Teh Awesomeness Awaits.

I'm back from Orlando in mostly one piece. Over there on the right, I'm proud to unveil my very first paid "blog ad" so check it out. They have some pretty cool (and apparently non-girly) merchandise. I'm not sure how they go about the whole testosterone-ladening thing, but I'm probably better off not knowing.

I'll be back as soon as I organize my thoughts and catch up a little.

Also, cold weather sucks it.

I hate Fast Zombies.

Let's get something straight. Zombies should shuffle. They should walk with their hands straight out from their bodies. They should be easy to avoid, and easy to riddle with bullets. They are allowed to be relentless, hungry, and almost impossible to kill, sure -- but they shouldn't be fast. That just freaks me right the hell out.

Other things zombies* should definitely not be allowed to do:

(1) Climb walls and trees and poles like coked-up chimpanzees.
(2) Be completely hairless and in better shape than Will Smith who is also completely hairless.
(3) Unhinge their jaw and roar like a lion right before they run at you full speed and rip your throat out.
(4) Be more than 1/4 vampire.
(5) Be smart.

As you can probably surmise, we saw I am Legend last night. If you think the zombies in 28 Days Later were fast, I am here to say that you are sadly mistaken. I will bet money that the zombies I saw last night would kick major ass in a zombie triathlon against those UK zombies, if in fact you could reliably get zombies to bike and swim. They obviously have the running part more than covered.

Maybe if we replaced biking and swimming with climbing and killing, we could actually get this thing off the ground in time for Beijing -- although I did do a quick google search on 'Chinese zombies' and from what I could see, they appear to be a zombie-free nation.

OK, I'm off to my next class with the rest of the zombies. Luckily, they are of the slow-moving, over-eating, techie-geek persuasion, and I think I can move faster than most of them. Wish me luck.



[note: From reading the comments, I realized that my generic use of the term "zombies" might be slightly at odds with the traditional voodoo-reanimated corpse that is controlled, puppet-like, by the sorcerer/priest who raised it from the dead. So be it. Whatever these things were supposed to be -- I like the term "zompires" -- they were scary-fast bastards.]

*Or any other "virally-mutated" creatures, like those over at humor-blogs.com.

Best 30 bucks I ever spent.

One thing you don't want to see two days before you leave on a trip is your cat dragging his raw ass across your rug. OK, granted, you probably don't want to see that ever, but two days before a trip it's extra-special, in that "Great. WTF is wrong with the cat's ass and how can we get him to the vet before we leave" kind of way.

We managed to take him to the vet this morning and now I'm waiting to go pick him up. It turns out he had to have his anal glands expressed.

Before I read that article, I had no idea what anal glands were, or why they apparently needed to be delivered somewhere overnight, but that's how it goes. I'm always learning new things about cats that make me think I don't want to know anything else because there's nothing left to know that won't cost me a fortune and/or turn out to be totally disgusting.

This wasn't too rough on the wallet, surprisingly. I think my wife said it cost $30 extra. From reading a few things on the web, I found out that you can learn to perform this procedure on your cat yourself. Dear god in heaven, why?? Why would anyone want to do this? Trust me, If I can pay someone else to root around in my cat's ass and fix a problem, then that's a bargain at any price. Although I could definitely live without having deep and meaningful anal gland conversations over lunch.

I think if I were a vet, I'd have to charge a minimum of $15,000 for anything ass-related. I realize I probably wouldn't get much ass-business, but one or two cat butts a year and I'd be on easy street. I really think vets should charge by the relative grossness of the procedure and the size of the animal. For instance, if you have a giant dog with a giant ass problem, that's gonna cost you a lot more, ass-wise, than a ferret's tiny one. That's the price you pay for wanting a pet with a giant ass.

They should also charge by how smelly your animal is overall. If it smells disgusting, there should be a stankification surcharge. They could just have a line item multiplier on the invoice:

080-54: Anal Gland Expressed $30.00
080-887: Smelled like that dude at the Phish Concert (x3)
Total: $90.00

Speaking of smelly asses, I'll try to keep you all updated on my Nerdfest 2008 conference. Picture 8,000 sweaty geeks in one giant hotel complex. You'd think they charged extra for the soap and water or something.

It's always good for a laugh or two.


humor-blogs.com

xs.to.pound.me.in.the.ass.com

Before Blogger allowed hosting of pictures, I used this place called http://xs.to to store them. It was free, and pretty reliable. When Blogger started hosting them, it was easier and I sort of drifted away from xs.to. Well, I guess they drifted away from me as well, because they just dropped about everything I had stored there from mid-2006 on back.

I am currently going through my posts one by one and replacing the pictures. I cannot tell you how much this sucks, and how much it makes me want to stab them in the neck with my car.

ps - If anyone knows how to get blogger to drop the picture where my friggin' text cursor is, instead of at the top of the post, please let me know before I kill myself. Thank you.

Poor Impulse Control.

Similar to the character Raven in the book "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, (it's a fantastic book and you should go read it now instead of this post) I am also getting a phrase tattooed on my forehead. Unlike Raven's, my tattoo will be voluntary, and I'll use small letters because I don't have a giant, slab-like forehead. It will say "Attention to detail is limited at best."

Why? Because that had to be my favorite line in my finally-posted blog review over at humor-blogs.com.

Reading parts of this review was like being in first grade all over again.

The report card criticisms were always the same. Johnny doesn't pay attention. Johnny doesn't apply himself. Johnny is always talking to his neighbor. Johnny won't stop touching his crotch. Well, that last one was actually from Miss Welch, my high school French teacher, but you get the idea. Check it out if you get the chance. Most of the comments were great, and Diesel does a fantastic job with the site. Every blog that gets reviewed always seems to get some unfavorable comments. I am pretty sure that these guys are on permanent retainer over there.

In other news, under the guise of "Well, I have to open it to put the batteries in," I played with this for a half hour yesterday. (Don't worry, that link is safe for work. Or is it? You take your chances on this here blog. )

If you are a geek like me, and had a microscope when you were a kid, this thing is pretty amazing. It's supposed to be a gift for my nephew, but I may have to keep it. It would be either really fun or a complete disaster to take it to a party. I haven't decided which yet. I supposed it would depend upon how much everyone had to drink before you broke it out, and how many nerds were in attendance.

After I put the batteries in, I sat down on the floor in front of the television and just swept my hand across the hardwood a few times to gather a little bit of detritus. I discovered some interesting things at 200X magnification. For one thing, I discovered we need to clean the floor way more often. Aside from that, it's an impressive piece of technology for $40. What did I see? Well, there was something that looked like a giant slab of freshly cut fish that turned out to be a tiny section of Christmas tree needle. Something else that was a bright fluorescent blue-green looked be a sand crystal or something that happened to glow in the particular wavelength of the LED light source.

If you get one of these, just don't look too closely at your own skin. It's shiny and wrinkled and has giant telephone poles poking out of it -- and seriously, you won't want to be in it any more.

And that was just from looking at my arm.

ps - I'm currently working on scanning some of my amazing childhood artwork, so stay tuned for that. Let's just say I was not a talented young man.

Things on Trees.

I always look at tree ornaments. I don't know why. Probably because I have so many different weird ornaments on my own Christmas tree that I like to see if anyone else has stuff like mine. You might remember Just Jack, the ornament I received from Yort last year. That thing freaked me right the hell out.

So long story short, I got looking at our friend's tree at a little house party they hosted on New Year's Eve. They all know I have a blog, so when I started not-so-surreptitiously snapping photos of their ornaments, they pretty much knew what was going to happen.

Let's start with this one:



I have nicknamed him Yul, the Hairless Angel. He wears a burlap dress and I believe his wings rotted off ages ago. According to the owner, he is an antique. According to me, he is a tiny Boy George on a string:



I'm not exactly sure what's going on here:



I always figure Pooh for a catcher instead of a pitcher, but come to think of it, he was always getting his stuff stuck in pots and trees and things, so I could be wrong.

This last one freaked me out a little:



No mouth. No nose. No ears. Fused hands. Empty sockets where the eyes are supposed to be.

And it flies.

If those aren't the ingredients for a guaranteed nightmare, I'm not sure what is. I took more than one picture of it since it was really creepy -- and today, when I uploaded them to the computer, I saw this:



I may never sleep again.

Anyway, Happy New Year and all that. Get on those resolutions, and also check out humor-blogs.com. They have a review page, and supposedly my blog is coming up. If they give me a crappy review, I'll be needing a hacker. So if you know of anybody, send them my way. Thanks.