A guerrilla promo for Aqua Teen Hunger Force brings Boston to a halt.
(Of course, this is a hoax story since it implies that there’s a traffic condition in Boston that’s dissimilar to a halt.)
I can’t make this up
Worst headline ever in a long time: UPS: A Big Brown Disappointment
Down by contact
Ahoy, dear readers! Sorry for the lack of posts; I was down-n-out with some sorta flu yesterday. I made it into the office for an hour or so, then gave up and came home to rest.
The construction across the street — our neighbor’s building an addition on his house — made sure that I never got too much sleep during the day. I take that as a positive, since it meant I didn’t have trouble when I went to bed last night.
Anyway, I’ve got a ton of work to catch up on, so I leave you with Life After Sports (and make sure you check out the slide show).
Over a barrel
Why have oil prices dropped from their near-$80/barrel peak? Because the laws of supply and demand trump the sneaky practices of speculators who kept the price inflated. Oh, and OPEC “has lately demonstrated its classic inclination toward ineffectiveness.”
Monday Morning Montaigne
From That the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them:
Indeed, just as study is a torment to a lazy man, abstinence from wine to a drunkard, frugality to the luxurious man, and exercise to a delicate idler, so it is with the rest. Things are not that painful or difficult of themselves; it is our weakness and cowardice that make them so. To judge of great and lofty things we need a soul of the same caliber; otherwise we attribute to them the vice that is our own. A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it.
Morning stroll
Amy thought it’d be a nice idea this morning if we lit out for Ringwood Manor and snapped some pix while the 8am light was going on. She wasn’t happy with her photos, but here’s the first image in the photoset I posted:
The Cokes are in the icebox, the popcorn’s on the table!
In other words, we’re havin’ a party! (of the Super Bowl & Mardi Gras variety)
If you’re interested in coming out to NJ on Sunday, let me know!
Come Fly Without Me
This week, my boss & I went over the year’s conference schedule, to figure out who’s going where. As it turns out, due to a couple of local-ish shows and changes in our production schedules, I’m not going to have to do too much business-flying this year. It’s a nice change from the past 3 years, which saw plenty of work-flights and lots of Xanax-ingestion.
I can trace my air-anxiety to a takeoff to Phoenix in October 2003, where the first 90 seconds out of Newark were the most harrowing moments of my life. Since then, I’ve been a nervous flyer. Not in extreme “Get me off this plane!” ways, but I tend to take bumps pretty seriously. It’s silly, and I’m able to get over it sometimes by preoccupying myself with music (the louder and more techno-y, the better) or that aforementioned anti-anxiety drug.
I bring all this up because Donald at 2Blowhards has a great post about Scary Airports:
The airports I’ve flown into that make me nervous tend to be those in cramped locations. National Airport near Washington and New York’s LaGuardia are two examples. National is tucked next to the Potomac River and its main runway is about 6,900 feet long (and seemed shorter the last time I used it, 15+ years ago). La Guardia’s runways are about 150 feet longer, but the airport is boxed in by Long Island Sound. Unless you’re landing to the north (and waving at friends in the Shea Stadium parking lot), landing approaches are over water.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with coming in over water. Although I recall that a flight during my trip to Sweden & Denmark in 2004 allowed passengers to look through cameras on the plane’s exterior, as part of the in-flight entertainment. The approach over water (I think it was coming into Paris for the connection at CDG) was a little disturbing from nose-cam.
Anyway, give his post a read, and make sure to check out the comments, which are fantastic.
(Bonus: a YouTube video of planes landing at the incredibly wind-cursed Wellington airport in NZ!)
V for Vitamin
Those of you who pretend to know me through this blog pretend to know that I’m a creature of habit. When something works out for me, I stick with it till it fails. Then I kick it to the curb. When I break from this practice, I tend to get screwed.
Last week week, for example, I switched from Breathe Right brand nose strips over to the private label brand at CVS. I should’ve known something was wrong when one of the instructions was “line up the bump” and another was “hold in place for 20 seconds.”
By morning, the strip was half off one side of my nose, and removing it left a nasty mark on the bridge (where I lined up the bump). So it’s back to the same old.
Now, if you’ve made it through this far, then you know there’s gonna be some sorta payoff. In this instance, it involves fluorescent urine and potential liver and CNS damage.
See, the same day I bought the cheap-ass nose strips, I also needed to restock on my multivitamin. I had just finished a 200-count bottle of One-A-Day Men’s Health. It’s only in the past year or two that I got into the habit of taking vitamins. I can’t detect any effect, but it’s possible I’d be a deteriorated wreck by now if I hadn’t been taking the darn things.
Amy & I checked out the local health food store, since she’d never been inside. I took a look at the vitamins while she was checking out some rice. The clerk directed me to Ultra II dailies from Nature’s Plus. It cost $25 for 60 tablets, which took me aback. But I bought them, figuring “at that price, they must be good.”
That was Saturday. Wednesday evening, Amy asked how the new vitamins were. Besides expensive.
I said, “They seem fine. I gotta say, though, I had no idea my body could produce a yellow that fluorescent.” She chalked it up to the B-complex in the vitamins. I thought maybe it was polonium-210, and that the FSB was ready to silence Virtual Memories for good, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Unless she was in on it. . .
Okay, so maybe I was getting a little paranoid.
I figured that having fluorescent urine would make for a fine party gimmick, since we do have that Super Bowl bash next Sunday, but Amy decided to give my new vitamins an extra look.
After a few minutes on the laptop, and she announced, “You need to stop taking those.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, it says here that the upper daily limit of vitamin A is 10,000 IU. And your new vitamin has 25,000 IU.”
“. . . Wow! There’s a Teratology Society? Is that like the Monster Society of Evil?”
“Sigh.”
I think I’d be worried if Amy did get some of my references.
We checked out a few more reputable sources, plus wikipedia, and determined that it was probably best if I don’t risk liver collapse, osteoporosis, CNS damage and, most important, hair loss (gotta have your priorities straight). So it’s back to the same old.
(Just wondering: if they’re pseudotumors, that means they’re not as bad as regular tumors, right?)
Road(kill) Warrior
Dear strange orange shadow-race of people who live on the edge of my suburban NJ town:
Please stop eating the squirrels.