It's The Most Wonderful Tiiiime...

A thought.

I was talking with my girlfriend yesterday while we were listening to Christmas music and doing crossword puzzles (man we're old) and "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" came on. Apart from the fact that I think Santa is probably a Nazi with his reindeer having names like Rudolph(Hitler) and Blitzen, she noticed something odd about the song. If you've never heard it...stop living in the sewers. No seriously, this is how it goes...

"You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen" (too many ands)

"Comet and Cupid and Donder and Blitzen" (more 'ands', plus Blitzen sounds like he's leading an attack)

"But do you recall?" (This is where it gets weird)

"The most famous reindeer of all?"

I have never really thought of the wording of this song before because, like most of you, I just learned it as a kid and cared more for the memorizing rather than understanding. Sort of like school I guess. Anyway, if you knew Dasher and Dancer and Lancer and Pony. And Comet and Stupid and Dumber and Nazi, why wouldn't you know the most famous one?!

It's like saying, "Well you know Taylor and Polk and Garfield and Van Buren. But do you recall the most famous President of all? Washington our very first President!" Or Lincoln or whatever you think is the most famous. Point is that's stupid.

Happy Thanksgiving (now with nunchakus)

Before I go into Thanksgiving, lemme just say this. Today I saw while walking at Waterfront Park, a Santa Claus...on a unicycle...playing "Let it Snow"...on bagpipes. I love Portland.

Anyway, I went to Eugene (pronounced You-jean) for Thanksgiving again this year. Ever since I met Maureen, she would go on and on how Thanksgiving was the best holiday. At least with her family. Last year was pretty good, but not anything to write home about. As you can tell by my blog here, I'm writing home now.

This year it was bigger, better, and definately crazier. We had dinner of course, and it was really, really awesome, especially the homemade stuffing. Then desert and a nap, which is essential. Some Longhorn football and a Heisman winning performance by Colt McCoy. Then some really crazy, insane version of sharades (not sure if that's the correct spelling).

I've played some games of sharades in my time, but none with players so skilled. I was trying to stump them, but they even got "Aqueous Transmission"! (which is a song by Incubus).

All in all it was a great Thanksgiving. The only thing that could've made it better would be.....ninjas? For some reason, Hollywood decided it would be a good idea to release an uber violent martial arts action movie called "Ninja Assasin" on Thanksgiving. Granted, Thanksgiving is the biggest movie going day of the year (yup, Americans love to go see a good flick after 5000 calories), but a ninja movie? It really doesn't seem to follow that 'yuletide' spirit. Although, had I not gone to Youjean, I probably would've seen it.

Hip Hop Hooray....OH...Hey!

Hooray to me! After nearly 10 months of unemployment, yesterday I received offers for not one, but TWO jobs! I will now be both a professional quizmaster and blogger. Weird huh? Anyway, enough of the boring stuff, on with the jokes and funny shtuff!

So, I was down on our favorite street Hawthorne and decided to get my weekly ration of ground coffee and extra crunchy peanut butter at Freddies. Upon exiting said store, I was almost immediately confronted by an 80 year old homeless man holding his dentures and wearing a life preserver. You know, the usual. As I passed him he exclaimed in a rather clear voice considering his age and penchant for booze...

"Naasp nope!"

I stopped and turned toward him with a confused, and admittedly somewhat frightened, look on my face. He must of realized that I could not understand him, so he put his dentures back into his mouth and repeated....

"Nice coat."

I thanked him, then ran the other direction, screaming and throwing spare change into side alleys like chaffs to throw him off my trail.

Why am I telling you all this? Is it because it's strange beyond belief and sort of funny? Yes. But the real reason is, I didn't realize you need teeth to properly enunciate words.

A tongue makes sense, because if you didn't have a tongue you would just sound like Green Day, and no one can understand what the hell they are saying. Lips also make sense because it fine tunes the words. I just don't see why teeth are necessary for speech? Hard sounds like "T", "D", and "C" all need that certain...bite....to...it (Austin Powers (in Goldmember voice)).

I just did a parentheses within a parentheses, which I find pretty cool. Lost my train of thought.

If someone would like to explain to me in the comments why teeth are useful for speech I would like to know. I could just look it up, but my roommate got Modern Warfare 2, and if I'm going to waste my time I would like it to be enjoyable.

Down To The Wire

(this is more like practice for writings to be done later today)

On this day 20 years ago, communism in Europe received its final crushing blow with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As such, I hope to celebrate this momentous occasion by telling you about....my recent trip to the grocery store. (SPOILER: It has nothing to do with Berlin, Germany, walls, falling, or communism. Well, maybe a bit of communism.)

So as I do on Mondays, or at the beginning of the week, I clear out my fridge of all the spoiled and/or empty containers of food and make the journey to the Frederic Meyer (his full name in my head) and restock. Normally when people go to the grocery store the last thing they get is the milk, but for whatever reason today I decided that was the first thing I would get.

Some of you may think, "What's so bad about getting milk first?". Well, it is refrigerated for a reason. Even though many people have repeatedly told me that there isn't a chance in hell (well maybe hell, it's sorta hot there I hear) that a bottle of milk could spoil before you got it home, I felt like the race was on. I was racing down isles and if I couldn't decide before I passed an item if I needed it or not, then on the shelf it would stay. Needless to say I skipped quite a few items and also picked some strange ones up, because I was afraid if I didn't then something horrible would happen with my diet that week.

Another thing I noticed about speed shopping is the vast majority of items that I purchased were ones that happened to be at eye level. I wonder if certain food companies purchase that shelf space? It had never occurred to me, but as I was rolling (I came up with a rule about halfway through the store to save time that I had to glide through isles without touching the ground, which to me was both smart AND fun) I thought that stores could bank on this if they aren't already. Like tell Coke that their products are going on the bottom shelf....unless, they tell us why Coke Zero tastes just like Coke, or something. Maybe money would be better.

Well I got through my grocery store visit withOUT spoiling the milk, and all I had to sacrifice was purchasing the things I needed for stuff that I may or may not eat.

Oh, the communism part. Someone new must have been working the food court counter because the breakfast pizza that they normally have samples of in the morning, had whole slices as samples. I'm not kidding, WHOLE SLICES!! My only conclusion of this is that they were a communist and thought they needed to share the wealth and bring down the Frederick Meyer capitalistic machine. Or they were too lazy to cut it into small pieces. Either way, good for me.

(And for no reason at all, go here http://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/)

The Future Is Now

The future is now, the present is past, and the past is...well...damn you got me. Perusing teh intarwebs today I came across this story (and videos YAY!) of a tour that Microsoft is doing on college campuses across the nation. Not your usual boring lectures on how Microsoft got started and all students should look to the company as proof positive to NOT stay in school, they (the company) decided to showcase some prototypes they have been working on.



Prepare yourself, this is the coolest thing I've seen, um, today I guess. But it could be the coolest thing I've seen for months (with the exception of the dinosaur puppets).

http://www.istartedsomething.com/uploads/collegetour1.f4v

and...

http://www.istartedsomething.com/uploads/collegetour2.f4v

The first video shows some of the really cool ways you can interact with your PC using a variety of sensory controls. Voice activation, motion, and eye tracking all to find a webpage without that nasty carpel tunnel crap. But what I like best is the way the "internet browser" (if you can call it that) works.

You give the computer a voice command like, "Computer, search 'toilet stall tapping' " and then a billion tiny web pages fly up on your screen, like some kind of mosaic art piece.

Looking at the billion web pages that are 2x2 pixels in size you exclaim, "Computer, this is incredibly useless to me. Organize." And then the web browser throws arbitrary categories on the newly rearranged web page dots.

Now that you have something resembling a path to surf the web by, you can tell your PC, "Computer-ji...oh, sorry we're not in India...Computer, go to US Senators." Then you can use your eye tracking skills to pick out all the fun web pages in that category talking about closet homosexual senators and the wonderfully hypocritical lives they lead.

The coolest stuff is of course the clear display and being able to pretend you are Tony Stark, even though you would probably just look at stuff on FaceBook instead of designing an armored robot suit for fighting crime.

Can't wait for that!! Of course it's probably going to take five years till they bring it to us, and another 10 before it's actually affordable, but we'll all be millonaires by then right? (of course by then a millonaire is minimum wage due to inflation)

It's Been A While...

Checking my blog today, I realized that I haven't posted anything in a week!! How bored you all must be!! Without me to entertain you, life must be so bland. Well I'm back, and although I can't think of anything that interesting and/or provacative to write about...there's always Japan. The Bloggess, a favorite blog of mine, recently took a trip there with her husband, resulting in some zany antics but not telling us much about the land of the rising sun.

So Japan. Land of a thousand weird things. Maybe more. Here are a few to satiate you till I can think of something better to write:




The Windows 7 Whopper. Japan decided that the best way to celebrate a new Microsoft OS that will endoubtedly clog up your computer in the very near future, would be to clog up your arteries. This Whopper contains, you guessed it, seven hamburger patties!! Excluding my brothers (who are now probably trying to scrounge up money to buy tickets to Japan for the sole purpose of this burger) everyone else thinks this is beyond a bad idea. Kinda like wasting money on getting Vista when it was, in retrospect, only a beta version of 7.



On a side note, PC of the Mac & PC commercials should talk about how Apple products are designed to fail once they create a new line. My iphone has taken a huge dive since the release of 3GS and my roommate's is worse.



The Anti-Flu suit.
In light of the recent Swine Flu scares, Japanese company Haruyama Trading Co. has created a suit to repel the spread of the H1N1 virus. The suit is made from titanium dioxide and when it goes under sunlight the substance reacts with some sort of minor corrosive agent killing the virus.

Superb invention Japan! Now if we could only do something about the areas that the virus actually ENTERS THE BODY. Namely the eyes, nose and mouth. At least its stylish.



Lastly, I haven't really talked about gaming much. As this blog was orginally designed for geeks and such, it seems only fitting to have one crazy ass Japanese arcade game!! I give you ... table flipping.



The point of this game is to get your character pissed enough to want to overturn the table. You are on a date and certain things that happen through the evening cause you "anger". Whenever you see a queue that "makes you mad" you slam your hands on the table. Once you've built up enough rage you finish the level by flipping the table over, causing a scene, and generally ruining your date. Congratualtions you win!!

That's all for now, I hope you enjoyed this look into the land of people who have no concept of normal society.