Posts from July 2009

Every year Fools Play Improv declares war on Olympia’s Lakefair due to them trying to compete with our Saturday night entertainment. This is a just and righteous war. This year we sent out two powerful weapons: ANGRY BEEF and MIKE THE BLUE FOOL’S HAIR!

Let’s see how we did:

As you can see, Lakefair was completely destroyed. They won’t dare show their face again next year!

I wasn’t particularly happy with the default wallpapers that came with my Android T-Mobile G1, nor was I happy with any of the ones that I found online, so I decided to make my own!

I really like the little Android logo robot, so I was sure to include him (click for a full-sized version):

And here it is “in action” as the kids like to say these-a-days:

It’s kinda blurry, but as you can see I don’t put any icons in the 2nd row, so the little android guy shows through. That’s why he’s not dead-center in the image. I use this empty 2nd row as the place where I swipe my finger when I’m switching between Android’s three screens.

(I really like Android.)

Last weekend was the Puget Sound Bead Festival.

This weekend Carrie is out of town in Canada with the Lovejoy family, leaving me all alone with Fantastico. She’s even taking the dog!

Next weekend Carrie is out of town in California for a wedding, leaving me all alone with Suki & Fantastico.

The weekend after that is my sister’s wedding. Fortunately Carrie will be home for that. Whew!

Whoo! Lotsa stuffs going on during the weekends.

This past weekend was the 14th Annual Puget Sound Bead Festival. It was also 2nd Annual Chris Drives a Golf Cart Around weekend!

For the second year in a row my job at the Bead Festival was to drive people back and forth from the Hotel Murano to the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center in my “Courtesy Cart.” We didn’t like the people we rented the golf cart from last year, so this year we went with a different company, though I couldn’t tell you the names of either company because that information has flown right out of my head.

Anyway, this year the cart was much smaller, only a four-seater (including me, though sometimes three people could squeeze in the backseat) instead of the stretch six-seater. Here she is:

This one was so much easier to drive than the beast I had last year. It also ran much, much better, with the fantastic feature of turning completely off when it wasn’t moving, only to spring instantly to life the moment the accelerator was touched. It was much more maneauverable as well; I could easily go up and down sidewalks and dart around sandwich boards and street signs as if I were playing Mario Kart. Which I wasn’t.

Also, perhaps coolest of all, it came with its own little golf pencil strapped right to the steering wheel:

Sure, I never actually needed to use the golf pencil, but it was very considerate of them to put one in like that! Also, as you can see the instructions for how to operate the vehicle were very clearly laid out for you on the steering wheel as well, except for the letters “press br” in the words “depress brake,” which had been obliterated by a neat little hole at some point in the past.

So anyway, it was a lot of fun running back and forth in that little thing. I didn’t get as many tips as last year, though, but ah well.

Last week I had two great dreams in one night. The first one I call The Case of the Missing Socks:

Carrie & I lived in a house that isn’t the house where we actually live. This one was situated on a couple of acres of fields and trees. It had a porch that wrapped around the entire perimeter. The bedroom had floor-to-ceiling windows, and just on the other side of the porch opposite these windows was a rather large bush.

I couldn’t find my socks. I had some socks, but not nearly as many as I should have had. They kept on disappearing and I couldn’t figure out why. It was pretty steady, too. I’d put them away in my sock drawer and when I went to get some out there would be less and less each time. It was very puzzling to me.

Soon I found them, though: they were in that bush outside the bedroom windows. They were dangling from the branches like bananas, but it was obvious that they weren’t growing from the branches. The bush didn’t produce socks, my socks somehow ended up in the bush. I thought this was incredibly bizarre, so I asked my friends and family if they knew how the heck this was happening.

None of them thought it was in the least bit odd. They were like, “Oh, good, you found them.”

“Yes, but they were in a bush. Outside!”

“Well, that’s good.”

I tried to get them to help me figure out how they could have possibly gotten in there, but everyone just kinda thought that that’s where they ended up because that’s where they ended up. Somebody did kinda half-assedly make a suggestion, though: “Maybe the floor in your bedroom is slanted just a little?” The implication being that my socks were rolling across the bedroom floor, across the porch, and then landing in the bush.

The problem, of course, was that they weren’t rolled up when they were in the bush. They were fully un-rolled. I was getting kind of frustrated at everybody’s indifference to this very strange mystery.

Unfortunately at that point I had to use the bathroom, so I got up and took care of business. When I went back to bed I had another, seemingly unrelated dream:

Two of my friends, who in real-life are expecting a baby, went to the doctor’s office and learned that they were having a boy. They were so excited (especially the guy) that they decided to throw an impromptu “We’re Having a Boy” party. They decided to have it at my house. Without telling me or Carrie about it beforehand.

In the time it took them to drive from the doctor’s office to my house (which in this dream was actually my real house) they had planned the entire party and invited all of the guests. They all arrived at my house shortly before Carrie & I did—we had been off doing errands of some sort.

‘What the Hell is going on?” I asked the guy.

“We’re having a party at your house!” he said with a big smile on his face.

There were tons of people in the house. Must have been 40-50. My dream people were just throwing random people in my life in there as extras: Fools Play friends, Bead Factory people, etc. Eventually, though, they must have run out of people I actually know and in desperation threw in someone random.

Nathan Fillion was at the party.

But he was tiny. Maybe 5′2″ at the most. And he had his “Caleb” haircut from Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

By way of explanation, the guy who planned the party simply said, “Oh, yeah, I invited Nathan Fillion.”

It really didn’t seem like that big of a deal for him to be at the party. He wasn’t mobbed by people wanting an autograph or a picture or anything. Nobody was really talking to him all that much, so we went over to talk to him. He seemed like a very pleasant fellow, and I guess we’d known him for a while because he knew our names and stuff like that.

As we were talking a thought suddenly struck me. “I bet Nathan Fillion would get a kick out of that story.”

So I said to him, “Oh, hey, Nathan, you’re never gonna believe this dream I just had. You see, my socks kept on disappearing…” and I explained my entire previous dream to him. He agreed with me that it was very strange that nobody thought that it was weird that my socks were in a bush.

If the dream continued after that I don’t remember it very much. I should add that Nathan Fillion was wearing a sports coat over a T-shirt and was holding a yellowish drink in a clear plastic cup the whole time.

Well done, dream people! Both those dreams were excellently amusing.

Due to a peculiarity with the way we use numbers to represent times and dates in this country, at 12:34 and 56 seconds in the afternoon today the time/date can be written as:

12:34:56 7/8/9

What’s so special about that? Well, remove all the colons and slashes and this is what you get:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Of course, this is only happening in places where the month gets put before the date gets put before the year. Many places will have to wait until the 7th of August for this particular line-up to occur.

I’m not a numerologist or anything, so I don’t hold any superstitious associations with this date/time. I’m pretty sure the Universe doesn’t give a darn what numbers we use to signify an arbitrary point in time. It’s just a peculiar numeric convergence that I find kinda interesting.

EDIT: It just happened! And… nothing happened.

Sorry this is so late, but, hey, it was a holiday weekend!

Link of the Month:
The Brick Testament
It’s the world’s largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible. It is illustrated entirely using photos of LEGOs®. Hilarious and disturbing, it sheds brutal light on just how messed up the stories in the Bible actually are. So far they have 412 stories with 4,453 illustrations. And they’re constantly updating…

Game of the Month:
Robo Defense
Something unusual for me this month: Robo Defense is only available for the T-Mobile G1. That’s right, it’s a phone video game. And it’s damnably addictive. It’s a tower defense game: enemy robots are trying to make their way into your base, and you have to build towers with various abilities in order to blow ’em up before they get there. Towers are upgradable and changeable. There are flying as well as ground-based enemies. It’s simple, but a strategically rewarding play.

DVD of the Month:
Burn After Reading
You might have missed this Coen Brothers gem when it came out late last summer (I know I did). It’s basically a story about espionage and intrigue in Washington D.C., except that everybody is an absolute idiot. They’re just complete morons. Okay, so there are a couple of characters who aren’t morons, but they’re completely unsympathetic jerks. It’s a comedy that is filmed and scored and directed as if it were a completely serious film in the intrigue genre that it is playing around with. One of the stranger Coen Bros. movies.