I wear disposable contacts, which I throw out and replace every other Thursday. New contacts day is always the happiest day.

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NOTE: Basic familiarity with male anatomy is recommended to fully experience this post.

Men's briefs and boxer-briefs come with a part in front where the material overlaps by a couple inches. It's sort of like an airlock—objects can emerge if you intend for them to do so, but not accidentally. (Airlock? Okay, I've been watching a lot of Star Trek while working out recently.) I wonder why this principle is not applied to boxers. Some boxers come with no access ports at all, but most come with what is basically just a slit—the material only overlaps by half an inch or so in general. There may be a button, but often there is not. This does not provide much insurance against accidental exposure to the elements. Since boxers fit much more loosely and usually use thinner fabric, it seems to me that the airlock idea would be more useful on boxers than briefs. I wonder why I've never seen boxers like that. Sure, it's extra material, but boxers are already insanely overpriced; I'm sure they could stand to use three cents' more fabric.

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As I was brushing my teeth tonight, I coughed. As I coughed, for a brief moment I vividly imagined myself coughing so hard that every follicle in my body violently ejected my hairs, creating a showery poof of hair in my bathroom.

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When I get a can of Caffine Free Diet Coke® from the fridge, I often like to press it softly against my eyeballs. It feels very nice.


Currently listening: OneRepublic—Say (What I Need)

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I wonder...

Each year, how many fantasy-loving gamer nerds write into their wills, or at least tell their friends and family in seriousness, that when they die they want to be cremated so that they can't be revived as the undead minion of a powerful necromancer?

I bet it's more than zero.


Curently listening: Ben Folds—She Don't Use Jelly

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I just knocked my glasses off of the bathroom counter. They bounced on the floor and under the counter. I looked, and they had fallen down into the heating vent beneath the counter (my bathroom and kitchen have pseudo-heated floors). I think that if it weren't for the earpiece, they'd have fallen down into the nethers of my home. Close call.

Labels: house, random

This is the first photo I took at Butchart. I'll post more later once I spend some time working on them.

Labels: photography, random

The Victoria Clipper had a duty free shop onboard similar to what you'd see in an airport. During each trip they'd advertise the products available—untaxed liquor, cigarettes, and perfume, as well as souvenir-type items. On the return trip, after dinner, the announcer got on the speakers and invited us to all come and visit the "internationally-renowned Victoria Clipper duty free and souevenir shop," which got some light laughs from the passengers. "We've got sweatshirts, T-shirts, hats, and even a variety of stuffed animals for your pleasaure." The table across the aisle appeared to be a mother and three daughters, and they all giggled pretty hard at that. I stopped trying to hold it in.

My photographer companion dared me two shiny Canadian dollars to go back and ask for more details on the pleasure-bears. I declined.


Currently listening: Quarashi—Pro

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After we got to the port in Victoria, my friend and I took a bus to the gardens. During the first half of the trip we sat across from a retired woman who was chatty enough to almost miss her stop. She had been to Seattle once in the past, and remembered little about her trip other than a particular incident in her hotel. Her story went something like this.

"My husband and I were in the hotel room getting ready to leave, and he had flipped the TV. He was scanning through the channels and suddenly came across... porn. He'd never seen it before, I guess, and he was just mesmerized. He was just staring at the screen. I left the room and said I'd see him in the lobby in a few minutes. I waited down there a long time until I finally headed back up to the room to see what the matter was. When I got to the room, he was still sitting there in front of the TV, staring. I could barely pull him away from the thing, eh!

"Later on that night, he had fallen asleep and I was watching the TV, and wouldn't-you-know, I came across more porn. I hadn't seen it before either, but it looked interesting, so I decided to watch it for a little bit. I ended up watching the whole thing. It wasn't really my thing, I guess, but it was interesting. Oh! the acting; it was so bad, eh? I remember we went to the Space Needle twice—why he wanted to go twice I don't know—but mostly what I remember about Seattle is the porn."


Currently playing: Bear McCreary—Violence and Variations

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I spent yesterday in Victoria, British Columbia, at the Butchart Gardens. Well, technically, I spent most of yesterday traveling to and from the gardens. It probably should have been a multi-day trip, but at least I got to see most everything there for a little while. I took the Victoria Clipper, and I have to say, traveling by boat is certainly more pleasant than traveling by plane. It was not as fast as a plane direct route would have been—under three hours versus under one hour. But, the amount of time I'd have sat at the airport waiting in lines would have been much greater—there weren't even metal detectors at the port, so customs took just a couple minutes. The seats were much roomier, with many areas where a party could sit facing each other around a table, and you could roam the boat at will. And, it was about half the cost of the cheapest flight I could find.

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I just got a phone call from the six-digit number 900-193. There appeared to be no one on the other end. It was very weird.

Update: A lot of people are having the same problem. See the comments for this post.

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Here's what I think might convince a few Americans to eat more healthy food: under the label that shows how many calories a particular food has, the label could also display that amount in pounds—as in pounds that each serving will add to your butt. Basically, divide the number of calories by roughly 3500, and display that amount. That cinnamon roll? .15 pounds. Is it worth increasing your weight by .15 pounds (or counteracting .15 pounds worth of exercise) for a cinnamon roll?

Probably the biggest problem is that people aren't good at extrapolating. .15 pounds isn't, of course, a noticeable amount. But .15 pounds every day for a week is a full pound. A lot of people work really hard to lose a pound a week. I can't say that people would be able to make that jump. Maybe you could divide the number of calories by 500 instead of 3500, and say that if you ate a snack like that every day for a week you'd gain X pounds. In the case of the theoretical cinnamon roll, approximately 1. That'd be more of an in-your-face number. Eat one of these a day for a week, and you gain a pound. Would that motivate people to eat better?

Or, maybe we could, you know, develop more healthy food that doesn't taste terrible. One step at a time, I guess.

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Tuesday is... the day when all of your bug bites from Sunday start to itch like hell.

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Blogger is dumb. If you make something that it thinks is a spelling error, it actually changes your post's HTML to include a span tag around the spelling error.

<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">nametags</span>

Labels: code, random

I got a haircut today. (It feels glorious, by the way.) Everyone at the place I go to knows me and remembers very specific details about me. The manager was cutting my hair today, and she remembered that not only was I going to get a ceiling fan installed, but that I wasn't sure if I was going to do it myself or not because it was in the stairwell and would potentially be more complicated than a regular installation. She remembers that I like sci-fi and fantasy movies, and asked me if I had seen Iron Man and Indiana Jones yet. She remembers exactly how I like my hair cut, and I don't even remember her name. (In fairness there, their system displays my name on their screen, and they don't wear nametags.)

For a person with poor memory, this is both impressive and a little bit creepy. I have trouble recalling details like those about a lot of my friends, let alone people who cut my hair. Now, I'm willing to admit that I might be more distinct than their other customers; I've been going there for most of my haircuts in the past four years, and I'm the only one who rides there on a Segway. It's still a little weird to me, though, to have people I don't know remember those sorts of minutiae.


Currently listening: Morcheeba—Antidote

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I've been using this cream under my eyes that's supposed to reduce the appearance of my "bags" or dark circles. It seems to be working. My only real annoyance with it is that if I manage to get it too close to the edge of my eyelids, I don't notice until the next morning, when I wake up and my eyelid hurts. I actually wish it would sting on contact; then at least I could wash out my eye and do something about it.

Anyway, I should get to bed so I can see Indiana Jones tomorrow...


Currently listening: Madonna—Devil Wouldn't Recognize You

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All throughout college I had my Quotes file—a Word document of eighty pages that was just full of quotes that I thought were funny or interesting, mostly from my friends. I had a good time maintaining it. But at some point, I think my senior year, I stopped maintaining it. I occasionally—just a couple times a year now—put new quotes in it, but I've pretty much given up on it.

I don't know what really motivated me to create it in the first place. Perhaps subconsciously I thought that maybe I'd never be around people as funny as the people I knew in college, and I had to preserve those memories forever. Or maybe it was just part of my obsessive need to collect, store, and organize things. But whatever it was, I grew out of it. When I go through the list today, I realize that I hear and say things every day that are funnier than a lot of stuff in there. Only a few pages' worth of quotes in that document are probably truly special. It doesn't make much sense to worry about keeping most of the stuff in there, especially if I'm not going to keep adding new stuff that's just as entertaining as or more than other quotes in it.

The last quote I put in there was actually only about a month ago, and it was from 30 Rock, not real life.

Jack: But let me ask you a question, Kenneth. If Mr. Bright here told you to vote Republican, would you do it?
Kenneth: Oh, uh, no sir. I don’t vote Republican… or Democrat. Choosing is a sin, so I always just write in the Lord’s name!
Jack: That’s Republican; we count those.

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I was thinking that, if I were in an economics class and had to write a paper, I'd want to do it on this topic: what would different historical economists have to say about how much you should tip attractive waiters and waitresses?

I was originally going to mention Adam Smith here, but I'm not going to show my ignorance by losing the "match the economist to the theory" game, so let's just call my theoretical economist "Madam Sith." I like the ring to that. Madam Sith believes that people in a capitalistic society will act selfishly, but everyone acting largely selfishly will actually yield the best possible outcome for society as a whole. Would she, then, tip well so as to encourage that hot waiter to stay a waiter forever, or would she tip lightly to save as much income for herself? What if the waiter was just working a temporary job to pay for school, and was eventually looking to get into the same field of work as Madam Sith? Should Madam Sith tip very poorly to encourage him to study hard and get out of waiting tables as soon as possible?

These are the questions that need answers... these are the questions that should be answered by a sophomore economics student in a class paper.

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Science fiction short story idea:

In the future, the dominant religions are all based on one-line adages of today. For example, there is an entire religion based on "a place for everything and everything in its place." I bet you could extrapolate that into an interesting story.

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Today after I got out of bed, when making my bed, I picked up a corner of my out-of-place sheets and blanket and threw it toward its correct destination. I intended to just get it near where it needed to be so I could reach it more easily when I went over to the other side of the bed. But when the sheets fell, everything was already exactly where it should be. I had made my bed with a single throw. If that's not an omen that today is going to be a good day, I don't know what is.

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