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."

This morning when I got in my car to come home from work, my "default" radio station was playing one of the commercials that I find particularly irritating, so I pushed the button for another of the ones that I usually listen to.  They were playing the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women"; I listened to that for a little while, but decided that I wasn't really in the mood for that song, so I thought I'd try my third usual station to see what they had on.  When I got "Honky Tonk Women" again, I thought at first that I had mixed up which button was which, and I had to switch back and forth again before I really believed that both stations happened to be playing the same song at the same time. 

I've had this happen before with other songs, and it always leaves me feeling a bit weird, because at first I never quite believe that I haven't just pushed the same channel button as I was already listening to.

that an "electric fireplace" should bill itself as being made by the Amish, but judging by the number of these that go through UPS every day, they certainly seem to be selling well.  I haven't got that many in my assignment, but the two next to me, that load deliveries for Scappoose and Saint Helens ( outlying towns beyond the fringes of Portland itself ), have been getting around 5-15 of them per day for about the last six months. 

Maybe it's just that I grew up in a house that had a real fireplace, but I just don't get the appeal of an electric one.  If you're not going to have the faint smell of wood smoke, and the entertainment value of putting in wood and stirring it with the poker, I'd just as soon have a plain old electric heater that doesn't take up usable space.  But obviously that's just me.

Among the things I'm doing to settle in to my new computer is going through the websites I frequent and signing in, to make sure all my passwords are still valid.  The latest was at Powells.com, and I was surprised to find that it was sporting a new look since I last visited.  To me it seems vaguely Frank-Lloyd-Wright-ish; I like it, but then my preference runs to mininalism anyway.  The down side is that, as usual, a newly updated interface suffers a bit from feature-bloat -- it's running noticeably slower, at least at the moment.  That may improve with time.

The new computer that I ordered last week finally arrived about three hours ago, so now I am in the process of learning Windows Vista.  So far, not as bad as I had feared after a year of reading everybody bitching about it, although there are a few frustrating things.  By far the greatest of these is the fact that it will not accept the custom(isable)  drivers for my beloved trackball, falling back on the standard generic ones, despite the fact that it is itself a Microsoft product -- in my opinion by far the greatest one that they ever created in the history of the company.  For over five years, I've had the scroll wheel customized to register as "ALT+Tab", and now it won't let me change it from the default setting; it's going to take me weeks to break the habit of trying to switch back and forth between applications by clicking that.

And the one thing that made me "LOL" is another similar example of Microsoft's left hand not having a clue what the right hand is doing.  When I "registered" my copy of Vista, they sent a generic "Welcome" message to my hotmail account -- which ( because it included HTML elements ) brought up the dire warning that "You May Not Know This Sender:  Mark as Safe|Mark as Unsafe".  For a message from Microsoft itself.  Duh!

Anyway, at least it was easy enough to get Firefox back, which was about the first thing I did after anti-virus/firewall.  Everything else is probably going to take me a while to adapt to.

It's surprising how such little things can really bug me. 

I've been carrying the same cell phone for around five years now, and something that I'd been vaguely worried about from day one finally happened:  I lost the little rubber stopper that covered the power connector on Friday.  Aside from that, and the typical scratches and dings from being dropped about a half dozen times, it was still pretty much as good as new, but that gaping ( 1/2" X 1/8" ) hole in the bottom of my phone bugged me enough that I went and looked at possible replacements,  and today I gave in and bought one of them.

The one I picked is the UTstarcom Arc, although I got it in gold rather than the red pictured on that link.  According to my kitchen scale it is a whole quarter of an ounce lighter than my old Audiovox 8500 -- thinner but both slightly longer and wider.  It also adds web surfing capabilities and a camera, with surprisingly more manual control than I was expecting from a mere camera-phone, and Bluetooth, although to be honest I don't think I ever actually used the ( plug-in ) earpiece I had for the old one. 

So, once it finishes charging ( around noon, by the estimated charging time ), all I have to do is program in my contacts, figure out all the settings, and start learning how to make use of all the new features.