I'm So Drunk, You're Hot

When last we spoke, I made certain promises about the end of my picture show. I lied. It seems yours truly has absolutely nothing else going on right now and is running a little low on the old creativity juice. But just to mix it up and show you that I am not completely out of ideas yet, I'm going to turn this last (I swear it's the last) batch of lame pics into a contest. Until now I have been showing you shots of shippy and I looking more or less photogenic, (her being the more and me being the less) but now I'm going to reveal to you the ugly ducklings of the bunch. Now, some of these photos are bad because the photographer or subject was retarded and the rest are because shippy and I were drunk off our ass. It will be up to you to decide which was the case with every pic. I will number the shots and for each one you can either put an 'A' for 'artistic problems' or a 'D' for 'so drunk, it's a miracle their livers didn't leap out of their bodies and apply for amnesty.' The winner will receive a blog dedicated entirely to them and also a lifetime supply of oxygen.

Oh, and shippy is disqualified.






1. Don't feed the bears.

2. Scarier than anything in The Blair Witch Project.

3. When nobody offered to give me an airplane ride, I decided to give one to myself.

4. Poor Iceland, shippy only has eyes for the camera.

5. Hmm, no points for this one.

6. Girls love a cannon between their legs.

7. After awhile they just stopped asking me to be in shots.

8. I think this was an earnest debate concerning the recent Olympic spending in China. Or they were singing "Don'tcha" by the Pussycat Dolls.

9. Seriously, that's tobacco. No honestly, it is, I swear.

10. Amazingly, all these girls had boyfriends named John Smith. Just my luck.



This one isn't part of the contest, I just included it to say thank you to Tara for (hopefully) being a good sport about these pics being online and for an amazing trip. Booze Before Babes.

Surried!

Alright, here's the last round of euro pics. I have a lot more but I figured everyone is probably pretty sick of them by now, so I'll try to quit while I'm slightly ahead. Before we get started I should probably explain these a wee bit. You see, Tara has a friend who works in a snow or skateboard shop, I forget which, who gave her a couple pounds worth of Surrey stickers. (Surrey is a city in B.C. with a less than reputable reputation.) The idea being that we would take pictures of famous places and monuments newly emblazoned with a Surrey sticker. You will also notice that I am not in these shots. There are two reasons for this, the first being that I don't know Tara's friend and it would be kind of weird for him to have a bunch of pics of some guy he doesn't know. The second being that Tara looks a lot better than I do on film. (Except for her International Driver's License, she looks like one of the Pickton chicks in that one.) Finally, if you're worried that a bunch of culturally important monuments have been permanently ruined, don't be, we took the stickers off after we got the shot.


This is a castle in Trogir, Croatia. You may have to zoom in to see the sticker.



Another Croatian castle. This one's in Hvar.



A beautiful view of Cesky Krumlov... ruined by a Surrey sticker.


OK, the Eiffel Tower isn't technically getting Surried here, but it's hard to get it into the whole shot from up close.


And here's a shot from the Eiffel Tower.


This is the glass pyramid of the Louvre. Straight underneath us is the holy grail, or so says Dan Brown.


Alright, not a monument, but still a pretty cool look at the harbour in San Sebastian.


Awww yeah, we totally Surried this dude in Barcelona. He was completely oblivious. The dude on the left is Luphur, but we just called him Iceland.


This Quicksilver bus got to keep its sticker.


The prince of Monaco get's his castle Surried. The country rejoices.


Tara and Nick, what a cute couple. She had a good night on that pub crawl, I believe there were two other girls and thirty guys.


The Pantheon in Rome. When we put the sticker up I'm pretty sure I heard Raphael turning in his grave.


This last one isn't a Surrey photo, but we saw this in the Vatican museum and I wanted to bring the argument we had to the people. Undeniably it's beautiful, but is it art?

Photos for my Phriends

Ready for a new batch of phine photos? (If you don't like that joke, then phuck you.) Well get ready sucka, cause I'm bringing em hard 'n fast.




Amsterdam. City of... well, I'm sure you've heard.


Diamonds from the diamond factory. Luckily, Tara didn't try to transfer her special beer-mug, thief skills to diamonds.


The hot summer fashion.


Clogs. The new face of dignity and refinement.


Inside the wax museum. Here I am high-fiving the Chinese president. A portentous picture?


Bush is left speechless as Tara points out the follies of his government. He is taken to task for the Iraq war and for being, as she calls him, "Batshit crazy."


The eyes say it all.


Who's gayer now?


Um, ditto.


Make way for "Sweatpants-Spice."


This is actually a video, she didn't move for a half-hour.


The dinner ended when Clooney made a grab for Tara's last piece of smoked salmon.


Finally, a place where I could relax and be among friends.



Well, that's another one done. Check back in a week or so for the "Surreying" of Europe.

Pics for my Peeps

OK, here they are in no particular order.

Paros, Greece. Can you believe that only took her five minutes?


Mykonos, Greece. This is the only wildlife shot we got. Enjoy.


Hvar, Croatia. This is the view from the fortress on the hill in Hvar. What you can't see is us laughing at all the saps back home.


Hvar, Croatia. Joe in cell, thinking about what he did. (This is my first pic on the net since they took those other ones off when they found out I'd lied about my age.)

Split, Croatia. Two Joes for the price of one. What Joe (your Joe, not the doppleganger) and Tara don't realize is that they are in for an all-nighter, followed by a plane ride to Czech. Poor saps.


Prague, Czech. Little did I know when I left with her, but Tara is an amazing artist. She is considered one of the best in the world in the medium of oranges. Here is Drew with his likeness. Uncanny.

Cesky Krumlov, Czech. Yes, I was soaked and I had ruined my belt, but look how happy I am with my fifteen crowns. You better Czech yourself before you wreck yourself.

Cesky Krumlov, Czech. The waterfall in the bottom right is exactly like the one I slid down. Oh yeah, we're looking down from some old castle tower.

Cesky Krumlov, Czech. I'll leave you with what you all came to see... hardcore nudity! I'm the one in the one-piece.

More pics to come, stay tuned...

Fifteen Crowns Bitches!

Sorry, no photos yet. I know, I suck, but if you belong to MySpace then shipkicker might have some up on her page; check out shipkicker's blog to get her new address. However, I can't guarantee anything since I don't belong to that other blogging thing and won't join just cause it's the "cool" thing to do. In fact, I have never done anything "cool" in my life. But I digress...

To try to hold you over until I get my ass in gear with those pics, I thought I'd relate an amusing little story that happened in Czesky Krumlov, a small town in the Czech Republic. Shippy and I had met this dude named Drew in Prague and decided to travel together for a few days. One night after dinner we were walking along the cobble stone streets at sunset when we came upon a picturesque bridge with a gurgling river rushing beneath it. Shippy dared me to jump in; I declined. Shippy said she would give me five crowns (Czech currency) to jump and Drew said he would throw in ten; I hesitated. Shippy and Drew said they would each buy me a beer; I began taking off my shirt.

As I climbed over the railing, Drew ran down to the edge of the bridge to get a better shot with his camera. A small but enthusiastic crowd had gathered and I was about to jump when Drew and some strange, shirtless czech man began to yell at me. Ignoring the urging of Shippy to "just jump," I listened to Drew who told me that the old guy had jumped some years earlier and had broken his legs. Hm, a good thing to know.

Not wishing to disappoint my public, or lose fifteen crowns and two beer, I hustled my ass up the river to a small, man-made waterfall and proceeded to wade out to the middle, drop to my butt, and slide down the waterfall. The water was quite nice. I floated on my back and let the current take me to the bridge where I stood up to show how shallow it was; the water barely came up to my waist. Let this be a lesson to all the kids out there: never trust your friends. They mean you harm.

After getting out and having my picture taken with the old guy who might have saved my life, we went to a bar for ice cream and, in my case, free booze. The only unfortunate thing about all of this is that Shippy's camera ran out of juice so only Drew has the video of this escapade. I will try to get him to email it to me, but don't hold your breath. Oh, one last thing, in case you were wondering how much fifteen crowns was, it's approximately seventy cents... yeah.

Stinky Feet and Fanta

"How can I miss you if you never leave?"

After hearing that phrase over and over from friends, family, and that girl at the drive through at McDonalds, I finally left... and now I'm back. So, did you miss me?

Yes, loyal notjoecheeseheads I have returned from the land of soccer, warm beer, and delicious Fanta with stories to tell and bills to avoid. (Seriously, if any of you are bill collectors I sent the check out last week, honest.) Pictures will be available whenever the kicker of ships delivers them to me, but until then you will have to make do with what I call "word pictures." (Yes, I am aware of how lame word pictures are.) Here is my first word picture:


jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj
j j
j j
jj O O jj
j j
j j j
j j
j ---- j
j j
jjjjjjjjjjj


That is an abstract word picture of myself. It is awesome.

Anyway, enough with the foolishness and let me tell you a little bit about my trip because if there's one thing that people love more than seeing slides of a trip, it's reading about one. Now, I won't go into full disclosure mode because there is a lot to cover and I'm hoping to get a few posts out of this one topic. I also won't give away shipkicker's finer moments in case she wants to post about them herself. (Believe me, she had a few.) Alright, with that out of the way, let us take a journey across the Atlantic to a far away continent, full of history and magic... and Absinthe...

Lame. Honestly, that's how it started. Kinda lame. The lameness started right after we left the plane in London and ran right smack into the unholy, bitch goddess of customs. I wish her a million slow, excrutiatingly painful bowl movements. I wish they would bring back a few of the torture devices we saw in the London Tower and test them out on her. I wish... well you get the picture, (the word picture) she wasn't very nice. After dealing with her, the rest of London was pretty cool. We managed to figure out the subway system without too much trouble and we didn't really care about the absurdly high prices because at that time we were freakin rolling in the dough. The only trouble was that we were doing all this alone. I mean, we were together but we weren't meeting anybody. This hadn't started to bother me so much, but shipkicker was definitely getting a little antsy. Unfortunately for us, this trend would continue until Barcelona.

After London, we took the chunnel to Paris. Ahh, Paris. Finally, a chance to test out my forgotten, high school french. "Je m'appelle Joe." Being virgin backpackers, we had both packed way too much stuff and were lucky that Paris has a post office located conveniently on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. Also, Paris has many other sights that you should probably look up because frankly, I don't feel that I should have to do all the work for you. (People are so damned lazy.)

OK, there was an incident on the train ride from Paris to San Sebastian, Spain. If you talk to shippy it will sound like a big deal but the truth of the matter is that everything turned out alright... just like I knew it would... *cough*. The deal was that we got off one stop too early for our transfer and had to rush back to the train before it left. We barely made it and were sitting near the luggage racks when I decided to check our Eurail passes one more time. They weren't there. They weren't anywhere. After suffering a minor heart-attack, I got off at the next stop and was proceeding to the info desk when one of the train employees, let's call him Pierre, began asking all the backpackers with canadian flags on there packs if they had lost their Eurail tickets. Let me say that I have never loved another man quite the way I loved Pierre at that moment. He took us back to the other station where the tickets had obviously fell out of my pocket on the mad dash back to the train. After another short adventure in a small Spanish town, we finally made it to San Sebastian. No harm, no foul. And for that seemingly insignificant little incident, I had to endure another month of, "Do you have the Eurail tickets? Are you sure? Maybe we should staple them to one of your useless body parts, like your brain."

San Sebastian was gorgeous and the trip was just about to hit the next gear in Barcelona, but this post is starting to get a little long-winded, like its author, so I think I'll end it here. If you have any questions about cities that I've already covered, please feel free to ask. I am now an expert on all things european. Especially the trains.

Coming August 2006

THE EPIC RETURN OF NOTJOECHEESE

Featuring:
-a brand new command of the english language, including words like "threnody" and "viviparous."
-an allstar group of guest writers such as Chuck Norris' stunt double, the guy who played Worf on Star Trek, and Neil Diamond's estranged cat.
-the same jokes you love and remember, digitally enhanced and recycled.
-new contests!
-an expanded self-help guide. (ex. "How to please your man when you're completely out of cheese.)
-an exclusive look at shipkicker and notjoe's europe tour '06.
-a behind the scenes retrospective on the first season of just say joe to drugs, including an indepth report on what went wrong with the poem post.
-saltier pretzels, language.
-more taste! less filling!
-more revealing pictures of underage girls.
-new passwords!
-more exclamation points!!!
-all new political commentary. (ex. Is Fidel Castro getting fat?)
-"Million Little Pieces" style confessions from the years when I was hooked on children's Advil. Don't let anyone ever tell you that Flinstones Vitamins are not a gateway drug.


Do not despair, this August your internet connection will again become useful.