That figures

Oh man, guys, I need to apologize to you folks. I had this really great story about how I found this pen at work that had this really hilarious note on it -- it was waterproof. What kind of pen is waterproof? In what context would that possibly be useful? Is it like an astronaut pen for scuba divers? I could only imagine someone in a sinking submarine trying to write a note warning the people who discover the wreckage of the giant squid that swallowed the propeller, realizing he had a Bic, and then swearing (sailors swear a lot), wishing he had my pen.

I found myself outside with the pen and your run of the mill Post-It pad, trying to write something down. I don't remember why I was outside writing things down, but that's not the point; the point is, it was raining. What a glorious coincidence! I was oddly outside writing things down in the rain with a waterproof pen! It seemed to work ok, but afterwards it started to crap out. I threw the pen away today. So who would make an outlandish claim about having a waterproof pen, and then have it not be true? That'd be like a pot manufacturer saying that you can use their saucepan upside-down on the burner and get the same results when you boil your spaghetti. Why would you even bother making such a statement?

The problem, though, is that I can't find a link to this pen. It's a Vivo Microfine, one of those wacky ballpointers that looks almost like it's a felt tip. It's black (I refuse to use any pen that is not black [unless it's red, and then only in certain cases; the point is that blue ink was invented by terrorists]), has a nice grip, and nice balance. I like the pen. But it isn't waterproof! I haven't felt this cheated since that time I read a Shakira interview where she said that she wanted to sound like Led Zeppelin.

Hey guys, what is?

I hate when people use phrases that are shortened to the point of incompleteness. I am not talking about the now mainstream internet lingo, like IDK, my BFF Jill?, which is its own brand of infuriating. I am talking about when people say things like, "I am on my way to grab a vegan spring roll and a mineral water. Would you like to come with?" My opinion of ending things with prepositions notwithstanding, this is the sort of sentence that would make want to cause as much offense as possible: by walking away without even answering the question and ordering a hamburger at the nearest, greasiest location that served one. Then kicking a nearby dog for good measure.

There are others, too. See you in a few. A few what? Seconds? Days? I know you are probably thinking something along the lines of, "That's clearly context related, Engineer." You know what else is context related? Your face. How is that better than saying, "See you in a few minutes," or "See you in a bit," which is the same length. Or, if you're really that lazy, "See you"? That removes the completely ambiguous and unnecessary statement of "a few." My seventh grade biology teacher used to say, "No naked numbers!" and this reminds me of that. She said she meant that we were to always include unites with our numbers, but I always thought that she secretly was just a little prudish and wanted to repress 4's sexuality. I'm not going answer these people until they tell me with whom or a few what. Finish your sentences, jerks.

I never really got on board with calling Ultimate Frisbee just "Ultimate" either. I feel like that would be like calling Super Mario Brothers "Super." [Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that Super Mario Brothers isn't super; I am saying it should be called "Mario."] I really hate things that are described by their modifier rather than the modified word. Consider this example: if someone offered you a peanut butter and milk, you would probably say, "What, like on a stick?" But you'd be missing out, because he really meant peanut butter cookies, and it wouldn't be your fault! Nobody calls peanut butter cookies just peanut butters, or pound cake pound. How come Ultimate Frisbee gets this exception? I don't have time to ponder this question, because I have to go in a few. Hey, do you want to come with? No? Well, I hope you keep reading How.

Make the first one count

Hey, you know what? Ice cream is pretty great. I don't know who is responsible for it, wikipedia says it's both the Mesopotamians and the Chinese in the same article, but I always heard it was the Chinese. (You know, in that same sentence with noodles and paper and fireworks. But you know what they didn't invent? Whiskey. My people handled that one. You're welcome.)

There is one problem that I have, though. You know how the first time you scoop ice cream it comes out so wonderfully, like, well, cream? That is a pretty difficult to surpass dessert experience. There are a few that come close: first bite of fresh cookies, Oreos dunked in chocolate, and throwing a pie at a drifter. But after the ice cream has been in the freezer for a few days, it is not nearly as glorious. In fact, it is hard and barely a cream at all.

There are a few possible remedies, and none of them are particularly good. You can heat up your spoon, but that's only a temporary solution. You can lower the temperature of your freezer, but then you run the risk of having ice cream that's too creamy or cherry popsicles that look like they're crying blood. I think the sanest answer is to get a soft serve machine in my living room next to my couch.

Rollercoaster... I hate that song.

I feel I must apologize again for my low output lately. My life has been a series of ups and downs, each down more up than the last, and vice versa. But don't you for a second think I'm going to complain about my life or job on How Observant. I hate blogs like that. If you really gave a damn what was going on in my life you'd call me or something. You didn't, so let's not waste any time. I'm pretty sure I made a promise early on in the life of this blog that I wouldn't talk about garbage like that. I observe in entertaining fashion, hence the title.

I was reminded about one of my chief missions just as I was sitting down for this entry, in fact. One of those stupid AT&T commercials came on -- the Wes Anderson ones where he lives in New Hautelantaugustemson -- and it occurred to me that I need to cover some of those terrible, terrible commercials that are out there again. Wes Anderson, although I am rather fond of his movies (and usually his commercials) did not have a hit with this series. His American Express commercial cracked me right up, though.

The good news for Mr. Anderson is that he's not alone right now. I think a the top of the list, undoubtedly, is Wendy's. There is always a one character doing something absurd while wearing the Wendy's crayon red hair. And, you know, absurdity is sometimes good ("Find the Fish" anyone?) but these people suck at it. Just show us your square hamburgers and be done with it. Kicking trees, playing the didgeridoo in a freezer and turning into a non-blue Veruca Salt just isn't getting the job done. These commercials make me want to go to McDonald's. Ponder that one.

Also, Best Buy. There is a commercial where the customer and the salesman are discussing HDTV, and they are not talking in complete sentences. At one point, the customer says that he likes cowboy explosions, and that's pretty awesome. I can't think of a movie that couldn't be improved with cowboy explosions. Maybe Phantoms.

I do feel the need to give some positive remarks to Geico, though. They parlayed a successful commercial series into a television program. And they have another awesome series right now, with Lauren Wallace (who is made of lightning), the cousin of Mike Wallace. I love those commercials. Take a note, Wendy's, and see what a real commercial looks like.

How un-e-harmonious

Internet dating is turning into a pretty serious deal these days. Some of them try to trick you, like OkCupid, which lures you with obnoxious internet quizzes that they try to pass off as memes, but in order to be a meme, people have to actually recognize the concept they're spreading. But as it turns out, OkCupid is an internet dating site.

I don't get it. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but the whole concept seems ludicrous. Efficient, but ludicrous. Here is my description, as I understand internet dating, separated conveniently by gender.

Men: sadly browse profiles, skipping entries without pictures, picking one that sounds like she'd be willing to sleep with him with minimal effort, sends out 30 messages to the most likely candidates, browse over to his favorite Star Trek themed pornographic website.

Women: cry, watch Sex and the City, write a profile underexaggerating age and weight while overexaggerting intelligence and culture, post a picture from 7 years ago, be sure to mention how much fun and blond she is, wonder if the guy who just sent her a message could be The One, feed cats.

The event that prompted me to write this post was a commercial I saw for chemistry.com. They are one of these web-based dating services, that has E-harmony in its sights (sites?). Even though E-harmony commercials are annoying, I don't think chemistry's tack is the right one here. They typically show a person who reads a list of inoffensive qualities (one person forgot Earth Day, another was gay, another was a Goth or some other lifestyle that takes themselves way too seriously) in an effort to sort out why they were rejected by E-harmony. I guess it could just be my prejudices, but I don't think I want to subscribe to an internet dating service that caters to the rejects of another internet dating service. That's like getting the meal of stuff that wasn't quite good enough to make it onto Taco Bell's menu. No quiero.

Shattering taboos, one pair at a time

I just got some new underwear this weekend, and I must say, I am completely pleased. I have been wearing underwear for a while now, and I'd like to think I'm pretty good at it. (Although, occasionally I do make mistakes. Once, more recently than I'd like to admit, I put my boxers on backwards. The urinal was completely off limits that day.) There are times that I'd like to mention things about underwear, but for whatever reason, underwear is pretty sexualized. I think that's a bit extreme. It'd be like saying that a guy who climbs Mount Everest once is a big time mountain climber. I've spent a lot of time with science, I want to see some repeatability, killer.

I would probably say that for the average person, underwear's day to day role is much less sexual than the media would lead us to believe. I'm pretty sure it's mostly so you keep sweat and stuff off your real clothes. And to let you have a chance to wear something that has dollar signs on it. (Sadly, I don't actually have money boxers. I wish I did.)

I might have underwear questions. And they might not be sexual in nature. Like, for example, what's the deal with the hybrid boxer-briefs? There is no way that they seem competitive with the full-on boxer shorts. Also, are the people who are wearing briefs later in life just afraid to try something new? How many people try boxers, but decide they hate freedom and go back? I want statistics on that. But this isn't polite conversation. Even though asking something like, "Do my cutoffs go with this blazer?" might be a little less controversial.

This is to say nothing about the feminine sorts of underwear. But they seem even more sexualized. Bras, for example. There are some girls who probably could get on without them, but they still insist on it. Is that because of social pressure? An excess of pride? A safeguard against turning into a human thermometer? You can't ask that question out loud.

And I think that's bunk. I would like to know what sorts of personal decisions go into electing between boy shorts and panties for girls. Is it similar to the issues weighed for boxers and briefs with guys? Or is it usually a sexualized decision? How often to girls top and bottom underwears match? That doesn't even come up with us! (Actually, I guess I only speak for those of us who are not transvestites.)

I think the biggest question is about the boxer-briefs. The more I think about it, it seems like the worst of both worlds. And is it really necessary to put those douchey looking underwear models on the cover of every underwear package? I know what it's supposed to look like.

Wow, he's fat and he sucks (No, I'm not talking about Michael Moore)

I don't really like to talk about sports much, but I dislike Notre Dame just enough to pile on a little. This school decided that they should cut Ty Willingham loose after three years (the general rule of thumb for a college coach is four) and built Charlie Weis a giant treasure chest full of money and fried chicken, and it turns out that he's just not that good of a coach.

For those of you not so sports inclined, it would be like if a major movie studio that nobody likes, like Universal or Fox, decided in 1992 to invest a ten year contract in Kevin Costner. That's right after Robin Hood and Dances with Wolves, which made him gigantic, after he had a string of big movies with things like No Way Out, Field of Dreams and Bull Durham. At first it would look pretty good, because Tin Cup was fun, JFK was big and so was The Bodyguard. After that, though, people started noticing that he's not a terribly talented guy. He has a very Keanuish approach to line delivery (which reminds me -- I finally saw the third Matrix and it was awful. I would have rather watched a movie about a school full of monkeys competing in track and field) and is getting old, so you're not even going to get the women in their early thirties going to see movies he's in because he's in them. People in their early forties don't go out as much to the movies.

On top of being not talented, he started making movies like Waterworld and the Postman and 3000 Miles to Graceland. Not exactly the Untouchables, there Kevin. Then again, he had Sean Connery and Robert DeNiro in that movie with him, so it wouldn't be hard to pretend you can act a little around them.

So, Notre Dame is stuck with Charlie Weis and he just made Waterworld. Ty Willingham at least looks like he's improving, rather than claiming to be somebody who could outscheme anybody and literally being last in total offense. Kevin Costner wasn't that big of a bastard. His offense hasn't scored a touchdown yet. It's been three weeks! Is there anything funnier than laughing at arrogant people getting their comeuppance? I submit that there is not.

It's not quite a love poem, but they are tubers, after all

Sometimes when I perform an activity that I had not done for a long time, I am reminded at how wonderful that experience was and get angry with myself for not doing it more often. Watching Wayne's World is one of them. I love Wayne's World; both the movies and the SNL sketch. But I can't remember the last time I watched any of them.

I made mashed potatoes with dinner tonight. They were glorious. I don't know why I don't eat them multiple times a day. I don't know why this was the first time I've done it since I moved to Augusta. I hate myself a little for not eating them more. You know how sometimes you eat an entire five pound bag of fun size Snickers bars and then, bloated and hurting inside, wonder why you did that? It's like that, except the complete opposite. I want to invite them to my wedding. (For food, although making mashed potatoes a groomsman is not completely out of the question.)

I am now going to make short list of Chuck Norris style quotations expressing my opinions of mashed potatoes.

• They should give heroin addicts mashed potatoes instead of methadone, that would eliminate drug addictions everywhere.
• If Blowpop made a mashed potato flavored lollipop, we'd still be hearing about them.
• At football games, they should sell mashed potato hats like they sell beer hats. I would buy two.
• In Soviet Russia, potatoes mash you!
  
• I am going to start dipping instant mashed potatoes, when the real thing is unattainable.
• When I die, I hope it's a mob hit where I am fitted with cement shoes and thrown into a vat of butter mashed potatoes to sleep with the chives.
• The Egyptians should have built the pyramids out of mashed potatoes.
• In the future, instead of butter I will top my mashed potatoes with mashed potatoes.

Let me know if you have any others to add.

He's probably a three monther

I'm sure you've probably heard somebody say, "She's a twenty-footer," meaning this hypothetical she looks rather attractive from any distance, so long as it's greater than twenty feet. Thirty feet, for example. I personally don't like this scale, because it kind of breaks down for good looking people, the kind of people at whom one would actually enjoy looking. What do you say when you meet someone who is actually hot? She's a one incher? Do we get into microscopic scales? I hope not, because the only way that could be lamer would be to say, "She's a 9.314159."

A friend of mine proposed using poker hands to describe the relative attractivity of girls, but it didn't really catch on, unfortunately. The beauty of this system is that two pair may sound low, but you typically bet on a two pair. There's a very high ceiling; like the girl in your class might be really hot, and so you could say she's a full house. And that's almost a no lose situation. I think someone like Maria Sharapova would be somewhere like four of a kind. How many straight flushes have you seen in real life? One maybe? See how perfect a system this was?

Anyway, Fred Thompson just announced that he's running for president. I give him about three months before he blends into the noise. This looked like a really compelling group of candidates early in the election. But now that we get to spend time with them, they all look horribly, horribly flawed. We are already within the time range for like all of them. Except Thompson. We'll see how long that goes.

All right, if I'm going to bring up these scales, I think I owe you a picture, possibly to illustrate. Keeping with the tennis theme, I present a possible new tennis crush, Ana Ivanovic, who is at worst, a king high flush.
This makes me a little bit uncomfortable, though, because this is the first celebrity crush who is younger than me. I'm feeling old. But I have a blog, and that makes me hip, right?

I only have so many shrimps

I can't remember if I wrote this already. I hope I didn't. I've been thinking about it a while and with all the drama of starting work and finishing with school I can't remember and I am far too lazy to go too far back and check. If it is a repeat, yell at me and I'll get you another post, lickety-split. Or in two shakes of a lammy's tail, whichever is faster.

I like to eat things that have other things in them. Like pastas with chicken or seafood, cereals with marshmallows or shrimp and garlic sauce, that staple of Chinese restaurants that have pictures for menus. It's a pretty convenient menu system, when you think about it, and I still think it's a little bit funny that they always have pictures of spareribs on them. Spareribs just aren't the sort of thing that I think of as Chinese food. Even though I'm told that there is not that much that is "Chinese" about it. Funny how Americans can remake the food culture of a country with a billion people into their own. We are such an awesome people, I wish I were something else so I could choose to become American.

When I eat those things, though, I like to have a relatively even distribution of the things that are in the thing. I try to spread out the things throughout the meal because I hate having the
the last bite of any meal not have a bite of the special ingredient. The Chicken Alfredo is called that because of the chicken, the shrimp and garlic sauce has the same deal, and where do you think all the luck in the Lucky Charms come from? If I wanted bites of Alfredo, I would have ordered it without the chicken. If I wanted to eat Lucky Charms without the marshmallows, I would crumble pieces of my cork bulletin board off into a bowl of milk. And I don't want that.

Also, eating two shrimp in one bite is completely unacceptable. That would be a completely irresponsible decision. Occasionally a bite with no shrimp or chicken may be required, but so long as there are pieces left for later bites. Mostly, I think people who want to eat all their shrimp right away are sociopaths. Those are the kinds of people who, like the foolish grasshopper, eat all of their food in the spring. I, like the wise ant, store a little bit for the winter so I can enjoy shrimp throughout the entire meal. And it was delicious.