This Day In History: 06/27

Monday, June 27, 2005

The world of blogging has a practice called "tagging", a chain letter pyramid scheme at its finest, designed to increase readership at your own blog and blogs people might never otherwise discover. Once you are tagged, you're supposed to answer the question and then tag a few more people so the insidious virus of linkbacks has new carriers in its world-dominating conquest of the web. Last week, I was tagged by mtymouse to list my top six songs of the moment. So here are my picks, with the first two being tried and true favourites (out of many more) and the rest being the Musique Du Jour (catchy today, could be annoying tomorrow). As an added bonus, you get MP3 excerpts of all the songs, since it's always fun to hear new songs you might have missed.

  1. Coldplay - Shiver (1.2MB MP3)
  2. Trashcan Sinatras - All The Dark Horses (922KB MP3)
  3. Manic Street Preachers - Empty Souls (997KB MP3)
  4. Green Day - Holiday (587KB MP3)
  5. Tony C and the Truth - Little Bit More (645KB MP3)
  6. Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc (702KB MP3)

Sadly, this little venture in tagging will expose just how far onto the fringe of blogging I am, as I don't read enough regularly-updated blogs to successfully pass the tag on. In the game of tagging, I'm like the last male child of a family name who inexplicably has all daughters and kills the family name for good, or like the boy named William Randall the Sixth who decides to name his son, Horace.

Since I can't find three willing souls to re-tag, I'll just tag Florida-Mike twice, since he's often out of material to write about (and fakes daily updates by posting Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all on Monday). He can list his six top songs of the moment, and then (because he'll like doing this more, and with biting cynicism) his six hated songs of the moment as well.

Stay tuned tomorrow for exclusive BenAnna wedding pictures the media doesn't want you to see!

Store apologizes to Oprah for BEING CLOSED AFTER CLOSING OMGWTF TAKE YOUR RICH 'CRASH ASS' TO THE 24-HOUR WALMART
A tricky puzzle to waste a few hours of your day
Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. 7, 9, and 11 are just out of the question.

tagged as tags, lists | permalink | 5 comments

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Safari Day: Tracking the Tag

In an egotistical effort to leave my mark on the Internet (and not content with already having Uniform Resource Identifiers ) I created my very first tag last month. The subject of the tag was the number four: four things I know, four things I used to know, four things I want to know, and four things I don't know and don't care about. Now that fifty days have passed, I thought I would see just how insidious my tag was.

  • BU (also known as the founding father of four play)
    • Brianne (failed to tag anyone new)
    • Mark (also failed to tag anyone, but better late than never)
    • Anna (tagged all of her work friends, because there's nothing better to do at work, and also added a fifth category)
      • Diana (pulled the classic "if you want to do this, you too are tagged!")
      • Allison (broke the tag, and was subsequently hit by seven years of bad luck)
      • Jason (broke the tag, like a morbidly obese man taking up so many bleachers that he can singlehandedly stop The Wave)
      • Katie (wins the "I tagged everyone in the room and no one replied" award)
        • Erin (ignored the siren call of the tag)
        • Amy L (never replied, like a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it)
        • Amy B (failed at tagging and, subsequently, life)
        • Shay (too cool to answer a tag. Too Shay!)
    • Kim (who was actually the first person to perpetuate my tag)
      • Sam (tried an unsuccessful shotgun tag of everyone reading his reply)
      • Mandy (ignored the tag like a teenager giving the silent treatment)
      • Mindi (broke the tag like five pounds of jumbo shrimp in a four pound bag)
      • Mike (escaped being tagged by me, only to be tagged by Kim)
        • Marty (broke the tag but got a job offer in the interim)
        • Jamie (yet another tragic break in the tag)
        • Mark (replied but didn't tag anyone new, smashing the dreams of hopeful tag grandparents everywhere wanting tag grandkids)
        • Chris (apparently made out with Mike after a night of red wine?)
          • Michael (didn't tag anyone new, becoming a tag black hole)
          • Grandma (played the Uno Reverse card and told Chris to tag more people instead of naming her own)
          • Christine (another tagful dead end)
    • Rob (I didn't even tag this clown and got a return! That's called a good investment)

Conclusion: My tag virus actually made it to the fifth generation, which I never expected, but petered out before it could do any lasting harm to the Internet.

Like a marauding army of kleptomaniacal showgirls
Novel ways to get out of jury duty
The crossword puzzle man

tagged as tags | permalink | 5 comments

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Memory Day: Food

  • Because my dad got home from work three hours earlier than my mom, he was always in charge of weekday dinners. A typical meal for my sister and I consisted of boiled hot dogs, green beans, and a tall glass of milk, which we would eat at the dining room table while reading cartoon and kids' books.

  • My favourite meal as a kid was two Celeste Pizza-for-One's, cooked on the microwave crisper disc that never actually made the crust crisp. When I was sick of these, the favourite meal became Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, with the powdered cheese that resembled the aftereffects of sanding down a giant statue of Big Bird.

  • Cookie Crisp was the favoured breakfast cereal, followed by Corn Chex, Honey Nut Cheerios, and Rice Krispies.

  • Our favourite foods always went in cycles -- we would find something we loved, my parents would stock up on it via coupons and sales, the last eight months' supply would go stale, and we would get sick of eating the stale leftovers during the next eight months.

  • Every couple weeks, we would order pizza from Pizza Hut for a family movie night. My parents always tipped the delivery guy whatever it took to round up to the nearest dollar, although my sister and I would secretly add a dollar or two when we could afford it as we grew older and recognized the worth of the greenback.

  • The only other place we ordered food from was the local Chinese restaurant -- my meal of choice was wanton soup, shrimp chips, and some sweet and sour chicken (also known as Really Expensive Chicken McNuggets).

  • When we ate out, we would always go somewhere with an all-you-can-eat-buffet because a mortal man's meal was not big enough for my 6'7" dad. At the Chesapeake Bay Seafood house, we would always start out with Hush Puppies. I hated Hush Puppies but apparently I was supposed to love them so I pretended to. Creamed corn is the worst.

  • One year, there was a sale on corn, but we ended up with a million cans of creamed corn instead of regular corn. We limped through three or four cans before donating the entire lot to charity. Those Cub Scouts leaving donation bags on our doorknob never knew what hit them.

  • My parents ate a lot of Mexican TV dinners when I was growing up, and the smell of the cheap refried beans and processed guacamole would linger in the house for hours like a recently evicted out-of-town college friend. Even today, I cannot smell some Mexican food smells without feeling nauseous.

  • I drank a glass of milk every day until I went to college, where I promptly became lactose intolerant.
  • Happy Birthday Jared Gibbs and Kerry Crowley!

    Everything's Green for Home Depot
    Wimbledon invasion of mice and men
    One-eyed gator pulls golfer into pond

    tagged as memories | permalink | 7 comments

    Friday, June 27, 2008

    Friday Fragments

    contains more sodium than generic brand soy sauce

    ♠ Yesterday on the way to work, I saw a flashing highway sign that said "DRIVE HAMMERED, GET NAILED" and was sponsored by the Fairfax County police department. This unfortunate slang might actually increase the number of drunk drivers on the road. No doubt, they were channeling Katie Melua's Sailboat song where she sings, "If you were a piece of wood I'd nail you (to the floor)".

    ♠ There haven't been a lot of horrible songs on XM recently, although Groove Armada's "I See You Baby, Shakin' Dat Ass" made a surprise reappearance last week. Other than that, the worst song I've heard is CSS's "Music is My Hot, Hot Sex" . I'm guessing this song was written by either a meth-addicted chipmanzee or the lead singer of Tatu.

    ♠ Speaking of chimps, we're going to the Zoo on Saturday so various one-year-olds can experience the joys of wandering through the wafting aromas of elephant dung. We're also going to see who would win in a fight -- Ella or a lemur.

    ♠ Ella is obviously in training to bcome a pissant middle schooler with a straw hanging out of her mouth. She has also learned that when a camera comes out, you should pause and pose until the flash goes off.

    ♠ My dentist's office could learn a thing or two about flashes, since it took them two tries with the panoramic X-Ray machine to get prints that weren't too dark to see. This is also after the three weeks of bureaucratic shuffling it took to set up the referral in the first place. As of yesterday, I now have a map of my teeth and a referral to get my wisdom teeth removed -- something I'll probably do in mid-July.

    ♠ Something YOU should do before mid-July is to vote for your favourite caption from this week's Caption Contest. One vote per person please -- all duplicate votes get reset using my high-tech wizardry! I can see you cheaters.

    ♠ Wizardry 8 was such a boring game. I bought it during my first year in Tallahassee and lost interest roughly one week later. Sadly, the part of the game I enjoyed most was discovering that the music was just a bunch of MP3 files which I could swap out with my own. However, even the novelty of starting every quest with Sir Robin's theme was not enough to make it a fun game.

    ♠ Speaking of games, I recently purchased a laptop to use up some Dell coupons. I got the Dell M1530 based on its reviews, as well as a graphics card that can run most of the games I would play while travelling (World of Warcraft, Snood, and Cosmopolitan Makeover: Barbie's Dream Salon). I figured it was about time that I jumped on the laptop bandwagon, and was also tired of writing up meeting minutes at work then typing them in later. Plus, now I can trash talk Mike on IM during games of Mario Kart. The laptop should get here sometime next week.

    ♠ Have a great weekend everyone!

    Bad guys get the most girls
    School closed due to ninjas
    James Fagan will rip children apart

    tagged as fragments | permalink | 2 comments

    Monday, June 27, 2011

    Weekend Wrap-up


    Drinking out of nose cups.


    Badminton and Cornhole

    3 out of 4 Brians endorse this cookout.


    Food!
    Escaped dog runs the Maryland Half Marathon
    Fans surprised to learn that Japanese pop idol isn't real
    Eight million gallons of water drained from reservoir after man urinates in it

    tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 3 comments

    Wednesday, June 27, 2012

    Back Day

    Yesterday morning, I somehow managed to throw out my back while bending over my laptop to check my email saving a small child from the path of an oncoming dump truck. Since then, I have been homebound, slowly shuffling around the house with an excessively curved back, not unlike a D3 Witch Doctor. In yoga terminology, I can cat just fine but seem to have misplaced the muscles needed to cow. It's a weird feeling, because it's not necessarily that painful -- it just feels like a few muscles that I once relied upon have mysteriously vanished.

    Since the aging process has apparently accelerated, I expect to get my first gray hair tomorrow, after which I will have dinner at 4:30 PM and watch Wheel of Fortune on TBS. In the meantime though, I am lying on the floor with the miscreant laptop on my stomach, working on a proposal for work.

    tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 1 comment

    Thursday, June 27, 2013

    Random Picture Thursday

    Random swatches of June from my camera's memory card...

    [Unfortunately, these images were lost during a server upgrade.]

    tagged as media | permalink | 0 comments

    Friday, June 27, 2014

    Camping Day

    I am away camping today, so here is a video of the wild heat lightning in Sterling (from Wednesday night) to tide you over until my return.

    tagged as media | permalink | 3 comments

    Monday, June 27, 2016

    Weekend Wrap-up

    On Saturday night, we went to Chris & Kathy's 40th Birthday Party, produced with all of the stops pulled out at the Bull Run Winery. We ate finger foods on sticks, sparred with overzealous waiters trying to steal our plates, and danced gracefully across the various Venn diagram circles of friends from various epochs of their lives.

    On Sunday, Rebecca went hiking at Raven Rocks and blogged about it while I mowed the lawn and catnapped with Booty on the couch. In the evening, we ate leftovers (my new easy barbeque chicken recipe and Dominos pizza) and dabbled in season two of Halt and Catch Fire.

    My time off continues, as I've decided to burn some extra leave and take the entire week off, continuing through the day after Independence Day. What should I do with my lavish leisure time while you're buried in staff meetings and TPS reports?

    tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 2 comments

    Wednesday, June 27, 2018

    Review Day

    There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

    No Shame by Lily Allen:
    Every artist seems to go through an album fatigue phase where they do a lot of mellow songs and sound in need of a long nap (see also, KT Tunstall's Crescent Empire album, as well as Muse's Second Law album). Lily Allen is no exception. This album has a few pleasant songs but very little that is memorable or in the same vein as her older songs. Also, the album cover looks like her label texted her for art on a deadline and she sent them the last blurry picture from her phone.

    Final Grade: C+

    Arrested Development, Season Four Remix:
    This is a re-editing of the awful fourth season of Arrested Development intended to overcome its core limitation: the fact that most of the characters are not interesting enough for an extended storyline and need the rest of the cast to play off of. Early episodes are definitely more like the originals, but this is not enough to make the fourth season stories any more interesting. It's telling that the best parts of the first episodes are newly-inserted flashbacks to existing scenes from the third season. I wanted to watch through this before starting the new fifth season, but gave up after just four episodes. It was interesting to see salient members of the cast of Outsourced (including the taxi driver that Mike went to high school with) in the India episode. Free on Netflix.

    Final Grade: Not Rated

    Downsizing (R):
    This is an awful, pointless, overly long movie in which Matt Damon is shrunk down to help conserve our natural resources. The movie focuses on the story of the most boring character in the cast and it takes too long to get to any of the interesting characters. A whole ton of wasted worldbuilding potential can be found here.

    Final Grade: D

    Everything Sucks, Season One:
    This comedy about high schoolers in the 90s feels a little like Stranger Things without all of the annoying fantasy bits. It drags a good deal in the middle but is over quickly and ends well. Free on Netflix.

    Final Grade: B-

    tagged as reviews | permalink | 0 comments

    Monday, June 27, 2022

    Weekend Wrap-up

    My new office art arrived on Friday afternoon, "Sitting Tree" by Cynthia Decker.

    On Friday evening while Rebecca was at her physical therapy course, Maia played quietly by herself in the living room.

    On Saturday, I took the kids on a trip out to Alexandria to see my parents. Ian's configuration knobs were all out of whack this day, as he only napped for 20 minutes all day long but did poop 7 different times. As such, we didn't stay long, but we did get Maia a Happy Meal lunch with an ugly toy on the way home. In the evening, Maia did a puppet show.

    Here is the Sunday sunrise shift, sitting in the basement, trying not to wake up Maia. My window needs a little Windex.

    Sunday was a close-to-home day. We hit the playground before it got too hot, and then stayed inside. I played Kirby and the Forgotten Land on the Switch with Maia during Ian's nap, and then a new board game from Elizabeth, Santorini.

    Bonus Picture: Rebecca's mushrooms are finally sprouting!

    tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 1 comment

     

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