By which I mean I've been spending way too much time this past week playing Plants vs. Zombies, a hilarious computer game in which you protect yourself from the zombie invasion by planting flowers on your lawn.  Put that simply it doesn't sound like much, but it's gotten me so hooked that I even went out and spent forty dollars on a so-called gaming mouse -- after having used a trackball for over a dozen years -- because things just move too fast in the game to just be using my thumb.


The new userpic for this entry is my "Zombatar" ( zombie avatar ), created at the Plants vs. Zombies website.  I did the best I could with the hair-style; I don't really have a comb-over, but that was the only option for balding rather than bald.  ( Also, I haven't dyed my hair/ mustache purple ... yet. )


After you defeat  "Dr. Zomboss", the zombies send you a note saying they're going to give up trying to eat your brains; now they just want to make a music video for you.  The the sunflower comes on singing :



( Zombies on the Lawn )


Why yes, I have seen that new Burger King ad with Tony Stewart ( who actually I'd never heard of before he started doing their commercials ) about doing product endorsements...

Another for the "what will they think of next" file:  at the Computex tech convention ECS computers showed off a "net-top" ( a desktop computer built with netbook components ) that is disguised as a Ming vase. 


PC World magazine, Engadget, and Tom's Hardware all thought it was pretty cool, but though the couple of paragraphs I read in PC Advisor claimed they were going to be selling them soon, I couldn't find any links with anything resembling an order form -- even on ECS's own site.  If the price were in line with other net-tops I've seen, I'd be sorely tempted, just for the sheer coolness factor. 

Special alert to norabombay :

For some unexplained reason, I thought of you when I read this story:


A man with a tattoo of Britney Spears' name on his arm or neck allegedly stole a Chihuahua with pink earrings from a South Florida gay bar. Brian Dortort, 48, said Thursday he has spent weeks searching for his 4-month-old pooch, named Hudson Hayward Hemingway. The dog, about the size of a softball, was in a specialty pet bag.

Dortort said he let a man hold the Chihuahua for a moment during a friend's birthday party, then both of them disappeared.

Police said a suspect has been identified, but it's up to the Broward State Attorney's Office to decide whether to an issue an arrest warrant.

As someone who has been watching the series "Criminal Minds" since the beginning, I have to say that KFC's ad department might have wanted to put a little more thought into their latest ad campaign.  I understand that their intent was to strike back at all of the Subway ads that mock other fast food chains, but the slogan "Taste the un-sub side of KFC" is a little jarring when one has become accustomed to the word "unsub" as FBI-speak for "serial killer." 

Somehow I doubt that that is the sort of image they were going for.

According to Amazon, due to be released on DVD July 28. 

I know there are those on my FL who would want to know.

That is all.

Although I know a lot of people are all "fangirl squee" about Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, I've always been mostly "meh".  I mean, it's good ice cream, I just think the difference in flavor between that and ordinary store-brand ice cream is at least an order of magnitude less than the difference in price.

That being said, I think I'm going to end up trying their newest product at least once, just because I love one of the advertising slogans they created for it:

"We married fudge, ice cream, and brownies.  Don't worry, it's legal in Vermont."



A none-too-subtle reference to the legalization of gay marriage there, used in an advertising campaign; seems like some sort of progress to me, though being neither gay nor likely to ever get married, I suppose I'm not terribly qualified to make that sort of statement.

In Friday's ad for CompUSA ( which I just now got around to reading ), there is an ad for a Mitsubishi DLP HD rear projection TV. 

A TV whose diagonal measurement is 73", or, for those of you more accustomed to sensible rather than traditional units, 1.854 Meters. 

Its width is less than an inch shy of my height.  granted, I'm on the short side, but still -- this is more than two and a half times the width of my current TV.   Its diagonal is more than three times that of my first TV, bought in 1987. 



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Somewhat non-sequitur, but I was going to add a comment about  theferrett 's so-called "monster penis system", but I found it surprisingly difficult to locate the postings about it among his five-thousand-plus entries.  I hadn't really noticed before that nearly all of LJ's supposed "search" options are for things that I find almost completely useless.  I wanted to search "subject" or "title", but if that's possible I'm apparently not smart enough to figure out how; or perhaps I just do it far to seldom to know where to look.

It's been almost a year since I last gave in to the temptation to post something from the LOLcat family of websites, but this one had me laughing too hard to pass up. I especially like the bit of the license plate that they didn't white out -- I know it's some symbol, rather than an "O", between those two "L"s, but it's close enough to add just that little something extra.




see more Fail Blog

"Ask your Doctor if Medical Advice from TV commercials is right for you."




It took me a minute to recognize the format as the typical legalese found at the end of commercials like those, then I laughed.

This morning on my way home from work, I happened to pass a black Kia Spectra, and I had an odd thought. 

If I a car like that, and painted several sets of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet stripes on it, would anyone get the joke, or would they just assume I was really, really gay?

Though technically what I feel is not really "joy at the misfortune of others", but more "joy at the indirect results of the misfortune of others". 

Whether or not you would apply the schadenfreude label to the latter emotion, last night I was certainly feeling it to the utmost -- all because of a commercial I happened to see on TV.  It seems that one of the local stores whose obnoxious commercials have annoyed me for the past decade, "The Bedroom Superstore", is actually going out of business.  ( And you thought this "economic downturn" didn't have a silver lining. )  While I don't particularly care one way or another about whether or not they sell furniture, I am extremely happy that once their going-out-of-business sale is over I'll never again have to leap frantically for my remote in an attempt to shut up one of their ads. 

For some reason they've always seemed to believe that the very best way to get people to come in and buy furniture from them is with spots featuring an announcer who combines all the worst aspects of the ones who do used car ads, and those who do monster truck rally ads of the "SUNDAY!!!  SUNDAY!!!  SUNDAY!!!"  variety.  And another thing that I thought was odd is that they never mention anything about the furniture that you could buy there; the ads were always and only about the "amazing" financing you could get, and how "huge" this week's sale was.  ( If everything in the store is "on sale" every week, is that really a sale?  Not by my definition. )
 

The odd coincidence is, I got up right after hearing that to start making this post, but because I couldn't figure out how to spell "schadenfreude", I got too lazy to go through with it, but this morning it was used in one of the comics I read fairly regularly ( Monty ), so I decided to go ahead and do it now.

I usually don't pay attention to the bit of the Late Late show where they tell who the guests will be for the next night, so I couldn't have warned those on my FriendsList who are serious Nathan Fillion fans to tune in last night.  Even so, I probably wouldn't have know just from the schedule that he would be

wearing a leather kilt.


Luckily, CBS puts the episodes on their website a couple of days after they air, so you should be able to tune in for your eye candy tomorrow.

As I have said before, because I work the night shift I usually tape programs that air while I'm asleep, to watch after work, so I only just got around to last night's "Tonight Show".  One of the bits they did was called "Famous Dates and the Next Day", in which Jay listed certain things that happened throughout history, and the little known things that followed the next day.  For example, the day after the Wright brothers' flight at Kittyhawk, Orville supposedly suggested they charge passengers $25 per bag for their luggage. 

What they claim happened April 9, 1971 -- the day after Starbucks opened the first store -- was that they opened five more stores on the same block.  The ( blatantly Photoshopped ) picture they showed, however, wasn't of Pike Place Market ( location of the first Starbucks ), but of Powells bookstore, something I couldn't  help but recognize even past all the faked Starbucks signs.  Now obviously even when you Photoshop a picture that thoroughly you have to start with something; I just thought it was weird that they should choose that one as their canvas.  I mean, they're based in L.A., surely there are hundreds of locations there they could have used, since there wasn't much of the original left after they manipulated it -- though clearly enough for me to instantly know what it really was.  ( Now that I look a little farther, I think the original is the same one that's on the Wikipedia page for Powells. )

Maybe somebody in Jay's graphic design department is from Portland...

Pi Day Here's the one I made. I cheated by using store bought crust, but it came out looking pretty good. I'm tempted to have pizza for lunch, in honor of comedian Brian Regan. He does a joke about the day he started college, when his new room-mate from New Jersey asked him if he wanted to split "a pie". Having never heard someone refer to a pizza that way, he was a little puzzled, but since he was hungry he said sure. That's how they ended up having half pepperoni, half pumpkin.

Don't forget to make ( or purchase ) pie(s) for pi day -- at least those who use US style date notation ( 3-14 ). 
Only six years left until the really big one -- 3-14-'15.

Normally, if one isn't a completely lazy procrastinator, the time to post lists for the previous year is the beginning of January, but at least I'm finally getting around to it now.  I kind of fudged a bit on this list of books read for 2008,  in that I included a great many children's books and comic books that I re-read while entering them in LibraryThing in a brief attempt at completism; even disallowing those I'm relatively pleased with my final numbers.


( The full list: )

Last night's episode of Oregon ArtBeat featured a segment on Andy Paiko, a Portland artist who creates amazingly cool glass sculptures that are mechanical devices.  The program showed his seismograph and spinning wheel, and his web site also lists a glass chair, hourglass, coral, and "pseudoelectrical devices".

Go look.  He's got some beautiful stuff.

Odd -- my gmail account had begun getting spam in German.

!?!

Granted, I'm technically of German descent ( though thoroughly mongrelized ), but I don't speak German and have never sent an email with German in it that I'm aware of, and I'm pretty careful to have as little contact as possible between what I do on the net and my actual legal name.

smileyPumpkin
Originally uploaded by khavrinen237

My nextdoor neighbor's ritual gourd sacrifice for 2008. Not all that original, but well executed ( no pun intended ), I thought.

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For some reason, my last attempt at blogging a Flickr photo won't go through. I think I may have uploaded too large a file for LJ to accept, but for the moment I'm too lazy to drill down through all the layers of FAQs to locate the proper parameters. If you want to click on the pumpkin photo above, however, it will take you to my Flick page, where you can see my previous photo, titled "Tree Pattern Baldness."