Recently in Miscellaneous Category

Awesome product of the week: LED emoticon for your car. The next time I find $29.99 on a sidewalk, I am totally spending it on this.

So yeah, my web site disappeared for a couple days. Technical difficulties and such. Sorry about that! But it's all good now, so no worries.

I recently discovered the absolute best place in the world for replenishing some of my stagnant wardrobe. Okay, maybe it's not really the absolute best place in the world, but I've never come across any store that was so cheap without being proportionally crappy. Anyway, it's called Steve & Barry's, and I originally remember it as a little university sportswear shop on Green Street in Champaign. Now there's this huge mega-store at Randhurst. It was crazy; I was in awe. On a completely unrelated note, I am easily impressed.

I just got back from my nightly walk with Murphy, and I feel inclined to share something.

As he was sniffing around like he normally does, he came across a highly compelling section of snow. As in "I really need to poop on this" compelling. The only problem was that this spot was approximately 8 inches from the ground. Being that he's about 15 or 16 inches tall while on all-fours, you'd think that this would create an impossible situation. But no! He proceeded to lift his hind legs off the ground and perform a handstand, canine-style. He then angled his backside upwards in an attempt to launch his poop (sorry for using this word, but there are only so many ways to express the concept) on top of his target. Success! I wish I had a video of it; the event was inspiring. Yes, inspiring! His struggle was a message that no matter how petty or insignificant your goals may seem to be to other people, the important thing is that they are your goals and you need to do whatever you can to achieve them. Accomplishment is always determined by you, not by them (whoever they are). I laughed at him and I called him a nut, but he kept at it and ultimately I wound up having to clean it up.

Yes, darn it, I found a moral in watching a dog take a crap.

I have a new policy: every time that I hear the song "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley on the radio, I am changing the station. It was a novel song at first, but now it sounds like a hundred screeching cats running their claws down chalk boards.

But I guess that's the case for most successful pop songs.

Anyway, please, programming directors - make it stop.

So it's officially "666" - or, more accurately, "6062006." Either way, people are making a big deal about it. I'm not going to write much here, mainly because it's not really worth it, but I do think that it was mildly amusing that at just about exactly 12:00am, I walked directly into a spider web. I'm still itching! I'm convinced that I have bugs crawling over me. Stupid power of suggestion. Wait, that's not amusing. At least not for me. But it was sufficiently evil to ring in this day of uncomfortably-too-many-6s.

So Murphy and I began our nightly walk outside for him to relieve his bladder before bed, and something in the sky caught my eye (but not quite like a big pizza pie). It kind of looked like a blimp. A gray-ish shape with a strobing red light and a bright white light at its edge. The only thing was that the more I looked at it, the more irregular it seemed, and the less it seemed like it was moving. And what in the world would a blimp be doing in the Central Illinois sky at midnight?

So I kept my eye on it for about 10 minutes as I walked around. It didn't move at all. Being the nut-job that I am, I figured that I'd try to catch this little spectacle on camera. You know, so if it started zipping around, I'd have the shaky amateur video to sell to UPN or something. I went inside, got my camera out, and after a couple unsuccessful attempts to leave without Murphy making a fuss that could potentially wake Susan, I leashed him up again and took him downstairs. I looked to the sky, but now all I saw were boring old stars. And the moon, of course (which, incidentally, did hit my eye like a big pizza pie). Yeah, it's an anticlimax - sorry about that. But where did my UFO go?? I couldn't have been the only one who saw it tonight. It was in the south sky. Anyone...? Anyone...? I really don't want to think that I was hallucinating.

As Susan and I drove through the relatively-scenic State Farm campus today, I saw something that I've actually never seen before: a cricket match. I didn't get a chance watch the game go on (I was only driving by), but the quick glance made me somewhat happy to know that there is at least a little bit of international culture in Bloomington-Normal. Although I do believe that all of the people playing were Indian, so it wasn't as surprising of a sight as it would have been if the players were a random sampling of frat boys from ISU. Still, I thought it was pretty neat. Maybe I'll find a match to sit down and watch some day.

I don't watch a lot of television, at least as something more than background noise. The shows that I pay attention to are very carefully selected. I usually gravitate toward the animated - this could be my inner 12 year old having way too much control over my personality - and the witty/hilarious. Now I recently discovered The Loop, which I was surprised to find extremely hilarious. And then I saw that the T.V. critics out there more or less hate it. What the heck? I almost always agree with "critical acclaim" (or lack of it), even when apparently nobody else does. I know that the chances are slim that more than a handful of people will read this, but does anyone out there agree with me? Is The Loop the greatest television comedy since Scrubs?

I was browsing through the Daily Vidette today, which is the student newspaper for Illinois State University, and realized why I stopped reading it on a regular basis, at least as a source of legitimate information. In the past, I was a little thrown off by Associated Press articles that were simply cut off 3/4 of the way through. This seemingly happened so that room could be made for advertisements of drinking establishments. This type of thing makes the publication seem not so much a newspaper funded by ads, but an adpaper that fills empty space with news snippets.

And then every once in a while, an amusing typo would find itself onto the pages. A major headline on the front page a while back, for example, referred to "opinoins" of students. Today, I found three typoed headlines in the first six pages! (If you're curious, they referred to the university "libaray," an issue concerning "identy" theft, and something about President Bush's "cheif" of staff.) What kind of editorial staff lets these kinds of things just slip by? How can they expect anyone to take them seriously when they truncate articles in meaningless ways, misspell headlines, and of course hire columnists who seem to summon most of their insight from beer commercials and MTV?

Student papers tend to take a lot of abuse from critics, but the Vidette I imagine is playng in a whole different ballpark. In a way, the paper represents the university's student body, and if its staff is going to be sloppy and misguided in the ways that it presents news and opinion, then really, what good is it?