THE ULTIMATE

Coming home from the opera last night (a bunch of us went to see Madama Butterfly, never having been to an opera before), a door opened in my mind and something was revealed to me. That something: The Creepiest Pickup Line Ever.

You have to deliver this with roughly the same cadence as the line "Do you mind if we dance wif yo' dates?" from Animal House. Are you ready?

THE LINE IS

"Do you want some babies in you?"

I have no idea where that came from. To be honest, I don't want to know.

The opera was pretty good, though!

I AM TEH L337 HAX0R

For those of you who may not be down with the ice-cold cyber-lingo, that post title up there is just indicating to the world how awesome I am at the art of computer hacking. The deal is this: There was a problem I was noticing where some of the archive links weren't working, so I just fixed it. All I had to do was decrypt the signal buffer and reroute the output to an unused cybernode using an inverse spline tracing algorithm, and make sure the dataport settings were aligned against any firewall phage ghosts. If you didn't understand what I just said, that's cool. It's just hacker speak. That's my language now. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go metasurf the infosphere.

THE SMOOTH HIGH WALL OF COWARDICE

Pretty much everybody has celebrity crushes. Brad Pitt. Angelina Jolie. Jude Law. Scarlett Johansson. Etcetera. Mine happens to be Kari Byron from the awesome Discovery Channel show Mythbusters.

Let's make this quick: During a recent lunch, I found out she's in the June issue of FHM. I soon found myself at a location where that magazine is sold (not that there's a shortage of those), and picked it up.

But I didn't buy it. I ... I couldn't.

Kari Byron, if you are reading this, I am sorry. You are still my Ideal Woman, but a $5 price tag combined with the fact that I'd actually have to present a copy of FHM at the register and say "Yes, I am paying money for this magazine" defeated me utterly. FHM. Plus you were only in it for like four pages. I am my own worst enemy.

However

If anybody has a copy of that issue they came by for free (maybe you have a little brother, or work at a bookstore, or do janitorial services for a frat house), I would not object to you sending it to me. I just could not justify that purchase.

On second thought, I hope Kari Byron isn't reading this.

TODAY'S TECHNOLOGY CORNER

I would like to be able to watch new episodes of the Simpsons on Fox, I really would. But for some reason, Fox (and only Fox) comes in horribly shitty on my TV. I get that weird offset ghost-overlay, plus some stripes, plus the occasional vertical jitter. And this is on cable, making it doubly stupid in my mind (if one channel is affected, why not all?). It's a mystery that I've chosen to attribute to evil spirits. The answer is probably so complicated, it might as well be that anyway.

BOOM CHA

Dogblog update at long last. How about that!

My sunburned parts are doing better. I found a neon-green aloe gel that I slather on them every now and then, and it feels pretty great. Some plants, as it turns out, are our pals. Thanks, plants.

AREA BURNS

You know how sometimes hikers or kids get lost in the woods and end up dying of "exposure"? I think I know how that works after spending literally my entire Sunday on top of a cliff by the ocean in Pacifica. I feel like the sun beat me up. I put on sunblock, but due to what I'm going to have to call "application oversights" I ended up with some very specific burns on

- My left wrist near my watch
- My ears
- The hollow of my throat
- The sides, but not the back, of my neck

Plus I don't think my nose escaped solar onslaught despite repeated coats.

Still, it's not just the sun; just being outside for an entire day strains a dude. This is knowledge I have now, for the future. The knowledge exists inside of me.

WHAT, STOMACH

I'll admit it was foolish to wait until around 3:00 to have lunch, but today is Bagel Friday and that offsets the lunch clock some. That still doesn't explain where the stomach ache came from, nor this weird feeling suffusing my whole body, as though I had eaten a brick and my circulatory system was busy circulating pieces of that brick all through me. It's not even as if this is unfamiliar food! I've gotten the spicy chicken fillet sandwich from Wendy's once a week for the past three weeks now.

Stomach, all I did was put food in you. What is the matter with that.

CORRECTING MISPERCEPTIONS

All right, look. I blow my nose a lot at work. The tissues that we are given here at work are kind of ... messy? Particulate? Lots of times when I blow my nose, little bits of Kleenex go flying dust-like from the tissue and end up on my shirt. If these things accumulate, they start to make me look like I have chin dandruff or something. It's easy enough to brush off, but today's shirt has kind of a ribbed texture to it and it's not quite as simple. So if you see me today, that's what's going on: Tissue fluff. Not ... whatever else you might be imagining.

THE GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT: FOUGHT

This weekend saw a return to the field of battle on an occasion that I organized and chose to call THE GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT. It was the second match of a game I invented last year called ULTIMATE TEAM CARDBOARD FORTRESS BATTLE, with some minor rule changes, and those rules have once again been tweaked a little to make the game's feral joy engine of a heart run that much smoother. THE GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT has taken its place as an optional (but oh so sweet) warmup to the primary action.

We had a lot of "photojournalists" this time; pictures will be forthcoming. I want to take this space to thank everyone who showed up for making it almost unbearably fun.

NO ANSWER WILL BE SATISFYING

Have you ever had this happen to you? You're just hanging out, being you, minding your own business, when all of a sudden a weird ultrasound whine starts up in one of your ears?

What in the hell is the cause of that?

I refuse to believe there's something in my ear that's capable of vibrating at 2 kHz or whatever that frequency is. It's got to be something else. But first I need to know if I'm crazy or what.

PERSONALITY TEST QUESTION #1

Here is a thing that happens.

It is pretty much inevitable that the shower curtain, the plastic one that sits inside the tub, will get some mildew on it. Four people in my house take showers, after all. So when that happens, I take it off the rings and put it in the washing machine on "hot" and add a generous amount of bleach. While I add the bleach, I find myself cackling. I think it's because I enjoy the thought of the shower curtain being completely cleansed of life.

Does this make me a bad person.

NOT THAT I'M COMPLAINING

Something I've noticed when I go to hand in my rent checks is that the real estate company that rents out all the property on the Presidio employs some ridiculously attractive women. Is that really necessary.