Public service announcement

Saw this today, and it struck me as important enough to share with all of you, especially if you, like me, are a fan of The Office.

Won't you think of Jenna?

Friday night freakout

I stumbled across this today. Back in the early days of VCRs, we must have rented every Disney title on the market. Not just The Parent Trap or Alice in Wonderland. I'm talking Snowball Express, Condorman, and The Black Hole.

This movie weirded me out a little as a kid; it was awfully dark for a Disney movie (aside from the black hole, which for some reason was red). And I was fine throughout the bulk of the movie, but it was the ending that got me. I could never tell exactly what was going on.

Even now, I'm a little fuzzy on what is happening. You watch the ending here, and you tell me what happened. The bad guy goes to hell, but the good guys in the spaceship are led by an angel through Heaven and out into open space?

Ad fail?

I giggled when I saw ads for the DC Superheroes cartoons while perusing Marvel.com.

It's a small world, after all

So what with all the various social networks around, there are a lot of ways to contact me. The most popular one is Facebook, where people I didn't know even remembered me are getting back in touch. For a social pariah, this gives you a warm fuzzy.

I decided to jot down the ones I could think of off my head, and this is what I came up with:

Become a fan on
Facebook

Become a follower on
Twitter
Plurk

Become a friend on
MySpace
Facebook

See what weird crap I listen to
Last.fm
In the interest of disclosure, I should point out that the Richard Marx song that is in the playlist played while I was away from my desk. So when you see that, it was just a pee break.

Now I marvel at some of my co-workers, who have legions of fans and followers, and I wonder how much time they're able to devote to sifting through all that stuff.

Fortunately, this is not something I am currently burdened with. But hope springs eternal, right?

Sometimes you just need a musical number

First day of school

I was happy to see my son looking forward to attending his first day of kindergarten. He's really jazzed about going to school, and I'd like that sentiment to last as long as possible.

If you check the picture below, you can see that he has inherited my inability to keep my eyes open for pictures. Apparently plaid is also hereditary; who knew?

Another successful hunt

Hit a few local thrift stores today, and not only did I come away with an armload of books, but I managed to snag -- for $2.99 -- a working, in-the-box and Styrofoam Bandai Electronics Gunfighter game.

I love old-school handheld electronic games, but not enough to spend exhorbitant sums of money on them. This price was more my speed.

Here's a video I found on YouTube that gives you an idea of what it's like:

We are currently experiencing technical difficulties

Translation: Something got boned on my computer and I have to fix it. Meh. Will be back as soon as I exorcise the demons.

What's invisible and smells like carrots?

Long day + happy hour after work + tired = another YouTube clip. But hey, it has a bunny rabbit!

Why my son sometimes calls me Dave

My son had finished watching the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie when I had an idea.

"Hey, Brody," I said as I rummaged through the bin of records in the living room, "Check this out." I pulled Chipmunk Punk out and showed it to him. His face lit up as he recognized Alvin, Simon and Theodore on the cover.

We listened to that and then Chipmunk Rock following that. He sat mesmerized, listening to the whole thing. He studied both album covers.

He pointed at Chipmunk Punk and told me, "Those are the old-school Chipmunks." I had to ask him to repeat that because I wasn't sure that I heard him right.

But I had. He seems to prefer the old-school Chipmunk design, apparently.

He can also be heard running around the house singing "I Love Rock N' Roll" in his best chipmunk voice from time to time. It's weird how much like me he is. Kinda scary when I think about it.

For him.

Does this creep anyone else out?

For some reason the addition of a baby to the cast of the Plastic Man cartoon creeped me out as a kid. I mean, look at Baby Plas.

Random thought before bed

A year ago tonight, I was a little nervous. My daughter was to be born the next day, and I had no idea how things were going to transpire.

But a year later, I can honestly say that I couldn't be happier about our addition to the family. Unless, you know, she came out with bundles of money or a PS3 or something.

Or a Slurpee machine. But that might have hurt.

Get the point?

Having just watched the Indiana Jones trilogy the past few nights, I noticed something and thought, well if I noticed it, and I'm pretty slow, someone else surely noticed it as well.

Someone did, but the page has since gone. But since we're dealing with an archaeologist, I thought it fitting that I use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to resurrect it.

Warning: This may distract you the next time you watch a Harrison Ford movie. If you don't mind, then by all means, check out the finger gallery.

Let them eat cake

The birthday girl (technically not till this week) enjoyed her party as far as I can tell. She was very smiley. This picture was just a few minutes before she got a bath.

I'm still freaking out. My son will start kindergarten in another week or so and my daughter is already a year old. Where does the time go?

Hurrrrk.

Now I have to be honest: my grandmother used to work for Golden Grain, so I'll always have a special place in my heart for the company's products. I could eat a box of chicken Rice-A-Roni all by myself.

But this one...I just...I dunno.

Get back, Chococat

My house is slowly turning into a Sanrio store. Hello Kitty's visage is emblazoned on many a decoration hanging up.

We're getting ready for Ramona's first birthday party. Yeah, I can't believe she's 1 already, either.

I'm looking forward to seeing what she does to her cake. Fortunately, we got a deal where if you buy a first birthday cake, they give you a stunt cake for free. That's the small one you give to the kid while everyone else eats the main cake.

There's a joke in there about having cake and eating it, too, but I'm just too tired to bother. Let's just pretend I did, okay?

I'm so jealous of this hairstyle.

I always had a hard time explaining exactly what I wanted when I got my hair cut. I saw this picture, and I wondered, wow...how do you ask for that?

Yeah, it's like if Iron Man modeled his helmet after Wilford Brimley?

Oh, brother

I think I know what I'm going to work on in this writing workshop. And since I can't bring all of you with me, I figured I'd give a brief synopsis.

Two brothers (fraternal twins) decide to go on a road trip in California to get out of their respective ruts. As with many brothers, they're very much alike but very different at the same time.

How far into their journey will they get before they want to kill each other?

My kingdom for a time machine

Seeing this makes me want to go back in time and stay up late:

Group therapy

Well, for the first time in ages, I'm part of a writing group. I'm pretty jazzed about it because we all write different types of stuff, so it will be interesting to see different voices and points of view.

I will always have a love for creative writing classes, though it would take a while for there to be a good reason for it.

When I was in my first creative writing class in the first semester of junior college, I was not exactly inspired by some of the feedback.

I wrote a story about, of all things, a guy going to his 20th high school reunion. Keep in mind that I had only graduated high school a few months prior; heck, I was still 17.

While much of the feedback was positive, the one that sticks out is someone who was in the class to write Literature, and anything that didn't have a deeper meaning was a waste of her time.

Which, I should add, is perfectly fine. Different strokes for different folks, right? However, you can be more diplomatic about your disdain for humor-based pieces.

"The part at the end with the phone call was funny, but the rest was crap unbelievable."

This, by the way, was criticism from someone in her early 30s directed at a 17-year-old. I shouldn't have let it bother me, but it soured me so much that for the remainder of the class, I just used stories I'd already written.

It wasn't until the next year that I took another writing class, this time with a different instructor. While not entirely enthusiastic about my writing--the thing that stuck out to her was that it appeared to be meticulously proofread--the class was inviting enough for me to actually want to share my writing.

At the end of the semester, we could, for extra credit, compile a list of 10 markets to which we could theoretically send our work and choose one to actually submit a piece to.

I just did it for the extra credit and promptly forgot about it. But August rolled around and I got a manila envelope in the mail. Inside was a magazine, a letter of congratulations, and a check for $10.

I fully expected to get the first of many rejection letters. Instead, I got published on my first submission. Score!

So I rested on my laurels until a creative writing class at CSU Stanislaus. The instructor and I didn't agree on very much, but I met a cute brunette in that class, so in the long run, it was time well-spent. I think so, anyway. My wife may disagree.

I was getting prolific again at that point, and it seemed like I was churning out almost as much stuff as I was in high school.

But one thing pissed me off, and as typically happens with people like me, I focused all my energies on something that didn't warrant the attention.

I had turned in the first draft of a story in which there's a mention of how one of the characters loves the breadsticks at a certain restaurant. I wrote that shortly after gorging myself on breadsticks at Olive Garden.

The corrected version of my draft came back from my teacher, and he had crossed out breadsticks and written "garlic bread?" I meant what I wrote, and left it as such in the final draft.

Sure enough, he "corrected" me again.

So in the next story, I included a page-long conversation between two characters about the difference between garlic bread and breadsticks.

In retrospect, I think I may have crossed the line a teensy bit with one character asking the other in exasperation, "How the hell can you have lived on this planet for this long without knowing what a friggin' breadstick is?"

The only comment from the instructor was "This is not amusing."