xkcd

The funniest comic strip I have ever read

For example:

I Love BJ's

(oh, it hurts leaving the jokes unsaid)

So we've started an experiment to shop for certain things at BJ's wholesale club recently. It seems the best things for use to buy there are non-prodcue items and meat. I'm not sure if it bothers me that the meat section is my favorite part of BJ's. I know it made me feel weird the other day when I made the comment, "I love BJ's meat".

The Walk

For no other reason than that my brother in law said I should post a movie on the web somewhere, I give you "The Walk" one of my first productions using the iMovie software. This movie took me exactly 23.7 seconds to make, not including filming time.

Enjoy

Otakon

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend Otakon at the Baltimore Convention Center. My wife, Brother-in-Law and his friend all paid the 60$ registration fee to attend for both Saturday and Sunday. I however couldn't justify the expense. You see, Otakon is an anime convention. While knew this event would be high entertainment for me, I knew it would only be entertaining for an hour or two. That's the way it works when you are expecting to be entertained by the attendees rather than by the convention itself.

The plan was for all four of us to go on Sunday and trade off one of the three passes we had. Serendipitously, we found a discarded pass on the way to the Convention Center so we could all enter together. I was now going by the name "David" written on the pass.

Here's the scene: 5000 nerds, dorks, loners, geeks, goths, hackers, role-players, gamers, and assorted other shakedowns from the cultural substrata descending upon the convention center, mostly dressed as thier favorite anime characters; Sailor Moon to Hellsing to Gohan to Cloud. Oh ya, quite the fun scene. I'm glad I went. Of course, it wasn't all just for the people watching. I actually did manage to find one exhibit I was genuinely interested in; Red vs. Blue. Technically they classify RvB as "machinma" not anime, but I bought a T-shirt off of them anyway.

Update: My wife's pictures of the event can be found here.

Mizzice in the hizzice

I have recently rekindled my fondness for killing.

Our house has recently been inhabited by a pack of mice. We noticed the first one a few weeks ago, while we were downstairs watching TV. It scurried across the floor from the utility room (where we keep the dog's food) into one of the little woofer holes at the bottom of a stereo speaker next to the TV. Chris started freaking out and I had to grab the speaker and bring it outside in an effort to shake the mouse out. I think I was successful but I wasn't sure, because just at the moment when I thought I saw the mouse shake out, I flinched my head away (it was a violent shake I gave, and I thought the mouse would fly into my face). When I looked back a half-second later, I saw no trace of the mouse anywhere around me, outside or in the speaker. Mission accomplished, or so I thought.

About a week later we see a mouse scurry across the floor as before, except it didn't end up in the speaker, instead in went into a vent built into the side of the hearth for feeding cold flue air. My heart sank thinking that I hadn’t shaken that mouse out the speaker after all. The day after that though, we saw a couple more mice scurry around in single file. Suddenly this situation was promoted from a mouse problem to a mice problem.

The next day our house was filled with peanut butter baited traps. I bought a variety of traps, thinking that if any one mouse got wise by seeing a dead comrade in a particular trap, he might learn to avoid it. I had the traditional snap-traps, a few glue traps, and some new-fangled humane traps that caught them in a little box. By last Friday I had killed or captured five mice in all and I thought I had won. But then, just the other day, we began to hear some noises in the walls upstairs. I think we have just one mouse left and I will remain on the hunt. For one day I will be the glorious victor, and my enemy will be destroyed.