floorpie

Is that me rocking out to Nelly and/or Limp Bizkit?

I’ve been tasked with updating Mighty Girl’s blog while she’s on vacation. Does this mean I’m prostituting myself in the hopes of getting hits from visitors to her much more popular site? Yes, yes it does. Oh, and welcome, welcome…

Observations of the day:

– The bird stuck inside Home Depot was flying around in the Home & Garden section instead of, say, plumbing.
– At Fry’s (an electronic’s store), they have a long stretch of numbered cash registers. It is the job of some high school aged teen to stand on top of a footstool at the front of the customer line, scanning up and down the registers searching for a free one. When he (and it’s always a he) spots one, he looks down to the waiting customer and mutters the number to them. When someone within his age group +/- 10 years comes up, he has to somehow affect a cool demeanor for this obviously embarrassing task. I do not envy him his job.
– Second in crappy jobs to the above guy, are the guy’s that have to check your receipt at the exit (also at Fry’s, but can be just about any retail store as of late). He/she never really checks your bag, but any theft the store experiences is ultimately entirely his/her responsibility.
– without an air conditioner, my sliding glass door has become my thermostat.

If you always feel like you’re walking through Life in a fog, you may not be alone according to this article from the New Scientist. An excerpt:

PICTURE the following, and prepare to be amazed. You’re walking across a college campus when a stranger asks you for directions. While you’re talking to him, two men pass between you carrying a wooden door. You feel a moment’s irritation, but they move on and you carry on describing the route. When you’ve finished, the stranger informs you that you’ve just taken part in a psychology experiment. “Did you notice anything change after the two men passed with the door?” he asks. “No,” you reply uneasily. He then explains that the man who initially approached you walked off behind the door, leaving him in his place. The first man now comes up to join you. Looking at them standing side by side, you notice that the two are of different height and build, are dressed differently, have different haircuts and different voices.

Overheard from 40-ish guy playing frisbee in Golden Gate Park:

“Man, I gotta get this throw down, I don’t know what’s up!”

ah yeaahhhh…

From my old days at Lockheed Martin I learned such luminary business phraseology as, “That sounds like a real slam-dunk solution, Bill”. Also, when in meetings where you are desperate to say something if only to look like you know what you’re doing in front of your boss, you can always say, “Is this true in all cases?” (Speaking of which, that little bit of wisdom was imparted to me during an all-hands meeting with one of the VP’s) At any rate, if I had known about this BS generator from Dack, I would have been “aggregate turn-key deliverables”-ing my way to senior management in no time. Instead, I quit and lived nearly happily ever after…

Someone has finally taken the time to carve the hallowed Shotgun Rules in proverbial stone (thanks Ben). It seems to me that calling Shotgun is primarily a guy thing (pardon my male chauvinism). I say that only because I can fondly recall parking lot brawls over my friend’s circa early-1980’s Pontiac Safari stationwagon. You know the one with the oxidized paint, oil-stained carpets, and non new-car smell? Man, when that baby would roar to life with 60% of the pistons firing, the music blaring through the tweeter, and our adolescent bodies compressing the springs to near driveway-grind levels, that’s when you truly knew you were alive! At any rate, having never witnessed it, I’d love to hear about some particulary bloody Shotgun tale from the women in the audience…

Reading Ernie’s post about Shenmue II got me thinking about Zork. The older dorks among you will undoubtedly remember that text-based treasure. It went something like this:

You are West of the house
look
You are standing West of a house
south
you are on a path, a house is to the North
east
you are in front of a house
look at house
The house is a small cottage with a door and window
open door
The door is locked
unlock door
You can’t do that here
you suck
You can’t do that here
shit
You can’t do that here

etc, etc, etc.

I remember thinking how much better playing Zork on my computer was than on my friends, because I had a color monitor instead of a monochrome, thereby rendering the text in brilliant white on blue instead of archaic amber on black.

As I play on my PS2 I often think about those awesome games of yore. Then again, no I don’t…

Back in Junior High, I was in a Youth Community Basketball League. Typically, teams were picked at random by culling from a list of guys who signed up for the short, 14 game season (plus playoffs). My team, however, was captained by one of my more stringent playground-basketball enemies, and coached by his father. Dave (because we were all named Dave back then) was clever enough to realize that even if we were always on opposing teams at school, we were still really good players in our own rights, and would be consequently unstoppable together. Therefore, Dave fed his dad a list of names of all the best guys in school, thereby making us into an indomitable uber-team. Each game was a hard-fought trial by fire that season; but, we were somehow able to persevere and surprise the entire league by amassing an incredible and impressive record of….0-14.