I bet that hurt...

The sad fact that plagues copy editors: the I and the O are right next to each other on the keyboard. Back in my newspaper days, any time I typed "three-point shot" in a sports caption or any reference in news stories to "public meetings," "Department of Public Works" or God forbid, "Public Storage," I asked everyone else on the copy desk to verify that I had in fact typed what I thought.

Hey, it's Friday night...

Friday nights are usually when people hang out, go out, or black out (sometimes all three). In honor of the celebratory nature of Friday nights, I present the awesomest walrus I've ever seen, who I call Chumley. Break it down for us, Chumley:

New commenting system

Trying out Disqus as a replacement for the old-school commenting system. This should make the comments more discussiony, which will be cool.

Thanks to Josh for the tip.

Oh dear God, Microsoft...why?!

We here at Siftin' often celebrate the less than successful. Or in other words, hooray for crap!

I think you can learn more from bad ideas than good ones sometimes, and I came across this post on CNET's Crave blog that runs through the 8 worst Microsoft promo videos.

With all that money and talent at their disposal, how bad could it be, you ask?

Check out Josh Lowensohn's post and find out for yourself. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Tuesday's child is full of FAIL

I've never been particularly graceful, thus shooting the whole "Tuesday's child is full of grace" thing all to hell.

But when I dipped into my baby book to see how old I was when I hit a baby milestone recently, I noticed that I had a lot of coordination trouble. Here are the top 5 greatest hits, so to speak (with approximate age):

5. (5 months) Hit head against fireplace bricks at grandparents' house. Result: "Small bruise on forehead -- fine afterward."

4. (1 year) Fell down in back yard and split open my top lip. Result: "Swelling went down after a couple of hours."

3. (13 months) Stepped on a sewing needed; it almost went completely through my foot. My mom has told me about this one. apparently, the head of the needle was poking up, tentpole-style, in the skin on the top of my foot. Result: "It hardly bled at all. Jeff didn't cry much at all. Fine a few minutes later."

2. (16 months) Fell on the floor while sucking on a bottle. Cut lip on outside. Result: "Cut bled pretty good. Jeff was fine as soon as he was given an ice cube to suck on." One of the big memories of my childhood is the taste of an ice cube wrapped in a paper towel. This happened so often, I thought it was one of the major food groups.

1. This is the first one I actually remember, as I had just turned 4. I was at preschool on the swing set. Always the social butterly, I was swinging on a two-person swing. I think it was one of the ones that looked like a seesaw.

It was almost time to go back inside, and while my classmates weren't having any trouble with this, I was. Being short, my feet couldn't quite reach the ground, and since I was riding solo, I had no one to help me.

Well, I didn't want to be late, so I thought if I grabbed part of the main frame, that would slow me down enough, and I could hop off. Note that waiting for a minute or two while I slowed down naturally didn't actually occur to me.

I grabbed the bar as I was swinging back, and I guess I miscalculated. I heard a giant gong, and it felt like the back of my head was on fire.

Yep, I practically brained myself because I didn't want to be late for making macaroni arts and crafts.

The result: "Bled for a while, but was fine afterward. No swelling."

This filled up the Accidents page in my baby book before I even made it to school, where I was the Gerald Ford of Portola Elementary School.

I'm not exaggerating. I was on a first-name basis with Lindy, the secretary, and every time I came into the office, she'd turn to the mini-fridge next to her and reach for an icepack for me.

I would trip constantly, slide occasionally -- one time requiring a quick trip home to change clothes, as I'd slid all the way up my left side in mud during soccer at recess -- and I ran into stuff a lot.

You'd think a giant storage locker bigger than a Dumpster would be a pretty easy thing to work around, right?

During a game of Soak 'Em (or Bombardment, depending on where you went to school), I saw a random ball bounce near me. I ran for it at top speed to get it before one of the bigger kids did, and somehow neglected to factor in that giant storage locker, which I plowed into with the top right side of my head.

No blood, but a ginormous goose egg was sprouting on my head, which meant that my record, if not my skull, was broken, and it was off for another icepack from Lindy.

To add insult to injury, I had to do a speech in front of the class that day, which I did, holding the ice on my dome.

And no, it wasn't on playground safety.

I'm here, sort of

I'm spending a little too much time at The Prelinger Archives these days. To be more accurate, I'm looking at more than the Prelinger collection, but there's a lot of public domain goodness to be had. Check it out.

More movies enter the Siftin' vaults!

Having already nabbed The Essential Ernest film collection while out shopping with my parents (how any Ernest collection can call itself essential without including Ernest Goes to Camp, I don't know; I wanted it mainly for the commercials anyway), I was looking elsewhere when my dad motioned to me.

"Here's something you need for your blog," he told me. He was holding Cult Classics: 20 Movie Pack. Now I'm fairly skeptical of multimovie packs. The quality is often on par with a half-assed transfer of a VHS tape that had been buried beneath a 100-year-old outhouse. But on the other hand, if you get one or two movies worth watching -- and I use the word "worth" very loosely; that's how I ended up watching Night Train to Terror -- it's not a total loss.

I scanned the back to check out the lineup. Off the top, there was Reefer Madness, which is always a crowd pleaser. There were also the semi-companion films to that classic, The Cocaine Fiends and Sex Madness. But there were two in particular that caught my attention. See if you can pick them out from this list:

Chained for Life
Child Bride
The Cocaine Fiends
Delinquent Daughters
Escort Girl
Gambling with Souls
Joyless Street
Mad Youth
Marihuana
The Marijuana Menace
Omoo-Omoo, The Shark God
Reefer Madness
The Road to Ruin
Sex Madness
She Shoulda' Said No!
Slaves in Bondage
Ten Nights in a Barroom
Terror of Tiny Town
Test Tube Babies
The Wild and the Wicked

Oh, hell yes. Finally, I'd get a chance to watch Terror of Tiny Town, a western with an all-little-people cast. Yes, you heard me. I read about this in The Golden Turkey Awards, and all these years later, I own it.

Second one I noticed: Omoo-Omoo, The Shark God. How can you not want to watch a movie with that name?

Don't answer that.

Well, I've got lots of movie watching ahead of me. Wish me luck. And lest you think it's a film festival with boobies galore, I should point out that the most recent film in the collection is still over 50 years old.

YouTube as educational tool

Sometimes, I really could just spend hours checking out videos on YouTube. For example, as regular readers are abundantly aware of, I'm obsessed with old TV shows and commercials.

Now what's great is all the people who had VCRs back in the Stone Age top-loader days are uploading samples of their collections to share with everyone. I love this, because it's one thing to read what shows were on during a certain time, but it's another to watch the opening credits to them, because there are shows that you just don't remember because they weren't syndicated or they didn't last particularly long.

Thanks to uploader videoholic2008, here's a sample of what you could find on TV if you tuned in in early 1977, which is about the earliest I can remember any TV shows specifically.

Why don't they bring back Scrabble?

One of the joys of staying home from school was watching game shows in the morning instead of avoiding mockery courtesy of some classmates.

One that never failed to keep me watching was Scrabble, hosted by the man himself, Chuck Woolery.

Why?

Well, the players would pick tiles, which would give them two letters to choose from to put into the particular word they were trying to guess. And every so often there was an exchange like this:

"OK, you've got a D and a P."

"I'll take the P, Chuck."

Potty jokes are always funny. Here's a clip from the first episode so you can see how it worked.

Songs that should be used for commercials, but aren't

Yes, it's that time once again. Time to ruin another handful of songs by pairing them up with unlikely products in the name of advertising campaigns.

And again, I hope I never see any of these on TV. For a number of reasons.

ELO - Turn to Stone: Viagra

The Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard: Preparation H

ABBA - Waterloo: Kohler toilets

Zero Seven - In the Waiting Line: The Department of Motor Vehicles

Little River Band - Lonesome Loser: World of Warcraft (I kid, I kid)

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole: suppositories

Rolling Stones - Paint It Black: Sherwin-Williams

Doobie Brothers - It Keeps You Runnin': Ex-Lax

The Who - I Can See For Miles: LASIK surgery

Johnny Otis - Willie and the Hand Jive: Adult pay-per-view movies

The Bar-Kays - Soul Finger: See your proctologist public service announcement

Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers - Why Do Fools Fall In Love: eHarmony.com

Steve Lawrence - Go Away, Little Girl: Girl Scout cookies

The Isley Brothers - It's Your Thing: Sex education public service announcement

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Don't Do Me Like That: The Kama Sutra

Men at Work - Who Can It Be Now?: Caller ID

Air Supply - Making Love Out of Nothing At All: Herbal male enhancement pills

Taco - Puttin' On The Ritz: Ritz crackers (no-brainer)

and finally...

America - A Horse With No Name: Ann Coulter's next show


HEY-OOOOOOOOOO!

Day of discovery

Some days, you just learn things whether you're trying or not. Today, for example, I learned:

It's "Take a load off, Fanny," not "Take a load off, Annie."

Guinness really is pretty filling; two even moreso.

I'm glad there was finally a new episode of The Office.

And I must be a giant dork, because I laughed way too hard at this picture, which I found on this blog:



What did you learn today?

"I shall triumph over human lethargy!"

I know, I know.

So many of you keep asking for my fitness secrets that I had to break down and spill the beans.

There is one book I consult when considering doing actual exercise:


The Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book.

Before I hit puberty and discovered that exercise shows were populated by girls in skimpy leotards, this was the coolest may to learn about exercising.

I used to check this book out of the library from time to time as a lad. Of course, the library's copy had additional artwork in it; some artist wannabe had seen fit to add explosive fart clouds to the figures where he thought necessary, which, from the look of it, was just about everywhere.

But fortunately, the copy I procured from eBay (eBay: Buy all the crap your parents wouldn't let you have as a kid!) suffered only from mild water damage.

I look at it now and am a bit skeptical as to the benefit of some of these exercises. I mean, look:



Leaping up and down may look cool when the Silver Surfer does it (if I were a bigger nerd, I might say he looked Radd, but I'm not, so I didn't), but I must have been doing something wrong, because I never got buffed doing it.

I worried that I might look like a moron doing these exercises, and they must have realized that, because look at Spider-Man performing The Little Miss Muffet.



Poor Spidey. This is almost as embarrassing as Spider-Man 3. Still, I guess you burn some calories doing this. So like if you ate three Fritos and did this for an hour or so, you'd probably have burned off a third of those calories.

At a certain point it seemed like they ran out of ideas. Granted, this was written in 1976 before Olivia Newton-John invented aerobics or whatever, but what the hell is this supposed to accomplish?



WTF?

Coincidentally, many of you may be rolling your eyes right now, too. Medusa (of the Inhumans) also showed how to do jaw exercises (insert your own Lindsey Lohan joke here), chin-ups (where you press against your thumbs with your chin muscles--to prevent double chins), scalp pulls (I clearly did that one wrong), and the ever-so-difficult lying on a mildly inclined plane.

No, really.

So I don't know how beneficial the book is, but you wanted to know my beauty secrets, and here they are, revealed just for you, true believers!

Excelsior!

Oh jeez, not another LOLcat...

moar funny pictures

This is one of those things that's probably funnier to me than to others, but that's okay.

More pudding pie news!

The nice person at Hostess who responded to my missive informed me that right now, the vanilla pudding pies are still discontinued.

Bah.

I can only hope that if the chocolate pies do really well, they'll bring back vanilla.

In times like these, you can rely on Siftin' to bring you the news that really matters.

Carry on...

Wicked garden

April, 1979.

In a few more weeks, I'd officially be a big brother. For now, I just wanted to help where possible. I was practically a man at that point -- 4 1/2 -- and I knew that I needed to help around around the house.

Aside from cleaning my room. That just was not going to happen. Once, lured with the promise of cinnamon rolls, I managed a blitzkrieg on the clutter in my room. But as I neared my deadline, I ended up shoving half the stuff under my bed, feigning surprise when my mom pointed it out during the pre-cinnamon roll inspection.

But this day was one of those blue sky California days; not too hot, not too cold. And being 4 1/2, I wanted to get out of the house. It was after noon, so The Monkees was already over. It was a bunch of boring junk until the afternoon, and I had time to kill.

So I asked my mom if I could water the garden in the back yard. I had a feeling what the answer would be; after what happened the first time I watered the lawn, I was not asked to return to that job.

In my defense, I was a little fuzzy on homonyms as a 3-year-old, so when my mom asked if I could be a dear and water the lawn while she pulled some weeds, I thought she meant "deer" and peed on the grass.

Perfectly honest mistake.

But if I couched this latest request in the guise of being helpful, I thought it would improve my chances.

"Mommy," I said, putting on my best doe-eyed face, "Can I go water the garden?" She was about to say something when her face changed suddenly, like someone had just kicked her or something.

"All right," she said.

I jumped up and down in excitement and ran to the back door.

"Jeffrey?"

"Huh?"

"This time, if you have to go pee-pee, come in the house, okay?"

"I know, Mom," I said, rolling my eyes before heading out the door.

Suddenly, I was a cowboy in the Old West, heading to a showdown. I imagined my spurs clanging as I hiked up my Toughskins (a size too big so I'd grow into them) and prepared to face off with some no-account villain.

I'd seen lots of John Wayne movies by that time, so I had the walk down pat. It was sort of the same walk I did when I got a wedgie. Just more dignified.

I saw my "gun" lying near the shed. Our garden hose had a pistol grip on it that made it easy to target certain plants (or any stray cats on fences). If you wanted the continuous stream, a little ring flipped down to hold the trigger in place, sort of like on gas nozzles.

I turned the faucet, and watched the hose seem to spring to life like an angry snake. Tiny jets of water streamed out where the hose connected to the faucet. Everything was ready.

I grabbed the hose in my right hand and clasped my left over it to steady it as I unleashed the fury of botanical badassery.

I was now in control of nature and my own destiny. I was watering the garden -- all by myself! John Wayne would be proud.

And after I'd made my first sweep of the garden, I got a little cocky. Surely I didn't need both hands to steady the hose. In fact, I could do a quick draw, just like The Duke himself.

I slung my shooting iron in my imaginary holster and got ready to draw, legs akimbo like any good gunfighter. My pants hung low; better to imitate chaps.

I drew.

I won.

All the plants in the garden were victims of my shooting spree. It took all the strength I had in my right hand to keep the hose from getting away from me, but I was doing it.

Just when I felt uberconfident, my pants slipped even lower. Beyond chaps territory. If I didn't grab them, anyone walking into our back yard would have a good chance at seeing me in my skivvies. What if it was a -- gulp -- girl?

Well, that just wouldn't do.

I let go of the trigger so I could set the hose down and fix my pants, but that's when I found that during my superfast quick draw, I knocked the ring over, keeping the stream going whether I held the trigger or not.

I tried to hitch up my pants in one hand while holding onto the hose with the other, but by that point, the trigger was wet and slippery, and I lost grip of the handle.

As the first jet of extremely cold water hit me in the face, I must have screamed. Something got my mom's attention. Luckily she had the camera nearby so she could capture for posterity what she saw when she went to see what I was screaming about.



Thus ended my desire to do any gardening-related chores.

Always choose the right job for your skillset

And that's one to grow on...

That sounds familiar!

OK, I noticed this the other day while perusing TV show openings on YouTube uploaded by my new hero, bobcnn.

Go to about 4:30, when you get to the theme song for Today's FBI. Listen to that song.



Then listen to the main theme for one of my favoritest movies ever, Stripes.



They sound more than just a little similar. They both came out the same year, 1981. And they were both the work of Elmer Bernstein, if IMDB is to be believed. I wonder why the themes are so similar. I mean, it's like the Stripes theme turned around a little, really.

Just struck me odd; thought I'd share. You're welcome.

Photographic proof!

If you've always wanted to see part of my desk, boy oh boy, are you in luck. Check out the latest edition of CNET's Buzz Report.

Oh, and this totally happened.

Trying out a few things

Blogger is offering a few new gadgets and whatnot, so I thought I'd give a few a try.

1. If you just can't live without me...
Now you can easily subscribe to the blog (or the comments) with the click of a button. Chances are you already know how to do this, but every time is someone's first time, so I thought I'd add it.

2. Blogger Play
It's just a box that cycles through the latest pictures to be added to Blogger. I dunno. Some people like pretty pictures. When it bores me, I'll probably remove it. Unless I forget about it. Buh-leeted. Let's see if that was the one bogging it down...

3. Search the site
Now, with the help of the little box at the bottom, you can search anything mentioned on the site, or linked to from the site. I haven't had a chance to try it out, so let me know if it's worth keeping.

4. New YouTube vids at the bottom
I usually have the video feed at the bottom pull in stuff tagged "classic commercials," but I've updated it to pull in videos uploaded by bobcnn, a YouTube user who has uploaded tons of sheer TV awesomeness. Check it out.

5. Publish in the future
Finally. Sometimes, I actually have "real-life" stuff to do, so I don't get a chance to post a blog until the very end of the night. Now if I get ahead, I can just set it and forget it. I'm actually testing this right now. This should publish the morning after I'm writing this.

So, if you have any requests or comments, just let me know, and if you aren't a jerk, there's a good chance that you'll get what you ask for. Thanks again to everyone who reads and comments and doesn't tell me how much I suck.

In case you have an hour or so to kill

I'm always checking on Hulu to see what's been added, and much to my surprise, there's a bad movie there!

And because I'm that lazy helpful, I'm just embedding the thing right here.

It's called Cutting Class. I'd be willing to bet the only reason this thing has been added to the lineup is because Brad Pitt is in it before, you know, he was Brad Pitt.

That said, he's not horrible in this; I mean, he does what he can with what he's got. Martin Mull, who I love, plays the lead girl's father, and there's a running gag that involves him getting injury upon injury. Alas, it's really not funny, and it just doesn't seem to fit.

Still, if you, like me, are a fan of cheesy horror movies, you could definitely do worse. Give it a shot. It is rated TV-MA, on account of language, gore, and, if memory serves, a boobie or two. You've been warned.