Yesterday's web update was written in the style of Mike Catania (ha ha).

Two hundred and thirty-six episodes later and Friends is finally off the air. Not quite though, since NBC plans to air reruns of all the recent Friends episodes and Friends-related news shows throughout Sweeps Month. They also made tons of money by shorting the final season by six episodes and then filling those timeslots with reruns tagged as "fan favourites".

They should have ended the series in a completely unexpected manner. For example, the friends are sitting in their apartment chatting it up when a plane crashes into the building because the pilot was involved in a freak tuna fish mishap. Fade to black with no explanation and roll credits.

You can tell Sweeps Month is here because every other commercial is an ad for some series finale, like "The Final Fear Factor of All Time!". ABC, the perennial ratings loser, is pre-empting Sunday's Alias for the second Harry Potter movie and a never-before-seen trailer from the new movie, Harry Potter and the Puberty Conundrum, followed the next week by seven straight nights of Who Wants to Be a SUPER Millionaire where the prize is TEN million dollars. Don't worry, because Regis Philbin has said that they learned the lesson of oversaturation from showing 363 episodes of the original show in a single year, and will not make that mistake again.

Caption Contest Entries

Vote for your favourite entry using the poll in the left sidebar by Wednesday night, 8 PM EST. No voting shenanigans please -- you can enlist your friends to come to the site and vote as long as you don't tell them which one is yours. Obvious ballot stuffers will be shot.

Happy Birthday Jason Chrisley!

List Day: You're Old and I'm Not

It has been 4 years since Friends went off the air and Desperate Housewives came on. Remember when Mike (of Mike and Chompy) was obsessed with that show ?

It has been 8 years since I finished writing the game, Augmented Fourth . If you're really bored at work and have Java, you can play it online!

It has been 9 years since Pat Brown and I were Marching Virginians section leaders. Have you played the slot machine recently ?

Happy Birthday Erin Blankenship and Jason Chrisley!

Just Plain Thursday

Happy Birthday to Erin and Best Meat!

Named and Shamed: the 16 barred from the UK
Boy just loves to play dress-up
Kid Zapper: Patent Pending

Friday Fragments

♠ Yesterday, Rebecca left for a camping trip at the Grand Canyon, so I can now invite strippers to house parties with impunity for the next few days. If you are a stripper in need of a venue, and are also willing to bring steaks, let me know.

♠ We grilled some hamburgers on Wednesday night, and discovered that a year-old bag of Costco patties reconstitutes pretty well in spite of freezer burn. My six-year-old grill is on its last legs now though, and a new one might be in the cards in time for summer grilling season.

♠ Speaking of replacements, I'll need to replace my twelve-year-old scanner at some point, since it finally stopped working during the preparation for a Memory Day post. Without a scanner, I cannot subject you to delightful pictures of crap in my drawers.

♠ At the rate of scanning so far, I estimate that it'll take another six to eight years of posts before I run out of history. Then I might have to actually come up with new content for posts -- maybe a "What I Ate for Lunch" featurette.

♠ Plans for the weekend will be pretty boring. Because Rebecca is catching wild mules at the bottom of the canyon, I'll probably be at the computer all weekend cranking out a new release of DDMSence involving Schematron (which is not as cool as it sounds), and maybe writing another battle report. I might also finish cleaning out the basement closet, which has been the final box in the flow chart of "places to put crap I'm too lazy to throw away" for a couple years now.

♠ Have a great weekend!

Weekend Wrap-up

The weekend, in list form:

• Purchased a 2012 Honda Accord EX-L V6 with butt-warmers


• Tried to order carryout from Pizzario's only to learn that the owners had moved further north into Cascades, into a new location with a new name, but the same menu and the same complete lack of customers


• Had bachelor time while Rebecca was on a wine country trip


• Cleaned the house, did the laundry, and mowed the lawn


• Started watching Game of Thrones, which I'm liking much more than I expected I would


• Paid the first half of my Loudoun County house tax


• Volunteered for the 3 PM - 11 PM shift for another project at work that's doing a 24-hour exercise, immediately adding 120 miles to the new car's odometer

Census Day

Overly Excited Llama is overly excited about the fact that it's been three years since the last website census, and the fact that I can remember this time period is astounding, considering how hard it is to get me to the dentist at least once a year.

As you can see from the chart below, visitor counts to the URI! Zone have declined only minimally over the past three years, in spite of the hyper-competitive web of today which offers so many other ways to waste time on the Internet, from Animals Being Dicks to all of the websites where every article starts with a number in the title. I'm not sure what the spike and decline in 2009 was all about -- perhaps people left after my marriage because they preferred sites with a higher ratio of ho's and a lower ratio of grocers' apostrophes.

It is also more difficult to track visits since the bulk of visitors now read the URI! Zone through a feed reader. According to the stats (and stats don't lie), I have 17 readers using Google Reader to consume this website, in spite of Google's insistence that Google Reader is a dead project.

In order to coax lurkers out of the woodwork, I am having another incentive-based census. Click on the "comments" link below to:

• Say hello
• Link to your blog or Twitter feed
• Say something funny, clownfish

A randomly selected commenter will be chosen to win a $10 gift certificate to Amazon.com for their troubles. Hooray! I'll leave this post open for a couple weeks to catch all of the folks that no longer visit every day.

(If you are a feeder, you'll need to click through to the actual website to post).

Memory Day: Snapshots

The picture on the left was taken ten years ago in May 2004. The picture on the right was taken yesterday. A few changes of note:

• No more CRT monitors!


• Eric Barberan (who lived in the basement before Kathy) got married last Friday.


• No one plays Footmen Frenzy anymore.


• The Alias calendar (OMG ALIAS) has been replaced by Goats in Trees.


• The Canon photo printer that clogged 54% of the time has been replaced by another Canon photo printer that clogs 49% of the time.


• The HP LaserJet that printed all of my undergraduate scores has been replaced by a Dell that automatically prints on both sides of the paper!


• Amber wasn't even born yet in May 2004.


• We still have the wooden chair set like the one Anna's sitting in, but the supports have all cracked, so we only let tiny people sit there now.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Lilyhammer, Season 3:
This show has run out of ideas and is treading water on reimplementation of old plots. The charm is gone and characters have their characters assassinated through illogical actions to push the plot forward. It jumps the shark once Torgeir starts seeing ghosts midseason. Free on Netflix, but stop at Season Two and skip this one.

Final Grade: D

Halt and Catch Fire, Season 1:
This new show about the rise of personal computers in Texas in the 1980s was surprisingly good for being under-hyped. We enjoy watching Lee Pace in things, except for Guardians of the Galaxy where, apparently, his evil superpower was to have a deeper voice and better diction than the people around him. He's able to show his range here as a less-than-likeable protagonist (supposedly inspired by the lead in Mad Men so the audience of that show would start watching this one after Mad Men ends its run). Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B+

Bloodline, Season 1:
This show is super slow. It's slower than the plot development in Unbreakable and slower than the slo-mo reaction shots of Jim Caviezel blinking while reciting war poetry in The Thin Red Line. If you took the glacial pace of Six Feet Under, removed all of the deep philosophical hooks about mortality, turned it into a slow-burning murder thriller, and then tried to stream it over dialup, you would get this show. It's made by the creator of Damages, whose first season I really liked, but just takes far too long to get to the point. The last three episodes are tense, exciting, and a well-coursed denouement, but you have to get through ten episodes that are equivalent to watching that stupid plastic bag blow around the screen in American Beauty. This is also one of those shows where pretentious viewers argue that the setting is one of the main characters, but you can't reuse a single helicopter view of Key West and the same three pans of a beach and make this claim. Free on Netflix, if you don't count 13 hours of your life.

Final Grade: C-

Sleep Better Iso-Cool Memory Foam Pillow:
I finally had to dispose of my childhood era pillow because it no longer provided any support (and because a cat threw up on it), and bought this replacement for under $40. It's actually a very good pillow with a good blend of sturdy and soft, although it will take a while for me to break my former habit of scrunching the pillow into my desired shape -- this is the type of pillow that you just let sit in one place and it will adjust based on how you're sleeping on it.

Final Grade: B+

List Day: You're Old and I'm Not

• It has been 1 year since I bought an Oculus Rift (and 10 months since I last turned it on).


• It has been 2 years since we climbed up a 14,000 ft mountain in Colorado.


• It has been 3 years since my dad and I built a shed in the backyard.


• It has been 4 years since Rebecca got her first smartphone, the iPhone 5C.


• It has been 5 years since Rebecca became an officially licensed Physical Therapist Assistant.


• It has been 6 years since we saw Cirque du Soleil under a seedy overpass in Quebec City.


• It has been 7 years since we hit our max wedding trips per year limit (Baylis & Richie, Sam & Kristen, Amanda & Frank, Emily & Brian, Becca & Jason).


• It has been 8 years since we saw Muse in concert and resolved to buy old people seats for future concerts.


• It has been 9 years since we got married.


• It has been 10 years since Mike (of Mike and Chompy) first moved to DC. Ancient prophecy states that he will move here a total of 3 times in his lifetime.


• It has been 11 years since Anna had her first kid (and less than 1 year since the most recent).


• It has been 12 years since I started doing 12 of 12.


• It has been 13 years since Kathy lived in the basement for a summer.


• It has been 14 years since I bought a house in Sterling.


• It has been 15 years since I got a Masters in Music Composition (and 15 years since I last pulled it out of the envelope it was mailed in to look at it).

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Superbloom by Misterwives:
This is the third album from Misterwives, which I like way more than Connect the Dots but not quite as much as their debut, Our Own House. Lots of catchy tunes this time around, and the album is even a whole 60 minutes long without much padding.

Final Grade: B+

Blindspotting (R):
We really enjoyed this Daveed Diggs vehicle which explores prejudice and racism in an interesting way without ever feeling too preachy. Both of the lead actors do a great job with their characters, and there are shades of 8 Mile in the way the story is told.

Final Grade: B+

Half Drunk Under a Full Moon by the Fratellis:
The Fratellis' pandemic album is solid if a little muted. I don't like it as much as Eyes Wide, Tongue-Tied although it does feature Rebecca's third trimester pregnancy anthem, "Find a place and lay your body down".

Final Grade: B

Bad Education:
This movie starring Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney as high school administrators ensnarled in an embezzlement scandal had a promising start -- not hilarious but worth finishing. Unfortunately, renting HBO movies through Amazon only gives you 24 hours to start and finish the movie (unlike the usual 48). We didn't realize this until we sat down the next night with an hour to go but only 20 minutes left on the rental.

Final Grade: Not Rated, but HBO gets a D