Sexy Tyme!

This thing has blown up. I'm pretty sure we're going to be discovered soon, land a record deal or two, and be swimming in Benjamins before Tuesday.

Have a look for yourself.

Sweater Day!

In honor of Borat, and because Noam's mother bought him 5 of the same sweater off of Ebay for about 2 bucks, today was Sweater Day in the Wash U psych department. Here we are. Hot studs, no?



Oh, and have you tried this? It's way addictive. Maybe not on the scale of Sudoku, but definitely a good way to pass some time.

Ruminations on music

-Kia recently had a revelation: she said she realized that my taste in music was like (insert loud clanging obnoxious sounds) and her taste in music was (insert soft, angelic, soft rock sounds). I didn't used to think this, but it is actually possible to co-exist with someone who listens to country music and soft rock. The trick is to never be in the same place...I kid! I kid because I love.

-The only two shows that I wanted to go to at The Pageant sold out in about 15 minutes. I think some people around here are starved for music. I've been here two and a half years and have found two decent venues for music. Granted, I haven't checked out a lot of the blues places, so I still need to do that. But still, two decent venues. A sad state of affairs.

-Guitar learning has been side-tracked by a busted string. And the attempt to fix said string resulted in another busted string. Note to self: must learn to correctly replace busted strings.

You heard it here first

I don't usually take requests for my blog, but here's one. It's a word (invented by Sarah Barks, submitted by David Goldsmith) that hopefully everyone will start using.

figgle: the act of figuring out a mystery by googling it

Say it. Use it. Love it.

When you dote upon a star

A few things I gleaned from this celebrity-athlete break-up list:

1. I didn't quite know how to spell "athlete" until I tried. I thought, perhaps, "athelete"? It didn't look right.

2. Alyssa Milano has a thing for baseball players. And pitchers at that. American League pitchers.

3. Jeter and Mariah Carey??? I must have missed that one.

4. It took me a second to identify who was the dude and who was the woman in the picture of Roberto Alomar and Mary Pierce. Seriously.

5. I think Mandy Moore was only dating Andy Roddick because she thought he was Ashton Kutcher. Or because they sounded like a cute couple -- "Andy and Mandy". Their celebrity couple name would just be Mandy. How perfect.

6. There are many "celebrities" that I just never knew existed. Who the crap is Jillian?

Olympics fever!

Technology is amazing, isn't it? The simple fact that we can see events occurring halfway across the world in crystal clear detail would have been just unheard of early in the last century. Now it's all instantaneous, wall-to-wall coverage, and intricate back stories about the Olympians' lives to make you really care about the outcomes.

Oh, and apparently NBC has the power to extend the length of each calendar day during the Olympics:

NBC Universal's unprecendented coverage of the Torino Games features the most coverage -- including the most live coverage -- across the most platforms of any Winter Olympics in history. The 418 total hours of programming -- an increase over the 375.5 hours of coverage from Salt Lake, the previous record for a Winter Games -- will average 24.6 hours of coverage per day.

Isn't that great? You can view an average of 24.6 hours of Olympics during each 24 hour day. Incredible.

And yet, it's not on right now.

Hollywood it ain't

Don't ask me why, but from time to time ideas for movies pop into my head. Am I weird? Does this happen to anyone else? I don't know, for some reason some event will happen or I'll think of something, and I'll say "Yeah, that would make a good movie." Out loud, too. People on the street think I'm a little off.

So two of the ideas that recently popped into my head recently:

-a woman is trying to call her boyfriend, maybe it's Valentine's Day, maybe not. Anyway, she tries to call him, but dials the wrong number and instead a charming, single, witty, slightly rumpled guy answers the phone. She soon realizes she's dialed the wrong number, they both have a good laugh about the mistake, they have an interesting little conversation, we get the sense that this woman likes this guy, we like this guy, and then the woman realizes she still has yet to actually speak to her real boyfriend. She politely ends the conversation with the Mystery Man, but we have a sense there is a spark there. And, importantly, she still has Mystery Man's number in her cell phone. We see the real boyfriend, who is unsatisfactory/unattentive/boring/pretentious, eventually the woman makes an excuse to call Mystery Man again, they have a platonic friendship, things go sour with real boyfriend, things heat up with Mystery Man, blah blah blah. We'll need some romantic leads here. I'm already in contact with Drew Barrymore.

-this one comes straight from real life, although it's just the beginning of the movie, and sort of along the same theme of mixed-up communications as the last idea. Today, I got a manila envelope with a picture inside it in the mail from my parents, and stuck in one of the folds was a second, normal-sized white envelope. It was stamped and from quick visual inspection contained a check. It was intended to go to somewhere in Newton, MA and had a return address in Natick, MA. Anyway, I thought an interesting thing would be to follow the story of finding the person who sent this letter, maybe something cool happens along the way. Really the story isn't about the lost letter, but what happens after. It's like Simpsons episodes. They never end up being about what they start out being about. I mean, look at the one where Bart divorces his parents. It starts out with them cleaning out the house, then they find Bart's ad for Baby Stink Breath, and somehow it ends up with Homer in a skate-off with Tony Hawk. Now THAT'S a plot.

A third idea (that I think I thought up with Pete) involved two people driving along in a car, having a witty, interesting, insightful conversation, and then as they get to a toll booth, they pull out guns, casually rob the toll booth, and speed away. To where, I don't know. We didn't get that far. The rest still needs to be figured out. But we thought that was a cool way to begin a movie -- until we realized it was almost exactly the beginning of Pulp Fiction, except in a car instead of a restaurant. Damn.

Yankee Haters in da House

Yes folks, hating the Yankees in New England goes all the way to the Little League level.

I'm not sure what I would have done had I been put on a baseball team called the Yankees as a kid. Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about that. My first little league team was named after a jewelry store. We were Medford Jewelers Inc., or MJI for short. We had bright orange uniforms. We played teams like Gaffey Funeral Home and Johnny's Foodmaster and West Medford Bank. It sort of gave you your own identity, however lame that identity was.

Then at the next level, I was on a team for two years that was named after the Rotary club. We were, simply, Rotary. We played the other clubs in town - Lions, Kiwanis, and Leahy. At the time, I didn't really know what a Rotary club was. Come to think of it, I still don't. I know they have halls and events and everything. But to what end? Who knows. All I knew then was that I proudly wore that oversized blue jersey and those undersized stretchy baseball pants with pride, because our team was better than the other 3 teams during the two years that I played in the league.

Japanese for "This game is so addictive!!"

It's kind of humbling when Sudoku tells you that you're below average and 100% of the people who have played this game before are better than you. It's a good reality check, keeps the old ego under control. The last time I played, I thought I had made vast improvements. I cut about 20 minutes off my score. Unfortunately, that still left me worse than about 95% of other players at the medium level. Baby steps, baby steps. You actually kind of have to be a little schizophrenic to succeed at this game. I mean this with all due respect to those who really do have schizophrenia. I'm mainly referring to that scene in A Beautiful Mind, where Nash is looking at the wall of numbers and some of the numbers start to glow or move or flash and everything starts "making sense" for him. Same with this. You sort of have to let your eyes go and just look for patterns and weird groupings of numbers, and when you've been playing for long enough (as I clearly have), you just sort of know that a number goes in a cell, but don't really know why. I think that's what we in psychology call "implicit memory".

You've probably already discovered it...

...but if not, you must give Pandora a try. It's like radio, but better. And it's all stuff you should like, but don't know it yet. Just try it, ya knucklehead!