cheap laughs

i don't care if you've heard this joke already. it's still funny.

Big going-away party for my friend tomorrow night. She's moving to "new york". I put it in quotes because she's actually moving to Wehauken, New Jersey. Wait, that's not the same thing? says who?

I know the feeling

Turns out I don't owe the feds $10,390. It was really just $700. Which is funny, because $700 seems more real to me because I can actually pay it, then eat ramen noodles for a while. Downside: ramen noodles are not my favorite. Upside: I think I'm dropping a few ell-bees.

Picture at left is from the running of the bulls in Pamplona. It's also a nice metaphor for my experience with the Feds; that's me in white.

not-so-secret passwords

Google enabled a "search public events" feature in their Calendar. (Full disclosure: I used the calendar when I was doing some planning, before I switched to the Backpack deal from 37signals.)

A special bonus of the new feature is that people haven't been paying attention to their calendar settings, and/or they weren't expecting google to make their calendar searchable. So they put password and user information in calendars that are now easy for the public to see. Oops.

You can read more about it over on another blog.

If you want to see it for yourself, log into google calendar, type "user password" in the search field, and click "Search Public Events".

2 hours of my life I can never get back; relationship insight (really); numerology

(too lazy to track down a picture - I will paint you a picture with words.)

Spent two hours of my life watching the movie Pathfinder. This is a movie that only my little brother could like. (he's famous for liking every movie, ever.) And I spent $10. The premise seemed cool: It looked cold, there were swords, and it was rated R for "Strong, brutal violence throughout." Should have been rated S for "Severe sucking throughout." It was predictable and formulaic and ridiculous. I'm ashamed I watched it. It was probably worse than Miami Vice, a movie so memorably bad that my then-girlfriend broke up with me the day after we saw it. She said the two events were unrelated, but I'm not so sure.

------------------
Was talking with my friend this weekend over lunch and he helped me realize something pithy about relationships, i.e., if you're in one, you have three options/scenarios/choices/paths or whatever:

1. Get what you want (no need to effect any change here - your needs are being met, you're happy, and also rare).
   
2. Adjust expectation so that you want what you get (this is what I understand is true about most long-term relationships).
   
3. Make a change (e.g. quit).
   

Most people these days think you should experience #1, and if not, you go straight to #3, even if you're married. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying that it is.

--------------
numerology and astrology is complete crap. This is blog post number 224, though, so if you're into 2x2=4 type patterns then this is the post for you.

The blog has come a long way since I started. Readership is way up*, and I'm funnier than ever**.
love you.

---------------
* outright lie
** opinion stated as fact, which could be characterized as a lie, if you wanted to be mean about it.

they don't call him jay-jo for nothing

my friend Sam has a nice little thing going on over there in cyberspace. Plus he just got engaged. But he also has a sweet picture of me with my "girlfriend", or at least a girl that I tried to make time with a few months ago. You can see me working to number-close in the photo. If you don't know what 'number-close' means, you better ask somebody.

special bonus feature: sweet shot of my man Jay-Jo dropping it like it's hot at the engagement party. get there. You can see Sam's description of the event over on his thing with the thing.

laughs, plus really good music, plus I suck at guitar (x2807)

Spent last night playing guitar (badly) and going to a show with some friends. We saw the Fishtank Ensemble in LA, and they were awesome.

That's them in the photo, and l to r there's a fiddler, guitarist, accordionist, singer/2nd fiddle/banjolele/handsaw, upright bass, and shamisan. At least I think it's a shamisan. A very old japanese string instrument? yeah, one of those.

Anyway, it was wicked good. One drawback to the show was they started playing super late, so it was tough to hang around on a school night. They played some Romanian dance tunes (really), some gypsy (Roma) party music, and Mozart, among other selections. I've only really heard about the Roma in the context of their culture, and not much of it good. But the music is fun, and it's jaw-droppingly cool to see it performed live. Seeing six people onstage performing wickedly complex musical pieces is always a treat. If they come to your town, go check them out.

---------------
unrelated, I had some big laughs with my friends before and after the show. My friend Jordan described how he first kissed a girl. He was fourteen-ish, and although he liked a girl and she seemed interested, he couldn't work out how to actually french her. he asked her if she would be his girlfriend. she said, umm, no.

old jordan would have been put off by this, but new jordan had an ace up his sleeve: he was getting his wisdom teeth out in a couple days, and the dentist had told him that he might lose sensation in his lipface. so he tried a different strategy...

"I might lose feeling in my lips, because I'm having my wisdom teeth removed. Can we make out so I know what it feels like, just in case?"

her heart softens, because now he's like a soldier going off to war, except he's 14 and he's actually going off to the dentist. but still, they did some frenching. ahhh, young love.

Sam pointed out later that this was a good strategy, and that you can employ it for any surgical procedure. I was at similar risk when I had my back surgery, but I didn't take advantage. mores the pity.

thanks for reading.

a whole website on a dry-erase board?

here's a clever, funny promotion for a new book.

enjoy.

You're gonna want that back

this is graphic and severe and awesome all at once.
here's the description from the guardian.co.uk :

Kaohsiung, Taiwan: The lower left arm of zoo veterinarian Chang Po-yu was bitten off by a crocodile when he tried to pull a tranquilizer dart from its body. In a bid to rescue the arm two bullets were shot at the crocodile but it was unharmed. Chang eventually underwent emergency surgery to have his limb reattached.

don't view the slides unless you're ready for images of a graphic nature. i'm posting remotely, so I can't add the main photo, even though it rules. the pictures tell the story. second best picture (after #1): the one where the police officer tries to shoot the crocodile, to no effect.
enjoy.

the persecution of the white and wealthy must stop!

Did you hear that those Duke lax players accused of rape had the charges dropped?

In the interest of fairness, it's nice to see their names cleared with the same enthusiasm with which they were smeared.

(Aside: in the UK, if accused of rape, your identity is kept secret - here in the states, it's only the accuser whose identity is not reported. That doesn't seem fair to me, as when Kobe Bryant was getting pummeled in the media and his accuser remained comfortably anonymous. I'm not saying a crime did or did not occur, but if you're going to report the identity of the accused, you should also report the identity of the accuser.)

Moving on, I'm glad that this terrible persecution of rich, white, boarding-school kids can come to an end. There's only so much of that I can take. And i'm not the only one. I appreciated this comment from one of the victims:

"This whole experience has opened my eyes to a world of injustice that I never knew existed."

That sounds ignorant and obtuse, which is about what I'd expect from a Duke lacross player. How much injustice do you experience when you're a rich, athletic white guy? That's part of why you went to college, to learn about that stuff, not live it. It's like you took the practical exam for being a famous athelete, except you're not famous. Just infamous. And you didn't get paid like a pro athelete.

happy easter

nothing happened.
well, nothing interesting. Some stuff broke in my house, so I get to fix it. super pumped about that. kind of.

happy easter.

cool: the blue marble; not cool: getting a ticket for turning right on a red light without stopping

found an interesting website during a period of extended interweb dorkout the other day. The image at left comes from NASA, and besides being an utterly spectacular picture, it's completely free. I just have to say that it came from NASA (it does) and they also ask that you put a link to the origin of the image. done. If you're into that sort of thing, you can find a lot more (free) amazing images like the blue marble shot at left. enjoy.

-------
less cool than panoramic shots of planet earth is getting a ticket for turning right on a red light without stopping. I'll be doing my part for local government by cutting a them a nice check and also attending traffic school. super pumped about that. special bonus: the officer did tell me that it was "very expensive" ticket. thanks for the heads up. please go bother somebody else.

probably not going to make it to the 20 year reunion...

it's been kind of a slow week in case-land. there was that whole business w/ the IRS (still unresolved, if you must know), plus chores and house and blah. It happens to people. into each life some rain must fall, etc. and so forth.

Then I get an email from a good friend about a guy that flunked out of his fancy-pants high school, only to enroll at my high school. Back in the day Ronnie was well-known around my high school for a) being good at basketball; b) being funny; c) scoring beers at the local quickie mart because he never got carded. Times have changed. You can Google the (in)famous Ronnie Ledesma yourself, but I'll save you the trouble and give you some highlights right here:

• here's a link to the news story about him being arrested w/ a "transient" in manteca, including video from News10 action local connected news, covering Sacramento, Stockton, and Modesto. this is by far the best resource for this awesome story. They have an interview and mugshots of the accused. I tried to get captures of the mugshots but action10NEWS was too clever for me.
  
• Here's a link to an article on some sort of online record keeping thing, probably a paper in manteca or maybe modesto, about the same thing.
  

I can't make this stuff up.

More info: Ronnie's dad was a police officer. For real. What's really bugging me is that this happened two months ago and I just heard about it today. Can I set some kind of alert for when Ronnie's rap sheet gets longer?

More superbness: In addition to the several charges pending for the recent arrest, "Ledesma also is being held on three outstanding warrants in Placer County for domestic violence and one for burglary."

He's a long shot to make the 20 year reunion, then.