| I actually look forward to seeing a movie now |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|02:38 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  pretty good | ] |
| [ | music |
| | O-Zone - Dragostea Din Tei | ] |
Tonight, Greg and I are going to Gold Class Cinemas to see "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Since our anniversary is this weekend (more on that later), we decided we'd pay extra for the experience of seeing a movie there. I bought the tickets weeks ago, reserved our recliners and for the last week, we both have been really looking forward to going.
Normally, we don't go to the theater to see movies that often. The chairs are uncomfortable, the floors are sticky, there are twenty minutes of commercials before the trailers, and well, there are other people there who have no manners.
We went a couple of months ago to Gold Class to see "Terminator: Salvation" with our friends Alisa and Luis, and we all decided that that was the way to go out and see a movie. Not something you'd do often, but as a once in a while treat.
It's so going to be a nice evening. |
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| Just because the fire truck is there doesn't mean you need to know why |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|05:20 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  okay | ] |
I had to make a quick trip to the local grocery store this afternoon. When I got to the parking lot entrance I usually use, it was blocked by a fire track with its lights flashing. I went around the block to the other parking lot entrance and went on with my shopping.
While I was inside, I didn't see any fire fighters or police officers so I figured everything was all right as far as I was concerned and I went about my business.
I passed a woman who looked to be in her sixties who was just rebuffed by a store employee after asking him what in heck was going on. As I passed by, I said, "The way I see it, if it was really bad, they wouldn't be letting us in the store."
"But aren't you curious?" she said.
"Of course I'm curious! I'm human. Still, I figure that if it were our business, they'd let us know."
She shrugged and went down the freezer aisle as I headed for the checkout stands. As I went to my car after checking out, I saw the fire fighters getting into the fire truck and getting ready to leave. Panic over. Crisis averted. |
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| Book available to good home |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|02:23 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | bookpost | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | not too bad, really | ] |
I'm finished with a non-fiction title called Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook, so it is now available to anyone who wants it. Just comment and I'll send it to you.
It's hilarious, but it's also quite disturbing when you get right down to it. It makes retail jobs out to be large piles of suck, and as someone who has worked retail, it is 100% right on the money. I almost wish a survival handbook like this was available back then. |
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| Worst simile I've read in a while |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|10:02 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | okay | ] |
"He flushed, red creeping up his fat neck like vomit up a gullet after a long night of drinking."- Hardscrabble Road by Jane Haddam |
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| It figures |
[Jun. 16th, 2009|02:25 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | RBD - Adiós | ] |
Weird Al Yankovic posts a single to the on-line music stores that is an "Internet Leak" of his upcoming album. It's a parody, but of course, I've never heard the original. I wasn't even aware of the original's existence until now.
I hate it when that happens. |
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| I'm amazed how fast he grasped the concept |
[Jun. 11th, 2009|01:40 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | The Partridge Family - I Think I Love You | ] |
Today at lunch, several co-workers and I were at a local sandwich place having a rather spirited political discussion. Well, okay, they were having a spirited political discussion, I was doing an oekaki puzzle.
One of the folks at the table is a recent transplant from China. His English is excellent, but he doesn't grasp some of the finer nuances of American culture yet.
"What is 'politically correct'?" he asked us over lunch.
"Well....," someone said, obviously searching for a good way to explain it. "Like if you see a very fat lady, you don't call her fat. You say she's a 'person of size' or 'full-figured'."
"Oh, so you lie, then?"
Brilliant. |
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| How Unix geeks are born |
[Jun. 10th, 2009|10:22 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | puns | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | not too bad, really | ] |
A friend of mine who administrates Unix environments for a living recently took his kids to a museum with a dinosaur exhibit. As part of the attraction, one could sit in a dinosaur egg and have one's picture taken.
I was looking at the pictures he'd posted to FaceBook, including one where he himself had posed in the egg, looking like he was ready to crawl out onto the Jurassic sands. He captioned it, "Hatching the Unix geek!"
I thought, "That's not hatching. That's a shell escape." |
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| Book available to good home |
[Jun. 9th, 2009|12:13 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | bookpost | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | not too bad, really | ] |
I just read Evil Intent by Kate Charles, which is the first in a series of mysteries about an Anglican clergyperson named Callie Anson. I enjoyed it, though I was quite disappointed that even today, some Anglicans feel women do not belong in the clergy and that it's "man's work." I mean, "The Vicar of Dibley" didn't quite touch on that to a large extent.
Anyway, if anyone would like to read it, let me know and I'll send it to you. |
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| A little Pippin goes a long way |
[Jun. 8th, 2009|01:23 pm] |
I was at karaoke laast Thursday when someone starting singing "No Time at All" from the musical "Pippin."
My brain immediately conjured up a Greek chorus in white robes and white masks chanting, "OH! IT'S TIME. TO START. LIVING!"
You see, back in 1990, I was in college and doing the Fall Show with Boris' Kitchen, the campus comedy troupe. Our opener for the show was "The Greek Chorus Sketch," which now lives in infamy as one of the best bits the group has ever done. At least, in my opinion it is.
So, we're figuring out what to do about bows when someone noticed that there was a rolled up something nailed to the ceiling of the student theater. This turned out to be the lyric sheet to "No Time At All" that gets dropped down when Berthe asks the audience to sing with her in "Pippin," which another group (Tympanium Euphorium) had just done a couple of weeks prior. So, since the band we were using had some folks in common from the "Pippin" production, we ended the show with the chorus coming out, chanting the first line of the song, the lyrics dropped down and the rest of us walked out as one of the characters we played in the show and the music for "No Time At All" played from band pit. You could tell who in the audience had been involved with "Pippin" as they had hit the floor laughing.
Remember that, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) seventorches? Those were the days. |
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| I want cake, not fondant |
[Jun. 7th, 2009|03:13 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | bookpost | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Kolchak, the Night Stalker - The Werewolf | ] |
I read through the new Martha Stewart's Cupcakes while I was at Costco today and was very disappointed. I had originally put it in my cart and was reading it while I was in line waiting to be checked out. By the time I got up to the front, I asked if I could put it back.
Here's the problem I had with it: Too much icing and not enough cake.
The greater portion of the book seemed to involve how to top your cupcakes with different frosting so that they would resemble flowers, beach scenes, bunny rabbits, duckies and the like. There were very few recipes for the actual cake parts of the cupcake. I suppose there are fewer things you can do with cake than with frosting, but I was hoping for more variety in the cakes.
I shall now return to my search for cupcake cookbooks that actually feature the cake. |
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| The service is great, but the grammar is crappy |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|01:37 pm] |
I was listening to the radio on the way into work today, and one of the commercials I heard was for one of those shuttle services where they'll take you to the airport so you don't have to drive yourself.
At one point, the announcer (the owner of the company) started extolling the virtues of said services and went on to say, "that means there were two thousand less cars on the road which means there isn't as much emissions!"
Oh, the pain. |
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| Is this what they mean by ruff love? |
[Jun. 2nd, 2009|11:00 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | huh? | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | tired | ] |
I was reading tonight about a man near Chehalis who was just sentenced to 30 days in jail for having sex with his two dogs. Apparently, some folks in his furry group turned him in when they saw what he was up to.
Oooo-kay. And I thought nothing could be weirder than the Enumclaw horse-lover story. I was wrong.
Gives a whole new meaning to Double Dog Dare, doesn't it? |
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| Sometimes you need a linguist to label your rubber stamps |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|03:32 pm] |
I was in a rubber stamp store yesterday and as I was perusing the word stamps I came across a large stamp of several colums of Japanese kana. It was weird because the kana was not always facing the correct direction and there was a mix of hiragana and katakana. The kana itself seemed to be in gojuon order (for example, ka ki ku ke ko were all in one string) and although my Japanese is not great, I can still pick out sentence structure, which was impossible considering the kana weren't all facing the same way. At this point, I was totally confused, and looked at the side of the mount to see if the manufacturer had included a description.
"Kanji poem," it read. Wrong on both counts.
I put it down and then scanned the rest of the shelf. My eye alighted on another stamp with kana, specifically a small stamp with the hiragana "a" on it. Just to be safe, I checked the stamp description on the side.
"Symbol." Well, I suppose that was technically correct at least. |
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| Is rock-throwing becoming an epidemic up here? |
[May. 29th, 2009|06:30 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  gobsmacked | ] |
Another person was throwing rocks at cars on I5, but this time up where I90 merges with I5 in downtown Seattle. One hit a semi carrying five tons of cargo.
People! Rocks plus cars going 65 miles an hour equals NOT GOOD! |
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| Ah, the wild days of the tasty two inches |
[May. 27th, 2009|03:14 pm] |
I'm not sure what put me in mind of this execrable book, but this morning the novel Seventh Avenue Murder by Liza Bennett popped into my head.
This book was a paperback original from Harlequin back when it had started it's Worldwide Mystery Library imprint somewhere around 1989/1990. At that point I was in college and had picked it up free from the bookstore I was working at as it had come in as used. The cover quote from some reviewer was a classic non-compliment ("Liza Bennett is strong on story-telling") so I figured I'd be in for some really awful writing fun.
Boy, was I! Holy crap, but this book was AWFUL! Besides the nauseatingly bad descriptions of people ("She was swathed in a pomegranate pantsuit..."), the obnoxious dialogue and the inane characters for whom a terrible tragedy was when they arrived in Paris too late to shop for the day, the plot made no sense.
For example, our heroine Peg Goodenough (a clue right there that this was not going to be classic literature) is convinced that a woman was murdered because the suicide note left on the mirror in the hotel room in Paris was written in a lipstick that was not her shade!!
You're probably wondering why I remember this book so well. Well, it rapidly became a source of entertainment in our suite during junior year. We'd occasionally pick it up, quote from the more ridiculous passages, laugh at it, give hilarious dramatic readings of the "kissing...smearing..." scene and then put it back on the shelf. The only other books we tended to do this with was the Gor series, so that ought to tell you something.
Man, I miss those days. Maybe I should host a bad writing party and have people bring over the worst published passages they can find. |
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| Maybe it's like Hello Kitty only with sushi |
[May. 25th, 2009|07:30 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | not too bad, really | ] |
I saw an ad on Facebook today for a new restaurant in Ballard called "Moshi Moshi Sushi."
I almost called them just to see if they would answer the phone, "Moshi moshi. Moshi Moshi Sushi." |
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| A geeky practical joke I will never do |
[May. 22nd, 2009|10:27 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | puns | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | okay | ] |
I was thinking this morning about how it might be amusing to roll up a D&D character, take the character sheet over to the local Les Schwab, hand the sheet to the mechanic and say, "Hi, I was wondering if I could get some help with my alignment." |
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