wildyams

I saw this article about how snowball fighting has become a huge sporting event in Sobetsucho, Japan and it triggered a thought process: Since John has a huge affinity for dodgeball, and since he now lives on Hoth, I thought maybe he could try to organize something like the Showa Shinzan International Yukigassen, which is according to the article "the de facto world snowball-fight championship." I mean, sure it's not the same as dodgeball, but consider the rules:

Two teams of seven players each start with 90 snowballs and face off on a field as wide as a tennis court and 1‡ times as long. The field features "shelters" -- 3-foot walls of snow that the players hide behind -- and a flag for each team, planted deep inside its half of the court. Players wearing protective helmets take opponents out of the game by hitting them with a ball. A team wins a three-minute set either by having the most players standing at the end, or by grabbing the other's flag. Matches are decided over three sets.

You take players out of the game by hitting them with a ball! That's practically dodgeball, except that you're dodging balls made of snow instead of rubber, right? Anyway, I was all excited thinking this could be a big thing for John until I read the following:

"Everyone who gets married gives up snowball fighting" because of the big time commitment, says Mr. Miyashita. "Japanese wives won't put up with it."

Turns out these guys spend almost all of their spare time practicing after work, on weekends, etc... Some of them even practice in the summer with rubber balls, honing their throwing technique and "tactics". Oh well, I guess if you want the ultimate prize you gotta be willing to pay the ultimate price, right? And obviously it doesn't get much bigger than being crowned the world snowball fighting champ!

As you may have noticed (but hopefully didn't) as tender of the ol' store here, I slightly adjusted the look here at Wild Yams. The idea is to make the links more legible, and I think this adjustment has done it. While an overall re-design would be the best thing (the look here is way beyond stale), I'm not really up for it right now. Maybe I'll do it eventually. I guess the truth is I don't care that much :lol Even though I doubt I'll change it back, feel free to bitch and moan in the comments if you want. If I don't read em, I'm sure somebody will.

Speaking of that, there seems to be some agitation or passive-aggressive negativity back in the comments lately. It hasn't erupted into any big flame war or anything, but it's getting annoying again. There's enough smarminess and "look at how much cooler I am than you" stuff in the world without it going on here (and yes I know, I'm guilty of it too, I'll try to lay off). Behave yourselves or I'll turn this weblog around and take you back home, and then it will off to bed with no supper.

On a different note, I think I'm getting sick, and since Steven was out all last week I'm gonna blame him if it does in fact happen. He said he had pneumonia or something like that, and what I'm feeling is just an irritation in the back of my throat and in my sinuses, and not some bronchial issue, so hopefully if I do have something coming on it won't be much worse than just a mild head cold. It's probably the rain we've been having that's been accounting for people getting sick, but who knows. Maybe we're all just assholes and we deserve it. I'm off to bed now, you kids play nice.

So I woke up this morning feeling like absolute crap, and as a result used one of my precious sick days and stayed in bed all day. I got a lot of rest and am feeling a little better now, which puts me at feeling about as good as I did last night. My throat and sinuses are very dry and irritated, but I'm trying to drink a lot of liquids to help with that. Anyway, I don't have a whole lot to talk about cause I spent the day in bed. I did see a very exciting Laker game tonight though as the Lakers finally beat the Houston Rockets (after losing two games to them already this year). Anyway, since I don't really have much of interest to say, here are the lyrics to the song sung by the Ewoks at the end of Return of the Jedi (it is important to note that George Lucas removed this song in the "Special Edition" re-release version that hit theaters in 1997):

If you want to get the English translation of what these lyrics mean, you can find them at this website.

Another exciting day today of my continuing sickness! I woke up this morning and felt worse today than I did yesterday, so naturally I called in sick again and spent the day in bed. I think it paid off though, because I feel a hell of a lot better now. I've got a slight cough, and my nose is running a bit, but I feel pretty good. I'm gonna go back to work tomorrow unless I feel worse than I did today. Since I once again have nothing interesting to talk about (do I ever?) here is a fun movie-themed "game" called the Movie Alphabet Game (here is part 2 as well). I haven't tried part 2 yet, but I got all the answers to part 1 (if you're nice I might give them to you :lol) Good luck.

I'm gonna piss and moan for a while, so if you don't like it, turn the channel. First off, it's fucking hot already, and I hate it. I mean, early March is not summer, right? According to weather.com yesterday was 93ƒ F, which means it was 7ƒ hotter than the record of 86ƒ back from 1946. That's pretty damn hot here for early March. Considering about a week ago it was pouring rain and it was so cold I had to wear socks to bed, it's quite a drastic change, and I hate it. On top of that, I fired up my AC for the first time in months yesterday only to find that it doesn't work. I talked to my apartment manager and he says they'll send the guy out to replace the freon, so hopefully that will get taken care of soon. The good news is that starting tomorrow I'm gonna be housesitting for my Dad again, so I'm guaranteed to have an air-conditioned environment till Monday at least. Last night the heat prompted me to shave my head (which was long overdue), and to switch from flannel sheets on my bed to smooth cotton ones (forgive me if I didn't identify my sheets properly, what do I know about sheets?).

I haven't blogged much lately, and that was mainly cause, well, I was sick at home and didn't have shit to talk about. And I'm lazy. Anyway, I didn't go to work on Friday like I was planning because on Thursday night I was up all night coughing and didn't finally get to sleep till sometime after 5 am. When my alarm went off a few hours later, I thought it would probably be a bad idea to start my road to recovery on only 2 or 3 hours sleep, so I called in sick again and went back to bed. The problem was I slept all day, and my sleeping schedule has been way off ever since. On Sunday I slept in till about 3:30 in the afternoon, and so Sunday night I couldn't get to sleep till the sun was coming up, and so I was rather tired at work all day Monday. I was tired enough to go to bed right after coming home from work yesterday (after shaving my head and changing the sheets). Ok, so now cause I went to bed so early, I got up early. At 5 am, whoopee :roll The good thing about this was that one, it was cool at that hour, and two I went to breakfast at pretty much the only place I go to breakfast if I get up early: Dupars. Ok, I'm done whining. You can wake up now.

You gotta love this story from The Smoking Gun about a Georgia woman who went to Wal-Mart and tried to buy over a thousand dollars worth of items using a fake $1 million bill. I mean, even if there really were $1 million bills, did the woman really think that the cashier would just count out a million dollars in change, minus the thousand or so that she was spending? I would have thought it would just be common sense that any time you're expecting to get over nine hundred thousand dollars in cash handed to you, you better be sure you're completely legal in the exchange, cause nobody is just gonna hand that kinda money over unless there is no doubt that they really do owe it to you. Right? My guess is that this woman has a good shot at being a future Darwin Award Winner.

I woke up early again this morning (because I went to bed early again last night), but I wasn't up for going for breakfast two days in a row, so I tried to go back to sleep. After laying in bed for about 30 minutes to an hour, I figured it wasn't happening, so I rolled over and turned on the TV, figuring I'd see if there was a movie or something on before going to work. Well, to my surprise and delight, the Peter Sellers/Blake Edwards classic A Shot in the Dark had just started on one of my pay channels, so I watched that whole thing (except for the first five minutes or so, which I missed). I have to say, I had not seen that movie, or any of those Pink Panther movies, since I was probably 10 to 12 years old, and I had really forgotten how incredibly funny A Shot in the Dark was. It was a great way to start off the day, laughing myself silly like that. Anyway, then I woke up, went to work, and had the usual day, and now I'm gonna get packed up and get ready to go to my Dad's place to begin my housesitting :grin

Last night I picked up Dave and we drove out to C & O Trattoria down by the beach for Jon's 29th birthday dinner. Dinner was great, the usual enormous portions of food, and it was great to see everyone who showed up. Afterwards I took Dave home, and then I noticed something: my camera had been stolen. See, when I got off work I put it in my armrest-holder thing and drove to pickup Dave. When I got to Dave's, I put my car stereo faceplate in there as well, and after picking up Dave I never put the faceplate back on cause we were just talking the whole time. When I got to the restaurant I valeted the car (as that's really the only option, or go pay about the same to park in a lot two blocks away). After I got the car back, I never checked in my armrest holder again till I dropped Dave off and I went to put my stereo back on. When I did that, I realized I had put my camera in there hours earlier, and it was no longer there, so I can only assume that the valet at the restaurant took it. First I have to say that in all honesty I haven't been using my camera hardly at all for a couple months now. I probably take maybe a picture a week on average, if that (which is quite different than when I first got it and snapped pictures constantly). Also, I was never much of a camera person before I got that camera, and only got that to take pictures to put on my blog here; but I found that most people really hate it when I did that, so I'd stopped doing it (or at least tapered way off on that). So anyway, the point is I don't really have a strong desire to replace the camera; however, I'm not really sure what I should do about the fact that it was stolen. I don't think I could identify the valet, as I didn't really give him more than a cursory glance (maybe I could pick him out of a lineup, but I doubt it). Given that, would it be worth it to call the valet company (they're not employed by the restaurant) and tell them one of their valets is a thief? Would it be worth it to call the police? I mean, I'm not that broken up that I don't have the camera anymore, although it does annoy me that I had something stolen from me like that, but do I have a moral responsibility to report it or something, or is it likely that reporting it won't really do any good? Oh well, thank god it's Friday at least, right?

UPDATE: I see that Jon also had some stuff stolen out of his car by the valet guy, so I'm sure we'll talk today and figure something out.

In light of the fact that I watched Star Trek: Nemesis twice this weekend, and Matt providing me with this hilarious link to a site that just replays Kirk yelling "Khan!" over and over; I figured I would bring up something I talked about with Dave, Jen and Cookie this weekend: what if they had a cable channel devoted solely to Star Trek? "So what?" you might say. I mean, a Star Trek channel would just be them running stuff from one of the five TV shows or 10 movies (or 11 if you include Trekkies), right, and what would be so interesting about that? At first I figured that would be plenty of programming to keep a channel going round the clock forever, but sooner or later it's gonna get repetitive, and that is where my own idea for a Trek Channel would come in.

See, I've found that most Trekkies are such devoted fans of the shows and movies that they not only love watching all the Trek stuff, but they will even support stuff that the actors of the different shows and movies have done, even the stuff that isn't Trek-related. A prime example of this was when Dave told me that when he was at Patrick Stewart's one-man stage performance of A Christmas Carol (something you typically wouldn't have found Dave at unless Patrick Stewart was performing it), he said he was sitting behind two women who were arguing about whether Kirk or Picard was the better captain. That's just one example, but obviously there are many others, as no one would doubt that Trekkies (or 'Trekkers', if you prefer) are some of the most hardcore fans of anything anywhere, and I know that even if I'm not right about every Trek fan, I'm certainly right about some of them.

When we discussed this possibility this weekend, it led to a rather humorous conversation, about what kind of weird programming lineups you might see on this channel when they weren't running one of the movies or TV shows. For instance, you might see some T.J. Hooker re-runs, or some great Shatner movies, like Kingdom of the Spiders or Airplane 2. Then you could see some great stuff by Patrick Stewart like Excalibur or Dune. Or maybe they could show Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Transformers the Movie, both starring Leonard Nimoy. Or maybe they could run some Brent Spiner flicks like Phenomenon or ID4. Or possibly they could run Clockstoppers (directed by Jonathan Frakes) or Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (starring Kate Mulgrew). I dunno about you, but I think this is a goldmine here!

Here's a few random thoughts for you. While I was housesitting for my Dad this weekend, I happened by Rick's for a meal, and on the review of my co-worker, Steven, I decided to try the famous 'spuderito', which is basically a burrito with french fries in it. I have to say, that not only is this a genius idea, but it was fantastically delicious. It was so good that I have been tempted to go back for another one, even though now that I'm back in Hollywood it's a good 30-45 minutes drive-time out of the way. I only haven't gone back because I know I'll be in Pasadena soon enough, and then I'll go again.

Speaking of being back in Hollywood, my air conditioning is finally fixed, and boy is it ever! As anyone who knows me will tell you, I like it cold, so having my AC be on the blink was distressing last week. Since all that was wrong was that the freon needed to be refilled, I noticed that it is now kicking ass with a full refill. For the last couple years it was not getting anywhere near as cold as it could, and would not stay cool for that long (some nights in the summer I'd run it and it would stop running sometime during the night). That wasn't the case last night, as I ran it very cold all night just to test it, and found that it not only kept me cool all night, but in the morning I even cranked it up some more to see if it would work, and it most definitely kicked in even colder. So now that I'm cool, I'm happy :grin

Finally, last night was a hell of a great Laker game. The Lakers beat the hapless Orlando Magic in overtime (that part wasn't great, LA should have routed them), and what stood out was the fact that LA overcame a 19 point defecit and rallied to win behind Kobe Bryant's 24 fourth quarter points (which tied a Laker franchise high for points scored in a quarter, a record which hadn't been equalled in about 30 years). What was equally impressive about Kobe's 4th quarter was what he did at the defensive end of the floor. Kobe was finally put on Tracy McGrady (last year's NBA scoring champ, and who is also on his way to this year's NBA scoring crown), who entering the 4th quarter had already surpassed his points per game average and had 32 points. McGrady entered the game having scored a league high 62 points two games ago and 40 points in the last game, and looked like he was headed towards another huge night against the Lakers. Kobe Bryant, however, held McGrady to only 5 points in the fourth quarter and the ensuing overtime period. In other words, while Kobe was lighting it up on offense, he completely shut down the league's best scorer on defense. It was truly an amazing 15 minutes of basketball. Most important, the Lakers got the win and are now the 3rd seed in the Western Conference. I hope they can hold onto it.

You may have noticed my site was down for a little bit last night and this morning. I'm afraid that was my fault. See, evidently I unknowingly let the registration on my domain here (wildyams.com) lapse, and as a result they yanked it. Me seeing the site was gone was my first notice that my site needed to be renewed, so I promptly renewed it and now it's good as new (I hope). See, when I originally registered this site I gave an AOL email address that I used back then, and which (like all AOL email addresses) has since become a spam receptacle; so when they sent me the notice to re-up my site, I never even saw it. After I renewed my site, I changed my email address, so hopefully I won't have that problem again two years from now when the site again comes up for renewal.

Anyway, enough about that. I've been going to bed and getting up earlier lately, and getting to work earlier as well. I have to say it feels better to do that. I typically don't have a problem getting to sleep, I've just always put off getting into bed. I get caught up in doing my usual meaningless stuff and next thing I know it's 2 or 3 am. Then that makes me extra sleepy in the morning and I have trouble getting up. I have trouble waking up anyway, but it's harder when I'm super sleepy.

What else can I talk about? I read an interesting article by some guy who's a huge video game afficianado about how he thinks that in the next year or two the entire video game industry is gonna crash. I don't know if I believe him (I can't really picture that), but he makes some interesting points. At the very least, it's an amusing read because he uses phrases like "enormous electrical dorkhat" to describe virtual reality headsets.

Ok, I'm off to watch the Lakers (hopefully) kick the shit out of the Clippers :grin

Man it was slow at work today, but I managed to make it through nonetheless. The biggest news at the office today was that it was Amy's birthday (Happy Birthday again, birthday girl!), and so we went out to lunch at Zach's and also had cake in the afternoon. Dave joined us for lunch at Zach's, at which point he was hounded endlessly about what it is he likes about Star Trek Voyager. Dave was a good sport though and answered all questions and we all seemed to have a good time. Josh at work gave me a copy of V to watch, as he claims it is his favorite movie/TV event of all time. I don't really remember the show, although I remember it being on and there being a lot of hullaballoo over it when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. It sounds like an interesting concept though, so I'm kinda interested to see how it is, although I'm steeling myself for some 1983 TV production values :lol I'll try to keep an open mind though. Well, on that note, I'm gonna make dinner and pop in V and then probably call it a night.

It's been a good weekend. Friday I got a call from my good friend Grover who called from the road telling me he was moving from Tucson to San Francisco and wanted to know if he could stay with me as a halfway-point stopover. Naturally I told him that was fine, and we agreed to meet up that night. I already had plans on Friday night to meet up with Rebecca, Dave and Jen, so Grover just met up with us. Grover was gonna go hang out with his family in the area for a bit first, so Dave, Jen, Rebecca and myself went to dinner at Crown City so we could also keep an eye on the Lakers-Clippers game (the Lakers barely won, again). After dinner we went back to Dave and Jen's place, where Grover met up with us. We sat up and talked for a couple hours then I dropped Rebecca off and Grover follwed me back here and he crashed on my couch.

The next day we got up and went for a really late breakfast at Dupars, then I loaned Grover a book of 200 CDs for the road (he said he'd forgotten all his CDs), and off he went on his way to meet his sister in Sacramento. After he left, I went and met Cookie, Matt, Steven and Josh over on the lot where we went to see Dawn of the Dead. The theater on the lot was a bit warm, and the audience was the most annoying kind you can have for a horror movie: the stereotypical crowd of people talking to the screen, saying stuff like "oh no, don't go in there!" and that thoroughly annoyed everyone. The movie was ok, although it was a far cry from the original, in my opinion. There were some things about it that worked pretty well, although there were too many instances of stereotypical horror-movie stuff where a character acts like a complete idiot and it creates a crisis that they have to deal with. It's not a bad movie though, although there's certainly lots of zombie movies that are much better. I'm sure it will do pretty well at the box office, especially since it beat out the other zombie movie that's been ruling the box office lately.

After the movie we all went up to Liz's house for she and Amy's co-birthday party celebration; and lemme just say, what a house! The house was great and in a great location, so it made the perfect place to have a big party. Most people from work showed up, as did a lot of former employees and other people I didn't know at all. There was tons of booze, lots of good conversation, karaoke and a hulk pinata. I spent a good portion of the evening hanging around outside by the pool, looking at the view of Hollywood and talking about movies (go figure :lol). Around midnight Cookie got pretty anxious to leave, and since I was his ride (as well as Josh's) I had to take him back to his car; but first I managed to talk him into staying for the pinata, although maybe we should have left, as there was a slight pinata mishap. All in all it was a fun night though, and it was really good to see everyone, especially people I hadn't seen in a while (like Greenspan, Joan and Thomas). So that was my weekend, and I for one had a good time :grin

I saw this pretty hilarious breakdown of what changes to the Constitution we should make if we want marriage to reflect exactly what the Bible says about it, take a look (my favorite part is the line about being fined one shoe :lol):

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

This will be my last entry for a little bit cause I'm in the process of switching my site to another server again (thanks to Dave for doing all this, he's the man! :grin) Anyway, to make things easier, I'm gonna quit making entries till the site is all switched over, which may be later today or might be a couple days, you never know. If anyone is reading this and gets bored with no new entries, go to one of these sites to keep yourself entertained:

- Fark
- BoingBoing
- Daypop

That's all for now, see you on the other server :grin

Ok, evidently I am now all moved over to the new server, and am quite happy about it. Thanks once again to Dave for moving me over here. There are a few things different over here on the new server, because of the way that Movable Type blogs have to be transferred from one server to the next. The most immediate thing that anyone who comes to my site regularly will notice is that the smilies in the comments are now gone. I may decide to do the work to put them back, but considering there is going to be a new version of Movable Type coming soon, odds are good that I would probably have to put the smilies back in when I upgrade to that anyway; so I doubt I'm going to do that yet. Also, to put the smilies in, I had to tweak a lot of the different MT files, and considering this is a fresh install of MT I'll probably be better off upgrading with these fresh, untouched files than I would have been with the ones I had tweaked. So that's the bad news about the move to the new server, but the good news more than makes up for it. The good news is that now my site will run a hell of a lot faster, and what that means for people leaving comments is that when you hit 'Post Comment' it will actually do it right away instead of sitting there hanging or posting the comment more than once. In theory at least, that kind of stuff should be in the past, and that makes me very happy. So anyway, there you go, that's my report from the new server, and I'm very glad to be here.

So I was perusing this list of 100 movies that need more love, when I happened to notice at #31:

Often mistaken for that bastard creation “comedy horror”, Fright Night is actually something more fun. Yes, it’s a cheesy vampire story. Yes, it features some wonderfully old-fashioned special effects. But despite its schlocky genre roots, it’s also simply a good film. Taking the high concept premise of what would happen if a vampire moved in next door to a kid obsessed with vampire movies, it manages to pay witty respect to the genres past, as well as having some fun with the conventions of the teen horror flick. The acting from the kids isn’t great, but with Chris Sarandon and Roddy McDowall hamming it up as vampire and hunter respectively, there’s more class and smarts to this movie than you think.

The Defense: Smarter than its reputation suggests, it probably won’t scare you any more, but it’s still an offbeat tribute to the love of horror. It’s also one of the only Stephen Geoffreys movies not to feature thrusting man-staffs, which is noteworthy in itself.

I just wanted to bring everyone up to speed on what's going on in the NBA lately, whether you all wanted to know or not. On Wednesday I had the incredibly good fortune of being offered a ticket to the Lakers-Queens game at Staples Center, courtesy of Liz, Keith and their friends who couldn't go. It was a hugely important game for the Lakers, who are making a late season run at the best record in the Western Conference (and possibly the league). The Lakers are a mere two games behind the Queens with about 10 games remaining, so every game counts. The game I went to was one of the most lopsided wins the Lakers have had all year, and was also the worst loss the Queens have had all year; and was hands down the most fun I've ever had at a basketball game. First of all, the Queens are the Lakers biggest rivals right now, and are the most hated team of most Laker fans. Second, the Queens are the only team ahead of the Lakers in the standings, so winning the game helped LA gain a full game on Sacramento. Because of these two things, winning the way the Lakers did (by 24 points) was incredibly fun. For the last few years the Lakers-Queens games are notoriously close, and I don't think the Lakers had even had a huge lead like that against Sacramento since 2000. Also, LA hadn't been playing that great before that game, so it was rather unexpected (LA had been winning, but only barely, and against teams that aren't very good). Anyway, that win seems to have jump-started the Lakers, as they also destroyed the Minnesota Timberwolves last night. The TWolves had the second best record in the West, but after the Lakers won by 17 points, LA took over the second best record, and that leaves the Queens as the lone team ahead of the Lakers. So needless to say I'm quite happy about the current state of the NBA.

I finally got out to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this weekend, and I have to say I really, really loved the movie. I will say that the ending and "final twist" were not really necessary, and that it would have been a great film without that; however, with the ending it presents a whole new spin on a few things and brings up some interesting questions about people, human nature and relationships. That being said, I found it to be a very moving, and quite touching story. I can already tell that it's going to be something I really will want to see again, and probably quite a few times. Like with any movie that is not told in chronological order, it will probably change drastically for me the second time I see it, and hopefully in a good way. I haven't really talked to anyonee else who saw it and liked it, so maybe I'm alone on this; but the movie really made an impact on me so I wanted to write an entry about it. So there.

I did find a pretty hilarious review of the movie on IMDB's user comments that I thought I'd share with you:

Date: 27 March 2004
Summary: Deserves the Razzie for the stupidest movie

I wanted to make an entry congratulating my good friend and co-worker Josh for what sounds like a great career breakthrough: he sold a treatment for a script to a big time producer/director type guy, and now naturally will be penning the script in the hopes that they decide to make it (which would be unbelievably cool!). Anyway, as you can imagine, that was the big news at work today; other than that it was pretty tame (except that Victor brought doughnuts). The only other real topic of conversation today was this article about the archives of Stanley Kubrick. If you're at all a fan of his films, definitely read it. Even if you're not, it's a fascinating read into just how thorough, precise or crazy Kubrick was (you decide).

Here's a couple questions for you:

- Can you tell more about someone based on what kind of a car they drive, what kind of food they eat, what kind of movies/TV shows they watch or how they vote?

- Can an umbrella be tightened, and if so, how?

- What Sylvester Stallone movie would you most like to see have a sequel (or another sequel, in some cases)?

- What's the best slogan that you've ever seen on a bumper sticker or article of clothing?

- Do you blow dry?

All answers will be confidential unless you post them in the comments section.

I got this link off of Boingboing and thought they were pretty excellent. Enjoy.

Good news for all you Shaq fans out there. I'm talking about the fans of Shaq's rap career now, not the fans of his movie career or basketball career. Anyway, the good news is that Shaq's Best Of album is now available on Amazon for only $3.99 if you are willing to buy it used. See, I buy lots of albums used on Amazon, cause you can get some great deals that way, and Shaq's Best Of album is just one example. In fact, the deals on the rest of Shaq's albums are so good on Amazon, that you can buy all 4 of his other albums for less than the $4 his Best Of album costs. Check it out:

Shaq Diesel - The album that started it all, on sale for 55 whole cents!

You Can't Stop the Reign - Shaq's most expensive album, selling for a whopping $1.25

Respect - Shaq's most recent album can be yours for half a buck!

Shaq-Fu: Da Return - Finally, the album that inspired (or was inspired by, I'm not really sure) a video game, you can buy this one brand new and still factory sealed for fifteen cents!

See? If you buy all 4 of Shaq's albums individually it will only cost you $2.45 as opposed to the $3.99 that they want for his Best Of (you could even throw in that Shaq Fu videogame, which is going for 35 cents, and still be under $3 for the whole package). Let's face it, there aren't a whole lot of musicians who's entire body of work costs less than a happy meal, so I suggest you act quickly before these deals are snapped up! :grin

I'm gonna be heading off to bed as soon as I finish this entry, but I wanted to put a few thoughts down before I hit the hay. First, last night was awesome. At about 6 pm right as we were all getting off work, Liz figured it would be a good idea to see if people wanted to go to the Smoke House for drinks. Now this was the first time I'd ever been to the Smoke House, and it was the first time I can remember anyone trying to get people to go there after work (there have been a few, and I mean very few, instances of us all going out after work, but never to the Smoke House). Anyway, about 10 of us went and it turned into a celebration of Josh selling his treatment and a great time was had by all. We sat and had drinks in the bar and helped ourselves to the free food they served (appetizers); and then after about an hour or two of that, we all decided to just say fuck it and get a table for dinner. Since Cookie had to leave to get home and feed his cat, he didn't see what everyone got to eat, and I would write it all down here except I only know what I got, which was fish n' chips (Alaskan halibut, no less). We also helped ourselves to what the Smoke House proclaimed as "the world's best garlic bread", which was in fact, as Matt so aptly observed, more like bread with crushed Cheetos smashed into it. It may not have been very tasty, but at least it was cheap :roll ($10!). Anyway, the evening was a smashing success, and I for one hope that we all get together to hang out after work more often. It's a very lively bunch that I work with, and it seems like everyone has a good time when we all get together in a social way like that.

I don't really have much else to say right now; tonight was more mellow with me just hanging out here, making myself dinner and watching Holes (which I kept hearing was great, but which I found to be ok, except that it had way too much backstory and "coincidences" for my liking, but overall not bad). After the movie was over, I decided for shits and grins to go back on what I said and try to bring the smilies back. Unless I'm wrong, I should have them back up and running (as long as you use IE for the PC, that is) by sometime during the day tomorrow.

The only other thing I have to report is that Queens lost to the Spurs (and lost by 18), which now moves the Lakers to a single scant game behind the Queens in the standings, and the Lakers and Queens play each other one more time before the season is over. The Lakers are rolling right now, winning their last 9 and having a record of 20-4 since the All-Star break. Meanwhile, the Queens are crumbling before everyone's very eyes, losers of 6 of their last 10. If the Lakers were to finish the season with the #1 seed in the West, after everything they have been through this year with the injuries and whatnot, that would be a truly remarkable accomplishment. Just makes me wonder what LA could have done if Shaq hadn't missed 15 games, Kobe hadn't missed 17 games, Karl Malone hadn't missed 40 games, Rick Fox hadn't missed 41 games, Slava Medvedenko hadn't missed 14 games, and Horace Grant hadn't missed 19 games (and counting, cause he's still injured). Oh well, as long as they're all healthy for the playoffs, especially if LA has the #1 seed, then the Lakers should be in great shape. Bring on the playoffs! :grin