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!

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.

Memory Day: Food

Happy Birthday Jared Gibbs and Kerry Crowley!

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!

Weekend Wrap-up

Drinking out of nose cups.		Badminton and Cornhole
3 out of 4 Brians endorse this cookout.		Food!

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.

Random Picture Thursday

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

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

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.

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?

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-

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!