After Life

When I Go To Get My Shoes Shined, I Gotta Take Their Word*

I mean, having one of those plastic Wal-Mart chairs break under your weight is one thing, but this must have been pretty embarrassing. This bench is like cement or limestone or something.



*Title taken from the brilliant Weird Al song "Fat" of course.

USA Today vs. New York Times

Let's see. One has good writing and relatively little sports coverage. The other has a funny graph every day.



*As part of IU's Student Newspaper Readership Program, every student can get a free copy of these newspapers by swiping their ID at these boxes dispersed around campus. After a couple months of careful review, this is my comparison of the two newspapers.

**One thing that is interesting about the NY Times is that I find myself actually enjoying the articles in the business section. Am I getting boringer, or am I just reading a better newspaper?

Weirdly Irrelevant

I have written before about weird Google results, and back when I was bloggin' on the 'Space, I was pretty amped to find out that somehow my profile was on the first page of results for searches for "stuffed animal pants." Well, you'd think that if you searched for "Fuller, go easy on the Pepsi" on Google you would get a rich list of hits relating to this wonderful moment in movie history, but instead you get a YTMND featuring Fuller as hit #1 (I guess I can understand that one) and what is #2? This very weblog that you are reading here. As much as I love attention, something isn't right about that. Underneath hit #2, the powers that be have deemed that my post comparing the YouTube guitar stylings of two Steve Vai devotees to be especially relevant to searches about Fuller going easy on the Pepsi. Huh? Doesn't that seem a like kind of a waste? Besides the name, this blog has nothing at all to do with the classic line that it takes its name from. Shame on you, Google! What about all the people looking for a discussion forum where they can talk about their favorite Home Alone quotes? Somethin' ain't right.

IMPORTANT update: My MySpace profile through some strange twist of fate is now hit #2 for searches for "stuffed animal pants." Can you believe this crap? It would be a dream come true if you could just click here and then on my hit. I really think we can make this happen. Sorry I am such a loser. LOL.

"Bad for Families"

At the store on Saturday egg nog was on sale for 50 cents, and it reminded me of another time when egg nog was on sale, and how it led to me meeting Birch Miller. It was the winter in either 2000 or 2001, probably 2001, since eggnog season had ended and it had gone one sale for good. I was at the big Kroger on College Mall road with Brigid Hendricks and we were near the checkout and she said "Oh, there's my friend Birch" and she pointed to this guy who had a whole bunch of eggnog. He said it was on sale so he was stocking up. We talked for a minute, and the conversation invariably turned to the topic of the new U-Scan self checkout system. Birch said "Don't use those, they're bad for families." I said "What?" and he said "They're bad for working families."

I don't really know why, but this phrase "bad for families" really left an impression in my mind. Whenever I saw Birch after that, I had to bring up the "bad for families" thing. If he was locking up his bike outside the Secret Sailor, I said to him "Don't do that, that's bad for families." Didn't really matter what it was, I would always bring it up. After a while I got the feeling that he didn't like me. But now we are pretty good friends, and I pretty much never bring up the "bad for families" thing.

U-Scan checkouts are everywhere. I still think they're kind of annoying.

Here is a picture of Birch's burning misspelled UITS ID badge.



I have no idea why egg nog is on sale, or why it is even available yet. Next to the regular eggnog, there was some pumpkin eggnog, obviously for Halloween I guess, but I'm not sure how that would taste. Has anyone out there tried it? Is it any good? It might go on sale soon. If it went to waste that would be bad for working families.

Throw the Party You Want to Be Invited To

Double Caveman Movie Review!

Starbucking:

A documentary about a guy who tries to visit every single Starbucks.
Dude is crazy.
Constantly jumping out of car, running into the middle of traffic.
I thought to myself, "He reminds me of one of the characters in Word Wars."
Then in the special features they show him at a Scrabble tournament.
Perfect.
For him, it's not about Starbucks, "It's about doing something different."
Still, he didn't look healthy.
Caffeine overload?
I loved pretty much every minute of this movie.


The Darjeeling Limited:

Jason Schwartzman always plays the same character.
But I guess so does Owen Wilson.
This was fun to watch though.
Wes Anderson is like pizza, even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.
I felt hate for all of the characters, every brother was a different brand of asshole.
Even their mom kinda bugged me.
But I guess we're all human.
And that's kind W.A.'s thing, lovable neurotics, jerks, etc.
Could have done without the heavy-handed baggage metaphor.
The funeral part was really cool though.
The part about their mom was kind of pointless.
But I guess that's why they went to India.
So they had to put it in or something.
Would watch again. But not pay for it.

My Book Report on Ben Stein's Lecture at IU

I never really had much of an opinion either way about Ben Stein, but the other day I saw a little card on my table when I was eating lunch that said that Ben Stein would be speaking for free at IU. The card said "yes, the guy from Ferris Bueller" and I thought that it sounded kind of fun but I realized that it was at the same time that I had band practice, so I wouldn't be able to go. Well, I found out that band practice was canceled while enjoying the rare treat of riding as a passenger in Torlando's car, and there was like 20 minutes before the lecture was supposed to start, so I had him drop me off at the auditorium and went in to see what it was all about. As I was sitting there, I remembered that I really don't know anything about Ben Stein, except that I kind of remember him being either really boring (as in Ferris Bueller) or a condescending a-hole (like on Win Ben Stein's money, or more recently, what I consider to possibly be the worst show in TV, America's Most Smartest Model [I do watch it]). I got a program, and it said that the event was sponsored by the College Republicans. Uh-oh! What had I gotten myself into? There was a bio of Mr. Stein, and I guess there is where things started to get a little more interesting for me. I didn't know that he holds a law degree, used to be a speech writer for Nixon, worked as an analyst on Wall Street, all of these things, before getting into show business.

Aside from kind of being a kiss-ass about how beautiful IU's campus is (I mean, yes, it is, but he went a little overboard in his praises), as soon as he started talking I was kind of into it. He's not nearly as monotone as he is on TV, that was the first thing I noticed. He seemed genuinely into talking about life.

He read off a long list of good ways that a person with otherwise plenty of opportunities can screw up their life. Here are some of the ones I can remember:
Blame other people for the bad things in your life.
Don't work hard, just wait for opportunities to fall into your lap.
Spend all your money as soon as you get it. No need to save.
Get drunk and be high a lot.
Don't be grateful for what you have. Complain instead.
Get into a relationship with someone with lots of problems and think that you will be the one who can change them.
Spend your time watching TV instead of doing productive things.
Treat those who are important to you badly.
Be jealous of people who have things that you don't.

Those are the only ones I can remember. What was most memorable about what he said was that through college and Columbia and law school at Yale, he felt that the place where he learned the most about the world was at the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program. He alluded to being high throughout most of his education, and during the Q&A session when a student suggested that he run for president, he said that his history with drugs and women pretty much immediately disqualified him from serving in that capacity. He also said that being president seemed like too much work, and that he has trouble getting up before 10AM in the morning. Awesome!

Although he said that he was a republican, he talked a lot about how much he didn't like what the party had become, and said that he related more with the republican party of the past, the one that can maybe still be found in small towns. To this, I thought "why not just not be a republican if it's not what you want it to be?" Oh well.

During Q&A nobody got tazed, which was good, and this one older woman got up, and she said "Will you, you know, do it for us Ben? Will you do the thing?" You ask, what thing? Ben Stein knew what she was talking about, and obliged: "Adams.... Adamowsky... Bueller..... Bueller.... Bueller?" The crowd went nuts. I thought that was kind of weird because I always thought of that as being "my generation"'s movie, although most of the audience seemed to be undergrads, therefore about ten years younger than I am, and they were totally feelin it.

Someone also asked if the models on America's Most Smartest Model are really as dumb as they seem on TV, his reply was something like "waaaaay dumber, trust me" and he proceeded to tell a story about how one of them could not name a single country that we fought against in WWII.

All in all, it was a pretty quality lecture, although it never ceases to amaze me how incompetent people sound when they get up at the mic to ask a question at Q&A time. Not to say that I wouldn't, because I would, pretty sure. But the anxiety and blundering in people's speech just seems to be so painfully universal. It's interesting.

Says A Stately Old Man:

Some Countries Pay a Lot of Taxes

Just something to think about.