WIDESPREAD FAME VIRUS

The general assumption in today's society seems to be that you need to be a TV or movie or rock star in order to be really famous and widely recognized, but is that really true? What about people who are in commercials that you see all the time? Doesn't it seem possible that those people get seen way more often by way more people?

I guess this is just a roundabout way of wondering what life is like for that girl in the Boston Market commercial (with the pie). Does she get asked out on dates all the time? Because if she doesn't, I can help to change that. I am committed to improving society in all its forms.

HAIL THOR

This blog post contains one (1) homonym (in the title)

Actual thunder and lightning just a few minutes ago here in San Francisco! Rain coming down in sheets, wind whipping at the house! There was even hail! I saw it outside, coating the pavement of the cul-de-sac. Outstanding.

FOREGONE CONCLUSION?

I suppose you weirdos are going to tell me that apricot cream cheese is also a good idea. What is this once-proud nation coming to.

(Reference) A List of Cream Cheeses With Whom Nonaggression Pacts Have Been Signed

- Plain
- Sun-dried tomato
- Chive
- Herb

(Reference) A List of Cream Cheeses Considered Enemies of the State

- Pineapple chive
- Apple cinnamon
- Apricot

Our lists are probably different. That's okay; we can still be pals, but I think you might want to get some tongue counseling. If such a profession existed.

CLOUDSHIPS

The weather has been changing here literally every hour, going from sunny to not and back again as giant clouds or groups of clouds glide swiftly past this office park far overhead, occasionally dumping cargoes of rain. I will admit to you all that I've looked at these clouds and thought to myself "This is kind of what it would be like if aliens invaded." Giant flying saucers would just trundle by on inscrutable missions, untouchable, occasionally dropping stuff on us. You know I'm right.

ISN'T THAT INTERESTING

Two things:

1. The sunglasses I wear must have some sort of polarization thing going on, or maybe this is just how sunglasses roll and I never noticed: Today on the drive to work, I noticed a cloud that was pink. It wasn't really pink, but the light reflecting from/through it appeared pink through my sunglasses; taking them off rendered it white again. Just that one cloud, not any of the others floating nearby. It was almost (almost) enough to make someone believe in chemtrails.

2. I think I was the first person to use what I think of as the "main" toilet in the upstairs bathroom here at the office; when I went into the stall, the bowl was full of water and a milky substance that foamed when I flushed it. I'm assuming it was soap.

Those are my accomplishments for the day.

TWO WEEKS IN A ROW NOW

Think about these two things:

- The taste of cream cheese
- The taste of apples and cinnamon (cooked together, one hopes)

Do these things belong together.

Once again the only possible conclusion is NO. No, they do not. Apple cinnamon cream cheese is a wrong idea.

At this point I have to wonder what's going on at the bagel place. Is there something happening to the guy making the cream cheese? This is the second time this has happened in just two weeks. Maybe these hideous cream cheeses are a cry for help. Is this man being held in the cream cheese department against his will? Is he shackled to a machine of some sort? Did thugs kidnap his children? These things cannot be logically excluded.

THE BETTER DAY

Pretty much the best thing about Valentine's Day, honestly, is that the candy is half off the next day. When I can walk out of a Walgreen's with a bag of Blow Pops, peanut butter cups, and Tootsie Roll Pops, and also make a donation to the American Heart Society using only five bucks, I call that good.

RESOLUTION

It's almost Valentine's Day over on the East Coast, so I figured why not update. A little early, even.

Today also sees resolution to the headset issue from before: I got one with a wire. The kiosk clerk actually had to dig around quite a bit to find one; Bluetooth is pretty much the de facto standard these days, but my phone's old. I know I'll have to cave and get a new one eventually, but I'm not looking forward to reentering all those damn numbers. Do you know how many numbers I have accumulated. This isn't me trying to sound important or even popular; you'd be surprised how many people are in your phone, probably.

I bet if I got another LG phone, there'd be a way to get them to talk to each other, but I'm just too lazy to go phone shopping when the one I have works fine.

TIME FOR A NEW ONE

So I have one of those headsets for my phone that has a wire, one end of which hooks into my ear while the other plugs into the phone itself. Or at least I had one. Long story short: I accidentally left the ear-part lying in the rain outside my car for at least a few hours, possibly overnight. I uh no longer want to put that end of it inside my ear; there was a while maybe last year where a guy I know seemed to get a lot of ear infections, and it sounded like a horrible pain in the ass.

But so now what. I should get a new one, yeah, but ... okay, look: The whole having-a-wire thing is what doomed the last one (it must have gotten snagged on some part of my clothing without me noticing), so it would be good to have one that's wireless. But I'd need to be sure to only wear it inside the car (which is what I do anyway), or else I'd end up looking like

- One of those business-type jackasses that congregate in bars you know to avoid
- Someone who's trying as hard as he can to live out his cyborg fantasy

I'll just have to see, I guess. By which I mean "see how much the wireless ones cost," because if they're expensive, then fuck it. The wired one lasted a long time; I can get another without feeling ridiculous.

EASY QUESTION

Consider the following two things:

1. Pineapples
2. Chives

Should these be friends.

I submit to you that the answer is no. And you know that I like pineapples. But these two flavors were not meant to mingle, especially not in the context of cream cheese (today is Bagel Friday and that was one of the variant cream cheeses at the table).

(I will take as proof the fact that it did not seem to have been heavily sampled pretty late into the morning here)

Who makes these decisions, and can they be stopped. That's the question that's hard to answer here.

WHY FOR ALL THE NOISE

This just happened maybe two minutes ago: I'm in my room getting ready to go to work when I hear basically all the sirens in the city go screaming past my house (the main road that winds through the Presidio passes not far from my back porch). It's not uncommon for me to hear a siren every once in a while; I assume they're ambulances or cops heading for accidents on the Golden Gate Bridge. But this sounded like a truly serious number of sirens. What the hell is going on out there?

I'm taking a different way to work today.

WELCOME TO TODAY

The only thing I can think about is playing more ROCKET SLIME. This is Chris's fault (he sent it to me). Basically whenever I look at an object now, I think about whether I can shoot it out of a cannon, or combine it with some other object to make a new object that I can shoot out of a cannon for more damage. Did you know, for instance, that combining a wooden box with a chimaera wing makes an iron shuriken? This game has turned me into an advanced weapons systems engineer.

HISTORICAL ACCURACY

How about that: My old high school has a wikipedia page. This is unsurprising, but still sort of startling in that somebody out there took the time to make it. I note that the two middle schools also have wikipedia pages. It's kind of too bad that the sort of edits that I'd want to make for sociohistorical context would probably get written off as bias, even though anyone who went there when I did would know them to be true.

Not that they'd even be that big a deal: The Wellwood page would say something like "Most of the nice kids came from here," and the Eagle Hill one could be neatly summed up as: "Mostly jerks."

I went to Eagle Hill for a year when we moved to the area. Draw your own conclusions.

TOO ... MANY ... JOKES

God dammit people. You'd think there'd be one guy on the entire Boston PD who'd take a look at one of those lights and, in the space of .032 seconds, realize the following items:

- "Hey, that's a guy from Aqua Teen Hunger Force"
- "You know what, this isn't a bomb, it's a bunch of lights"

Here's a question I already know the answer to: Why is it that these things have been up in eight other major American cities without anybody freaking out? (the answer is that none of these cities are run by idiots, apparently)

But here's a couple of questions I don't know the answers to:

- Where are the ones in San Francisco? Did they already get taken down? (FUCK)
- If it turned out you could sell these things on eBay, how awesome would that be? (engadget had a link to one that apparently got removed) Seriously, how awesome.