Die, spambots, DIE!

Eight spam comments in half an hour... grrrrr, who the hell opened the floodgates? I'm turning on the word verification thingie. To all of you humans out there, I do apologize for the inconvenience.

Over at the fantastic resale venue Bookman's, one can find all sorts of interesting things... Indeed, things one has never seen before. This time, it was not merchandise, but mannerism. I had seen a gentleman pull a glass out of his pocket, fill it at the drinking fountain, and drink the contents. Quite a nice idea, I must admit... But odd enough that I don't recall ever seeing this before. If you decide to try this, I have but two words of advice: don't trip.

Lola Weekend

I'm coining the phrase "Lola ____", where _____ is a period of time. It's when you can tell there are multiple possibilities as to what will happen, all of them quite different (as in the excellent movie Run Lola Run. Here's the two things that may happen:

1) A friend of mine decided that he doesn't want to go to a concert in Vegas alone, and invites me at the last minute. This is not likely (he has about three hours to finalize the plan with me), but possible. In case you're wondering, the concert is Backstreet Boys. I wouldn't be my first pick, but it does invoke my Rule of Concert Going: Unless you completely, utterly hate the band, if someone offers to take you to a concert, just go. You'll have a wonderful time. Since I don't utterly hate the Backstreet Boys, if he wants to take me, I'll gladly go.

2) I wake up early Saturday morning, do an odd job of checking people in for a medical seminar at the Ritz-Carlton, meet up with a different friend of mine, go have lunch and watch The Aristocrats with him, possibly sneak in a swim and a nap, head up to *another* odd job where I'll be handing margaritas to conventioneers up at Fort McDowell Adventures, then head back into town, sing my heart out at karaoke (JJ's Cantina on Scottsdale north of McKellips) and try Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life" for the first time in public (eep!), hand out with friends after the bar closes, and stumble into bed so late it's early once more. Whew.

Either way, this weekend should be pretty darn fun. I'll let you know how it goes either way, and if I'm in Vegas, expect mobile picture goodness.

I was standing on the corner...

"Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega is a pretty darn good song. There are two bits of trivia about it that you likely do not know: First, the original song is nothing more than Vega singing. There's no backing music of any kind, just her. A group called DNA liked it and did the remixed version of it that you hear on the radio. The second bit of trivia is that the song was used as the benchmark track for the now ubiquitous compressed music format known as the MP3. So in effect, mp3s were designed to play Suzanne Vega songs.

What the Jester is Having for Dinner: Amazing Jake's, Mesa, AZ

Wow, it's actually good. Roasted poblano corn chowder with a nice spicy bite to complement the sweetness of the corn (almost too sweet), spinach salad with bacon, hard-boiled egg, and roasted almonds; tasty pastas that are FOR ONCE al dente (and a mac n cheese that isn't neon orange!), the only weak point is the pizza. Fun game selection (i.e. they have DDR), and good prices (50 cents for three songs on DDR), now if only you didn't have to buy dinner in order to play the video games.

Song lyric for me to look up later... "you're unforgiven, so go on livin'". I have a sneaky suspicion that Belinda Carlisle is the artist. If you can name the song off what I've given, I'll be thrilled.

GMail Weirdness

I've gotta say I absolutely love GMail, Google's email service. The storage capacity is massive and growing by the second, I can easily search for any message, and the spam that gets sent is almost nonexistent. The weird thing about the spam that I receive is that all of it is in Japanese (or maybe Mandarin Chinese, kinda hard to tell the difference when it comes out as gibberish characters). Does anyone else out there have the same thing happen with their spam?

Why I love Washington Mutual

Apologetic ATMs. I made a withdrawal this morning. After I entered my PIN, I got this message on screen:

Sorry, I just ran out of paper
(It's been a crazy day!)


At Wells Fargo, I just get a very business-y screen saying that the machine is out of order.

Yay work!

I just got hired on for a seasonal position at Fairytale Brownies. Thank you to the great people at Pridestaff over in Mesa. There is a certain perk to the job that is certainly unique. Some of you may be familiar with Starbucks's perk of giving all of its employees a complimentary pound of coffee every week. Fairytale Brownies does something similar... a half-dozen complimentary brownies every single day. So, if you need some chocolate solace, just let me know and I'll set you up ;-)

Plans To Take Over The World #3,872

While driving down the freeway listening to a catchy tune, I had what may be a very brilliant and very ridiculous idea- a CD full of earworm songs. Nice thing is, if you get a song stuck in your head all you have to do is pop the CD in and it is guaranteed GONE. Only problem is that a different song will be very firmly lodged. So far I'm thinking of using:

• "There's A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" from Disney's Carousel of Progress
• "Katamari On the Rocks" from Katamari Damacy
• "Cruel Angel Thesis" from Neon Genesis Evangelion
• "Take a Chance On Me" by ABBA

and I'm sure I'll come up with many more. Got any ideas for ones to add? Let me know in the Comments. And don't dare suggest "it's a small world". That's why the Carousel of Progress song is in there- it's a Disney earworm without being as sickly saccharine as small world.