Xboxing's been good to me, Howard...

So I finally got all set up on Xbox Live, and lo and behold, it's almost midnight--because I've been playing all night.

So if any of you Xboxers out there want a n00b to pound on, my gamertag is

.

Be gentle.

That's gotta be a record.

For your Friday night video pleasure, here's the fastest Super Mario Bros. run you'll ever see.

We interrupt this program...

Had a great night. Hung out with my peeps after work. Just got an Xbox 360. Productivity for the night shot. Back tomorrow. Maybe.

Okay, fine. Me in costume. Sorta.

After being mildly castigated by my friend last week because I didn't dress up for Halloween this year, I thought that I could at least comb through the Siftin' photo archives and take a look at Halloweens past.

This was Halloween 1975, when I was just days shy of my first birthday. One thing I always liked about my costumes was that they were often a blend of custom tailoring and low-tech reuse of existing garments.

Hence, the classic mouse ears hat. I'm told that I was a fiend for Mickey Mouse at a pretty young age. I called him "Meemouse" and would want to watch reruns of "The Mickey Mouse Club" when it came on.

I don't know if my parents took me out trick-or-treating, but at least there was a picture for posterity.

Okay, now wait just a minute here. Here's me in 1977, just before my third birthday. That's what the back of the picture says. But I have another picture (which is really fuzzy, so I didn't use it) of me in this outfit two years later when I was in kindergarten. Did my mom let me wear the same costume twice?

I called her, and once I mentioned it, she said that it was possible, but she didn't remember for sure.

At any rate, I remember this when I wore it in kindergarten. My mom made the fake fur leggings and the fake leather vest, but the base of the costume was a set of white thermal underwear. My favorite part of the costume was the plastic mace, which, by the end of a day of kindergarten, had very few pointy parts still sticking out.

This is one of my favorite Halloween costumes ever, despite this shot of me rolling my eyes. Mr. Skeleton here was a pretty clever outfit. It's just a black leotard with reflective tape as the various bones. Stylish and safe to hit the streets at night. In fact, now that I think of it, I don't remember ever having a store-bought costume. They were always handmade, which is pretty awesome.

The next year, I finally got to be Superman. That's me in the center of the shot. My mom, if I recall correctly, didn't make my cape; rather, my first-grade teacher did. We moved in the middle of first grade, and as a going-away present, she made me a red cape.

Embarrassingly, I used a full set of Superman Underoos along with blue tights for my main outfit. And since my idea of dying my cowboy boots red was not entirely practical, we used knee-high red socks stretched over them.

 

The last Halloween picture I have here--I need to go to the master archive to look for the ones I'm missing, which may actually be slides--skips ahead a few years to 1984.

I was crafting ever more elaborate ideas for costumes, but I couldn't decide which one I liked the most. Consequently, I ended up cobbling my costume together the night before Halloween. I used a bunch of the stuff my dad used at his job with the phone company and dressed as a phone guy. It was a cool costume in retrospect, but at the time, I remember being pissed off that I had to use a last-resort that wasn't superhero-related.

Does it show much?

My weird brain

My brain is weird. When I was younger, memories imprinted themselves on my brain with what I think now is disproportionate importance.

Case in point: We recently moved to Pleasanton, which is where I spent a lot of time as a lad growing up in nearby Livermore. Pleasanton had the Stoneridge Mall, which was the biggest mall in our area. Sometimes on our way home, we'd pass the Burger King right by the 580 freeway entrance, and I think we begged to stop damn near every time.

One particular time, we *had* to stop, because they were offering Superman-related merchandise. In fact, what we got were these cup holder toys:



Now, the weird thing is that to this day, I see that Burger King, and it is immediately categorized as "The Burger King where we got the cool Super Powers cupholders." Like over 20 years later, mind you.

This also happens when I drive through certain areas and remember what song I heard for the first time when I was there. Completely useless memories, but they're there.

Anyone else similarly afflicted?

Walk hard, thanks to Honda

Oddly enough, the day I thought, wow, is it already the season for The Nutcracker, I saw a story about a gizmo from Honda that is supposed to help with mobility.

And before I could say, "Go go, gadget legs," I thought that this contraption reminded me of something.

And then I figured it out. The one vehicle from Kenner's Super Powers Collection that I didn't mind not having as a kid: The Justice Jogger.

I would love to know who at Kenner thought any of the Justice Leaguers needed a weird vehicle like this, to say nothing of Superman, who was lounging in it on the box.

Warning: Time suck ahead

I got sucked into these locked-room mystery games, and because misery loves company, I'm sharing them with you. Mwa!