I really like http://www.epinions.com/ a lot (despite the stupid name), and http://www.askmehelpdesk.com, too.
I like these collaborative peer-review/knowledge transfer type sites. It's great.
Now if only I could afford to buy stuff.
There's another "Chris Wage" in canada somewhere. I found mention of him and his band at this page, talking to someone named "wannabe sk8ter jenn".
This is so not cool.
My friend Steve got us some Nintendo games for my birthday: Super Mario 3, RC Pro-Am, and Bible Adventures (which, I think, was a joke)..
Super Mario 3 is great.. Although, I am still on the lookout for Super Mario 2..
Did you ever wonder why Super Mario 2 was so friggin weird? Well, there's a reason -- it originally wasn't a Mario game at all!
Read more about that here!
On the other hand, I saw another bumper sticker that read "Forget world peace -- visualize your hand on the turn signal", which I thought was pretty funny..
.. and then I plowed into a telephone pole.
I saw one of those bumper stickers that said "put down your cellphone and drive" today.
While I agree that a cellphone in the hands of a moron driving a car is dangerous, there are far worse things.
According to an American Automobile Association study -- one of the key studies used by the insurance industry in setting rates across the country -- cell phones did not rank in the top five causes of auto accidents last year. Of the 32,000 analyzed accidents, cell phones contributed to only 1.5 percent.*
You know that ranks highest in the causes of automobile accidents at a whopping 29%? Driver distraction. Read: gawking at bumper stickers. Think about it.
*http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/070701/opi_0707010001.shtml
Oh yeah, it's my birthday today.
I turned 22.
22 is a pretty non-eventful birthday. I guess I don't have anything to look forward to until I hit 25, when I can rent cars. After that, it's a slippery slope into the casket. Teehee.
My plans for the evening are to go to my parents' house and eat a dinner of grilled salmon steaks, grilled squash and peppers, and a big salad.
It should be nice and relaxing, which is pretty much what I need after the past month.
I'm pretty sure this is the most entertaining thing the internet has ever produced.
I like to exaggerate things.
I lost like 8-10 pounds this week. Thank yoooou, Dr. Atkins (yes, yes, your mother had a friend who had an aunt whose cousin had kidney failure, blah blah -- shut up and stay tuned for a future installment on my nutrition/weight loss spiel -- that's a whole story in and of itself).
It's amazing what a difference 10 pounds makes. It's not the difference between fat and skinny.. It's just the difference between "bloated" and "not bloated".
There's this picture of Ben Affleck on some magazine right now, and Amanda said it looks just like me.. Which it does, admittedly.
Although I wouldn't say I really look like him.. it's just that his hair is all mussed and he is unshaven -- like I tend to usually be.
I should probably shave more often than I do.. I guess I have sensitive skin. I think if I made an effort to shave every day eventually my face would toughen up, but I'm such a wuss.
So, here's a question: what's up with those Nair-like hair removal things. I know most of them require the hair to be a certain length for it to work, but others don't -- so why couldn't a guy use that on his face, huh? HUH? I would expect none of them even work, and that's why. But wouldn't that be great? Instead of shaving every morning, you just lather up some lotion on your face and wipe off your beard. Maybe it's like the short-line at the DMV. It looks promising, and like it could be a convenient shortcut, but you figure if it was so great, it would be as long as the line you're in. (This is my new favorite metaphor -- it works for just about anything.)
You know what else is weird, is those guys that are starting to get their facial hair lased (is that a word?) off. I'm sorry, but shaving is a pain, yeah, but removing your facial hair permanently?
I think that's a little extreme. I like to think that my facial hair is part of what makes me a man.. *grunting noises* Besides, chicks dig a 5 o'clock shadow.. right? right? and dirty shirts with ketchup stains -- they dig those too, right? right?
During the year I spent at Boston University, I was a member of an improvised comedy troupe, along with my friend Aaron.
My shining moment was during the game that is set around a dinner party. Each guest has a mysterious quirk, which the host has to guess. If you've ever seen "Whose Line Is It Anyway", you know the one I mean.
My quirk was that I was a fish out of water. I spent the entire game pretending like I was dunking my head in the toilet to breathe. It got really big laughs, but ..
I always felt like a cheat, though, because really, I'm not that funny. Witty, yes -- clever? absolutely.. but not funny in that spontaneous, quirky "oh ferris bueller is there anything you can't do" way. When you get right down to it, I'm probably about as poorly cut out for improv comedy as you can get.
But I'll never forget staring at the carpet of the stage, hunched over an imaginary toilet, gasping for imaginary breaths of toiletwater. Not because I think of it as my "shining moment" or anything -- but just because that sort of memory tends to stick out in your mind, after the more mundane memories start fading away. Really, the "shining moment" comment was supposed to be in a slightly sardonic, self-deprecating sense. Did you catch that? I suppose in retrospect I could have put "shining moment" in quotes, like it is in this paragraph, but I thought that might have been too over-the-top. After all, there's such a thing as being too sardonic -- and besides, when people put things in quotes like that, I imagine the narrator accenting that phrase sharply and making those little air quotes with their fingers, and that really gets on my nerves -- especially when people do it all the time.
Getting back to my trip down memory lane:
I never performed in our actual grand finale show. I think it was because I had been recovering from my bad ankle sprain, and had missed a number of practices. But, on a subconscious (okay, conscious) level it probably had more to do with my insecurities and fear of doing something silly like pretending I was a fish breathing in an imaginary toilet in front of hundreds of people, rather than just a handful of friends, which I thought was plenty as it was.
I ended up being a ticket-taker at the show. How lame is that? I should have performed. Even if I had completely blanked on stage, I could have pretended I was a fish out of water. People seem to get a real kick out of that.