-Saturday:  Dropped my wife's diamond earring down the sink.  Managed to retrieve it, then dropped it down the sink again while cleaning it and it was gone for good.  Yes, I am that stupid.
-Sunday: Was driving home with a storage shed in my truck when it flipped out of my vehicle and exploded on the road.  Managed to retrieve it without incident.
-Yesterday: (A)  Somehow pulled a muscle in my neck while just sitting at my cube.  Went home sick and could barely move for the rest of the day.  (B) Dropped a heaping plate of greasy Chinese food all over the living room couch and floor after it was just cleaned.
-Today: Speeding ticket.  No proof of insurance.

Pop Quiz: In which of the following Terminator films does Judgment Day occur?

(A) Terminator
(B) T2: Judgment Day
(C) T3: Rise of the Machines
(D) Terminator Salvation

The correct answer is (C) T3: Rise of the Machines.

Wikipedia needs a template that says "This article was written in a manner to prove the intelligence of the authors, rather than in an effort to enlighten and inform readers."

Take this for example.

I should have known this post was going to come back to haunt me.  Certain individuals have found out about it and are now persecuting me for my beliefs.  This is the reason I have chosen to remain anonymous on my blog, but apparently I didn't do enough.  I am now under review for suspension at work, and have been uninvited from several birthday parties.   Thanks, internet!

Bonus Round:

Can anything else be 'fell' other than a 'fell swoop'?

I got second place in Chip MacGregor's bad poetry contest for the second year running (well, if you rule out the fact that his wife won last year) under the psuedonym Fred Gippler.  Next year I will dominate!  Here are my entries:

2008

Man, like every third kid on Sesame Street is in a wheel chair.  What, did they never get the polio vaccine or something?

Josh:         Did you know I can make a round square?
Mrs Josh:  I don't know things that are false.
Josh:         It's reasons like that why we don't have flying cars.
Mrs Josh:  It's reasons like that why we don't have flying cars that crash all over the place.
Josh:         That grammar's terrible.
Mrs Josh:  What? I just repeated the sentence structure you used?
Josh:          It's reasons like that why we don't have good grammar anymore.

Bonus Round:  If you keep taking everything I say literally, you're going to end up with egg all over your face

I went to the zoo when I was a kid and bought some ice cream which said $1 on the menu, but they told me it was actually $0.50 and gave me change.  I told the lady "This policy makes no sense...you're losing all the customers you'd gain if it was $0.50, but you're losing all the revenue you'd gain if it was $1.00"

Bonus Round
This is a real story about the zoo and ice cream, making it the best story ever.

Here are my favorite 'Would You Rather's that I thought of (as I recall).  These are the ones where the answer tells you the most about a person, starting with my favorite.

-Would you rather know that both the best and worst day of your life are behind you or ahead of you?
-Would you rather be the best in the world at one thing or second best at two?
-Would you rather have a machine that can create anything you can conceive, or a machine that creates random objects that you could not conceive?
-Would you rather have a perfect, limitless holodeck (virtual environment) that only you could enter, or the abilities of Superman in the real world?
-Would you rather have your mom be able to monitor and censor anything you communicate to others, or your father monitor and censor any information coming in through your 5 senses?
-Would you rather be trapped on a desert island with A)the collected written works of mankind but no internet access, or B) unlimited Wikipedia access (but no calling for help)

And a few just for fun:

-Would you rather laugh like a hyena or cry like a newborn?
-Would you rather move underwater as you now move out of water (can only travel on the lower surface, but can move quite quickly and breathe freely), or move out of water as you now move in water (your maximum speed is very slow, but altitude is not an issue)
-Would you rather have exclusive rights to Ghostbusters 9 but you can only make it if Ghostbusters 8 is created, or exclusive rights to 'Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! 2'
-Who would you rather appoint as supreme dictator: a random Joey or a random Steve?
-Who would you rather switch bodies with -  a random Ivory Coast citizen or a random 7 year old anywhere on Earth?
-Would you rather Mike Tyson has a death grudge against you or Bill Gates, with all of his resources?

Bonus Round

IM conversation with Bill Zunderman (Mike Tyson frequently figures in to our 'would you rather's):

Josh    WYR Mike Tyson have a death grudge against you, or have the universe altered to its current state but the laws of reality match that of a random movie
Bill       like if it was terminator, there's a nuclear holocaust coming
Bill       Mike Tyson
Josh     or it could be an Adam Sandler movie and things would just get totally goofy
Bill       there's nothing on IMDB that goes to a random movie... dang!
Bill       I want to see what it would have been
Bill       wait, there's a way
Bill       hold on...
Josh    yeah
Josh    replace the index in the url
Josh   oh man!
Josh   "Blade: The Series"!!!!!! [Editor: A vampire show - about the worst thing I could have possibly gotten]
Josh   is what I got, ha!
Bill       http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082644/
Bill       Vijay is the illegitimate child of a wealthy businessman and a beautiful singer. Abandoned as an infant and raised largely by a shiftless drunk, Vijay is now grown up and, unbeknownst to everyone, working for his own father. In order to marry his true love Mohini , however, he's going to have to find out what his true ancestry is--even if doing so throws everybody's life into chaos.
Bill       man, that sounds dumb
Bill       it's some kind of Indian crappy movie
Bill       how did you do it?
Josh     sounds about as close to the status quo universe as you could have gotten
Bill       I just used Excel to randomize a number between 1 and the number of a recent movie
Josh     not very scientific - yeah that's better
Bill       and popped it into the URL
Bill       =RAND()*320000
Bill       http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091072/
Bill       "Private detective is hired by rich man to find his niece, who has disappeared while traveling in Europe."
Bill       hahaha

Do you want the new good news or the bad news first?

The bad news.

OK-the bad news is there is no good news.

What's the good news?

There isn't any.  I just said that.

Bonus Round: There's not bonus round either.  Sorry.

'Assume' is a weird word because whenever you say 'Assuming x', you're really not assuming x ("to take as granted", from Merriam-Webster). you're stipulating it.  And whenever you don't say 'assuming x', you are assuming x--taking it as granted.

x = 'Individual human organs cannot technically be described as "alive"',  by the way.

Bonus Round: Dictionary.com is a terrible dictionary.  Take "taco", for example: "A corn tortilla folded around a filling such as ground meat or cheese."  Huh?  So it can't have meat and cheese?

From the Wikipedia article about The Man in the Yellow Hat in Curious George:

"The Man is never mentioned by name in the original adventures, or in any subsequent content over more than six decades...This tradition was broken in the 2006 film, in which the Man is referred to as 'Ted Shackleford'".

Ted Shackleford??? What a pathetic waste to 60 years of tradition.  I think all violations of sacred traditions should henceforth be called 'pulling a Ted Shackleford'.

Conversation with my 5 year old niece on Christmas Eve:

Me: What is your earliest memory?
Her: When I was one years old.
Me: What were you doing?
Her: I don't remember.
Her:...but after that I was two years old.

What's up with songs called "The way Betty churns butter on a warm Tuesday morning or Give me more of those sweet hot tamales."

You get to pick one name for a song, people.  You don't get to present options. 

What's next, nested title logic?:  Smells Like Teen Spirit OR (Life is Stupid AND (Here We Are Now, Entertainers OR NOT Hello, Hello, Hello))

I got mad at how inflated the big three article on Wikipedia is with sets of things that have never been referred to as 'the Big Three' in the history of life on Earth (Usher, Rihanna, and Beyonce? Game Boy, Game Gear, and Atari Lynx?  No one has ever called those the big flippin three!), so I added my own entry - tomato soup, Las Vegas, and 1941.  Let's see how long it sticks.

Other big 3 suggestions by me and Bill Zunderman - lava, learning  to ride a tricycle, and 93; Principles of War, Athletics at the 1908 Summer Olympics Men's discus throw, and Walter.

Bonus Round:  I have another fake Wiki that has stuck for years but I'm not going to spoil it by posting it here.

Conversation with a coworker

Me...    I went to get my emissions check today and I was $.30 short of the $27.75, so I had to use the ATM and pay a $1.50 fee
Me...    The guy was literally seconds away from making me go through the whole line again because I was rifling through my car for change
Frank...    it sums up everything wrong with this country.
Frank...    you know that little booth you stand in while they rev up your engine?  you should have pissed in it.
Me...    probably wouldn't be the first
Me...    or the last

Milk Duds are a poor man's Whoppers.

Yeah, I said it.

Shouldn't they just go ahead and make the #2 pencil the #1pencil?  It certainly seems to be the most popular.

Some randoms thoughts on the election while it is still (ir)relevant:

Serious ideas that will never happen:
-Someone REALLY needs to make a 50 state 'local politics' site with information for each city/state.  The most important information would be summaries and views from all sides on each Proposition, Judge, polling locations and hours, and local/national candidates.  The first two are surprisingly hard to find online today (especially judge information).  Whoever builds this site will make money.  It could eventually be expanded to include political activism and 'Get Out the Vote' in each state.

-A flash game around the theme of 'Battleground States' in an election year would be pretty popular.  The player could pick their candidate and difficulty setting ('Therapuetic' or 'Motivational').  The electoral map from 2008 would be shown, with the 'red' from the red states spreading into the blue states (or vice versa).  The player must rapidly allocate volunteers and campaign funds to each state to keep it from changing parties, with a counter ticking off the days until November 4th.  When election day comes, the Player wisn if they have at least 270 electoral votes.  Hey, it's even educational!  Each party could have 1 or 2 unique/humorous 'Specials', such as ACORN volunteer rigging for the Dems or electronic voting machine rigging for the Repubs.

-The debates are meaningless press conferences.  Make them better by locking the 2 candidates in a room with microphones, cameras, and nothing else (no moderators!) for 4 hours.  Each microphone automatically shuts off after the candidate has spoken for 2 hours, so both candidate must conserve their time lest the other candidate end up with the last hour completely to themselves. 

-Some math departments hold elections by allowing voters to rank all candidates rather than selecting one candidate.  This is proven to more accurately represent the wishes of all voters (mathematically speaking).  This would give third parties a much better chance because 'wasting your vote' would no longer be a concern - a voter would rank their ideal candidate first followed by their 'safe' candidate.  Incidentally, I always thought that if I was a third party candidate I'd take a national poll asking 'If you could personally select the president among the following candidates, who would you choose?'  If I won the poll, I'd hype it like crazy and make the argument that it proved victory was possible.

Ridiculous ideas that will never happen:
-Improve the debates by putting the candidates in elevated chairs.  When the audience rates the candidate's remarks highly, their chair raises towards the ceiling and $100 bills are blown towards them.  When the remarks are rated unfavorably, the chair lowers towards a pit of cockroaches.

-Put a video image of each candidate's face in each polling location.  The face becomes happier or sadder dynamically according to how voting is going for the candidate in that location.

-Replace the electoral college with 7 completely theoretical 'sectors'.  Every voter chooses his candidate and which sector they want to vote in.  The candidate who wins 4 or more sectors wins the election.  The campaign would become all about organizing voters to choose the appropriate sector (All McCain voters with last names starting with 'A' to 'F', pick sector 1!) which would be like herding cats.  Strategies would shift as each candidate struggled to respond to the other.  Secret strategies would be revealed and conflated with false rumors spread by the other campaign.  The ultimate result would be chaos as all voters waited until the last possible minute to vote to respond to current totals.  This would work better if all voters had real time information on the current tallies from each sector.

I was going to call this post "Boring the McCain 'victory' party" because I left before anything interesting happened, but I thought 'infiltrating' was more exciting, and I did sneak in without a ticket.  Pics to come.

I decided to head to the McCain victory party at around 7 tonight, not because I'm a huge McCain supporter, but because it was 15 minutes from my house and I figured the opportunity wouldn't come again any time soon (not pretending to be neutral--I did vote for McCain, but that's another story).

I wasn't sure if I would need a ticket to get in, but my goal was to get in either way.  I pride myself on sneaking in to high profile events when the opportunity arises.  Me and Curmudgeon Man once got onto the set of Jerry Maguire just by walking in as if we belonged (not because I was a huge fan!).  I got in the VIP section at a Dan Quayle event when I was 14 and shook hands with him (NBIWAHF!!) even though that was supposed to require a Secret Service search (which I found out afterwards).  I was also very close to getting into the VIP section at a George W Bush speaking event in 2004, but decided not to go for it since I had a knife on me at the time. 

So I headed to the party at the AZ Biltmore hotel and parked at the nearby Biltmore mall.  I started walking to the hotel on foot, and was about 10 minutes away when my mom called and convinced me that I was 3-5 miles away.  I turned back and got my truck to try and park closer.  Right at that moment, the police decided to shut down the key intersections, so I ended up parking about a mile further away about 35 minutes later.  Whoops.

As I approached the event, there were two journalists in front of me with massive professional cameras.  I blended in behind them and headed for the first set of double doors, but the lady at the door stopped me and asked for my ticket.  I rifled through my bag as if I was looking for it and retreated.  I reexamined the scene - there were 3 sets of double doors so I headed for the second set and got ticket checked again.  I decided to give it one more try then give up and leave.

I noticed a couple of guys walking in with folding chairs; it didn't look like they were checked for tickets.  I looked for a folding chair I could grab to head in with.  There was a merch table with hats, buttons, etc, and one of the chairs was empty, but there were two workers standing about a foot away from the chair.  I tried to work up the nerve to grab the chair, and almost did, but I didn't have the guts.

So I went back to the last set of doors; one girl checking tickets was on her cell phone and the other had her back turned.  I put my cell phone to my ear, my head down, and barreled right through without looking up, blending immediately into the crowd.  As far as I know, no one ever said a word to me.

I saw a lady with a dress made of 'McCain/Palin' bumper stickers and a guy with a 'McCain 08' yarmulka,.  Everyone was dressed pretty formally, and of course there was press swarming everywhere.  I went into the crowded auditorium and some country singer (John someone) was singing.  It was about the size of a high school basketball court, but a third of the room was taken up by TV cameras and bright spotlights for the anchors.  I got within a few feet of the stage pretty easily.  They had CNN and Fox News on the big screen and the first thing I saw was 'Obama wins Ohio', at which point I knew the election was lost, but the crowd wasn't reacting at all.  It appeared people weren't following the electoral math as they cheered every time McCain won a state (even Texas) even though it was over from the start.

Governor Jim Gibbons (?) approached the mic and said there were 270 "electorial" votes required to win, and McCain already had x number, again ignoring the electoral math.  At one point, Fox News was switched over to ABC news on the big screen, and the crowd  chanted 'Fox News! Fox News!' (and I shouted 'Nickelodeon!! Nickelodeon!!!) until it was switched back on.  I knew McCain and Palin  wouldn't be speaking inside the auditorium (they spoke out on the lawn) and I had to get home, so I made the rounds of the press areas  (which no one was guarding or checking passes on) and headed out. I spent about 20 minutes waiting at the bar for a free soda, then I saw they cost $3 so I  took off.  Yes, I am very, very cheap.

Twenty minutes later, I got back to my truck and turned my radio; the news about Obama's victory broke that very second.