Archive for the ‘Living’ Category

You've got a month.

That's how long you have to complete an album of 10 original songs or 35 minutes of original music, according to the RPM Challenge. Whip your band into shape and crank up the tunes. Better hurry, it's a short month and most decent stage explosives have a 10-day waiting period.

If you're not ready to record quite that quickly, hop over to February Album Writing Month and write the songs this year for next year's album challenge. And then in June you can write a screenplay about your whacky experiences for ScriptFrenzy, or wait till November to write a novel about it for NaNoWriMo.

The whole point of these insanely deadlined events is to get your creative juices boiling and spilling out over the sides. Stop thinking about doing something and do it! Don't worry about how good it is. No one else will be. Just do it, to prove to yourself you can do it after all.

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Happy New Year's! It's time to fondly remember all the things we've accomplished over the last year, have a drink, and then solemnly vow to never do any of them ever again.

Most resolutions happen soon after the horrified realization of the state you woke up in on New Year's afternoon, but those are usually unthinking, knee-jerk reactions to the sight of your own bodily fluids as opposed to well-thought-out guidelines for a new and improved you. Such panicky resolutions are often extreme and unrealistic, such as "I'll lose 84 lbs by Arbor Day" or "I'll never drink vodka and lighter fluid again."

Me, I prefer to choose my resolutions carefully so that I can carefully craft myself into the perfectly realized paragon of humanity that is my destiny. Also I like resolutions I have a slim chance of keeping, like "I resolve to wake up, most days." Here's my list.

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How many times have you said to yourself, "Boy, I wish I could pick up Dr. Laura Schlessinger and throw her into an open flame"?

Well now you can, with this 11" Dr. Laura action doll! Dressed in a smart yellow pantsuit and equipped with 23 different phrases such as "proud mother of an American soldier," "Now, go do the right thing," "Argue with me, it makes me testy," and more. Not all the phrases are listed, but I assume "Do what I say, not what I did," "If you're gay or a lesbian, it's a biological error," and "What do you mean my TV show was cancelled?" are in there as well.

Display her proudly on your child's nightstand to ward off premarital sex and gay vibes! Send her to that deadbeat brother of yours to express your shame by proxy! Dress her up in tacky lingerie and hook her up with the Bratz boys! Dr. Laura does it all!

I anticipate massive sales of this figure, both from Dr. Laura fans who want to support her and Dr. Laura detractors who will find it far superior to the handmade voodoo dolls they've been using up till now.

As I will be spending a goodly chunk of tomorrow gleefully ignoring my doctor's advice and raising my cholesterol by the forkfull, I'd like to take a moment now to give thanks for all the things for which I am, you know, thankful.

I'm thankful that Tom and Katie finally bonded and can now go raise their spawn in peace, leaving valuable magazine cover room for other, more deserving oddities. I am somewhat concerned, however, that the new Mrs. Cruise seems to be shrinking.

I'm thankful that FOX recognized that they could too overestimate how low the American public was willing to sink and cancelled the O.J. special and book. Kudos to them, and I'm positive they have learned their lesson and will strive to be tasteful and appropriate when they come back next year with Michael Jackson's "What I Didn't Do with Those Kids."

I'm grateful this Bond had only one eerily appropriate gadget this time, and that nearly alone of all of Hollywood actually seemed to try to do CPR properly. Better luck next time, James!

I'm grateful for whichever plucky, unemployed soul leaked the unfinished-but-lengthier Spider-Man 3 trailer onto the Web (Ha! Get it? Web!) so disappointed fans could be reassured that Eric Forman will in fact be cool. Here's a link but you may have to keep looking; Sony's yanking them as fast as they pop up. Too bad: this trailer is much more exciting than the official one.

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KFC — which is finally embracing their unhealthy roots again and going back to calling themselves "Kentucky Fried Chicken" — has decided to go for the flyover and alien market by creating an 87,500 sq. ft. image of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert, near the fabled ufologist hotspot Area 51. It is composed of 65,000 1'x1' colored tiles and is visible from space (image is from Google Earth; if you have the program installed click on it to view the deep fried visage yourself).

"If we hear back from a life form in space today – whether NASA astronauts or a signal from some life form on Mars – we'll send up some Original Recipe Chicken," said KFC President Gregg Dedrick, quoted in a Reuters article.

Which opens up a greasy cardboard bucket of questions. How, exactly, will they do this? Has the KFC Corporation secretly been developing their own space program to enable geosynchronous takeout? What about the other franchises? Are we just now finding out about a frantic fast food space race? How far away are Happy Meal payloads? What happens when the delivery gets to ISS and the astronauts discover they forgot the potato wedges? And is this the first step towards marketing to extraterrestrials, or is this a subtle way to stop alien attacks by clogging invaders with cholesterol?

These are exciting times, my friends.

Time to fire up the dice again, tomorrow is Dungeons and Dragons Day. This jolly holiday, which in an amazing coincidence is sponsored by D&D game company Wizards of the Coast, brings together gamers from around the world to huddle in small comic book and collecgible card shops to rattle dice at each other and save the world. Sign up for official play is closed, but you can still gather around and gawk at the players or celebrate in your own home.

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The first election irregularities have appeared! Kanye West, furious at being named only the Best Hip Hop Artist at the MTV Europe Music Awards, stormed the stage and launched a rant after not winning Best Video even though his video "Touch the Sky" "cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons." Best Video instead went to Justice and Simian for "We Are Your Friends." No word yet on whether Diebold machines were involved.

Drivl.com

The Seven Stages of Owning an iPod. I've never actually owned one myself, but it turns out owning a puppy works exactly the same way.

And if you ever appear as a guest on The Colbert Report, Slate.com has a how-to guide to help you avoid looking stupid. Or more stupid than you need to, anyway.

I always thought math was a formidable weapon, considering the effects it has on me — even the proximity of an algebra problem forces me to go lie down with a damp washcloth on my forehead — but I had no idea it could vanguish unholy demons.

Fortunately we have Costas Efthimiou, a physics professor at the University of Central Florida, who has debunked the vampire myth once and for all. Sort of. His claim is that, given that vampires must feed on human blood and a human, once bit, becomes a vampire, humans would be eliminated within two and a half years.

However, fans of the genre are scoffing at his work, claiming that he has missed two major gaps in his logic. The first being that Mr. Efthimiou assumes vampires would never die themselves, whether from accident, starvation, vampire-on-vampire violence, or those pesky blond girls with their fancy spin kicks. The second is that, in most vampire-related mythology, a single bite doesn't change a human or necessarily even kill one. But other than that, his theory is a fine one.

He goes on with his undead trifecta by disproving ghosts and zombies. You can find his paper here.

Me, I think it's a smoke screen. Mr. Efthimiou would have you believe that there are no vampires, and so you'll take down the garlic and box up the extra crosses and go back to low-neck sweaters and never notice this physics professor of the night sneaking up on you…

The latest commercial from Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" movement is an illuminating one, especially if you've never really internalized the fact that models on magazine covers and advertisements are Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives. Everyone "knows" that, of course, but still there's that hidden (or not-so-hidden) belief that someone who looks like that actually exists somewhere outside of a Barbie box, and that if women just try hard enough — and buy the right things — they can look like that too.

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Tired of recharging your Palm Pilot or Zire every night? Frustrated with the cracked screen on your PocketPC? Move to the hottest new design for convenient data organization and portable storage: paper.

The PocketMod was devised by Chad Adams to print all your need-to-have info onto a piece of paper that, with one cut and three folds, becomes a flippable 8-page book that fits nicely into your purse or back pocket. The Flash app allows you to pick and choose what to put on each page, and there's a downloadable version.

Me, I don't think my handwriting recognition software is up to it.