Okay, here's the deal. The picture is a piece of tripe. I would have scanned the cover but I traded the CD-ROM for some fried sushi (I live in the South-East United States, and yes it does exist. Think fried ice-cream or fried Snickers). Of course it would have been a piece of tripe also, and I would expect it to be treated as such.

As for being Mr. Tough Guy; I am not. Happily after years of therapy, I can successfully say that most people regard me as mostly harmless. Before that, people had a tendency to compare me to the characters played by such actors as Anthony Perkins, Anthony Hopkins, and Steve Buscemi. If you are familiar with American cinema over the last forty years, you will recognize a dark pattern. I did not want to accept the fact that I scared people. I found this out after casually offering a friend the fun of being disemboweled with a spoon --the bowl end, not a shiv-- if he did not explain the Buscemi comparison. At that point, I had not seen the movie Con Air yet. Hell, years later when I was sharing this with my ex-girlfriend, she confessed to actually talking to the local police when we had first began to date.

The comment about meeting people was included because it had actually happened the night before I read fulvio's comment. I had been visiting my ex and raiding here refrigerator last month when I found a take-out container with a note written on top comparing her tits to week-old steamed vegetables. After asking, she explained that it had been written by the very happy bartender at a local restaurant bar she socializes at after work. Sorry people, I am old fashioned and find remarks like that rude and unacceptable -- especially from the hired help. Now the next time she went to her hang-out, she told the bartender what I said and added, "that he better be nice to her or I would come and kick his ass". He said, "bring it on."

Anyway, the other night her friends had stood her up and she called me and asked if I would eat dinner with her. I had just finished a twelve hour shift and was feeling pretty tired, but agreed to meet her anyway. And if you have read this far, I am sure you have guessed where I met her for dinner. She introduced me to the bartender and told me that he was the one who had written the nasty note on here takeaway carton. I tell you, in a perverse sort of way, it is fun to watch someone as big as this bartender was (he probably had 50-60 pounds on me and was at least half my age) squirm and try to shrink into the floor. He was not very talkative. So I smiled a half-smile and ordered soup. Never fear, I tipped him well before leaving. After all, he somehow mistook my drink for water when he rang up the ticket.