Irrefutable Evidence

Man Sues God

This article about Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers looks like an Onion article, but apparently is not.

What Not To Sing In An Airport

You know how the last song you hear on the radio before getting out of the car sticks in your head and you end up singing it to yourself. Last weekend i flew to San Francisco for the Plum Blossom Federation Kung Fu Tournament and as I arrived at the airport the new Beck song was playing on the radio. So as i walked into the airport, i was singing

We got a time bomb, we got a time bomb,....

Fortunately, i realized where i was before i reached the security checkpoint.

Doo-Far

Overheard in Starbucks this morning:

"I hear they're sending 26000 troops to Dufar"
"Where?"
"Doo-FAR"
"What country is that in?"
"Africa"
"Oh"

Code Monkey

This is fun:

Proof That God Has A Sense Of Humor

And proof that lions are not to be trifled with.

List of Evil

Everybody seems to develop a compulsion to create lists near the end of the year, and i wanted to jump on the bandwagon. The normal best-of lists are tedious, and worst-of is worse, so i settled on making a list of things that i really like but am embarassed to admit i like. I call this the List of Evil, because that sounds slightly funnier than List of Silliness or List of WTF? So here goes:

1. The band Tool. I own most of the Tool CDs and all but the most recent A Perfect Circle CD, and i listen to them fairly frequently. I still turn up the radio when they play "Sober", even 10 years after i heard for the first time. I've always had a thing for hard rock/heavy metal genre, but most of it makes me feel... stupid. Tool doesn't make me feel stupid, even if many of my fellow fans are pre-pubescent misfits. Yeah, Tool is pretentious at times, even a little creepy, and their obsession with anal sex puzzles me. They're kind of like that kid from your high-school english class who sat in the back, wearing an old army-surplus coat, writing bizarre stories in a spiral notebook. You know, the guy with a copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook, who read Charles Bukowski and smoked weed during lunch. OK, maybe that was just my high school.
2. Conservative Blogs. I don't have any idea why, but i like to read blogs with which i disagree more than blogs with which i agree. I suppose it's the same compulsion that causes people to poke at bruises, or to go see horror movies.
3. VH1 List Shows. This is the TV equivalent of reading a cereal box, but for some reason i still get sucked into them. The lists are pretty stupid (who could possibly care what is the 87th best heavy metal song of all time as judged by Blender magazine, or whatever). The snarky Z-list pseudo-celebrities are not funny, but there's something fun about people who nobody's ever heard of attempting to sound as if their opinion matters (its like blogging). I think the appeal is similar to eavesdropping on the conversation of people at neighboring tables in a restaurant, especially when they're talking about something exceptionally inane.
4. Taco Bell Grilled Stuft Burrito. Even the name is stupid. This is about my 4th or 5th choice as far as fast-food burritos go, but the mere fact that anything at Taco Bell could be worth ordering is remarkable.
5. Spy Novels. There are some authors who are lumped into the spy genre whose work i think can legitimately be considered literature, notably Alan Furst, Graham Greene and John LeCarre. But i like almost everything in this genre, from Ian Fleming to Tom Clancy to Ludlum to Forsythe. The only spy novel i've not been able to finish was one of William F. Buckley's Blackford Oakes books.
6. The Clippers. Especially Marko Jaric. He looks like a slightly stupified fan who wandered onto the court and miraculously can hit the three.
7. UFC. And K1 and any of the other mixed martial arts spectacles. When i watch this stuff i feel simultaneously guilty and thrilled. Like, i enjoy the fighting and the skill that many of the fighters display, but i can't shake the feeling that i'm going to hell for watching it.
8. 7/11 Coffee. I can walk into a 7/11, pour my own damn cup of coffee, put some synthetic, flavored cream-like substance into it, maybe get a souvenir styrofoam cup, and it costs about half of what Starbucks costs. And i can also get beef jerkey. What's not to like.
9. Jean Claude Van Damme movies. Now, i've never actually paid to see one, and i think i've seen all of the ones i've seen on the USA Network. And the movies are not good, let's make no mistake about that. But i've probably seen most of them, and i've seen all or parts of Bloodsport about a dozen times. I really don't understand this to be honest. I'd never sit through a Steven Seagal movie, and with most martial arts movies i rarely make it past the first fight scene. And i'm kind of creeped out by that bump on his forehead. I guess the good things you can say are that he looks like somebody who could actually beat the crap out of the bad guys, and he usually faces reasonably tough opponents.
10. Windows XP. As a geek, it's humiliating to admit, but my primary system at home runs XP. If you've been with MS since the DOS days like me, you can probably appreciate what an amazing piece of work XP is, even if it does have security and performance issues. Thank god for Firefox though.

Road Kill and Snow

Still at my parents house in IN. There was a headline in the local paper here that read "Roadkill Deer Not Appropriate for Food". That's just so Hoosier.

It snowed on Wednesday night so we had a white Thanksgiving, complete with snowball fights and snowmen. My brother-in-law and I took all of the boys (my two nephews and my two boys) to the Spongebob movie so that my mom wouldn't have them underfoot in the kitchen. The movie is suitably goofy, in that uniquely Spongebobian way that combines butt humor and surrealism. The boys liked it, though my nephew Matt found it "odd".

We had the traditional Thxgiving meal and ate to the traditional excessive excess. It was good except for the presence of my grandmother who gets under my mother's skin in sort of the same way that a candiru fish swims up the human urethra. Bloodshed was narrowly avoided though, and there was pie.

Went back to Pokagon today. I did another trail run, my first run ever in snow i think. Dad and the boys went "geo-caching", basically using a GPS to find a cache placed in the forest by another geo-cacher. This one was an ammo box filled with small toys. It was a bit hard to find in the snow. I caught up with them right before they got to the location, and i helped them search for the box. Fun.

It's not too cold thank god, in the 30s right now. We're planning to go to The Three Kings tavern, which we all call Hoagland because it's in Hoagland, IN. At one time in the past they had the best ribs in the known universe. After several changes of ownership, they're still OK; but we go there more for nostalgic reasons than anything.

Many, many things to be thankful for; too many to enumerate. My parent's dial-up connection however is not one of them, so i'm done for now.