This Day In History: 10/03

Wednesday, October 03, 2001

For some reason I find it highly amusing that the library CDs from the Classical and Romantic periods are scratched, broken, worn, or just plain missing, while the CDs of composers like Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg are in mint condition. I've only got about forty more works left to catalogue from my 125-selection Listening Exam list. Pretty soon the library staff here can stop giving me dirty looks for checking out so many CDs at one time.

"Oh books can be indecent books,
though recent books are bolder,
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed, everything is lewd,
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz (there's a dirty old man!)
" - Tom Lehrer, Smut

permalink | 0 comments

Thursday, October 03, 2002

I finished off the 3rd season of The Sopranos yesterday. Overall, I thought it was a good season and had its moments, but it wasn't quite as good as the previous seasons. There was no overarching plot tying this season together, and the writers often started developing a character or story before dropping it without resolution. Also, one of the actors passed away before this season began, so to prevent a plot hole, there is a requisite 'last scene' early in the season where digital remixes of old footage allow that character to have one final chat with Tony Soprano before death. It's pretty horrible. They should have just shown that character from the back the whole time; it would have been more believable.

Search for 'go to hell' returns Microsoft.
World's Funniest Joke: "Jokes mentioning ducks were considered particularly funny."
Boy dials police to report grandma's cooking

tagged as reviews | permalink | 0 comments

Friday, October 03, 2003

The season premiere of Alias was good stuff. The show could go in any direction now, and it's definitely easier for new viewers to follow. When I got the Season 1 DVDs, my roommate hated it in the beginning and then got hooked on it in spite of herself. It turns out that her sisters are addicted to it too. I'm like a pusher.

We had our first frost here last night. Though I hate waking up when it's chilly in the house, I do enjoy not requiring an air conditioning all year long. I occasionally hear peeps and pipes from my friends down in Tallahassee; apparently everything is about the same as it always has been.

I'm working on a new custom map for Warcraft III -- it should be out on Monday.

The Hokies beat UConn 47-13 last weekend. This weekend they're ranked #4 and playing at Rutgers.

Article on Alias composer, Michael Giacchino
Arnold's a Pig
Judge who nixed Do-Not-Call List is called
Judge who nixed Do-Not-Call List is on the list
Man sues after being locked in toilet

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Monday, October 03, 2005

Welcome to October. It's definitely Fall now -- I can tell because it was chilly when I woke up this morning, Shopper Food Warehouse is selling Halloween pumpkins, and Costco is selling Christmas ornaments. I like the changing scenery and the associated briskness, and the fact that it's cold out, but not so cold that you have to bundle up too much (I hate being cold). This is also why Summer beats Winter -- Winter has good high points like holidays and snow, but I hate being cold so that rules out most common days. Spring is just too wet and unpredictable -- they should just excise that season altogether (maybe they could replace it with another Fall).

Fall is probably my favourite season, followed by Summer, Winter, and then Spring (Rock trumps them all, but even Scissors beats Spring). The one thing I don't like about the Fall is the emergence of mutant crickets in sheds. Every year I go out to the shed in the Fall and it's teeming with these gross-looking useless insects that do nothing but hang on the wall, watching you, and waiting for you to turn your back so they can gut you from behind. They can easily hop three feet into the air, but aren't afraid of anything you do. I'm going to train Anna and Ben's new puppy to eat them on command.

I kept pretty busy this weekend. In between multiple shopping trips all over the county (I finally picked up the missing set of curtains) and taking care of homebound recuperating toothless invalids, I made some time on Saturday morning to visit the new puppy and watch the Hokies trounce West Virginia 34-17. Baylee is a beagle / border collie mix. Anna and Ben choose the spelling to be unique yuppies, and because Bayley looks like it should rhyme with Péle. When I was in high school, I knew a girl named Gbehlee, so I guess Baylee isn't that much of a stretch.

I saw the puppy just a couple days after it had moved in, but it seemed pretty happy with its surroundings. It pooped outside when I was there, which apparently is a big deal. Sydney seems pretty calm about the whole affair and tried to steal Baylee's bone (because it smelled like bacon, and who WOULDN'T steal a bacon-scented toy). When Baylee gets too close, Sydney will get annoyed, but otherwise they chase each other around and act cute together. Baylee farts a lot, so I'm sure everyone will get along fine in that household.

Kitty doesn't like the new puppy much at all, except when it's sleeping and not doing its jerky erratic puppy shtick. She will sit on the stairs watching like a cat-spy, and occasionally come down to put up a good brave face, but mostly she spends time upstairs sleeping (nothing new). I'm sure that after a few weeks, all three of them will be playing some No-Limit Hold'Em for bacon bones and sleeping together in a big pile of fuzz.

I like other peoples' dogs, but I would probably never get a dog myself -- if I wanted high maintenance I would just date a sorority girl. Cats are great because they are the like the end table of pets. You feed them and occasionally play with them and they take care of everything else themselves. Self-cleaning, always sitting in your lap, and they poop in a box -- what more could you ask for?

Marry your Baby Daddy Day, because there aint no apostrophes in the ghetto
Teen's camcorder records his death
Clowns succeeded in distracting the children but apparently annoyed doctors and nurses.

Yesterday's search terms:
performance majors hate pedagogy, john basedow implants, inspector gadget spoilers, warcraft iii poop maps, uri and the moscow cat circus, woo president arthur, where that cheese go

permalink | 9 comments

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

List Day: Ten Random Road Trip Thoughts

  1. There's a commercial bus line called LAMERS. At first glance, the website emblazoned on the side of the bus could have been a one-word last name of the company founder (www.golamers.com), but it turns out to be a positive, upbeat, Special-Olympics-style cheer for people who are lame. No word on whether or not you must be this lame to ride, but I bet the company is missing a huge target market: sports teams could charter the bus line to ferry visiting teams to and from their stadium -- yes, I have the maturity of a twelve-year-old.

  2. People in Delaware and New Jersey actually slow down to the posted 10 MPH in EZ-Pass / Smart Tag toll lanes, an outdated local practice that I discovered while simultaneously testing out my anti-lock brakes. The last time anyone went lower than sixty miles an hour in a Virginia toll lane was the week when the Post revealed that all the toll cameras were fake and everyone wanted to see for themselves.

  3. I don't know what exactly you do in a Truck Climbing Lane, but I hope it's something like the Physical Challenge from Double Dare.

  4. You can tell that your company's fleet of trucks is exceeding the emissions laws when the thick black smoke emanating from the wet dungeon walls exhaust pipes curls through the air and projects a solid shadow on the ground below the truck. Then again, the likelihood that New Jersey has emissions laws is roughly equal to dying from a Flying Donkey Tiger Punch to the neck.

  5. There's a name for everything in New Jersey -- I did not stop at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on the way to the wedding, but I'm sure it would have been a poetic experience. With a little cash I might be able to get something named after me. A rest stop's probably too expensive, but someday you might drive past "Brian Uri!'s Mile Marker 94". I'd buy 222 but I don't think Jersey is big enough to have one.

  6. I have dubbed my blue suit, my "wedding suit", because I only wear it to weddings now that I'm no longer a performing monkey musician. I can provide a chronological history of the suit based on the wedding programs in the right pocket which, on Saturday, contained a program from Philip Barbie's wedding in 2004 as well as four other programs.

  7. My tie has not been retied in almost six years now. Someday I will learn to tie it.

  8. Piscataway would be the perfect marketing birthplace of Nature's Miracle.

  9. New Jersey townships love to tinker with the speed limit along their routes. In the twenty mile stretch between Mount Olive and Swartswood, the speed limit jumped randomly between 25 and 50 miles per hour, with no direct correlation to whether the road was in the city or the country, a main street or a commercial route. Given the Jersey love of roads and building roads, I'm sure someone analyzed every 50 foot section of road and determined the optimal traveling speed (rounded to the nearest five) then billed the government eight million dollars. I felt like I was following a strategy guide for a really tedious platformer game.

  10. Not being able to pump your own gas means that there's a ton of minimum wage jobs available in New Jersey. They should improve the economy and extend this concept to other arenas, like not being able to wipe your bottom, not being able to make left turns or U turns, and not being able to buy your own beer if you're under 21. Hopefully no one has stolen any of my ideas before I patent them and make millions.
Escaped hamster interrupts jet flight
Idiot Baggie gets passenger detained
Dodders have bad taste in host plants

tagged as lists | permalink | 3 comments

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Memory Day: Gymnastics

As I mentioned a couple months ago, being stuck in day care was an agonizing way to spend the afternoon, much like that of a cat dipped in peanut butter trying to groom itself. In fact, it was after-school day care and not college applications that sparked in us the early drive to do extracurricular activities. One of mine was gymnastics, which I started in fourth grade with my sister (who was in sixth).

Luckily for us, the city's gymnastics program was offered at our school, so there was no need for buses or travel, and we got out of day care twice a week. Unluckily for us, gymnastics was taught by the same gym teachers who felt that the backbone of physical education involved playing with parachutes, square dancing, and eighties dance music. The gymnastics program that was offered gave us only the barest glimpse into the world glamourized by the movie Stick It, where girls in spandex sat in bathtubs full of ice cubes and puberty is the dread killer of dreams. (This movie is not to be confused with the recent documentary, Stick It In, which details the fight for obscenity and respectability in an outlawed college football cheer).

A typical gymnastics session would begin with the entire group running in a circle and jumping over cones to the mellifluous sounds of Donna Summer (this sounds exactly like gym class because it was). This was followed by light stretching and several individual gymnast moves like the front walkover, the back walkover, the front flip, the back flip, the bridge, and various pointed-toe jumps with adjectives like "back" and "front" describing them. There were no pommel horses or rings, though we occasionally got to walk down a balance beam or do a single canned routine on the parallel bars (everyone had to do the exact same routine for safety purposes, and it always ended with the Penny Drop).

While Olympic gymnasts were engaging in death-defying (and crotch-defying) feats, we were inventing "routines" set to the best of Michael Jackson that had us rolling around on the carpet or doing cartwheels, round-offs (cartwheels with attitude, OH SNAP), or posed splits. The one tangible skill I walked away with was the ability to reach two inches past the edge of the Sit N' Reach box in the Physical Fitness test -- this, coupled with my ten minute mile ensured that I could at least get a Satisfactory rating. The day that I could effortlessly do a perfect split without even thinking about it is far in the past. Today, the only toes I can fondle without straining belong to someone else (and generally the cops have a problem with this).

As I grew older, the gymnastics program went on tour, and the best of the gymnasts travelled to a local Jewish private school once a week where we taught the faithful how to run around a room jumping over cones. The only difference between them and us was that all of their parents had bought special gymnastics tights and shoes, while we rolled up in our trashy public school shorts and T-shirts, smoking joints and getting in gang fights.

Book now for the flight to nowhere
Man eats 21 pounds of grits
Biologists aim to kill an island full of snitches

tagged as memories | permalink | 2 comments

Friday, October 03, 2008

Friday Failures

Unnecessary Use of "Scream" at Halloween: The fact that Halloween is approaching doesn't mean you can put "scream" into any phrase and make it topical. The ABC network becomes AB-Scream! for a month, which doesn't even make sense. Busch Gardens hosts Howloscream! which seems redundant to me. (Do something about that, Philip). I suppose it's better than the half-assed Hallowscream that most other venues host.

Joe Biden: Despite his obvious knowledge of the issues and confidence in his answers, he sighed loudly into the microphone on multiple occasions, which means we'll have to listen to conservative pundits nitpick this for the next four weeks as an example of either arrogance, sexism, or smoker's lung. He also broke into what's classically known as the "shit-eating grin" every time he and Obama were accused of something.

Sarah Palin: I only watched the first hour of the debate, because it all went downhill after the initial question, which Palin essentially replied to with a variant of "I'm going to ignore all your questions and say what I had planned to say." A debate is an opportunity for verbal ripostes and witty repart?e (and not once did either candidate use the "How appropriate...you fight like a cow." dialog option). Palin subverted the format by giving speeches and ignoring every question.

Joe Six Pack: I must be the only person in the world who DOESN'T want my next-door neighbour anywhere near the power structures of our government. For example, Doobie is awesome, but would you leave him the keys to your Porsche on Tuesday morning if you knew that Tuesday night was Beefeater night?

Gwen Ifill: You can't pose two different questions to the candidates at the exact same time. If you can't finish your question without taking a breath, it's a bad question. When someone doesn't answer your question, MAKE THEM ANSWER YOUR QUESTION. When you detect that the debate might go somewhere interesting for once, don't immediately kill the momentum by moving on to the next question because of time constraints. The VT cow with a hole in its stomach could have made a better mo(o)derator than you.

New Kids on the Block: Their reunion tour was at the Verizon Center last night. Didn't we learn anything from the 1980s reunion of the Monkees?

Denver police immortalize protesters in T-shirt
Condom-mobile goes missing
Offended neighbours get Utah statue moved
Who would win in a fight?

Obama / Biden (1 vote, 11.1%)


McCain / Palin (1 vote, 11.1%)


Osama bin Laden (2 votes, 22.2%)


Chris Smith / Ben Ahlbin (1 vote, 11.1%)


Mike Catania / Mike Jackson (4 votes, 44.4%)


tagged as random, politics | permalink | 3 comments

Monday, October 03, 2011

Second Anniversary

Today is our second anniversary, and while there is no more cake in the freezer and we won't make it back to Hanalei Bay this year, we are still the coolest people you know.

Perhaps we'll figure out where Brian and Emily are going on their honeymoon in three weeks time and steal their rooms for a much needed break from work and school.

Ray Bradbury: e-books can go to hell
Police: Wife threatened banks to hide money woes
Nestle Purina commercial makes a direct pitch to dogs

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Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Anniversary Day

Three years ago...

And today!

The pond is slightly larger than it once was. And, the wine is more pricey.

tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 5 comments

Thursday, October 03, 2013

Fourth Anniversary Day

As anniversaries pass, and senility robs us of our wedding memories, we'll always have the photographic evidence to fall back on.

Other posts in this series: 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

tagged as media | permalink | 2 comments

Friday, October 03, 2014

Fifth Anniversary Day

As anniversaries pass, and senility robs us of our wedding memories, we'll always have the photographic evidence to fall back on.

Other posts in this series: 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

tagged as media | permalink | 3 comments

Monday, October 03, 2016

Seventh Anniversary Day

As anniversaries pass, and senility robs us of our wedding memories, we'll always have the photographic evidence to fall back on (click to enlarge).

Other posts in this series: 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

tagged as media | permalink | 3 comments

Wednesday, October 03, 2018

Ninth Anniversary Day

As anniversaries pass, and senility robs us of our wedding memories, we'll always have the photographic evidence to fall back on.

Other posts in this series: 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

tagged as media | permalink | 1 comment

Monday, October 03, 2022

Thirteenth Anniversary Day

As anniversaries pass, and senility robs us of our wedding memories, we'll always have the photographic evidence to fall back on.

Other posts in this series: 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

tagged as media | permalink | 2 comments

 

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