April 2007

Make the logo bigger!

At work, we have this cartoon posted inside some of our cubicles. We use it to play Designer Bingo. Top left square is free. Currently I’ve got the entire bottom row X’ed out, although I’ve experienced EVERY one of these at some point. BINGO! However, I think this should have been a square… MAKE THE LOGO BIGGER! (click to listen to pee-yer-pants-funny mp3) A friend of a friend added some verses: “I want my logo different,Something nobody’s seen before!Can you use the font Papyrus?I’ve got it on my computer!”

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Rest in peace, Tres

Tres Smith, a photographer that sometimes worked freelance for my office, died on April 19 after a years-long fight against cancer. He was 41. While I didn’t know him as well as some, he never failed to be friendly, sweet, kind, and generous to me whenever we met. He had a fantastic sense of humor and piercing blue eyes. The last time I saw him he was taking pictures of me and Brittney eating chocolate cake at the Dairyette, laughing it up. We will all miss you, Tres. Rest in peace.

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Photo Walk

Doc and I like to take photo walks when the weather is nice. Usually we just start from our house and head off in a random direction and see what we can find that is interesting. Today we ended up at the YMCA pool in a park a mile or so from our house. As I circled the pool looking for interesting things to photograph, I kept getting whiffs of strong pot smoke from a couple of guys sitting on a picnic bench near the treeline, smoking. Doc wondered aloud what kind of people come to a public park to smoke out. I said, “People who don’t want their parents to smell the smoke coming from their rooms.”

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Piglet

PigletThis awesome little SmartCar parks in my parking lot at work sometimes after hours. The license plate says “PIGLET.” (I’ll wait for your cute fit to die down before continuing…) They’re gas-powered, get incredible mileage (probably similar or better than my hybrid Prius), and cost about $25,000 US. Yes, you read that right, 25 grand for this car. I really truly wish that people in this country would get on the ball and buy smaller cars like this one (check out the monstrosity parked next to it) but for that kind of money, I’m not sure it’s going to happen for the SmartCar. Squishy Little WorldI’m not certain what this is, exactly, but I stepped on it. It made for a cool photo. Kind of like a little planet, sitting there on the concrete.

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Wonder Bread Freemason Bus!

Weird DreamI dreamed last night that Doc joined a secret society, sort of like the Freemasons. They had come to our house in a huge bus shaped like a loaf of Wonder bread. He let them in and they made their pitch, and he decided to join because members got to wear neckties that had a little lever at the top that when you pressed it, made a really loud train whistle sound. He told me that he really didn’t believe what they were telling him, but he signed the papers because he wanted the train necktie. And who wouldn’t?! Mmmmm ChocolateIn other news, I got accepted to be in a taste test focus group study on chocolate bars! Next week I’ll get paid $60 to spend 90 minutes eating chocolate and giving my opinion. Can’t beat that with a stick. Work BitesI spent 8.5 hours at work on Saturday, finishing up a project that was supposed to launch today. We found out yesterday that it has been delayed for another week because the client, at the very last minute, decided that she didn’t like any of the copy we’d written. Just a global “I don’t like it,” no specifics given. I wasted my entire Saturday for nothing. At least I got a free lunch (or was it really free? I did trade my weekend for it!). Dot-Matrix Printer BikeI read a few weeks ago about a guy who custom built a bicycle equipped with a laptop computer and cans of water-soluble spray chalk. It received messages that people submitted to a website and printed them out on the sidewalks as he rode down the street. I think he was arrested before he ever got to use it (something about intent to perform criminal mischief/graffiti, and how coincidental that this […]

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Whatcha gonna do with all that junk?

OK, so I don’t know if you’ve heard the Black Eyed Peas’ song entitled “My Humps,” (the one that goes “whatcha gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?”) but I just recently heard it all the way through for the first time and saw the video. I’ll go on the record and say that oh my god this has got to be one of the most insanely stupid songs I’ve ever heard. “My lovely lady lumps?” Did she just sing the words “Tryin’ a feel my hump, hump. Lookin’ at my lump, lump.”?!?! And NOT crack up??! It’s not like there is any shortage in this world of vacuous songs that encourage women’s use of tits and ass to further their own materialistic desires and/or boost their rock-bottom self esteem (“my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,” anyone?)… but SERIOUSLY PEOPLE. Is “lady lumps” not the most asinine phrase you have ever heard? I don’t know whether to laugh or feel horribly embarrassed. Anyhoo, the point of all this is, my brother alerted me to a BRILLIANT cover of this song by Alanis Morrissette. She managed to make it sad and haunting in tone, which is incredibly amusing when she sings something like “I’ma get, get, get, get, you drunk, get you love drunk off my hump,” and the video is a fantastic parody. Check it out…

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What have they done to my house?!

My parents sold the house I grew up in and moved several years ago. My mom was heartbroken — this was the house she’d raised her children in. I was sad to see my parents leave, of course, but I’d said goodbye to the house long before that. Seeing it turned over to another family wasn’t an overly emotional event for me at the time. However… it has been brought to my attention that this house is once again on the market, and through the magic of the Internets (a.k.a. a series of tubes), I found the realty company’s photos. Now, I fully realize it’s not my house anymore, I haven’t lived there since 1990 (well, and that brief period in 1994 after college). And I fully realize that all homeowners do things to houses to suit their own tastes, to make them uniquely theirs. But this is just making me sad. Look what they’ve done! The Disturbingly Ornate Antique Jampacked Christmas Fairy threw up all over the house!! And aren’t you supposed to, you know, put away most of your decor and things, and go kind of minimalist, if you’re trying to sell your house? I guess these people never heard that little tidbit of advice. Oh yes… this one was MY room. Now it’s junky floral — and it is a pretty damn small room for all the crap that’s apparently in it. Under that yellow paint are layers of pink (the original, when I was very small), light blue, black with Jackson Pollock white drops (when my parents went out of town for a week; boy did I get in trouble for that), and also paintings that both I and my youngest brother painted directly on the walls. My parents’ bedroom. Boy, that bed almost doesn’t fit, […]

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BLAM!-boo™

In my dreams last night, I came up with a fabulous new product idea… BLAM!-boo™, bamboo building material stuffed with explosives! If you want a house that can self-destruct when necessary, just build your walls out of BLAM!-boo™, and you’ll be able to explode it any time you want! Somehow, being able to explode one’s house was a very important consideration in my dream. In another part of my dream, I was in some scenario very much like an action/thriller movie. At the last minute we uncovered enough of an old windowpane to realize that instructions for stopping the airplane explosion were written in the dust on the glass, and I scrambled up to the top of the airplane’s tail and pressed a red button. The explosion had JUST started, but as soon as I pressed the red button, it was like someone hit a “rewind” button and the explosion stopped mid-explose, and then retreated into itself. In yet another part of my dream, I was at a cocktail party in someone’s mansion that was also a bible museum, and I was supposed to go on the tour of the exhibit but I didn’t want to because my fingers and hands were very tingly and swelling and painful, especially the 4th finger on my right hand, and I was afraid that I soon wouldn’t be able to get my rings off. I thought maybe I’d eaten something I was allergic to, either at the party or in the cab of the semi truck/spaceship that had brought me and some friends from the island we’d been stranded on to the cocktail party, and it was making me tingle and swell up. Then I “woke up” in my dream, and realized that the reason I’d been “dreaming” about my hands feeling that […]

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