"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.