing is a new house every few years and low mortgage rates, but the insurance probably cancels that out so I’m sure it’s a wash. I write that portion with one town in mind specifically; Moore, OK.

WHY do you still LIVE there? There have been 5 major tornadoes in Moore in recent history. One is not yet rated, which is the one that happened just a couple months ago. There have been 2 F4’s (one in 2003, and another in 2010) and 2 F5’s (one in 1999, and another in 2013). If you paid attention in class a few moments ago, that F5 level was the one I listed as “Incredible Damage”. Not just high damage, because the word “high” isn’t enough. The word used is “incredible”.

Incredible-Impossible to believe

The damage these tornadoes do is so intense it is hard to believe it can be possible. Check out the graphic below to see the paths of all the tornadoes in the last 16 years through Moore, OK. As you can see they mostly follow the same basic path. Well all of them except that last little oddball, but someone has to be different… My point is, the fact that people still choose to live there is amazing to me. If I lived there I would take my insurance money and go buy a house far away from there, so as not to be swept away by the pissed off wind. I’m sure Moore has some redeeming qualities, but they better be giving away free money to the people that still live there or those people are getting screwed.

Well there’s my spiel about the pissed off wind, hope you found at least a piece of it enjoyable. I try to write about something important to me every week and this seemed very relevant tonight. I wrote this while listening to a little My Chemical Romance off of their album “The Black Parade”. The song “Teenagers” is as good an anthem as there is for high school students with a little bit of darkness, and the whole album is great if you have some pent up anger to express. Simply plug your phone into your car via AUX cord, select shuffle on the album and turn your cars volume up to a soothing billion and a half decibels and scream your little heads off. Enjoy! 🙂

Until next time my friends, stay safe and away from the pissed off wind! Find a hidey-hole!

-Daniel “THE” Perry

I’m Better Than James Bond. I’m an Internet Magellan!

This post was written for the internet Magellans such as me. Sure, everyone is the internet directly some of the day and almost all of us, thanks to the ever evolving smartphone, are connected to the web all the time. We find our weather, traffic, music, movies, directions, and all around general information online with a touch of our finger. Gone are the days that sometimes you just have to accept that information that you don’t know is just that…information you don’t know. Ten years ago, if I saw someone in a movie and I knew that I had seen him before but didn’t know where, I’d ask my dad and if he didn’t know I was SOL. I’d eventually figure it out but it was usually months down the line. Now, all I have to do is search whatever movie I’m watching on my IMDB app (very useful, download it), find the character in question, and look at their filmography. However, I’m getting away from my original point. There are still a few of us out there that don’t just check the weather, traffic, and entertainment on our internet but we take it a step further. That last step is what makes us “Internet Magellans” (Magellan was a Portuguese explorer from 1480 to 1521). We try to find a site no one else, or few others, have seen before. Now, it’s true, we occasionally do come across some articles, pictures, facts, and/or information, deep within the bowels of the web, that we should never see, wish we could unsee, and slam the laptop shut, scream like a little bitch, and run away. It’s an occupational hazard I suppose.

Now, some of you will find this post useless. I try to post something a little different every week so next week I’m sure I’ll post something you’ll enjoy. Without further ado…the list of things I’ve found in my travels across the chaos we call the internet:

CATEGORY #1 – Unusual Yet Useful Websites

Drinkify – http://drinkify.org/

A one page, easy-to-use site! Type in whatever you are listening to (comedian, musician, I’ve even tried Joel Osteen and T. D. Jakes) and it will give you a very detailed recipe for the perfect cocktail to fit the mood, right down to the type of glass you need. Try it out!

Everyone’s Mixtape – http://everyonesmixtape.com/

Everyone’s got a favorite mixtape! They may not be on cassettes anymore, hell, they’re not even on CDs anymore! However, this site will take you back and whatever you’re planning on doing that night, it’ll give you the perfect mix. It has a few “events” on the homepage for examples. It has everything from a “Summer BBQ” mix to a “Driving” mix, from a “Late Night” to “Making Out”. However, it also has a mixtape creator to make your own mixtape! Check it out!

7 Cups of Tea – www.7cupsoftea.com

You can privately talk online with a trained active listener or therapist at 7 Cups of Tea. Have you ever needed to get some things off your chest to someone that didn’t know you so they can’t really judge you? That’s what 7 Cups of Tea is for, I suppose. I’ve used it a couple of times just to test it out and talked with a couple of the free therapists and it’s actually really great. This would be great for all of you people out there that, once you learn a secret, you absolutely have to tell someone. Talk to someone on 7 Cups of Tea. They have an App!

CATEGORY #2 – Unusual but Informational Websites

Real Time World – http://shambles.net/worldclock/worldclock.swf

  

This website is actually really spectacular. It’s, once again, just a one page site (technically it’s one page off of a multipage website) that tells real time information about the population of the Earth in a great breakdown. It’s hard to explain without actually seeing it for yourself. Everything from prison growth to world population to deaths per second and even down to from what each person died and it’s all in 100% real time. You can also change the breakdown from Year to month, week, day, or now. When I found this website (if any of you know me you know I love real time information about anything around me…I honestly just want to know stuff) I stared at it for over an hour changing it to different breakdowns. Check this out and, if you like statistics, you won’t be disappointed.

Documentary Heaven – www.documentaryheaven.com

I love watching documentaries. This site will give you almost any documentary on almost any subject you want. Art, conpiracies, atheism, business, technology, 9/11 (yes, they have an entire category dedicated to 9/11), biology, sex, society, and war; they literally have it all. Anything you want to watch and learn this is your website. I highly recommend watching Exit Through The Gift Shop if you like street art, graffiti, or are a Banksy fan. Click the link and be amazed!

My Birth Year – www.whathappenedinmybirthyear.com

Just the very first few seconds of my birthyear. It goes on for about 25 minutes.

There are several sites out there that list a bunch of things that happened in whatever year you were born. However, this one does it way better. Once again, it’s a one-page website that has an editable box in which you type your birth year. The screen fades to black and words begin typing tell you the story of 19XX (whatever year you put in). Nevertheless, here is the cool part, it tells you all of this in BOOK FORM. You read all the historical events from that year and it’s like reading a book! I don’t know, maybe you don’t like books, I love them. It tells you the best selling movie, how life was different, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, who won the Oscars, best music, presidential blunders and it NEVER gets boring. If you don’t look at any other site on this blog post then look at this one. It’s so cool.

 

 

CATEGORY #3 – 11 Sites You’ll Need If You Want To Be A Spy…

We all know the worst Bond was Brosnan, right?

 #11 www.BeSurvival.com

  This websites taught me so much. If you’re worried that the zombie apocalypse or whatever apocalypse is “not a joke but going to happen” these days then this is the site you’ll want to memorize. When shit hits the fan (and it will one day) this site will teach you everything you need to know to survive and outsmart your opponents. It has a section on how to “Disappear and live under the radar” and it’s not nearly as hard as it seems. BeSurvival has articles on the “72 Items that will Disappear first when SHTF”. Go check it out and be smarter than the average bear.

#10: www.DuckDuckGo.com

Worried someone might be snooping on your online activity? You should be! The enemy is everywhere, and you don’t want to leave them a digital trail straight to your safehouse. You need DuckDuckGo.com. Fully committed to not giving a damn about what you do online, DuckDuckGo is the only place to search for dark glasses, overcoats, and hats.

#9: www.PrivNote.com

Sometimes you need to send a message and make absolutely sure it’s destroyed after it’s been read. Instead of strapping fireworks to stationary and hoping it makes its way safely through the mail system (seriously, don’t do that), use PrivNote.com. Send your message using this site, and it’ll be permanently deleted once it’s been read.

#8: www.IdleKeyboard.com

Ah, misdirection… You don’t need to be invisible to spy on international criminals, you just need them to think you’re doing something else. Especially if you’re working undercover in their facility of mass destruction! This is where IdleKeyboard.comcomes in. This clever little site makes it sound like you’re hard at work, loudly typing away, while you’re really watching the hacked security feed and looking over stolen deathray schematics.

#7: www.AvoidHumans.com

So, you’ve got some important intel, and you need to get it back to HQ safely. You’ll need to arrange a pickup, but where? Somewhere public, somewhere quiet, and somewhere nearby. Bingo! AvoidHumans.com. Choose from a bunch public but deserted places nearby –all of them perfect for when you need to sit next to a ‘stranger’, inconspicuously slide a briefcase their way, and casually walk off. I definitely could’ve used this when parking with my girlfriend.

#6: www.WakerUpper.com

It might sound like some kind of semi-legal beverage used by students and party-goers the world over, but WakerUpper.com isn’t. It’s a powerful tool for disrupting communications and creating chaos among the evil genius ranks. Using WakerUpper’s call scheduler, you can queue up automated calls to any telephone numbers you need to, for specific times and dates. Need to distract and confuse an entire group of henchmen at exactly 11:59PM? Now you can!

#5: www.WeTransfer.com

Transfer up to 10GB of Top Secret files!

You’ve managed to sneak into the head office of the evil corporation you’ve been sent to extract data from, but you’ve forgotten your sleep-dart-firing, secret-data-stealing, USB device that was so cleverly designed even you thought it was just a pen. Bummer. But, no problem! Rather than copy the diabolical database of doom onto a data stick, just open up WeTransfer.com and email the gigantic file straight to the intelligence agency! Nice.

 

 

 

#4: www.ScribbleMaps.com

Tailing enemy spies can give you all sorts of useful information, like where they drop off their intel, and where they pick up their gadgets. You need to keep track of this stuff, and the best way is to draw it on a map. ScribbleMaps.com lets you do that using whatever tablet or laptop you have in hand.

 

#3: www.CouchSurfing.com

Let’s face it, you’re going to be travelling a lot. And, you don’t have ten passports and giant wads of foreign currency hidden in a shoebox under the bed. No you don’t. That’s just in the movies. BUT, what you do have is CouchSurfing.com. This handy site can help you get set up with free accommodation anywhere you need to be.

 

#2: www.Pipl.com

So, the enemy agent you caught swallowed a cyanide capsule before you could interrogate him. You need to know who he’s working with, but his phone only has codenames for the people he’s spoken to. No problem! Get over to Pipl.com and start punching in the numbers or email addresses you have. Pipl will try to match the details you give it with a real person.

 

#1: www.DeadMansSwitch.net

Well, you might not think about it much while speeding down narrow city streets, hitting 100mph in your luxury sports car, narrowly scraping past lamp posts, trying to escape the clutches of evil henchmen and the inevitable torture and death that would follow, but this line of work IS dangerous. It really is. If the worst was to happen, you might need someone to know about it. EnterDeadMansSwitch.net.

This site lets you set up a number of emails to be sent, if, for any reason, you ‘disappear’. It works by periodically asking you if you’re still alive. If you don’t respond within a set period of time, it fires off your emails. You could set up two; one to the HQ, and the other jam-packed with secrets about crooked agents to the media. This way if you get taken out you’ll simultaneously alert your boss, AND truly drop a number of your less favourable contacts in the proverbial shit. Success! Kind of..

There you have just a little taste of what my travels through the interweb have shown me. The spy websites are some of my very best work, in fact. With those websites and skills filed away in the locked file cabinets, in the back corner of my brain, collecting dust and my arsenal of weaponry in my house under lock and key, I think I’ll be just fine when the government gets too big for its britches, or SHTF, or the zombie apocalypse happens. Honestly, nothing would surprise me anymore. A zombie could pop it’s head up in my back yard tomorrow, I’d sigh and say “Yeah…that’s about right…”, feed it some corned beef, and go inside and watch some cable.

Please don’t use the websites for evil…because that’s what I’m probably going to do and I don’t want you stealing my thunder.

OH! Video of the week! You all or going to like this one. Kevin Spacey is the best at impressions!

This post was written in it’s entirety while listening to The Who. If you don’t know who they are then shame on you because the song Baba O’Reilly is a revelation. Go look it up!

Until next time, keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your ass.

#BeUnlimited

-“The” Hunter Ansley

This One’s For You Service People

This is a topic not quite near and dear to my heart, but more my fiancés heart. Which, I suppose, does make it near and dear to my heart, but more so my pocket book. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, but those of you that don’t shouldn’t fear because I’m about to lay it out for you. TIP your FREAKIN waiters/waitresses.

My lovely fiancé, Ali, recently started working at a restaurant as a server. This is the first job she has had where she gets tips for her services. First, there is the immediate problem that should probably be addressed at some point in our lives, and that is the fact that waiters/waitresses make about $2 an hour. This is because of some bullshit loophole in the federal wage limit law that lets employers of these service workers work their employees for next to nothing and justify it by allowing them to take tips. They call these sorts of jobs “Tipped Professions”. In short, you are paying these peoples salary. They live off the money they get from tables. Now I understand if you get absolutely horrendous service, but short of a cockroach riding your baked potato like a mechanical bull or them getting your order completely wrong, bad service still earns a tip. It is never ok to stiff the person serving you, because you’re basically making them work for free.

battered empty purse with tear

While looking at the statistics for this particular issue, I ran across a table that illustrated the service industry pretty well. My post tonight is specifically about restaurant waiters and waitresses and bartenders, but the lesson transfers to all of the people listed in the table. It is pictured below in all of its glory.

What I take away from this chart, and what he says in his post after the chart (and I agree with him) is that it is never ok to not tip at least 15% of the ticket. If you have to take out your phone calculator and do the math right there at the table, do it. Why? I’ll let him tell you.

“Your tips are literally their only income. They also have to “tip out” the other staff, so when you tip a waiter you’re also tipping the busboy, bartender, and others. For these reasons, it’s never acceptable to tip under 15%, even if you hate the service. The way to handle terrible service is to complain to the manager like you would in a non-tipping situation—you’re not allowed to stiff on the tip and make them work for free.”

-Tim Urban

Here is the link to his post if you are interested-  waitbutwhy.com/2014/04/everything-dont-know-tipping.html

So not only are they trying to live off of what you pay them in tips, they also have to pay the bus boys some of what they made. Can you imagine that? Working your ass off to collect some hard earned cash and having to give some away to the bus boy? Now imagine that same scenario with a bunch of $2 tips. They wouldn’t take home but about $10 for the night. If you work a standard 4-5 hour shift, that’s working for $2 an hour base wage and getting about $2 an hour in tips. I’d shoot someone square in the temple if they left me a $2 tip. Then someone else could come take my spot and get crappy tips.

In the same article, Mr. Urban refers to service workers as having “memories lie elephants” meaning that if you leave a bad tip, they will remember you every time you come back. If you leave a good tip or a bad tip, it could very possibly reflect on your service next time you go there. If I was in that position, and several people I know that are waiters or waitresses have confirmed this, I would have little to no motivation t give someone good service the next time they come in if I know they tip horribly. On the flip side, if someone tips generously or at least fairly, I will have all the motivation in the world to be a good server, because I want your money. As a customer you have all the power to determine the level of service you get by how good a tipper you are. You also generally get better service if you are a kinD and courteous person and don’t treat your server like a second-class citizen. Ever taste spit casserole? If you’re a dick to your server you probably have.

On average, lets say you eat out 100 times a year, it costs about $350 a year to be a lousy tipper. To be an average tipper it costs about $450 a year. To be a good tipper it costs you about $550 a year. For $100 more per year you could go from a lousy tipper to an average tipper, and the same goes for average tipper to good tipper. $100 a year is not a lot of money. Plus it can make a world of difference in someone’s life. Think of it as charity, you are donating money to the “poor service worker” fund.

So just as a general tipping rule, here are some guidelines I recommend you stay in that will most definitely keep you in your server’s good graces:

Sit down wait service-   15-20% before taxes

Buffet wait service-     10% before taxes

Host or Hostess-   No obligation, but you should probably tip $5-10 if it’s ridiculously busy and they do a little extra to find you a table

Bartender-   About $2 a drink, or 15-20% of the whole tab. With bartenders, tie matters. If they spend 10 minutes making you and your friends a bunch of complicated mixed drinks tip a little more than if you would if hey just cracked open a couple cold ones.

Home Delivery-     One that I haven’t talked about, the delivery guy. About 10% is standard, or about $5 for pizza delivery. They will remember you forever if you tip them well, and even give you extra stuff (dipping sauces, cheese, spices, napkins, plates, etc..)

Follow these guidelines, and you can’t really go wrong, but don’t you ever stiff them on the tip so help me God I will find you.

To end this post, I would like to thank those of you who do tip well. Your servers everywhere appreciate it more than you know. And if you do go to a restaurant and either live a crappy tip or don’t leave a tip at all, just know that you will be remembered and talked about for months and years to come as a terrible person. I’ve heard of several of you already, and I think you’re dicks. I’m 100% not sorry if I offended any of you today, and I hope you have a wonderful night. Go eat somewhere nice and leave a big fat tip!

I wrote this to the sound of Panic! At The Disco’s most recent album “Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die”. Album favorites are probably “This Is Gospel” and “Miss Jackson”. They also have a new single out called “Hallelujah” that makes me burst out in song at the top of my lungs. Call me what you want. Brendan Urie is a rare talent.

Stay safe my friends, see you next time!

-Daniel “THE” Perry

Why Does She Always Ask For Popcorn AFTER We Sit Down In The Theatre?

To be completely honest with all of you, I had the hardest time this week coming up with something about which I wanted to write (never end a sentence with a preposition). Finally, I decided to keep with this week’s theme and come up with something about marriage. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start giving marriage advice, I’ve been married just over two years and still don’t a damn thing about it. However, if I do know one thing it’s that I love my wife and she’s taught me this, “I’m a man so I don’t know the first thing about women. She’s a woman so she knows everything there is to know about men and women”. That’s Chelsea Ansley for you. I can’t live with her because she says stuff like that, can’t live without her because, let’s be honest; she makes sure my head stays on my shoulders and shoes stay on the correct feet. Without her somebody would die, whether that is me or half the human species by my hand is beside the point. She has literally saved the human species. So I don’t know the BEST marriage advice but I know a little bit about the worst marriage advice. Also, I’ve been told all of these at least once by somebody somewhere and most of those people had either been divorced at least one time or hadn’t been married at all. Like I said, I’m in no place to give advice so I’ll let you hear it from some people who have been married for years. I found it deep within the bowels of the internet so I thought I’d share it with whoever wanted to read it. They are just short paragraphs on why the advice is bad advice.
1
Give your wife whatever she wants
“A happy wife is a happy life. This cliché is the most obnoxious, shortsighted form of martyrdom. When you spend all your time trying to make someone else happy, you end up sacrificing your own happiness. My wife actually brought this to my attention. We both want each other to be happy — we just know that putting yourself first is more important in the long run.” — Chris S

2
Spend time missing each other
“It might be good for the person who gave me this advice to spend time away from their spouse, but I actually like mine and want to be with him all the time. He’s my best friend; we’re inseparable!” — Sherry B.
Hunter here….I might understand this, but Chelsea is my very best friend in the world. She might annoy me sometimes but I follow her around like Tucker (our dog). She also does the same to me. I have a man cave and I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve been in there alone. She usually follows me. I don’t WANT to miss her. I want to get in as much time as I can.

3
Let your husband go to strip clubs
“Two friends told me to ‘be OK with’ my husband going to strip clubs. I may trust my husband 100 percent, but that does not mean I want him around naked women! Also, he is not spending our hard-earned money on strippers. Wrong on so many levels and asking for trouble.” — Angel A.
Hunter here…now I understand it’s $1.99 steak and shrimp, and I’ve been to strip clubs, and honestly, it’s pretty disgusting. It just is. I felt like I had to bleach myself when I walked out of there and I never ever went back. (I wasn’t by myself, some guys wanted to go to P-10 for lunch, little did I know that P-10 stood for Perfect 10 and I didn’t know exactly what I was walking into. I didn’t eat the shrimp…)

4
Never go to bed mad
“Sometimes you need to take a step back and just get some sleep.” — Kat R.
“We won’t go to bed angry, but sometimes both of us need time to cool off before having a calm conversation. Therefore, sometimes waiting until morning is necessary.” — Mary Jane T.

5
Don’t expect your husband/wife to change
“Right before I got married, an aunt told me, ‘Don’t ever expect your husband to change; it’ll never happen.’ She told me to accept him for who he was and be done with it. Shortly after marrying, I realized that change plays a very important role. A marriage is a living thing, and both partners must change and progress together in order for it to work long-term. I can’t imagine what our marriage would be like now if both of us were the exact same people we were when we first spoke our vows.” — Carly F.

6
Hide your money and purchases
“My grandmother told me to buy whatever I want, hide it for a short period of time, and bring it out slowly one by one. She thinks my husband won’t notice, and I’ll get to buy what I want, when I want. Talk about terrible advice! Where is the trust and financial responsibility here?” — Michelle S.
“I was told, ‘No man is trustworthy, so don’t spend all your money on the home. Keep some hidden away from your husband, so you aren’t left hung out to dry when you get divorced. Really!?” — Ife H.

7
Fantasize about other people
“Yes, a friend told me this is healthy because it’s a ‘harmless aphrodisiac.’ I just think it’s creepy and would prefer to think about my husband, thanks!” — Candice G.

Hunter, here….I couldn’t even imagine this. ESPECIALLY while being intimate with my wife. It’s my wife! I want to focus on HER not somebody else that’s not there. #WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot.

8
Enjoy it while it lasts
“An elderly man told me this at the bar while celebrating my bachelorette party. Gee, thanks for the confidence!” — Cameron S.

There you have it. Some of the worst advice I’ve been given about marriage. I can’t believe that some people actually live this out and think it works. “Enjoy it while it lasts”?! Seriously? There is no marriage on the planet, and never will be, that is all fun, games, running through fields of roses all of the time, but why go into a marriage with an attitude of doom? Fantasize about other people? I still don’t understand that. Why would I need to think about someone else when I married the perfect person for me and she’s right here with me? Never go to bed mad…this one is ridiculous. I will say that never ever will I sleep in the guest bedroom or in another bed because Chelsea and I are angry with each other but sometimes, you need time to cool off so you don’t say something you don’t mean that goes on to cause bitterness.

VIDEOS OF THE WEEK:

I write this blog in it’s entirety to the sound of the air conditioner in my office. I hate writing without music.

Until next time, keep the bugs of your glass and the bears off your ass,

-“The” Hunter Ansley #BeUnlimited

The Night That Didn’t Happen

Deniability. That, my friends, is the key word for all successfully executed bachelor parties. The Groom (in this weekends case, myself) has total plausible deniability. He knows only the location of said party, and that he needs to be there at a certain time. He knows that it will be a night that he will remember for the rest of his life. Much like the wedding, now that I think about it. The Best Man (in this case, my esteemed blog partner Mr. Hunter Ansley) does all the work in preparation of the party. He takes care of planning, invites, procurement of entertainment and refreshments, and the venue. All the Groomsmen have a hand in planning, and making this the night that makes, or in this case, proves the groom is a man worthy of continuing his quest for manhood with a woman of his choosing (in this case, the beautiful and wonderful Ali McNulty, soon to be the one and only Alisan Taylor Perry).

I think the Bro Code puts it quite well in Article 40 of the official Bro Code written by the Legend, Barney Stinson. It reads, ver batem: “Should a Bro become stricken with engagement, his Bros shall stage an intervention and attempt to heal him. This is more commonly known as “a bachelor party.” Now, try as they might, my bros will not change my mind about marrying my fantastic fiancé. But you can bet your sweet ass I’m looking forward to them trying. Tonight I offer you a look into what, historically speaking, bachelor parties are and have been.

I’ll give you 3 guesses as to whom the first group of hellions were that threw a celebration for their fellow soldiers’ last night as a single man. The friggin Spartans, that’s who. The Spartans, as early as 5^th century B.C. are said to have held the first bachelor parties for their brothers in combat. They would make toasts to the groom on the eve of his wedding, with a Spartan-like sense of manliness. (A note to my best man, groomsmen, and anyone that will be at my party Saturday; If it is anything short of Spartan quality, it will be a disappointment. I have every hope that it will put their sword wielding, cloth wearing, ancient Greek asses to shame. Now that they have that to live up to, I continue my history lesson.) “Bachelor” itself is actually a term used to describe a young knight, but its literal definition is “a man who is not and has never been married”. The term Bachelor was first used to describe an unmarried man in the 14^th century in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Spartans may have held the first bachelor parties, but the term wasn’t coined until 1922, when it was used in Chambers’ Journal of Literature, Science and Arts to describe a “jolly old party”. The term for the all-male all-nighter isn’t the same everywhere though, in Scotland, Ireland and the U.K, they refer to it as a “Stag Party”. Australians have the “Buck Party”. The French are a little different, as usual. Their term for the party is “enterrement de vie de garcon” which literally translates to “The burial of life as a boy”.

The theme for the grand majority of bachelor parties over the years in “booze, gambling, and strippers”. Which makes Las Vegas, more commonly known as Sin City, a prime location for many a bachelor party. There are dozens of websites and services that offer full access, full service packages to the party planner. This responsibility generally falls to the best man. One company in particular, I-Volunteer Inc., owns two of the largest bachelor party sites on the web. About 35% of the close to 4 million website visits cater the Las Vegas packages.

Perhaps the most famous representation of one of these shindigs is in the movie “The Hangover”. Which was a giant blockbuster hit, racking up about 100 million bucks in the first 2 weeks out, as well as a giant clusterfuck of a movie from start to epic finish. The second one sucked so don’t waste your time on it. The first one was worth at least one watch, and if you watch it once you will watch it again.

Some go for a much more…chill approach to the last day as a free man. Perhaps a sports game, poker night, a night at Dave & Busters, maybe a concert. Something that won’t give their spouse to be shingles when she thinks about it. That’s a little vanilla for my taste but for some people that’s exactly what the like about it. I’ll be shooting for something in the middle. Somewhere between getting stuck on a hotel roof and a night at book club. Has there ever been a bigger void?

Ending up stuck on the roof of Caesars Palace for your bachelor party would be pretty crappy, but there are some services made to give you a unique bachelor party…for a price. A travel agency in the UK called The Last Night of Freedom has a special package for bachelors who want to go where few have gone before. The North Pole. So if freezing your ass off with your closest friends and spending a ridiculous amount of money (14,000 Euros per person) is your idea of a good time, more power to you and I hope you get frostbite. In the last decade or so, there has been a rash of best men trying to one-up one another. White Water rafting, skiing in Colorado, big game hunting in Africa, weeklong luxury golf trips (thank you for not taking me golfing), you name it. Places and things that cost way too much money. It must be nice to be able to blow a few months of my pay per person on trips like this, but that’s not what I want. So Saturday night I’ll be chillin in Canton, TX where the only expense for my bro’s and me is time and alcohol, the gifts that keep on giving. I look forward to whatever happens. Ali, you have very little reason to worry. Hunter and I are professionals. *winks at Hunter*

Over the last week or so I’ve been on a Queen kick, so this whole thing was written while jamming to Queen’s Greatest Hits. If you haven’t heard of Queen, please check them out. Freddie Mercury is a musical Talent on par with some of the greatest.

Until next time my friends, stay safe!

-Daniel “The” Perry

15° Off Cool (Part 2)

Before I start, some people expressed confusion in what I meant by the title “15° Off Cool”. If the diagram I so carefully drew below doesn’t help you understand I can do nothing more for you.

    I’ll just start off by saying that this post is not going to be as long as the last one by any stretch of the imagination. A lot goes into explaining anyone’s mind to anyone else, not to mention explaining them to polar opposites. However, I hope you enjoyed last week’s post and maybe brought something out of it as well. Last week I talked to the extroverts trying to explain introverts; so, naturally, this week I’m going to talk to the introverts about being you and accepting yourself. I bet dollars to donuts you thought I was going to try to explain extroverts, didn’t you? I would never do attempt to do that…ever. I would rather try to explain the friendship between the dog and rat, Osirus and Riff Ratt (Below. Their Instagram is @osirisandriff).

When I say “Be you. Love yourself.” to fellow introverts I’m not saying that all introverts have problem with themselves. However, preferring isolation can take a toll on anyone even if you prefer it. We, as humans, are social beings. Now, me, I don’t really have a choice but to be pretty social because I have my wife at home, I go to my parents’ house almost every weekend, I talk to hundreds of people a week because of my job, and, in the past two years, I’ve settled into the fact that talking to people I don’t know really isn’t that bad once you get past the first two or three sentences. However, some introverts I know have the option of not talking to anyone if they don’t feel like it. Most people my age or maybe a couple of years younger are still in school; therefore, most of their time is either spent studying, netflixing, or sleeping. That’s the life of a college introvert. Also, introverts have a higher chance to become clinically depressed because isolation, or even being social but in small infrequent doses, can mess with the serotonin levels in your brain. One study showed that introverts who are infrequently social and/or anti-social have a 35% chance of clinical depression. I’m speaking from experience, I took anti-depressants for only a couple of years but had I not gotten into a job that required me being social, it might have been a different story. I guess the point of what I’m trying to say is that we’re weird. Extremely different. Extraordinarily unique. There is only 25 of us out of every 100 Americans. Usually when something is not very common it adds value. That applies to money, antiques, baseball cards, stamps, coins, books, and, sweet Lord, I would pay hundreds for a package of “Sour Starburst™” because they’re rare! You can’t find those sons of bitches anywhere anymore. Why doesn’t that apply to human personalities too? My post last week said one thing I want to retouch on, if you are one of the lucky people that an introvert calls a friend then it means they see value in you. Even though that person is undoubtedly different, I value you. If you can value someone else, then you should be able to completely value yourself. However, I don’t know you, this may not apply, but I know it applied to me not too awfully long ago. Nowadays, I get up and, even if its just mentally, I give myself a good ole’ Barney Stinson “Self-Five” or some others may know it as a “Homeschool High Five”.

   I’m not a fan of Joel Osteen but he had a great quote about loving yourself for being you, he said, “Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking ‘I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.’ God wasn’t having a bad when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbor. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.” Now I’m guilty just as much as the next person. My brother Brent is honestly the best at anything  he tries to do and usually on the first try! It’s honestly pretty ridiculous and infuriates me. You want to know what his secret is to being able to do anything he tries? He only tries stuff that he KNOWS he can do. I know that and it still burns me up. You know those rip-stick boards with the two wheels and shit? Yeah, I tried for an hour one day and got about four feet and landed on my ass. In an hour I got four feet. Now I never give up..I just know when I’m beaten so I went and got a skateboard and said “Screw this. Brent, however, saw it, jumped on it and to this day has never fallen down. He’s my brother but I can honestly say I wanted to kill him slowly at that moment. Now the trick to not murdering those kind of people in their sleep is remembering that you can do something they probably can’t do in a million years. Brent? He knows how to turn a computer on and off, that’s as far as it goes within reason. Brent wouldn’t be caught dead reading and/or writing a blog. Honestly, I can say I love him more for it. I’m glad he’ll never try those things that I’m good at (sometimes because I’m sure he’d take my thunder). Everyone has different talents. I have mine, Brent has his, Daniel has his, and, I’m sure somewhere, Alec Baldwin has his…it just hasn’t surfaced yet.

A couple of posts back I said “The fears you don’t face become your limits”. Loving your differences from others falls into one of those fears. Be unlimited. America is a country of extraverted people. Therefore, it begins to look like having an extraverted personality is the ideal personality and it is not. What is the ideal personality? Yours. The ideal personality is the one you developed while growing up. God didn’t get the labels mixed up and give you someone else’s personality and that’s why you’re different. You’re different because you were made with a purpose. Now THAT is a reason to love that you are different.

“The two most important days in your life are

the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

-Mark Twain

(I strongly suggest everyone go look up some Mark Twain quotes. He was a genius)

To the introverts: you want to know how you can be empowered in an extrovert’s world? Read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. I’m reading it now. It’s an easy read, she’s a great writer, and you will be able to see yourself with every turn of the page. I strongly recommend that you pick it up or download it on your iPad, Kindle, Nook or whatever it is that you have.

Also, the video of this week! Brent can probably do this too!

Then the dumbass throws him back?! Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot!

Be Unlimited, friends.

Until next time, you guessed it, keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your ass,

-“The” Hunter Ansley