Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Everything is related to everything.

Just as with the works of Kevin Bacon, there seem to be a few extensive catch-all links in the chain that act as major hubs for connections. Anyway, it's fun to play with.

Just Remember They're Out There

Ah, lax Internet privacy. How scary you can be sometimes.

My office break room has a little corkboard for pinning up coupons, places for rent, cars for sale, babysitters, and other miscellany for coworkers to share. While filling my mug with water I saw a business card tacked to the board for some guy's "Computer Consulting" business I hadn't heard of before.

On the card there was printed stuff like "Spy & Adware Removal," "Virus Removal," Upgrades, Repairs," and so forth—general computer-nerd stuff anyone doing A+ exam prep would know how to do. There was also "Pre-Purchase Consulting" which to me sounded suspiciously a lot like "You pay me just to tell you what computer to buy." The card had the guy's name and address, as well as telephone numbers and e-mail with a unique registered domain name, but no website. That piqued my curiosity.

My roommate's grandfather used to patronize another "computer consultation" business that habitually ripped him off pretty hardcore, taking advantage of his lack of computer savvy to overcharge him for work that really wasn't all that intensive (and they still managed to mess up his computer pretty badly). Interested as to how this guy compared, I took the business card back to my cubicle and plugged the address into Google Maps.

The business was obviously being run out of the guy's house—the address was a residential drive tucked away in a neighborhood. Thinking I would plug in the name of the business next, I clicked on "Web" to go over to the main search engine.

Google had the address's search results waiting for me, and by pure chance I noticed an interesting return a couple of rows down:

"Maryland Sex Offender Registry Search"

I had put in the guy's address, not his name, so I thought perhaps it was just an old listing that hadn't been updated. Nope. The list had been updated on March 24th of this year, and when I got to the address, there was his name.

So apparently this guy was at some point found guilty of felony sexual offense in the third degree. The list also had a three-letter code for the nature of the offense. In his case, it was CSO, or Child Sexual Offender. If I had to hazard a guess, he found it tough to find work after this charge stuck to him, so he was forced to go into business for himself, plying the only legitimate skills he had.

If the majority of computer consultants are either fleecing opportunists with the Ichthys as their logo* or guys like this, then I think I should look into entering that line of work myself, since I already have a reputational leg up on these folks.

*the aforementioned business my roommate's grandfather gave his money to

L'Chaim!

Found at the local gourmet/specialty beer shop. I don't care for alcohol at all, but I find myself wondering how this tastes.



Notice that it is kosher.

Edit: Super bonus! The blurb on the side of the He'Brew bottle! All grammar and formatting errors (such as beginning sentences with numerals) have been kept intact.

Ahem... *adjusts his monocle*

"In Jewish tradition, the number 10 demands Monumental gestures. As a publicity stunt for his 1956 film, Cecil B. DeMille got a Midwestern Judge to help erect hundreds of granite monuments of the Ten Commandments nationwide. 10 plagues finally let Moses' people go. Deut. 26:12 obligates Jews to give 1/10th of their earnings to charity. 10 generations span Adam to Noah and Noah to Abraham. 10 Sefirot in Kabbalah symbolize the core elements of Creation. Father of the Bomb, Robert Oppenheimer was blacklisted in 1953 for 10 years for his family's alleged un-American activities. 10% of Nobel Peace Prize winners are Jewish. On Rush's 10th album, Grace Under Pressure (#10 on Billboard), Geddy Lee sings of his parents surviving the Holocaust. After Sammy Davis Jr.'s 1990 death, the lights on the Vegas strip went dark for 10 minutes—the first time since JFK's assassination. A minion of 10 is necessary for communal prayer. Jack Black's parents joined a polyamorous group before divorcing when he was 10. In his Belief episode, Ali G confessed losing his virginity at 10 to an Italian supermodel. Mae West got 10 days in jail for obscenity for her 1927 play 'Sex'. She served eight, with two off for good behavior. 10 High Holy Days of repentance begin on Rosh Hashanah. 10 years after his Major League debut, Sandy Koufax refused to pitch Game 1 of the World Series on Yom Kippur. To mark 10 years of Schmaltz brewing, behold Monumental Jewbilation, HE'BREW's epic celebration of the most memorable moments in life. L'Chaim!"

Samurai Swordfight Not Included

It snowed a little last night. Most of it had already melted by the time I took the pictures below, but that's what I get for sleeping in (and being ignorant of the fact that it was going to snow overnight). It had been warm enough over the past couple of weeks to fool the cherry blossom trees into, well... blossoming, and with the ka-razy April snow we just got, I thought it'd be a rare opportunity to get some interesting photos. I'm pretty sure you don't see this very often.











Cool, huh? Now then, can we please be done with the cold weather for awhile?

I Would Call Mine "The Mischief Tank"

There's something about golf carts that make you want to do crazy shit in them. Think about it. Sit down in a golf cart, and what's one of the first thoughts to cross your mind?

"I wanna see what this sumbitch can do!"

Same goes with potato cannons. Upon picking up a potato cannon, nobody reviews a mental checklist of fun, safe ways in which the cannon can be enjoyed while wearing OSHA-approved safety goggles and under the supervision of a responsible third party.

"Man, think of all the stuff I could break, destroy, or otherwise damage with this baby. Awesome."

A scenario with golf carts and potato cannons? Too awesome for words.

Wwwwwuummmmnn, kshhhhhttt

Man, see, it's stuff like this that makes me want to make movies.

I found the first RvD back in 2003, soon after getting back from Kuwait and catching the moviemaking bug. I didn't know there'd been a sequel, however, and it looks like I didn't miss it by too much; it pretty much just came out.

I still have my Apple Production Suite installed on my G5... hmm.

So, Food Poisoning

Matt brought back leftover fried chicken from his grandfather's wake, along with instructions that we had to work on it. Always welcoming of free food, I did my part over the next couple of days to give the chicken a good home.

Then the chicken got an eviction notice.

It hit Matt Thursday night, and it hit me yesterday morning while at work. I went home and spent the rest of the day sipping Gatorade and worshipping the procelain god. Matt says his mother also fell victim to the chicken, and spent her Friday in a fashion similar to ours.

I went to bed at about 8PM yesterday, waking up at two-hour intervals whenever my body wanted me to turn over. This was in between vivid but altogether incoherent dreams about sorting ammunition (your guess is as good as mine). I usually got up when I awoke and walked around the house to get the aches out of my system, but fortunately by the time I'd first gone to bed my vomiting had stopped.

Today, after getting up and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (and waiting to see if it would stay eaten), my hunger-headache subsided and I felt good enough to go do my laundry. Matt was feeling better too so we decided to try some food food from the local gourmet. As I type this, my ham and swiss sandwich is still down, but after a day and a half of toast and Gatorade, Matt ate his food way too fast ("This soup is delicious" GNARGNARGNARGNAR) and up it came.

The worst is definitely behind us, though. I look forward to actually being up to do some sort of fun thing tomorrow.

Death, Taxes, and Chernobyl

Matt's maternal grandfather, our landlord, died yesterday evening. Requiescat in pace. The rental arrangements will, for the time being, be handled by the power of attorney, one of Matt's aunts. In grim irony as to the certainty of things, I was doing my taxes last night as well. The Hope Grant gave me back my entire tuition expense for 2006, which is amazing. I had to eat the cost of books, of course, but still, getting 100% of my tuition back is something I would never have even hoped for. Almost halfway towards a degree and I haven't even touched my GI bill yet; things are looking good for me financially.

My most recent gaming acquisition (on top of the pile of other games I have to finish) is STALKER for the PC, a game in development since 2001, long thought to be vaporware. Think Oblivion with guns and no leveling system.

It takes place in 2012, in the area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It's mostly a first-person shooter with some RPG elements such as inventory management, the need to eat, trading with NPCs, and so on. All in all, the game nails the dreary post-apocalyptic feel of games like Fallout but with a Russian ribbon of flavor running through it. The only thing you really need to know about STALKER, however, is that you can get blitzed on vodka and then immediately go shoot at zombies that have guns of their own. There's much more depth than that, but I thought such a scenario bore mention.

The game has its quirks and bugs, but I've been spared from the latter. It had me in its grip for the better part of this past weekend and I'm looking forward to playing some more tonight.

Schadenfreude Free With All Purchases

You know, time was I could rely on my being poor to keep me from buying stuff I don't need. Now I have to rely on my willpower, and that's not working out too well.

Speaking of going to electronics stores for things you could live without, while I was at Best Buy trying to leave with only one movie (successfully, as it turned out), I watched a doughy nerd with a stud in his nose strike out in the computer games section.

Him: You look familiar; did you go to Leonardt—
Her, very flatly: No.
Him, murmuring: Oh. Well, you kinda looked familiar.

He furtively looked around to check if anyone had seen, similar to what people do when they stumble while walking. We made eye contact through the racks, and he received that which he dreaded most.

Acknowledgement of the moment.

Toad and Seafood

Last weekend Matt, the other Matt, and I went to see Glen Phillips at the Rams Head Tavern (no apostrophe, thank you very much) in Annapolis. I only know a couple of his songs, as I was more of an STP man duting Toad's heyday, but I have to admit that the guy can sing very well. He knows his way around an acoustic too, which is always a plus for a singer.

He had an interesting story about how a vasectomy smells that has apparently been making the rounds at his tour spots. He went ahead and shared this story with us, as well as how the guy who prepped him for the procedure was apparently a Toad fan. I'm not sure how awkward it would be to talk about 90's alternative with a fellow who's shaving your freshly-anesthetized junk, but I'm guessing it's somewhere in the realm of very.

Speaking of fascinating stuff that shouldn't be, I watched two lobsters fight in the tank at the supermarket this afternoon for like ten minutes. It was amazing. All the other lobsters had given them a berth, content to pile up in the corners as it is a lobster's wont to do. They fought in the center, as the Gladiatores Violenti of old did in the Colloseum of Fair Rome. Actually, it was more sumo than swordplay, since both lobsters had their claws banded shut. They sort of pushed each other back and forth, but it was the fact that they were evenly matched that made it so enthralling. One would gain ground, then lose it, then gain it back, back and forth, until I realized I was holding a gallon of cold milk and my fingers were going numb. They were still at it as I walked away.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, it apparently smells like barbeque. Something to do with cauterizing shut your vas deferens.

I Resemble Anthony Perkins

This information came last night as Matt took a cell phone picture of me to prove to a friend that his roommate looks like the guy who played Norman Bates in Psycho.

I'd seen Psycho before, but that was several years ago, and the resemblance never occurred to me, nor did anyone else seem to take notice. Now however, all I can say is damn, it's downright uncanny.

Also, Anthony Perkins was one devilishly handsome fella.

Wrap Your Mind Around This, If You Can

Water can fall from the sky while it's frozen!





It's like... it's like that stuff that sno-cones are made from, only falling from the sky and devoid of colorful, flavored syrup!

Yes.

Hell yes.

"Aint Clem, Come Quick! The Crick Done Froze Over!"

It looked a lot cooler when there was snow on the ice, but it was too ass-cold outside to take pictures then.

The photos are actually 1024x768; the thumbnails are clickable for higher-res versions at Flickr.

This One Is About Toilets and Their Fans

The office where I work has a small custodial crew, hired from a cleaning company by the building owner. There's one guy on this crew who's a real piece of work.

You know that slightly weird but altogether harmless-seeming kid who sat at the very front of your algebra class in eighth grade? The one who thought he was everyone's friend because nobody really picked on him, yet it was all more out of a shared desire just to avoid him? Ever wonder what would happen if the kid grew older, but never grew out of his social maladjustment? This man is what happens.

The man of whom I write is almost as wide as he is tall, balding through an already-thin scraggle of curly gray hair. He does not walk. He can only waddle, and I don't mean just hints of a waddle or a waddly-type walk, either—you can see the effort he puts into lifting his leg from the hip and setting it down again. It is the quintessential duck-style waddle, so pronounced it would be parody were it not tragic, tragic reality. He breathes from the mouth, and he talks to people halfway down the hallway, loudly, even if they're not interested in talking back (perhaps an extension of his inability to fall into step with people due to his waddle). Once, when I was unfortunate enough to have to squeeze by him in the hallway junction, I picked up the unmistakable aroma of vinegar emanating from him. Oh, and this guy is a total creep, too.

Hmm, I guess it would be wrong of me to judge someone based on their appearance, huh? Well, I guess it's a good thing I'm not.

This guy likes to clean the women's restroom. He really, really likes to clean the women's restroom. He's responsible for cleaning the men's room too, but he only gets in there twice a day. With the ladies' room he's like a goddamn cuckoo clock: he pops his head through the door every hour. I wish I were lying when I say he gets himself in there every hour, but I think that's all he's really there for. Whenever he's away from the women's restroom, it feels as though he's just killing time, going through the motions cleaning other not-the-girls'-bathroom things, waiting for the next opportunity to get into that restroom at such an interval where he doesn't seem creepy. But I'm onto him. Oh yes I am.

To truly convey the creepy nature of this man's modus operandi regarding women's restroom sanitation, I shall have to break it down for you. First, he shall knock, though I'm sure this is only because even he realizes you can't just walk into the women's restroom unannounced. He shall then (quite) cheerfully call through the door "maintenance department," though "mouth-breathing manchild janitor" would be more succint and fitting.

Here is where, when I first noticed the pattern, something really started to give me chills. If nobody answers, he will enter, the door will close behind him, and he will clean the still-clean-from-the-last-four-times-he-was-in-there-today restroom. If the restroom is occupied, however, he will call (still very cheerfully), "Oh! That's okay!" There will be a pause as he stares at the door, then "Take your time, no rush!"

The pause and the line that follows pushes my creep-sensor needle into the orange of the meter. There are variations to the line (e.g. All right then, I'll wait" and so on), but just its presence doesn't sit well with me. Want to know what pushes my creep-sensor into the red?

When he makes small talk, through the door, with whoever's in the bathroom.

Now, the small talk is just small talk, innocuous per se. If you were to read it as dialogue from a script, with no direction, it would be boring. However, the fact that a fully-grown man is talking about the weather with a woman who just wants to finish her business on the other side of a door should be enough to make anybody cringe.

Even when he doesn't chat up a lady on the can, he stands there, several feet away but still essentially in front of the door, waiting for whoever's in there to leave. He could just go dust something or wipe down windows or whatever and come back later, but no, he waits, a true man on a mission.

My theory? He wants to see the face of the woman he'd talked to while she was doing her duty.

The crew he's a part of has been here for several months, but I'm only now mentioning it because of something interesting that happened today of which both I and Manchild Janitor were a part.

Our restroom has automatic-flushing urinals. I'll explain how they work for any women or robots who may be reading. Essentially, it's the same sort of echolocation device on sit-down toilets, only used here to determine when someone has both approached and left a urinal. When you leave, it flushes the urinal. I had a whimsical streak in me today, and early in the day today I indulged it by standing to the side of the urinal while I did my thing, where I would be invisible to the futuristic auto-flush technology. I zipped up, backed away, and the urinal did not flush, for it had never known I had been there. For some reason, it felt like an awesome thing. Man still superior to his own technology and all that.

Later this afternoon I was the victim of one of Manchild Janitor's halfway-down-the-hall conversation starters. Unlike all that had come before, however, this one interested me.

"Say, buddy, has the flushing been all right for you today?"

"The what?" I replied. The thing I'd done this morning with the urinal was not registering.

"Didja use a urinal toilet today?" (Yeah, he called it a "urinal toilet.")

"Yeah, I did."

"Did it flush okay?"

That's what reminded me, right there. I read his face, and his look was one of bewilderment. I jumped on it. I lied.

"Sure did."

He shook his head, as might a chess player who knew he had a winning move but was denied it before his turn. "Dang. I think one of the urinal toilets is actin' up a little. Don't use the one on the end, okay?"

He didn't specify which end, but as it happens I already knew which end. I couldn't let this go; this was an opportunity to crawl into his mind, if only a little bit. I had to see. I had to see if he was truly worthy of the title Manchild Janitor.

"Acting up, you say?" I walked closer to encourage him to share more.

"Yeah, was in there just now* and the water had pee in it, like it ain't flushed. I waved my hand and it flushed, but it might be broke or somethin. I waved my hand a couple more times to make sure, and all th'other urinal toilets too. They all seem to work okay, but stay away from that end one, okay?"

I was actually mildly surprised that nobody had used the urinal after me all day. If they had, however, I suppose none of this could have been possible. I nodded and continued down the hall, in a bemused daze.

My not-prank had blown his mind. He truly is the Manchild Janitor.

*Remember what I said about him only visiting the men's room a few times a day versus his clockwork-like visitation of the ladies' facilities.

Piano Hero

Want to learn how to play piano, or perhaps just a specific song? If a midi exists of the song, use Piano Hero to see how it's played!

All you have to do is download the Piano Hero .exe from Sourceforge, run it, and select a midi file that's on your computer.

I Think I'm In Love

With this.

Oh, and this too.

Happy Valentine's Day, suckers.

Follow Your Dreams, Unless They Are Not Financially Viable

The inlet that runs by the house was frozen over all last week due to it being ass cold outside, and I meant to take a photo because it looked awesome. However, I kept putting it off and putting it off because damn, it was ass cold outside.

The filmmaker bug is nibbling at me again, and I found myself fantasizing at work today about quitting and making a living creating works of entertainment. I guess the official term would be "independent filmmaker" but, you know, my stuff would be indy due to the nature of its creation, but not indy indy—not the same genre where flowers wilt or steaks rot in time-lapse black-and-white while its creators all but fellate others for awards and golf-claps. I dig accessible works of art, you see; I'm not so much an appreciator of art as I am a consumer of it. I suppose that says something about me right there, but I just can't "appreciate" something created for the sole purpose of pointing out how I both can't understand it and refuse to pretend that I do.

There's a cross on a hill that sits next to Route 5, in a small break of the trees. I haven't been up the hill to look at the cross up close, but it's probably about 10 feet tall and made of either stone or marble. When driving home from my friend's house late at night, I've sometimes caught glimpses of it during fog or during a starkly-clear full moon. It looks like an establishing shot out of a horror movie, and I find myself wanting to incorporate it into a work that doesn't exist.

Speaking of a horror-themed work that doesn't exist, I'm still waiting on Symphony of the Night to be released on Xbox Live. I've never played it before but damn, do I ever want to.

The Most Fascinating Thing You Will Ever Read, Ever

So I cleaned the oven this evening.

Hey, come on. This is about the most interesting thing I've done recently.

Anyway, I was pretty much forced to, since a horrible-smelling, oily smoke would start to pour up from beneath three of the four burners on the stovetop whenever they were turned on. Here is the epic story of how I went about that.

Being occupied by bachelors, the house obviously has very little in the way of cleaning supplies. Fortunately, this also meant there was plenty of BPoI™ to call upon to get the job done despite that.

I used a dish sponge, the Lysol Bathroom Cleaner from the bathroom, and about three SOS pads. After lifting the stovetop to disconnect the burners, I found I couldn't disconnect the first one. It was simply attached to the wires but good. For that burner, I simply sucked it up and cleaned out the tray beneath it with the hunk of iron resting on my hand, one watchful eye on the burner's knob in case some ghost decided to reach from the ether and turn the heat on while both of my hands were busy scrubbing. Hey, you never know. Try cleaning a burner while it's still attached to the stove and watch how paranoid you get. The other three burners detached nicely, enabling me to clean their trays in the sink.

To say these trays were filthy would be an insult to actual merely filthy things everywhere. These trays were biological hazards. If you had to throw the trays out with the rest of a hospital's trash, they would have to be separated from the medical waste so that the waste would not be contaminated. As I scrubbed each one with an SOS pad, the offal would blacken the water. The water would be black as it circled the drain. Black! As the soap inside the SOS pad lathered up with my scrubbing, a thin gray sludge of water, soap, and whatever the hell was on that tray gathered in the bottom. It was disgusting; I began to think the previous tenants never once cleaned the stove.

By the time I was done with all three, the crud I'd cleaned out had almost clogged the drain filter. Fortunately, it's removable, so it met with the trash can and a good thorough shaking. I thank providence I didn't have to actually touch it. After soaking the sponge for a rinse wipe-down (and more black water, God, where did it all come from?) on each of the trays, I put them back and fired up a burner.

Success! No more smoke, aside from the cooking-off of what water was left in the tray. I finally got to prepare my macaroni and cheese without any danger of setting off the smoke alarm–at least, no more danger than what there normally is of that happening when I make mac 'n cheese.

I suppose though, for awhile yet, that every time we cook, it will smell like someone sprayed Lysol in the kitchen.

Ah, Google Ads

Bringing cryptic non-advertising to the masses like nobody else can.



Well, are you?

"Oh, Come On, Man! How Do You Not Know What a Piano Is?"

This is the link.

A coworker suggested it's likely an effort on Google's part to help build up some data for an AI to analyze and later be able to more accurately assign keywords to images. I guess the whole 'random partner' deal is to prevent idiots from collaborating to assign stupid or unrelated words to images. It's kind of weird when you and a stranger on the Internet sync up mentally.

In addition, Matt pointed out that some of the "guests" you get partnered up with are probably just the AI bouncing some of its data off of a human mind. It'd be the only rational explanation for calling an old sepia photo of a married couple a "portmanteau."

I wonder if the points we earn will go towards something in the future.

I Liked That Lane Better Anyway

Southern Maryland got a couple of inches of snow on Sunday, just enough to throw off your groove while driving.

I had gone to my uncle's house to watch the NFC and AFC championship games and eat steamed oysters. Steamed oysters are one of those foods where I'll eat about two a year and that's all I need; it's just not compelling, as food goes. Eat one with a saltine cracker and all the flavor disappears.

Anyhow, by the time I started the drive home, full of meatballs and chicken wings (and two oysters), it was quite dark outside and the snow was still falling in tiny, heavy flakes. The roads were dusted but the snow was struggling to stay anything more than melted. For a moment, I forget I'm driving in snow and I slide out a bit while braking before the road I'm trying to turn onto.

Okay, no big deal, I drive a WRX, it's got all-wheel drive and performance tires, so I only need to be super careful when trying to come to a stop. I get onto that road and make my way down to a T intersection with a light. I want to make a left turn, and there's two turning lanes available. The leftmost lane has two cars, and the right lane is empty. I move into the leftmost lane and apply the brakes.

I feel a crunching sensation beneath my right foot as the brake shoes struggle to find purchase on the snow-caked brake pads. They can't. I'm already driving pretty slowly, so I'm forced to watch myself slide helplessly at 15 miles per hour towards the rear of the car in my turning lane. I figure I'm going to hit, and bumper damage will result, but little more. I'm dreading more the thought of having to exit my vehicle into the butt cold to exchange insurance information.

Then, inspiration strikes.

I turn the wheel slightly right, as though I were changing lanes. My all-wheel drive does not fail me and the car dutifully pulls into the empty turning lane, still unable to stop but at least now I'm not going to trade paint with the person in front of me.

Physics eventually does its thing and, incredibly, my car comes to a stop right where it should, abreast the first car to my left, lined up to turn. Nobody was the wiser; I bet if I'd had a passenger even they wouldn't have thought the lane change was anything but casual.

Just because you're trying to avoid an accident doesn't mean you can't be smooth while doing it.

MySpace: "What're Y'all Doing?"

I was talking with a coworker about the recent MySpace lawsuits regarding parents who feel the Internet is not living up to its imagined promise of being a babysitter, in a similar fashion to how the teevee let them and the generation before them down in the late 20th century.

The motivation behind the lawsuit is the unfortunate sexual assault of a handful of underage girls who agreed—through MySpace, natch—to meet strangers in real life. MySpace will not allow children under 14 to have a presence on the site at all, and the profiles of children under 16 are viewable by "friends only." By this point, however, it would seem you can't get much older without the whole deal beginning to seem exceedingly creepy anyway. Of course, let's not forget that these predators weaseled their way onto the minors' "friends list" anyway, proving that rule to be about as effective as a seatbelt made out of toilet paper.

It's like a nature show in there, and I mean that almost literally: it's the human mating dance of the 21st century. None of the males on MySpace seem to wear shirts, and all of the females seem to think that turning the exposure way way up on their webcams will hide their facial blemishes and make their skin seem geisha-perfect. In reality, it only makes it seem that they've turned the exposure way way up on their webcams. Now, I'm only one guy, I admit, but my idea of beauty is hardly a powder-white oval with two eyes and a dim pair of lips in a sad frown. Is it fair to claim that everyone on MySpace is looking for a hookup of a sexual nature? Sure it's not fair, but judging from the way some of these people write, their minds certainly aren't on English grammar and composition (or, for some people, even being coherent).

This coworker of mine is 26, and she confesses that even she feels a bit too old to be doing the MySpace thang—which is why she doesn't. She described one of the only times she visited the site thusly:

"I brought it up, and it was like instant confusion. 'What's going on? Who are you people? What're y'all doing? I want to go home! Mommy!' You know how you used to feel as a little kid when you got separated from your mom at the grocery store? Visiting MySpace feels like that to me."

It was the "What're y'all doing?" that got me. I laughed, long and hard. I think it should be their new slogan.

E-Mail Confusion Leads to E-Mail Expressing Further Confusion, Film at Eleven

Been watching a borrowed copy of season two of 24 on DVD. I got to the infamous "cougar" sequence I'd been hearing about, but only just. Pretty soon I guess I'll see what the big deal is.

There was a string of inane e-mails at work today where several members of another site deluged our inboxes with reply-to-all e-mails regarding why they had received a specific, single e-mail that had nothing to do with them and had been sent in error to that site's distribution list.

Paraphrases of some of the e-mails' contents follow. Keep in mind that these were all reply-to-all, so just about everybody received each one.

"I don't understand why I got this e-mail."

"Me neither."

"Please remove my name from this distro list."

"[site] MEMBERS, DONT REPLY TO ALL, THE ORIGINAL EMAIL WAS AUTOMATICALLY SENT"

"Please remove my name as well, and that of [her subordinate]."

"What is this e-mail about?"

"I, for one, am glad I got this update."

"I think this e-mail was sent to me by mistake."

"Someone needs to double check the distro list on your end."

"You can disregard the e-mail, it was sent in error to [site], and please don't reply to all."

They of course disregarded that e-mail and remote members continued to send us messages for almost twenty more minutes before I suppose someone over there walked around the cubicle farm and handed out individual slaps upside the back 'a the head.

You know how something will be funny, but then the joke goes on for too long and it turns tragic, but then the joke continues for even longer so it instead becomes really funny? That's the extent of my feelings for what happened there.

Also, in an unrelated e-mail, someone apparently thinks the noun form of "adapt" is "adaption."

And I'm one of the few people there without a college degree.

Traffic Avoidance by Design

I love working on the side of the highway opposite where 90% of the people in this county work. Lane changes are a glorious, easy thing. A mere two lanes away from me, the highway is a Gigeresque snarl of sole-occupant SUVs and immaculately clean Toyota Tacoma 4×4s jockeying to get into woefully inadequate turning lane.

The commute home is equally lovely. Ten minutes' driving, and I live on the side of the highway opposite the side that—yes!—90% of the county lives on!

I Made It to Star Scout, By The Way

Had some stale Twizzlers at work today, and now my jaw is tender from all the hardcore chewing.

In other confectionery news, Girl Scout cookie season has started, and already proud mothers are dutifully carting their daughters' order forms about work, shoving them under people's noses and asking if they would care to make any purchases. I'm really glad that, in the Boy Scouts, we never had to hawk cookies or light bulbs or other stuff. Everything we did was on the cheap, just like real men would do it.

Dome tents? Those things are expensive! As our quartermaster (easiest job in the troop, since we didn't have anything) used to say, "some tarp 'n twine'll do ya just fine!"

Toilet paper? Use leaves. The bigger the better. You better not wipe your ass with poison ivy because we've only gone over what it looks like a hojillion times.

The oar just broke? Paddle with your damn hands! The webbings, use the webbings of your fingers! It's there, just cup your hands and paddle.

In fact, I'd say our troop had only one thing, but that just might have been the most important thing of all:

The dignity of not selling cookies.

Tips By Way of Tits

We returned to the Hot Noodle this evening to deliver the waitress's tip, as we'd promised ourselves yesterday.

We did a piss-poor job of describing her to the hostess, a problem which was only compounded by the fact that both of the waitresses working the bar last night were the same height, skin tone, and hair color and style. We had to identify our waitress by the amount of cleavage she'd been showing.

No, really.

It was the hostess who opened up this avenue of identification. She leaned in close to us over the front counter, as if afraid people in the restaurant would overhear, break their chopsticks, throw them down into their dish with disgust, and leave.

"Now, I don't want you to take this the wrong way," she said in a hushed voice, "but do you remember how her dress was cut?" She made a slashing motion across her own chest, telegraphing what she meant.

The consensus between Matt and I was that our waitress had the more modest dress of the two there that night. The hostess seemed to know who it was, then, and so had us put the tip money into an envelope, which she then sealed and labeled with the waitress's name.

Nicole. Her name was Nicole, unless the hostess got it backwards. Here's hoping Nicole accepts our belated gratuity.

Paper Telephone

There's a game making the rounds that looks like a lot of fun: paper telephone. I'm gonna have to suggest it at the next party I attend.

The way it works is you start with a sentence written out at the top of a piece of paper. The next person has to draw a picture describing the sentence, then folds the paper so that the original sentence cannot be seen. After that person is finished drawing, they pass it to the next person, who describes the picture with a sentence, then folding over the picture so the next person cannot see it, and so on, between writer, artist, writer, artist. In other words, the only thing any one person has to go on is whatever the person immediately before them did. Keep that in mind as you look at some of them, and it'll be a lot funnier. The only thing that absolutely has to happen is that the game must end on a sentence, so that the original sentence and the ending sentence can be compared.

If you want some absolutely drop-dead hilarious paper telephone sessions, check out Biblical paper telephone, where you start with Bible passages and the writers are required to keep the Bible-type language going (thees, thous, begats, etc.)

"An Australian and his wife" had my sides in pain.

Hot Noodle, Stiffed Waitress

For this evening's Friday-night entertainment, Matt the housemate touched upon the idea of trying out the Hot Noodle's new "fuzion" bar. I looked it up; that's actually how it's spelled. It pained me to type the word, rest assured.

The Hot Noodle, while sounding like a rather esoteric sex act, is actually a pan-Asian cuisine restaurant and bar divided by a wall. During regular meal hours, the restaurant is open, but at night the bar side opens as well. Aside from the bar itself, there are pool tables, dart boards, hookah pipes, and a reduced after-hours menu offering the place's more popular dishes.

The week before, while there on lunch, we peeked through the glass door dividing the two halves of the establishment. The hostess approached us and offered us a flyer good for a free second round of shisha tobacco if presented to the waitress. Tonight we got our chance to cash it in, and cash it in we did.

We took a small booth-like setup against the wall, across from the pool tables. The booth had a tiny table on which the main hookah pipe would stand, as well as another small table for drinks and menu items. We chose the strawberry shisha tobacco to start, as I'd smoked that particular flavor in Kuwait and remembered it being pretty good.

Smoking from a hookah is largely meant to be a social thing; while one person is puffing, you have to form a seal over your own nozzle with a thumb or finger so that they can draw richer smoke. The tobacco used isn't the same stuff found in cigarettes; the vast majority of the mixture is actually flavored molasses. As such, the nicotene levels are incredibly low to start, and with the natural filtration done by the water in the hookah's bowl, by the time the smoke reaches your mouth there's almost none left at all.

After we were set up and puffing away—the strawberry was good, by the way—the waitress checked up on us and Matt ordered a saké-tini, which was for this place equal parts Grey Goose and Gekkaikan. Apparently, it was quite good. Damn good, actually. Smooth as hell. Matt couldn't stop raving about it.

We smoked for a bit and watched the pool players. When our waitress returned, she asked if we wanted anything to eat. We knew from our several lunches there that their pad Thai is excellent, so two orders of that, plus a straight vodka martini for Matt. It was his first time having Grey Goose, and he wanted to see how it did on its own.

We ate, we smoked, and Matt drank. The waitress was walking around with tequila shooters, and sweet-talked Matt into trying one. It was the whole nine yards: lick your hand, shake salt on your hand, lick the salt, take the shot, and suck on a lime. Bing bang boom. The pad Thai was great, by the way.

For the second round of tobacco, we wanted to try the coffee flavor, but as it turns out they were out of it, so we got mint instead. Much more subtle than strawberry, mint was something you could really taste only after you blew out the smoke. It was still good, though.

After we were done, our waitress delivered the itemized check, and Matt decided to put it on his card. Apparently that shot he had bought cost four dollars. Damn. I'm glad I don't have a taste for alcohol. Knowing I didn't have enough cash on me to cover my part of the bill, I slipped out of the restaurant to go to my credit union, which is conveniently located on the other side of the parking lot from the Hot Noodle. After withdrawing what I needed, I met Matt at my car.

Back home, I worked out how much of the bill I owed. Since I hadn't been around for the actual signing of the bill, I had one amount I couldn't yet figure.

"How much did you tip?" I asked.

For a moment, there was silence. Then: "Grrraaahh! I suck!"

"What, what happened?"

My housemate turned around in his chair, eyes wide. "I didn't fill in the tip line!"

If you'll remember, I had already left the restaurant when it came time to sign the receipt. Had I been there, I might have noticed and been able to catch it. I hadn't been, however, and so the tip column had remained empty. It was just a simple case of forgetfulness.

At that moment, we both could almost hear the nice waitress cursing our name, her normally-lovely face twisted into a mask of rage and spite, fist raised, shaking, as her own carefully-manicured nails drawing blood from her palm even as her knuckles whitened from the effort.

After the revelation's spell broke, we soon decided it'd be pretty styling (or as styling as it could be, at that point) to return the next night just to give the waitress her tip, so that's the plan for tomorrow. Let's hope she's working.

Let's Hope So, Buddy

On the way back from lunch today, we were approaching a red light with a Ford Escape in the lane next to us already stopped. There was a bumper sticker on the back that read "Life is good... eternal life is better." Naturally, there was also a Jesus fish and a smaller "He died for you" decal accompanying the sticker elsewhere on the back.

As we pulled up alongside the Escape, I saw that the driver was smoking.

New Species of Nerd Discovered: The Pen Fanboy

Staedtler, baby.

I picked up the Staedtler liquid point 7 (no capitalizations, thank you) at my local Staples, and now I am a convert. I am sold. You should be too. The Omega Pen exists, and it is available at your local office supply store in convenient four-packs. Holding the pen is what I imagine holding Excalibur or Mjölnir or Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi must feel like. You know, if they were pens.

It's as if the gray, no-nonsense PaperMate from accounting and the glitter-bedecked pink-ink gelpen from a teenage girl's diary got drunk at the Bic social and shared a night of forbidden passions, and this pen was their offspring. It's the college professor who knows how to laugh; it's the billionaire who wears an open sport coat with his t-shirt and jeans. It's what St. Peter would use to check off the names of souls as they enter Heaven if Heaven hadn't gone paperless in 2002.

In unrelated news, I'm fully confident that, years from now, it's the pen I'll be using to sign a DNAR on my deathbed. I'll marvel as every involuntary shake of my agèd, withered hand shows through in lines of perfect evenness, smoothness, and clarity. I shall soon thereafter draw my final breath, Staedtler still in my slowly-relaxing clutches, and that shall be the story of me.

It's also the most modest, least pretentious pen ever. The double-vowel in "Staedtler" isn't that fancy-pants Æ character that all the goths put in their fake goth names to make themselves look ancient or Roman or whatever—it's just an A and an E next to each other. The "Made in Germany" isn't in giant neon letters along the side, with a "Type R" sticker hastily slapped on the end; instead, it's in tiny block printing just below where the cap rests flush with the rest of the pen (minus the Type-R sticker). There to be appreciated, but not celebrated. Class.

In other words, you wouldn't be ashamed to carry this around all day in your shirt pocket, strong clip keeping it tight and ready against your chest, like a gunslinger suspecting an ambush. The pen is just there, as though the only thing it has to say is "Aw shucks, now. I'm a pen, not a Benz. I'm just trying to be useful, so I'm here if you need me. If not, that's cool too."

What an awesome writing implement. If only there were some way to blog by way of handwriting all the entries on paper. I guess, technology-wise, we're not quite there yet.

Bachelor's Guide to Improvised Speaker Cable Installation

So you've got this supremely awesome home theater setup, but unfortunately you didn't spring for the fancy-pants wireless speakers that they show in catalogs like Crutchfield and probably SkyMall. Perhaps the whole routine of driving your visitors to triage after they constantly get knocked out by tripping on the loose wires and hitting their head on the corner of the eight-dollar end table you got from a yard sale is getting old. It's time to string them up. I'm talking about the speaker wires there.

Even more unfortunately, you're lacking basic tools, since you're a bachelor and so, by extension, nobody is nagging expecting you to fix anything. As with all things single-life, from igniting rolled-up sheets of printer paper on the stove and then rushing outside with it to light your grill to putting an ancient throw rug over a window to keep the glare from hitting your two-thousand-dollar HDTV, it's all about improvisation.

Gather the following materials that are commonly close at hand for the average bachelor:

1. Keyring
2. Little brass hooky screws that kind of look like a question mark, only without the dot (as many as you think you'll need)
3. Nail (just one)
4. Big-ass combat knife with a solid butt
5. Some kind of thing to stand on (not pictured, unless you are going to use a desk, in which case my own is pictured as an example desk)



The steps for installing the hooky screws are just as easy to get as the materials themselves.

1. Move your thing to stand on to the place where you need to stand on it.
2. Stand on the thing with your other objects in your hands.
3. With the butt of the knife, tap the nail into the ceiling to make a guiding hole for the hooky screws.
4. Pull the nail back out again. I hope you have fingernails you don't mind messing up (if you actually are a bachelor, this is always the case). If you don't have fingernails or are not a bachelor, use the pinching power of the keyring to pull the nail out. Also, if you do it this way, you can totally pretend it's a grenade and you're pulling the pin on it.
5. Hand-twist that hooky screw into the guiding hole but good.
6. Rest the speaker cable in the crook o' the hook.
7. Move on down the line and go back to step one.

Before long, you'll have a veritable aqueduct through which your speaker cable passes, like so.



Yeah, those are where the hooky screws went in my particular case.

At the end, your cable will be clear of obstructing people and even decorations, as seen here descending tastefully to the speaker on the far side of your handsome portrait hanging over the mantle of Stephen Colbert standing in front of a portrait of himself hanging over the mantle.



Most of the more sophisticated wall-mounting hardware will allow for the speaker cable if both happen to attach to the speaker in the back. If they don't, just make use of your handy Bachelor Powers of Improvisation™ and bypass threading it through the mounts entirely, as I did.



As for the mounting system itself, well... that was just more BPoI™ on my part. Mounting tape + duct tape = no ugly nail holes that the landlord is yelling at me to spackle over come eviction time.

And so, rock on with your new, almost-so-organized-people-might-think-someone-else-put-you-up-to-it cable job!

Copies of Twilight Princess Soon To Be Worth $28,000, Predicts Area Man

Have you found Jesus? I have. He's in Hyrule. No, really!

Fire up Twilight Princess and head for Kakariko Village. Head to this spot on the map (GameCube users, just mentally flip the image):



There he is! Do you see him? Eh? Eh?

If you need a closer look, larger images are available via the thumbnail links.

Happy New Year

My resolution to make a new blog: successful.

It's time for some good old-fashioned laurel-resting-upon.