http://tlc.discovery.com/tv/la-ink/la-ink.html

If you can’t handle a little sass from your tattoo artist, then maybe you should rethink the whole idea of getting a tattoo.

Or maybe you should rethink getting tattoos from people who don’t treat you with respect. I’ve got about a dozen tattoos, from a total of six different artists, and none of them have treated me with disrespect. When you choose someone who will spend a lot of time touching your naked skin, your comfort level with that person is important, and if they speak to you in a way that makes you uncomfortable, choose another artist. To assume that being treated obnoxiously is part of the tattoo experience is just wrong. A tattoo is a mark of beautification or spirituality or commemoration—not a violation to be endured.

As to cost, artists who don’t charge by the hour are calculating hours in their heads when they quote a per-piece rate. You get what you pay for; you want a bargain? Get something returnable. $100 an hour is about average, although top artists go as high as $150. If you’re getting charged a lot less than $100, then maybe you should double check the quality and reputation of the artist.

Kat should have left a long time ago. She wanted to quit last season. She’s young, her husband, friends and family are in LA and the guys at the shop are quite sexist. She’s a good sport for having put up with it as long as she did.

Kat does such amazing portraiture it blows my mind. I’ll see her take a line drawing that looks okay and then she’s done and it looks amazing. They’ll lose customers without her – no one else in the shop can touch her work. They all have specialties and are very good at what they do, but they can’t do what she does.

I managed to get my tattoo for $50, I think, but it’s a circle of half-inch high black text smaller than my palm and thus wasn’t complex enough to bump the price up past supplies and basic labor. I think it took less than an hour, maybe half an hour.

oh and the travel channel kicks discovery’s ass.

I can’t stand how so many of their shows just get things wrong or go off on stupid tangents or omit data or etc. I was watching something on the Vandals attacking the Roman empire and their persecution of the “Catholic Christians.” It was mentioned that their beliefs were “Arian,” but the word “Christian” was never used in conjunction with this–it was always “Arianism” with no qualifiers or hints that Arianism was a very big branch of Christianity at the time.

Or all those “most extreme” shows about animals where they talk about an animal for 5 minutes, then spend the next 5 on some tangent that’s barely related. “You know, monkeys are smart, but they can’t solve a Rubik’s Cube. Watch this guy solve one in 12 seconds… etc.”

And all those shows about Nostradamus (sp?), UFOs, etc. (basically, what norbizness said above)… can’t stand them. They once had an entire hour-long documentary about some sort of really intelligent and odd-looking monkey that was supposedly thought to be “the missing link.” The whole show was devoted to asking this question and documenting just what the monkey could do, where it had lived, how it looked, and how scientists responded to it at the time. Then, in the last 5 minutes of the show, it was revealed that it was all a hoax and the owners had just shaved the monkey and trained it to do certain strange things like walk upright. There was not a single iota of an inkling that this was the case during the whole rest of the program–it was presented as if it the monkey had actually been a real anomaly and that it was still a question today.

I could go on, now that I’ve started thinking about the programs I’ve seen (I hate the Duggers), but I won’t.

/end rant

Certainly not by anyone other than Paulie or Mikey. Everyone else just puts their heads down when he’s in a mood and tries to keep their jobs. Paulie and Mikey know he’ can’t do anything to them.

My two favorite Mikey vs. Paul Sr. comments:

“Yeah, Dad, the CIA broke into your office and hid the tools from you.”

“First, apologize for calling me fat.”

Okay, that second one may have been mostly funny in context, but it really was damn funny. I love me some Mikey.