Good ad campaign?

So, Sunday night I was watching the Patriots blow out the Bills. Around 9:15 or so there was an ad for Subway featuring Peter Griffin from Family Guy rambling on about the food behind him on-screen. So that reminded me, whoa, I was missing Family Guy at the same time....I should switch back and forth during the commericals.

So I hit the remote for my local Fox station, and right on cue, there's Peter Griffin....puking all over the floor on screen.

Nice job, Subway. That's not exactly how you wanna draw it up in the ad office, huh?

Bored on friday

Okay, ten artists with my favorite song by each (not the same as when I posted my 10 favorites all by the Beatles a month or so ago).

Van Halen with Dave -- House of Pain
Van Halen wit Sammy -- Source of Infection
Metallica -- Blackened
Led Zeppelin -- When the Levee Breaks
The Eagles -- Life in the Fast Lane
The Doors -- Peace Frog
Pearl Jam -- Jeremy
Nirvana -- Breed
Soundgarden -- My Wave
Smashing Pumpkins -- geek usa

I usually would have arguments with a friend in college, he liked all the right bands, just not the right songs.

maybe I'll pick 10 more next week or something...in the mean time, i suppose you can argue one way or another about these....

how to deliver this...

okay, had a pretty good idea for a joke, not sure on how to nail the delivery.

The premise is along the idea of "I'm thinking of a number between one and a hundred", only in this case, we're talking fingers.

I want it to come off like, I'm thinking of a finger between pointer and ring...obviously it's a way to verbally give an f-u to someone. I think the delivery's got to be kinda deliberate to set it up right....say it too fast and excited, and it doesn't sound as funny.

Thought...

I don't think the real issue with

Toys Я Us

is the fact that the R is backwards. (And that's what supposed to be there in that line above....I found a Cyrillic letter in the Arial font on my computer to use for it, and that may not work on others' screens.)

Anyway, we have a predicate nominative here. So the pronoun in question should be "We".

Toys Я We

It's like breaking up....

Neil Sedaka, right? I should know, all the car trips as a kid with my dad blasting the oldies station.

Anyways, I found it interesting in that I've had a couple of major break-ups this week.

First, it was time to tell my dentist from the last ten years that his office is too far away to keep going to him. I mean really, 60 miles....it was one thing when I lived in various towns no more than 10 miles away. Besides, this is the guy that's found cavities. I had one dentist for the first 20+ years, and never had any teeth issues. With this guy....had my wisdom teeth pulled, and two fillings (and maybe a third, but he left it as a "watch" on my records for whoever I transfer to). An amusing story, I saved the wisdom teeth after the specialist he sent me to pulled them, and 2 years later (when I'd remembered to bring them), this dentist was able to not only identify which tooth came from where, he could point out where some decay had started that was the cause of the whole "you should have these pulled" conversation.

Okay, breakup number two. My job. I waited and waited six months at a time for my boss to replace my assistant. So now he has to replace two employees. Which were his only employees. So good luck with that, I'm going on to a bigger company. On the bright side, he can't exactly show me the door and be completely unstaffed for 3 weeks....there's some leverage. I even rejected an offer of a pay raise and the possibility of working from home to avoid the God-awful commute on I-95. (I actually don't believe the telecommuting one....he's got lots of "ideas" that never amount to anything. It took me 3 years to get business cards. And I've been waiting since month 1 for him to buy the required server upgrade so that we're not 2-3 versions behind on our software.) I guess that's what happens when you have a bunch of businesses and you consider one of them to be an afterthought....

I'm not big on "let's compare the stress between the break-ups" but some people might make that into a college psych paper....good luck with that.

On a completely unrelated note, my favorite teams are probably better than your favorite teams. Therefore, logically, I must be a better person than any of you, huh?

Slow-roasting a chicken all day in the Crock-Pot "BBQ Pit" thing on the counter. That's dinner, and there's peanut butter cheesecake for dessert.

A tale of two bands

The way the blinds are hanging at the window beyond my desk at work, I can be blinded temporarily for about 5-10 minutes at sunset each night, this time of year. (In the summer, I go home long before sunset, and in the winter, sunset's while I'm still working.) Anyway, the sky is pink with purple stripes of clouds. A bit freaky, but a change from typical blue/gray or even orange.

Last Sunday Duran Duran debuted their entire new album in a concert at the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford, CT. (Yeah, yeah, it's now the Chevrolet Theatre, whatever.) Let's see....lots of forty-something overweight women in droves. The songs were so-so. Some were good, some were not, but most of all, nobody really wanted to hear them. That's the thing when old bands re-unite. People wanna hear the same 15 songs at every show. In the parking lot, some guy walked past us getting in our car and asked where Rio and Hungry Like the Wolf were. I almost yelled back at him, in your record cabinet, dickhead. But yeah, after the new songs, they did a few old ones. My wife was a full-fledged fan back in the day, and she said she only recognized 5 songs. What was good was that the arena only seats about 3000 or so, and that meant being pretty close -- 20th row, center stage.

Now, Van Halen in Boston was a different story all together. Sold out and LOUD. All old stuff, and after 20 years of Sammy Hagar, I get the feeling they were glad to be able to play this stuff live. I knew every song, and could pick out random bits and pieces from Eddie's solo -- like some of Girl Gone Bad. There was a couple in front of us engaging in doobage, but it's not like they passed it around. Anyway, isn't VH more of a being drunk band, versus a being stoned band? A buddy of mine was kinda drunk, so he starts trying to put his arm around me during songs he liked. (Apparently he tried this with my dad who I gave my Stones ticket to a couple of years ago, and my dad had to keep pulling his arm off and telling him to cut the shit.) Wolfgang, on bass instead of Michael Anthony, pretty much "knew his place" -- you're the chubby 16-year-old kid who's new, just play your lines and don't draw attention to yourself. (One exception, they put a big Red Sock over the end of his bass to appeal to the crowd.) If nothing else, he certainly looks more in place height-wise than Anthony, who always seemed on the short end amidst the other band members. I'll be curious to see if they actually do a new album themselves. (Or if Eddie kills Dave instead.)

The cool thing about being in Boston is that it was also the day of the "rolling rally" parade for the Red Sox. (speaking of doobage...) But what this did is make getting a table at a restaurant an hour-long wait on a Thursday night. All the folks in the city for the Sox, overlapped with concertgoers. (My dinner: Veal parm sandwich from Four's Grille.)

And as I finish this up, the sky is all purple (Prince reference?) with a couple of yellow streaks in the horizon.

Pats-Colts this weekend. Should be good. (I'd be amused there WERE a cheap shot on Brady with all this anti-Pats stuff....because Peyton would invariably go down on the next series, kinda like a football version of a beanball war.)

Good pizza...

Here's a shot of the trees changing in our yard from last weekend. The colors that look best are rusty red, and for some reason, salmon. The worst color is a sorta pale yellowish-orange that is not only too common, but unappealing, and hideous when juxtaposed with trees still green.

Now, on to the pizza.

This was a stuffed-crust monstrosity I put together Saturday. Here's what you have to do. Prepare 2 large pizza crusts. I used a bread machine to knead the dough, as it comes out better than when I try to knead by hand. Then you coat a cast-iron pan with some extra virgin olive oil and put down the first crust.

The filling is made from seven kinds of meat.
Bacon (about half a pound)
Hot Italian Sausage (3 links' worth)
Sweet Italian Sausage (3 links' worth)
Diced Ham (about a quarter pound)
Chicken (one breast)
Pepperoni (two layers)
Ground Beef (another half pound or so)

There was about 4 cups of sauce mixed in with the meat (which you cook ahead of time in order to drain off some of the grease -- don't worry, there's plenty of heart attack risk still in there). We had some homemade sauce to use that used some of our garden tomatoes. Also about 3/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese.

Once you spread out the filling, top it with about 3 cups of shredded mozzarella. Then attach the top crust, and poke some holes in it for steam to escape.

About 20-25 minutes in a 425-degree oven. (220 Celsius, for those overseas)

Beer fest

Okay, first of all, Poison's "Nothin' But a Good Time" should not be sung by a choir of children, either in general, or for a commercial.

The beer fest was very good. My amber brew won the best amber, so I got a beer glass with a pewter inscription for Best Amber 2007. Of course, while walking out to my car to put the prize out there, I had it fall out of the box from Things Remembered. Luckily, I gave it a quick kick about six inches from the ground, so the only damage was a little scrape at the top. Rather that, than a full shatter. Sheesh, nice freakin' box.

Dinner was the venison steaks. Nicely done. All day we'd been eating -- shrimp platter, tons of buffalo wings, and my cousin made an impressive vat of chili. We had football games on two TVs. There were several pies for dessert. I had blueberry made by a cousin's wife.

And of course, we're all encouraged to take a care package home from the excess beer. So I get a random assorted 12-pack to put in the fridge.

Movie recommendation

I saw BeerFest last night while drinking Sierra Nevada's Fall Hops something-or-other special beer. The movie is hysterically immature. I recommend it to all who enjoy stuff like that. Now, because my dad's beer party is meant for the appreciation of beers, rather than mass chugging, none of the games in the BeerFest movie ever come into play. Somehow, they made it look okay for 30-somethings to play frat basement games.

One pretty cool thing I saw once in the fall was in college. A building on campus was covered in ivy (it is an Ivy League school, after all), and when the colors changed for the fall, the ivy was still green at the base of one wall, and then yellow, orange, and red at the top, for a kind of rainbow effect.

I need to check out hockey schedules around here. Connecticut's got a couple of minor league teams (and that's AFTER the Whalers left 10 years ago....sigh.) where $15 or so gets you in. Hockey season starts way too early. Even Canada doesn't have snow and ice yet, right?

The chicken fingers at my cousin's wedding last weekend weren't very good at all, nor the fries. But I still made out better than getting one of the adult meals. I didn't like what was served to the grown-ups. The best part is when a Saturday wedding counts as going to church for the weekend. The goof-offs in our pew didn't get out of the way for communion, though....so they took our seats and we ended up between some of them who did go up for communion and those who didn't.

If it stops raining, it'll be pumpkin-buying time tomorrow. I'm not much of a good carver. I make the same old triangle-eye, 3-tooth mouth design.

Maybe the Red Sox will win the pennant this weekend....that would give me something to do Sunday night.

Random hits....

I started to watch a Ren & Stimpy DVD last night. Apparently "adult" episodes. Well, definitely...like cartoon nudity with rather pornographic overtones. So they weren't exactly funny, like the old "Space Madness" classic. And I'm just about sure they won't be back on Nickelodeon any time soon, either. Oh well.

I had a homemade beer last night. It was good. It seems as though different individual bottles got different levels of the priming sugar -- I had a relatively flat bottle the other day, this one had a normal head on it and bubbly.

I got a shoulder injury this summer. It manifests itself in basketball mostly when I try to rebound, the strength to knock the ball loose from others isn't there. Oxford's new high school gym hosts pickup games on Monday nights. The court is pretty nice....the school only has 9th and 10th graders this year, as I suppose it would have been bad to have residents come back to a new high school just for one/two years, if they're already established at out-of-town high schools. I think my high school did that in the 1960s....started with just a freshman class in 1961 and kept adding to it.

In the valley of the forwards, the one-eyed point guard is king. I'm like one of four people in town, apparently, who can run an offense. Watching a fast break from the other end of the gym is an eyesore, and sure enough nobody seems to know what they're doing. I don't claim to be Steve Nash....but if the ball runs through my hands even ONCE on a possession, our odds of getting a hoop increase dramatically.

I get it, when announcers say something like, "that was a big out" in a baseball game. But I want announcers to say, "that wasn't really a big out," some other times. 10-1, ninth inning, a pop-up to start things off. That wasn't a big out, although probably good to get.

I tried making my own buffalo sauce. I screwed it up, though. I'm not sure I needed to heat the ingredients, and the butter separated. Also, I sliced the cayenne peppers that I'd grown, but I would have been better off grinding them to a powder. It still tasted okay, but wasn't really any good.

We've got a few bald trees, and yet plenty that are still all green. Not a lot of in-between so far this autumn.

Scottish vegetable

One of my kids said she went to one of these a few years ago with me. It was actually a "Scottish festival", where they do all sorts of stuff to celebrate Scotland. I went to one last weekend.

For food, they had bridies and Scottish meat pies. A little heavy on the onion flavoring, but I suppose that counts literally as a Scottish vegetable. Also a haggis puff roll or something like that. I guess when you're several generations removed from riding the boat over to America, you lose any real desire to connect THAT far.

I'm Scottish on my dad's side, Irish on my mom's, so it's interesting enough to go to one of these things every few years. They have "highland games", which of course is highlighted by tossing the caber. For kids, they could have a try throwing a cardboard tube -- probably something that carpet was rolled around at a store at some point.

There were some musicians doing folk songs, and a few bagpipe marching bands from around Connecticut. Everyone's dressed in kilts, men and women, with the knee-high socks with tassels. Girls were doing highland dancing in very colorful outfits.

I thought one of the better reasons to go is to check out the clan-specific merchandise. Every clan's got a tartan -- their own specific plaid pattern that identifies the family. So if you want to buy a scarf, a tam, or a kilt, you can buy your family's. I've already got plenty of stuff in my particular plaid. I was actually surprised not to see anyone with what I've got -- tartan ink. There were a few Celtic designs on various men and women there, but nobody else seems to have a plaid tattoo. Guess I'm unique there.

And when you look for "scottish tattoo" on Google or whatnot, usually you get references to a "military tattoo", but I don't think that has anything to do with needles. I'm not really sure why they call it that.

And it was almost 90 degrees out....the previous time I'd gone, it was like 55 and raining. Freakin' October.

Bottling takes a while

52 bottles of beer on the floor,
52 bottles of beer...
take one down, pass it around....

blah blah blah.

Here's the thing, if you ever make your own beer. You have to save bottles from beer you've already drunk at the house. And they've got to be the kind that aren't twist-offs....you need the good kind of beer bottle, because they've got to be able to be re-sealed with a new cap.

So the process involves this....preparing a disinfecting solution. This is easy....a heaping teaspoon of some chlorine-containing chemical to two gallons of water. Then you rinse out all the bottles. Having done this before, I've learned the key is to rinse out the beer bottles once you're done drinking from them. If you leave any beer at the bottom, or worse -- the natural sediment that a non-filtered beer will have in it, then you're going to have to deal with more mold growing at the bottom. It's nothing that the chlorine can't kill, but sometimes it's very hard to scrape the gunk out with a typical bottle brush. And also, you'll want to change the water you use more often in the rinsing out. The chlorine solution dries in about half an hour or so, which is fine since it takes about an hour to wash out 50-55 bottles.

Next step is priming the beer. If you drink what's been fermenting, it's going to taste okay, be room temperature, and flat. So you need to do some priming -- add fresh sugar to the beer to give the yeast something new to feed on. The sugar comes in the form of powdered malt extract, dissolved in water. It's very easy to have the water boil over while you heat it to dissolve it. And it sucks to have hot caramelizing liquid on your stove. My stove is flat-top electric, which is probably better than a gas range would be for such an accident. Add the priming solution to the beer, and start bottling.

This is easy enough, with a siphoning hose started by a small hand pump. It's advisable to leave a good inch of space from the top of the bottle to avoid caps blowing off from the built up carbon dioxide. Even though the tube's got a spigot on it, it's easier just to go quickly from bottle to bottle. At the bottom of the 5-gallon glass carboy, there's usually grain sediment that you won't want to try to siphon into a bottle. But if you want to strain it into a bowl or something, you can try for a buzz from the flat runoff.

Capping is slow. My dad's bottle capper probably comes from the 1970s, so I have no idea if capping technology or whatever has been increased. All I do is put the open cap into a magnetic holding spot in the capper, and place it over the bottle, and slowly pull down the handles of the capper, kinda like working with a corkscrew. If you're out of alignment, you can break the bottle, though. (A reason to wash more bottles than you might need, too....just pour the beer from the broken bottle into an extra.) It seems like the leverage is best when having the bottle on the floor, so working from a chair can save wear and tear on your knees.

In a couple of weeks, the beer's plenty carbonated enough, and then you can stick it in the fridge. Just remember not to drink it from the bottle -- there's always sediment from the grain at the bottom that shouldn't be re-mixed into the beer. Pour it into a glass and rinse out the bottom quarter of an inch or so. (especially if you plan to reuse the bottles another time, to avoid excess mold) And I'm told aging the beer improves the flavor, although I usually just drink them until they're gone in lieu of buying beer at the store.

Anyway, the flat room temperature stuff was promising....should be a worthy entry in my dad's Octoberfest in a couple of weeks.

Frogs are next

I am pretty sure that the Yankees losing last night was due to a literal plague of insects. God's mad.

Spam by phone....

So I just got a call at work. Picked up, and a recording says my auto warranty has just expired. They've sent me warnings by mail all along. Please press one to continue. Uhhhh....yeah. I could tell it was a recording because she didn't react to me reciting "bite me, bite me, bite me" into the phone. How'd she even know I had a car?

I started playing Zelda -- Four Swords Adventures. This thing looks like something for the original 1986 Nintendo, not a Gamecube. Lame, and easy so far. We'll see how it goes. I think they just wanted to show off the fact that you *could* play it by hooking the Gamecube up to a GameBoy.

My beer is fermenting in the kitchen. Another week or two until bottling. There's a pain in the ass task -- rinsing out beer bottles to prep them. They get sanitized with a diluted chlorine rinse....just enough to kill anything in them. But when they've last been filled with unfiltered beer, sometimes there's hard-to-clean scum off the bottom. A bottle brush sorta works, but any bottles that are too hard to clean just get sent back for the deposit money. You have to remember to rinse the bottle out right after you finish the beer or pour it in a glass, generally, to eliminate the buildup.

October 15 is the last major deadline of the year in the world of 401(k) plans. And it's always the biggest clients that use every last day to finish off the 2006 reporting for the government.

Ten Beatles Favorites

I've got iTunes here at work, and I successfully took all my tapes and converted them to MP3 by running wires from my tape recorder to the sound in port on my Mac. So I've got a folder that's all Beatles stuff. I grew up with the American albums, so I once entered "Beatles '65" as my favorite album in an online poll, and was told not to choose American versions! Anyways, so I've got twelve minute "songs" that represent entire album sides. I can't pick out "Michelle" at random, I've got to open up "Rubber Soul Side 1" and then scan for it. The only changes I did were if, the tape didn't have the same song sequence as the record. I grew up with my dad's records, so I subconsciously always have a certain "next song" queued up when one finishes. Well, on the tapes, Capitol was concerned with keeping the side lengths approximately equal. So on Abbey Road, for instance, Come Together is on side 2 instead of Here Comes the Sun. I took the time to splice anything like that I could think of apart, and re-sequenced them "properly". (Of course that's in quotation marks, since all the pre-Sgt. Pepper's stuff was packaged so differently for the US.)

In any event, I think that everybody probably likes at least one song by the band. Even if you don't like them in general, for most people you can find *something* they'll like. I bought a book called The Complete Beatles Scores, which spells out every song, every instrument, as close to the albums as they could come up with. Try playing keyboard parts to Revolution 9 and see who notices.

Anyways, I tend not to like the "obvious" songs by my favorite groups anyways, and the Beatles are no exception. These 10 are probably my favorites:

Tomorrow Never Knows
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey
Sgt. Pepper's....(Reprise) -- at the end of the album before A Day in the Life
The End
I'm Looking Through You
Helter Skelter
I Me Mine
Things We Said Today
Wait
I Wanna Be Your Man (gotta pick a Ringo song, huh?)

So the real question is, which will vary with commenters' ages....who know all of these songs?

What would happen if.... (9/26 edition)

...New Orleans or something got its own cable channel entitled "NO". A bit of a quirk, considering there's a cable channel called "YES" that shows New York Yankees games. Are you watching TV? Umm...yes and no.

Ever detect a weird smell and try to put it to something, then realize it makes no sense? Yesterday morning I opened the door to the stairwell at work and was grossed out. I thought to myself it smelled like...."old lady breath". I can't explain what it is, or why that phrase would come to mind upon the smell. Later in the day, I thought I smelled the combination of hair spray and gum....so again, who knows.

I used to think there was a simple chain among the candy bars 3 Musketeers, Milky Way, and Snickers. I assumed Milky Way was just 3 Musketeers plus caramel, while Snickers was Milky Way plus peanuts. The nougat's different in Snickers, though. Lighter in color. Also, the outside chocolate shell of a Milky Way is definitely thicker than it is for Snickers.

Let's say you're flying east to west, so that you almost get time to stand still for you -- at 4 pm you're in Los Angeles, and an hour later, you're a full time zone further west, so it's still 4 pm your local time in the sky. In theory you could probably get all the way around the world, if you fly fast enough (and at a narrow enough band around the earth -- maybe not LA, but perhaps Alaska). So, what happens if it's holy day. A Jewish guy in the office was out last week for Yom Kippur....I wondered if he'd gotten on a plane at sundown Friday and kept heading west, from the start of the international date line all the way around, then it would have been roughly Friday at 6 pm for 24 straight hours. Then he'd cross the date line at 5:59 pm Friday, and it would be Saturday at 6 pm. He never would have experienced Friday night at all, and so he wouldn't have to fast or whatever observations are undertaken.

Six of an item is often referred to as a half dozen.
I want 3 of something referred to as a "quarter dozen".
The New England Patriots have started the season with a quarter dozen wins.
Donuts, two dollars for a quarter dozen, $3.50 for a half dozen, $5.00 for a dozen.

Genesis was okay, but they obviously targeted their show last night to the long-time fans, rather than people who know of them from MTV like myself. Oh well....they were good, I just didn't recognize any of the ten-minute "progressive rock anthems".

There was an old saying that the "moral majority" was neither. I always liked to insist that "classic rock" was neither, as well -- just to piss off a friend for whom music stopped when he was in junior high school.

Let's try this again...

No, I'm not alluding to a famous quote from Daffy Duck. (Do you want to shoot him here, or wait till you get home?)

I'm saying this because my wife has gone to an online ticket re-seller and purchased us 2 nosebleed seats to see Genesis at Madison Square Garden Tuesday night. (I like how on Futurama, they have Madison Cube Garden.)

Anyways, Suldog is promising a story from his life as a dishwasher. But while he stalls, I've got my own story as one.

In college I worked for dining services, and was a really good worker in the dishroom. I sometimes would do the 4:30 to 7 shift -- early dinner -- a lot of putting away the last of the dishes run from lunch, and clearing the crap from trays of early eaters. We had a pretty big industrial dishwashing machine in there. It was a twenty-foot conveyer belt on which you could load the plates and stuff....two foot square racks for silverware...wire frames for drinking glasses...or you could also put giant roasting pans on there from the kitchen itself. Sort of like a big automatic car wash that you drive into.

There was a steady crew of 3-4 "townies" who worked full time in the dishroom, along with a crew of 2-3 students. My friend Brunel and I were working one night, along with the only young townie on the crew. A guy named Danny....probably about 20....maybe he finished high school, not even sure. He was an all right guy. Once we discussed the operations of the conveyer belt....could one ride it from beginning to end? Perhaps, if we turned off the spray hoses. Well, we talked Danny into going for a ride, and he certainly seemed up for it. He knew the machine itself better than we did, so he had turned off the spray hoses. He turned on the conveyer belt and crawled on.

So he's going along at the leisurely pace of the belt...it would take a minute or so, I guess from entering the washing tank to the exit. And he was fine, since the sprays weren't on. One problem, right at the end. He didn't turn off the water at the rinse bar. This was not only the last shot of water the dishes would get, but it was the hottest. I think we were told 180 degrees (F). So we hear him scream and start scurrying down the belt to get out of the tank. So he's not only soaking wet, he's burned. Second-degree burns, if I remember correctly. I think the top layer of skin was bright pink and peeling.

So sure enough, Danny was fired after that night. The funny part of the story was that there was a section outside the dishroom, where the line for students would form, where people could put "napkin notes" -- informal suggestions for specific cold cereal, or "fewer pot roast nights" or whatever. We thought it would be cute to put an anonymous note up there asking for Danny to be reinstated. A couple of days later our napkin note was responded to (right on the napkin, actually). Something to the effect of, the risk that our friend Danny posed to both himself, and the machinery, made it so that he would not be appointed back to his position.

And so we never saw him again. But the tale has lived on for years in what we'd call "dishroom lore." In the same way songs by Winger and the Cult were known as "dishroom music" for their popularity around 1989.

What would happen if.... (9/19 edition)

...I ordered the kid's meal for myself at my cousin's wedding next month? Actually, that is what I've done. It was either beef tenderloin (I hate beef when it's baked), Chicken Oscar (I "just say no" to stuff with chives in it), the vegetarian entree (yeah, right!), or the kid's meal (chicken fingers and fries!). This didn't take much thought. My mom said my aunt was going to call me and tell me I couldn't do it at first. I guess that if you order a kid's meal, it's one less person that they charge you for at the open bar. Now that wouldn't be fair...."you can have the kid's meal, Brian, but you'll be chasing it down with chocolate milk all afternoon."

I'm sure the folks who designed the World Wide Web didn't INTEND to choose the one polysyllabic letter in the alphabet for its abbreviation. There's no good way to say WWW really fast. The PBS show "Zoom" (2000s version) referred to it as "triple-W", but that's still a mouthful. Even one W is a mouthful, let alone three.

There ought to be a minimum slicing setting for cheese at the supermarket. I like my ham really thinly sliced. But cheese HAS to have some minimum thickness -- maybe an eighth of an inch? Because what good is it, if the cheese is so thinly sliced that it sticks to itself? I had to try to pry the slices apart with a sharp knife.

My younger daughter followed the older into the bathroom at a restaurant last weekend. Apparently girls learn early to go in pairs or something.

I started to watch Hitchock's movie Rope the other night....I've already seen it, and it's good. It seems impressive that the entire movie plays out as one very long scene -- there are no changes in the angle to "camera two". Of course, it could also be seen as just a fancy videotaping of a live play, in that regard, too. (That at least makes the memorization of such a long stretch of lines only slightly less impressive.)

When playing Scrabble under various influences (coconut rum, for instance), it's perfectly acceptable to play "PQRSTU" as a word. Any five-or-more consecutive letters of the alphabet, actually, are allowed, I believe. In fact, the same board also had "VWXYZ". Yes, it was on the triple word score, but the aforementioned influences preclude the actual tallying of points.

Vanilla ice cream is as popular as it is, in my opinion, only because it's pretty much white and "plain" looking. If vanilla ice cream were blue, or brown, it would sell much less. But because it looks natural, it's a popular flavor. I'm not playing the race card on this.

Was the Legion of Doom modeled after the Superdome amidst the Louisiana swamps?

If you carve your name in a pumpkin, you have to be wary of any letters that have holes in them. For instance, and "o" won't look like an o without some creative carving, as it would just be a hole.

In college on a calculus exam, I had to draw a picture of a duck. And then for more points, compute some line integral around the duck. This required me to erase the eyeball inside the duck I had drawn, because, of course, this prevents the line integral from automatically being equal to zero.

I saw a paperback version of the first Harry Potter book last night, and was stunned by how skinny it seemed. I thought perhaps it'd been divided into smaller books (part 1, part 2, etc....).

Is the Genesis concert next weekend?

That's what I was asked this morning while showering. The answer, of course, is
FUCK!

It was last night.

Oops. That's $150 I'll never get back. Not only did both of us completely forget, but I lost two sets of tennis (6-8, 7-9) to a friend of mine when I should have been driving to Hartford.

And...we were discussing concerts coming up....my friend is one of like 20 million people in the lottery trying to get Led Zeppelin tickets. I mentioned going to see VH next month....and never did it occur to me that I had Genesis tickets for a show starting in about an hour and a half.

I'm "cloning" a brew called Fat Tire Amber Ale. The brewmaking store puts together all the ingredients you need to make famous and not-so-famous beers, so you don't have to work too hard on ingredient-buying. I have no idea if this beer's any good. Each raw ingredient is awful, of course, so hopefully it'll all come together in the end. I had to run out to buy cheesecloth to make a homemade grain bag -- the first step is to steep the grains in water like a giant tea bag. I thought about using an old sock, and actually until I found the cheesecloth at the store, I almost bought a mesh ironing board cover to use.

I could definitely envision someone marketing a beer called "Old Sock"...

Apple season

Apple picking should commence this weekend. The wife makes a f-tastic "Dutch Apple" cheesecake. Our friends coming over the following weekend will be well fed.

Picking fruit at an orchards or farm always takes way less time than it seems like it should. I think hey, a nice trip outside and stuff, but really, you have all the apples/strawberries/blueberries you could ever need in like 15 minutes. So then it's off to the farm stand. I often go to this local place to pick them. They sponsor what is supposed to be a great Sunday breakfast, but I don't know anyone who's gone to it.

My dad is resurrecting his annual Octoberfest beer party this year. It'll be held at my cousin's house, since my parents downsized their house. Usually people hit wherever they find a bunch of microbrews, and we bring them over, try them all, and then judge the best, worst, weirdest-tasting, best label, etc....winner gets like, a beer-a-day calendar, or a mug. Dad cooks up a spread, and we all watch football. (Except for my dad's brother, who's relegated to the basement to watch NASCAR. I don't understand how my dad's brother can be from Alabama when everyone else in the family is from Connecticut.) I always like to be dropped off/picked up. Otherwise, I gotta loiter around the house to sober up, which means my mom comes home from her day of exile before I've left...which of course leads to at least the second degree, if not the third.

I may whip up a home brew to enter this year. I should go buy ingredients this week to have it ready within 5-6 weeks.

I got Seattle right in my suicide pool last week. This week, a certain team from a certain Midwestern town that starts with a C, ends with an O, and in the middle has "HICAG". (Da Bears.) Actually, I never liked the George Wendt episodes of the Superfans as much, compared to the original one with Joe Mantegna. Although there's nothing like Polish sausage substitute to ward off that fourth heart attack, I suppose. (And don't get me started about them trying to use the same bit with the Bulls.)

Wednesday of this week I was promised a new printer either that day or yesterday. I'm going to wait this one out and see how long it takes for the boss to come through. I got an old, used HP LaserJet 4 to use here, and I think it's just about out of toner.