escape to insanity

This is what happens when Sami and I talk. Absurd conversations about Monopoly and Nike-knockoffs. And yet… these are the best sorts of conversations.

edited lightly to make it easier to read:

Sami: Other pieces from the monopoly game include McDonalds fries, Moterola Cell Phone, Laptop, Laboradoodle, Jetplane, hybrid car, starbucks coffee cup
me: times have changed since i owned a monopoly board, apparently
me: i don't see “Iron” in that list… is this 'consumer whore monopoly' ?
Sami: Here and Now monopoly
me: same thing.
Sami: they actually had a vote thing online for cities on the board. Cities rallied to get their city on the damn thing. Minneapolis has a blue square or some sh*t
me: hahahahaha
Sami: I just thought it was funny that they put “Mall of America: Minneapolis St.Paul” .. The MoA is in Burnsville…
Sami: The cities that will be represented on the board include the following:
New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C., Dallas, Atlanta, Seattle, Phoenix, Minneapolis / St. Paul, Miami, Denver, Houston, Cleveland, St. Louis, Orlando, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Honolulu, Nashville
me: nashville? no one wants to own nashville.
me: and i'm surprised they only included one starbucks cup. you need at least three per square

Sami: HAHAHAHAH! The French Quarter in New Orleans is in the new monopoly! The Property value is at $2,600,000. Obviously this game was made before katrina…
me: hahahaha
me: now it's the 'go to jail' square
me: or the “you forfeit all your property and have to move your piece to someone else's property indefinitely” community card
Sami: Yeah, instead of houses, you get driftwood. And for the hotels, you get blow up rafts
me: the bank gives you some money to help, but most of it goes to the people who already own the bulk of the other properties

Sami: Nashville is “Grand Ole Opry” worth $1,000,000. Light Blue square. In it's neighborhood are the Gateway Arch, St. Louis and MoA, Minneapolis.
me: MoA?
me: ohhh… got it
Sami: St. Louis, Minneapolis and Nashville. Apparently the Lt. Blue squares are the Ghetto, the South and the Barrio.
me: something like that. are those properties rent-controlled?
Sami: I don't believe so, but if you end up owning them, you have to change your board piece to a cockroach, a barretta or a bill for child support.
me: those are the spaces you try to sell right after getting them, but no one else will take them
Sami: and by the end of the game your daughter is knocked up or you have a bulletwound.
me: does ghetto monopoly have switchblades as pieces?
Sami: And you have to go to the pawn shop to re-acquire all your property
Sami: HAH!
me: or do they stick to regular pieces? the kind you tuck in the back of your belt?
Sami: I think the pieces include a switchblade, but they also have more creative ones.
Sami: The razorblade, the barretta, the syringe, the 'fatty'…
Sami: and the 'bling bling' which actually comes cast in sterling silver instead of pewter
me: and the pieces no doubt have spinner rims
me: or, alternately, grills
Sami: Oh hell yes, brudduh
Sami: Diem says there's an el dorado or el camino with 24″ spinners, too.
Sami: you think that in ghetto monopoly, the el camino has hydrolics?

Sami: “You skipped out on your child support, Go Directly to Jail” and the GO square is now “The border”
me: probably. the jail square is about half the size of the board, but everyone keeps getting stuck there anyway
Sami: Free Parking is “Collect 200 dollars for mowing grass”
Sami: “Nobody ever really wins, you just do a little bit better each time”
me: nobody ever wins, you just hope to make it around the board once or twice without getting mugged
Sami: And instead of the banker, there's the “loan shark” or “mob”

Sami: We could actually make a game like this and just call it Ghetto-Opoly. Imagine how popular it'd be.
me: license it to whoever makes regular monopolies
Sami: Everytime you mortgage a property, someone has to beat the sh*t out of you.

Sami: sh*t, I forgot about the nike shoe piece… damn
me: oh, that's not nike
me: that's new balance
me: hahahahahahaha
Sami: Oh damn you know what it is!
me: even better… i had a pair of those
Sami: HAHAHAHAHAHAH *Dies*
Sami: You whore
me: nikes have the swish, new balance has a giant N
me: which at first everyone thinks is for nike. but NOT.
Sami: I repeat. You whore.
me: they're dirt cheap
me: in my defense, they were my work shoes
me: when i was working at the gymnastics place.
Sami: thanks to hundreds of little polynesian kids.
me: exactly
me: 3 cents a day? the claymation dude wants to put an end to that labor.

Sami: Ahhh… well then, You can pass The Border and Collect $2
me: i wonder if there's a moat around the ghetto board.
me: and a mini-fence
Sami: Electrified.
me: but it's only part-way around the board
Sami: Razorwire
me: and minutemen with rifles.
Sami: There's a giant Home Depot in the board. If you're playing as anything Mexi-related, if you land on it, you get $20 for tiling someone's bathroom if you roll an odd number, but roll an even number and you get deported

me: also, if you roll odd numbers, you have to pay the bum who just washed your window with dirty newspaper
Sami: And just hope that it's mud and not because he washed you window with his 'wiping hand'
me: …thanks for that mental image
me: i shall cherish it for as few seconds as possible
Sami: “Turn off the windshield wipers, they don't work, it's just making it worse…”

Ahhh yes. Good stuff.

Disclaimer: any product brand names or anything of the sort are probably trademarked, or copyrighted, or copylefted, or whatever the applicable term might be in their particular case. Don't sue me for anything.

You know what's fun? Managing to accidentally burn a nice little spot on the underside of your tongue. Yep. It's a blast.

You're just sitting there, minding your own business, enjoying what passes for a late-night snack, when BAM.

The pizza you just pulled out of the oven a few minutes earlier is delicious. It's tasty, it's pizza-licious. The sauce is exactly the way it's supposed to be, the cheese is nicely melted and just a little browned, and the crust is almost perfectly cooked. Granted, the edges of the crust were a little darker and crispier than you'd prefer, but overall it's a successful pizza run.

You've enjoyed the first slice. It was a little warm at first, being so fresh from the oven, but you were careful and got through it in one piece. You might have lost a tiny piece of pepperoni to gravity, but the rest of the slice went down in delicious bliss.

The second slice seems to be going just as well. You go in for another bite, expecting another mouthful of happiness, but then something happens. Something is wrong. You can't quite place it, but something… THERE. Now you know what it is. A small bit of the sauce has just escaped its cheesy constraints and made a break for it, trying to get out into the open. But alas, it doesn't seem to be going for the plate several inches below. It goes for the much closer, seemingly safer hiding spot. It's a difficult move, but it manages to pull off the stunt.

The burning hot droplet of formerly delicious pizza sauce is now hiding directly underneath your tongue.

Arguably some of the most sensitive tissue on your entire body, the underside of your tongue is the absolute worst place for hot pizza sauce to land. It's horrible. The slightest little burn, however insignificant it would be if located anywhere else on the body, feels like it's a third-degree burn turning your flesh to ash. You do not want to ever subject that tissue to hot burning sauce. Indeed, hot burning anything, for that matter.

Ow.

Riddle me this. It's currently March 24th, 2007, at 10pm CST. At the time of this post, it's almost 70 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

This is March. March. March is usually supposed to be the start of the end of our winter. Just a few weeks ago it was still bitterly cold, where you didn't want to be outdoors for more than a few seconds at a time. Just a few weeks ago it was apocalyptic weather, like in The Day After Tomorrow. Today, it's the polar opposite. I'm sitting here in shorts and a t-shirt, and I'm still sweating.

This is unnatural. Our seasons are shifting. March is supposed to still be winter, not summer. Here's an idea of how absurd this is. On my bed, I have a heated mattress pad under my sheets. On top of the sheets, I have a furry blanket, and then my standard comforter, and then my tiger blanket. Next to my bed I've got a ceramic space heater set to thermostat mode, so it kicks on whenever the temperature in the room falls below a certain temperature. We've had the main heat on in the house since it dropped below zero. There were a few nights just a few weeks ago, and especially during the late days of December, that I was still cold despite all those barriers against the frigid air. The last few nights, I've left off the mattress pad, the space heater, and the central heat. Not only that, I've tossed aside two of my blankets, keeping only the first blanket against any drafts in the room.

This is insane. Seventy degrees and muggy, and it's only the end of March.

Bear in mind, I'm in no way complaining. I love hot weather. I plan to move out to the Southwest eventually, where it's consistently warm. I'm just dumbfounded at the… wrongness… of the season. It shouldn't be this warm this early in the year.

Erik and I were having a discussion about this tonight, and I thought it could make for an interesting post here. We were talking about movies we'd seen recently, and as conversations with Erik often do, the topic at hand quickly turned to the actresses in the movies.

We started talking about our favorite actresses, and by extension our celebrity crushes if we had any. I figured it'd be fairly easy to come up with a list of my top celebrity crushes. It was a topic that was brought up fairly frequently last year amongst the four of us roommates. So, I put some thought into it briefly, and here's my top five celebrity crushes, in no particular order:

• Piper Perabo. Okay, she's a little older than I (by eight years), but she's still gorgeous. You may know her from such movies as 'The Cave,' 'Cheaper by the Dozen,' and most notably the main character in 'Coyote Ugly.'
• Keira Knightley. She's been in quite a few movies. She's been Guinevere in 'King Arthur,' a handmaiden for Queen Amidala in 'Star Wars Episode I,' and you might know her best for her role as Elizabeth in 'Pirates of the Caribbean' opposite Johnny Depp.
• Speaking of Queen Amidala, next up is Natalie Portman. She's been in a few of my favorite movies — Evey in 'V for Vendetta,' Sam in 'Garden State'… and of course she got her start in 'Leon the Professional.' She's the all-around good girl, plus she's brilliant — and puts her education ahead of her career. Big thumbs up for that.
• Zooey Deschanel. My roommate and I apparently share this one. Trillian in 'Hitchhiker's Guide,' Reese in 'Winter Passing,' and Will Ferrell's romantic attraction in 'Elf.' She's one of those people where you're not really sure what it is about her that you like, but you know you like them anyway.
• The fifth entry becomes a toss-up, and the ones I decided not to include get honorable mentions. I decided the honor of my fifth slot goes to Rachel McAdams, which should appease Erik. She's probably best known for her roles in 'The Notebook' (sappy chick-flick, avoid at all costs if you have any testosterone in your body) and 'Wedding Crashers.' She's just… adorable.

Honorable mentions go to Mandy Moore and Jennifer Garner. Moore didn't make it because… well… I can't think of any good reason really. Because I said it'd be a top five, not a top six. She's beautiful, she's a good girl (the kind you can bring home to the parents), and she's multi-talented. Garner didn't make it because she's a few years older than the rest and married to Ben can't-act-his-way-out-of-a-paper-bag Affleck).

Okay… your turn. Any celebrity crushes? Not “oh man s/he is HOTT!” celebrities; this would be a list of celebrities who you'd love to date if they weren't celebrities. Andrea… that means no Johnny Depp for you.

Link seeded today on Newsvine: Panda Club Playground on BBC News. Are you a sucker for cute?

Now look at the sixth picture and tell me those aren't ewoks.

I almost forgot to mention, Happy Pi Day!

Yes, I realize I'm a geek.

Great video on YouTube, brought to me by the good folks at UrbanCoffee, and brought to you by the good me at right here.

Introducing… the Apple iRack.

“It looks unstable!”

As of this previous Friday, I am now once again free of employment. I have no meaningful, gainful employment to speak of, and that will apparently still apply for the foreseeable future.

Thus far, on my second day of actually noticing (I don't count the weekend, since I wouldn't have been at work anyway) I'm enjoying the extra two hours of sleep my body has granted me. I wasn't sure how long I'd be able to sleep in, seeing as my body has grown accustomed to the shorter hours in bed. I've also managed to stay up past my ridiculous self-imposed work-day bedtime, which is nice.

Of course, I can't stay this way forever. I do eventually need to find a job. However… there are complications. One, I'm only going to be living in the area for another two-and-a-half months, so long-term gigs are iffy. Second, it doesn't help when companies you're going to interview with decide to cancel the interview just a few short hours beforehand. No ill will and no names, I'm just saying. It'd be great if I could just score a couple relatively simple one-off freelance gigs to do over the next month or two. Just a mom-and-pop store that needs a simple site to advertise their wares (the kind of place I sent proposals to back five months ago), nothing major. Just something to keep myself busy with.

In the meantime, I'm gonna slip back into bed for a bit, then get up, take a nice long hot shower (oh how I miss those) and enjoy the weather that seems finally to be coming around.

I recently realized, upon checking my Google Analytics account, that something was wrong. My unique visits had dropped to about 5 per day, which was a ridiculously low number. Upon some checking, I discovered that in the process of updating some of the files that run this site I had accidentally commented out the code that does the tracking. In plain English, the part that I needed wasn’t being used. I quickly corrected the problem and got the tracker working again. Obviously I wasn’t happy, since this threw off my stat tracking considerably, but at least I noticed the problem and managed to fix it rather easily.

Today, upon logging in — which I don’t do all that often, hence my ignorance of the problem — I happened to glance at the world map of visitors.

I was startled to see the smattering of dots from countries I’d never have expected. Not just the USA and selected European countries, but places like India, Kenya, China, even Morocco. Now, unfortunately Google Analytics doesn’t go so far as to show me who viewed what, so I can’t imagine what brings people to my site from these countries; not that people in these countries can’t view my site, but I’m curious how they find it (or how anyone finds it, for that matter). The image I’ve included here is a screenshot of the map just for February 28, 2007 — this map doesn’t include visits from any other weeks or days, just that one particular day. Interesting.

The next Presidential election is still almost two years away, yet the race is already kicking into high gear. We’ve all heard the big names throwing their hats in (or predicted to throw in, or hoped to throw in) for this one: Obama, She-Clinton, Giuliani, Gore, Romney, et cetera. At this point, it’s still probably a toss-up as to who might end up taking it next November. We still don’t even know who the official candidates are even going to be from all both parties.

In any case, if you’re an American and eligible to vote, you may find this site interesting. You can take a quiz to determine which of the front runners you might be likely to identify with and vote for. (Note: I’m not sure how accurate or helpful this quiz really is. Some of the questions were badly phrased and didn’t really have options I felt a strong commitment to.)

Perhaps more useful is their table of the various candidates’ positions on relevant issues. It’s a pretty good resource if you’re unsure of where the candidates stand on particular issues — anything from Social Security to the War in Iraq, gun control to school choice.

It’s still pretty early in the race, but it’s important to know the facts.