Two for the price of one!

So, I’m flipping through the channels last night when I come across one of the most surreal reality TV programs that I’ve ever seen,

Stars Earn Stripes is a show following 8 ‘celebrities’ who are paired up with actual military vets and sent through a series of challenges. By succeeding, they earn stripes, essentially getting them through to the next episode and earning money for the military charity of their choosing. And what a cavalcade of star power they put together! From left to right :

Todd Palin! You know, the husband of the famous person in the family. The one who doesn’t launch airborne assaults against deer.

Dean Cain! He apparently still exists. His attempts to look tough as seen above really come off more like a need for more bran in his diet.

Some WWE diva! I know nothing else about this woman. One of the more bizarre moments was hearing her complain about having to fire a SCAR because it isn’t a rifle she’s comfortable with. What?!

Terry Crews! The least known member of the Expendables cast.

Laila Ali! She punched other chicks in the face professionally for awhile.

Picabo Street! She won some medals for skiing fast or something. And who doesn’t want to have to bark orders at Private Picabo?

Some personal trainer! Seriously, they couldn’t even find an 8th person who the audience has sorta kinda heard of. They’re also clearly hiding him in the background in the hopes we won’t notice him.

Nick Lachey! He looks like he’s undecided as to whether he should charge in to battle or serenade us. He was also simply described as an ‘entertainer’, which is pretty much the kiss of death.

Overseeing it all is retired General Wesley Clark, last seen running for the Democratic Presidential nomination while wearing the sorts of sweaters normally seen on crazy homeless people and Bill Cosby.

Last night, they had to fast rope from a chopper on to a rooftop. Then one of the ‘celebrities’ had to take out a fuel dump before they both rappelled down a wall in to a pickup truck. Then they and their partners (a mix of Delta guys, Navy Seals, SWAT commanders and so on) took turns blowing shit up. Frankly, it looked fun. Nick and Terry were the pair with the slowest time, so they had to face off going through a kill house, kicking down doors and taking out targets with Glocks, assault rifles and sniper rifles. Again, looked fun. But the whole thing was stuffed with this weirdness about how brave these ‘celebrities’ were and how there lives were on the line…yeeaaaaahhhh.

It also featured possibly the craziest line of dialogue that I have ever heard :

The celebrities will be inserted by helicopter.

I can honestly say that I never, ever expected to hear that said. Ever. Overall, I encourage you to check it out if you want to laugh uproariously and have your brain broken at least once.

-Monday’s shift included possibly the vilest thing I’ve ever been around. A cart of cargo was bumped from a flight, because they ran out of space. So they brought the cart back. Now, this has been happening for about a week, because once you have 4 carts bumped due to lack of room on one day, it tends to create a trickle down effect that hampers things for days on end. Whenever it happens, we have to open the cart up and check to see if everything from the cart is still there. So we opened this…

…and the hellacious stench that escaped nearly choked the life from us all. We’re talking eyes watering, snot running, “Holy fuck, what the Hell IS that?” stink. This odour was alive and malicious and cruel. It filled the warehouse with it’s tendrils of pestilence in seconds. There was to be no escape and no quarter offered.

CLEARLY something had gone very, very bad. But what? As the cloud of flies cleared (and yes, it was a cloud of tiny little insects. Mingled with the stink, it was really something special), we prepared to go near the beast. This pretty much consisted of throwing on those painter dust masks, then going bandit style with a rag tied around the lower half of the face. We looked like a cross between those paranoid Japanese people during the SARS scare a few years back and 19th century train robbers. The stink didn’t care. It soaked through everything.

As we drew close, one of my co-workers asked what was all over the two big coolers at the bottom of the cart(of course it was the bottom…why be something conveniently reached?) The answer to his question : a writhing mass of maggots. Wonderful. This is certainly looking up. At least we now knew the source of this horror.

I managed to pull one of these monstrosities out of the cart, and the stink during that operation was so bad that I came about as close to flat out puking as you can without actually pulling the trigger. We’re talking gagging on bile here. Another guy got the second one out, then we walked them out back while trying not to choke.

We had made it out the main door when we hit a bump and they tipped over. Out flowed a viscous miasma of pure evil that looked like black pen ink, only it was filled with squirming maggots. Cue the second instance of gagging.

Turns out the coolers were full of 80 KG of now very rancid meat. Whoever loaded them in the cart way back on LAST TUESDAY failed to note that they were frozen food items, so nobody was any the wiser as they were bumped again, and again, and again, and they stayed out of the freezer for nearly a week.

It took 3 hours for the stench to clear. They’re in the dumpsters across the parking lot now. When I went to my car after work, I caught a whiff. I was parked 40 feet away. It’s coming for me now. My time is short.