December 2007 Archives

I was at Target back in Fort Dodge using some Christmas gift cards to buy "Super Mario Galaxy", and after the cashier rang it up, the dude told me something hilarious.

"Huh, that's different. There's 41 cents left on your card, dude. Do you even want it back?"

41 cents left? Are you kidding?

"41 cents? That's enough for a candy bar! You bet I'll take it."

And so I left the Electronics department and headed for the main checkouts, where I would use the 41 cents to buy a Three Musketeers bar, leading to the cashier telling me my total was NINE CENTS. I haven't heard a cashier tell me that since I was about eight years old. Nine cents. You bet.

On the way home, we stopped at McDonald's for lunch. I really wasn't hungry for a greasy burger, so I ordered the Chicken McNuggets. My brother ordered a McTasty Deluxe or something like that...I have to be honest, I don't eat at McDonald's often enough to know their menu. Is it a Big N Tasty? McTasty? One of those burgers with the misnomer, anyway. As we were driving away, my brother chided me, "Chicken McNuggets? What are you, 12?" Nice.

As for Super Mario Galaxy (because I know Cliff Glypha is gonna want my full opinion)...when the hell did Elmo start doing the voice for Mario? I put the disc in the Wii and was greeted with freaking Elmo screaming "Soooooooper Marrrrreeeeo Galaxeeeee!!!" Hopefully 10 year old kids think this is dominant, because it upset me so greatly I almost spilled my Bud Light.

The game itself, thankfully, is just about the greatest video game ever, and I am comfortable saying that. Its like a suped-up version of old Mario games -- modern remixes of the classic music, giant 3D versions of all the old characters, and modern twists on the Warp Zone feature. And thankfully, even though the Wii has the ability to play full speech, the characters still only speak one or two words, with the rest typed out in poorly-translated Engrish (and yes, I know that's misspelled, its a joke you moron).

Nine cent purchases at Target? Mario video games? Chicken McNuggets? If it wasn't for the existence of my mortgage and car payments, maybe there would be some credence to those "What are you, 12" claims. You bet.

My brother and I surprised our Dad with tickets to the Vikings game Sunday night, and managed to keep it a secret until Sunday morning. This was amazing not only because we talked about how the Vikes were going to dominate the game practically ALL NIGHT on Saturday, but because a couple of people at dinner were so excited they almost spilled the beans.

Seriously, this wasn't that big a deal. But one of my mother's best friends, upon hearing the plans, told me "Oh, I have goosebumps just thinking about you guys doing this for your dad! What a special gift, tickets to the game with his two sons!" Apparently we're better shoppers than we thought. I had the idea for this little adventure back in September when the Vikings were still terrible. In past years, its been impossible to get Viking tickets; with their recent run of suckiness, that has changed. A bad year on the field translated into a great year to buy tickets for a game.

For Christmas this year, my brother and I are surprising our Dad with tickets to the Vikings-Redskins game on the 23rd. While we've both been to Vikings games in the past, he hasn't been since the Met Stadium days some 30 years ago. That was back when the Vikings were tough and played outdoors, frequently in the snow. News flash: it gets just as cold and snowy in Minny as it does in Green Bay. The advantages of the cold weather the Packers now enjoy were once employed by the Vikings too.

Hell, I wish the Vikings still played outdoors. Football is a game meant to be played outdoors, taking the elements into account, and adapting your style of play to succeed. But having been to two games in late December/early January, I have to tell you...the 'Dome is awfully nice as a fan.

In June at a Twins game, when its 85 degrees and sunny? The dome is not a friendly place. It stinks, quite frankly. But in December when its 15 degrees below zero? Its a freakin' oasis of friendliness.

The first Vikings game I went to in person was on January 2, 2000. We drove through 18 inches of snow on mostly unplowed interstates to get there, and upon arriving in the Twin Cities, stepped out of our car into frigid 10 degree weather with 20 mile-per-hour wind gusts. The 70-degree climate controlled Metrodome was a friendly place that day, I have to tell you.

Four years later, my brother and I went to a Saturday-before-Christmas game between the Dolphins and Vikings, and it was the same story. There was only about six inches of snow, but it was 10 below zero with the wind chill. Sitting outside for 3-1/2 hours in that, or in a 70 degree teflon bubble? Um, is that even a question?

And this Sunday, with Minnesota buried beneath two feet of snow and temperatures expected to barely crack the mid-teens, it would be a pretty damn menacing prospect to sit outside for four hours. That was before NBC decided to move the game to Sunday Night, because its the best game of the week. The low on Sunday is expected to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 degrees. I don't care who you are, that's cold.

In June, when the Twins are playing, I despise the Metrodome with every fiber of my being. In December, its the most glorious place on earth. Especially when the Vikings don't wear their ridiculous clown pants.

You bet.

I'm all for convenience and moving towards a paperless society. And I love Ticketmaster's PDF ticket option -- which if you're not familiar, you should be. Order tickets online, they email you a PDF ticket, you print it out, and BAM you've got your tickets. I love this.

That was until I bought them as a gift for someone.

There's something tangible about putting paper tickets in an envelope, gifting them to someone, and having them open the envelope to discover tickets to an event they want to attend. PDF tickets are on letter-sized paper, and are roughly 85% advertisements, depending on the event and the venue. Your options in gifting them, as I see it, are threefold:

1) Email the PDF file to the person

2) Stick the 8-1/2 x 11 paper ticket-slash-commercial in a manila letter envelope, and gift it as you normally would, or fold said ticket-slash-commercial down to a smaller size before putting it in an appropriate sized envelope

3) Tell the person verbally, "Hey, I bought you tickets for XYZ!"

Lame, lame, lame. Sorry, I just think those are all lame options. The 8-1/2 x 11 paper ticket is terrible looking. There's just no way that looks right as a gift. And emailing a PDF seems so...impersonal. And telling someone what you bought them seems wrong. I dunno, maybe I'm just being stupid.

All I know is I've got two days until my brother and I have to give these tickets to our Dad, and I still don't know how we're going to present them to him. You Bet.

"Ninjas. Shadow men with ice water in their veins and death at their fingertips, elusive assassins who fill the midnight world with the whispery footprints of vengeance. These are their stories."

That's good writing, isn't it? Its from the back of a value DVD from the Dollar Aisle at Super Target, which is pretty much the best place ever. Usually DVDs from the dollar bin are poorly produced crap, with badly designed artwork and broken english text. Surprisingly, while the front cover of this one the usual crap, the back is cleanly designed (using Helvetica!) and the writer had what appears to be at least a 12th grade grasp of english, which is at least three and quite possibly even four years more than most discount DVDs.

"The Master" is the latest in a long line of gag Christmas gifts exchanged between by brother and I. Its hard to go wrong with picking out the worst DVD from the bargain bin. When its two episodes of a short-lived TV show from the heydey of bad dramatic television -- the 1970s -- and it stars Lee Van Cleef, well, its Awesome, even when its trying ever so hard not to be.

"Starring Lee Van Cleef as John McAllister, one of the few westerners welcomed into this bloody underworld of righteous reckoning, The Master is filled with enough breathless martial arts action to captivate even the fiercest of video warriors."

Video warriors? Righteous reckoning? Wow. Just...wow.

Truth:

Wassail is tasty.

Lesson:

But only if you let it cool off slightly before drinking it.

But Wait, There's Less:

I burned my lower lip completely off my face by drinking a hearty gulp immediately after pouring it. (Not really; but I did jump back about two inches on contact, and my lips were chapped until Sunday)

--

Truth:

Comments about "meat" are usually hilarious, even if you're really just talking about meat.

Lesson:

Especially when Cliff Glypha is within earshot.

But Wait, There's Less:

Continental Frutiger, a vegetarian, removed the ham from his Jimmy Johns Finger Sandwich and asked, "Anyone want my meat?" Cliff turned around, and I'll let you guess what he said...

No matter how many times I claim I will never sing in public again, Karaoke or otherwise, I always seem to get roped back into it. Funny how that always seems to be the case. For someone who has been accused of stubbornness from time to time, its amazing how easily I can be convinced to un-retire from public displays of bad singing.

Wednesday evening was the office Christmas party. I walked in two hours after it had kicked off, because I had another party to go to right after work. I had not been in the door two minutes when one guy handed me a bottle of beer, and another one handed me a pool cue. "Here, you got next game, buddy." These are the things that happen when you're a popular guy. Free beer and a ready-waiting game of pool.

After we finished the game (we lost), I ordered up another beer and began making the rounds, because when you know so many people at a party, you need to make sure to at least say hi to all of them. Halfway through that second beer I walked up to a table of ladies from the office. One of them was itching to sing karaoke, but there were two problems. One, she didn't want to sing alone and Two, she wanted to sing a song that was a duet requiring a male vocalist. Specifically, she wanted to sing the Sonny & Cher classic, "I Got You Babe".

Apparently she had been asking people all night, and had been rebuked several times over. Having just arrived minutes before, I had yet had the chance to follow suit. Because don't be mistaken, there was no way I was going to sing. Asking me was merely a formality; my answer was already prepared, and it was two letters...not three.

At first glance, this looks like a perfectly ordinary t-shirt, no? I mean, if you can get past the deuchebaggery of wearing a shirt that says "My team's player won the Heisman!", that is. I have a lot of sports-themed clothing, and I can't imagine owning, or even wearing, a shirt exclaiming a player on one of my teams won an award. You don't see me wearing a Johan Santana "Cy Young" t-shirt. Or an Adrian Peterson "I rushed for 297 yards" shirt. And I never would, even if such lame things existed.

But anyway, that's not the point. Look closer at this shirt; it doesn't say "Tim Tebow: 2007 Heisman Trophy Winner"...it says "Florida Quarterback". Nice.

QB Eagles approves of this (warning: gratuitous Tecmo Bowl reference). Omaha Blogger also approves of this. My question is, does this mean Brandon Fraizer, the backup QB for the Gators, could wear this shirt and tell people he won the Heisman? He is technically "Florida Quarterback"...just not THE Florida Quarterback.

All kidding aside, this ridiculous shirt is made possible by the NCAA, which prohibits players from marketing their names or likenesses, but allows schools to put their name and logo on anything, anywhere. It makes for a pretty ridiculous design, and out of all the hilarious things about it, my favorite is probably that the word "Quarterback" is so small...almost like it was tacked into the design at the last minute.

Wouldn't it be hysterical if this principle of generic naming was a regular occurrence in other walks of life?

Instead of Random Guy At Burger King, we'll call him "Steven Smith", it might be "Cashier BK". Instead of Cliff Glypha, it might be "Host BADCast". Instead of Jay Leno, it might be "Unfunny". You bet. The possibilities are endless, really.

What a ridiculous shirt. SG Bulls approves.

Monday morning, I got a pouting look from the fantasy football owner who's been running away with not only my division, but our entire league, all season. For most of the season, I had the second best record in the league...and second best in my own division! Week after week, I kept winning, hoping for someone else to knock her off. Week after week, she dismantled one opponent after another.

I knew that the final game of the season we would play, and I would have a chance to knock her off myself. That game was this week. The utter destruction can be seen at the left (although I took this screen grab before the end of the Monday Night game, and my QB scored me two more points after the grab). Good stuff.

172 points! Look at that Devastation of Musculation! Isn't it epic? If it wasn't for TJ Houshmanzadah having a bad week, I might have pushed 200 points, which just isn't done.

"You really kicked my butt this week."

"Well, I kept waiting all season for someone else to do it, so I finally had to take care of it myself!"

"172 points, you didn't show any mercy at all."

"Cobra Kai shows no mercy! I put you in a body bag, yeaeeeeeah!"

She didn't get the bad Karate Kid reference. Oh well. 172-89 is a good ol' fashioned beatdown, momentarily making me wish my team was named "Chuck Norris" instead of "Cleverly Named Team".

Tempering my enthusiasm: even after the Chuck Norris Roundhouse, I'm 10-4 and she's 12-2. We're both in the playoffs. Here's what really steams me, though: I have the second best record in the entire league, the second most points, and yet I'm the 5th seed in the playoffs. The four division winners automatically get seeds 1-4, despite their record.

Funny thing is, at 10-4 I play the #4 seed who is 7-7. Because he won his division with that horrible record.

Whatever. I'm guaranteeing a win, not just in the first round of the playoffs, but the whole taco. I'm winning. Book it, Danno. You bet.

Tuesday, I was supposed to be in Seward, Nebraska, visiting a friend of mine who's a college professor and assisting him in passing judgment on his students' final presentations. Then Mother Nature smacked that plan upside the head with her shoe, in the form of 1/3 inch of ice and several inches of snow.

I'd taken the day off work so that I could go to Seward, so when that trip got canceled I suddenly had a free day off. This was a case where it was probably a good thing I was planning on carpooling with three other people, because left to my own facilities, I  would have made the drive regardless of the weather. Sometimes its good to have dissenting viewpoints to convince you not to do stupid things.

So what did I do with my suddenly free day? I played video games. Aaannnd that's about it. Cliff Glypha will have a fit when he hears this, but I turned by Nintendo Wii on and according to the calendar that charts usage, the last time I'd played it was...

August 12. Four months ago!

1. If Led Zeppelin reunite, will they play "Stairway"? Slate says the song is the single biggest obstacle to a full-fledged reunion tour</a>.

"While there are still many obstacles to a Zeppelin tour, the most vexing may be that Robert Plant will have to overcome his reluctance to sing the song that has done the most damage to the band. Yes, 'Stairway to Heaven.'"

I've always found the fascination/derision that song generates to be very curious. Its the closest thing Zeppelin ever had to a hit -- even though it was never a single. But out of their entire catalog, it might be, at best, my 20th or even 30th favorite Zep song. Yet I understand most of the civilized world disagrees with me on that, and I'm OK with that. We all have our own opinions. I happen to prefer "Heartbreaker/Livin' Lovin' Maid", millions of others prefer "Stairway to Heaven". Whatever.

More from Slate: Stairway "turned Zeppelin into a joke. It was 'Stairway' that branded Zeppelin as spaced-out mystics. It was 'Stairway' that drove them to the madness of the absurd fantasy sequences in their movie The Song Remains the Same. It was 'Stairway' that sold them to a mass audience that found it amusing to hold lighters aloft throughout the song, perhaps under the understandable impression that they were attending a concert by the Moody Blues. Plant has disowned 'Stairway.' But 'Stairway' would be an essential component in any set list constructed by a band calling itself Led Zeppelin."

Page/Plant conspicuously left the song out of their mid-nineties "Unledded" MTV special. Would they really be able to play a reunion gig and not play it now? To be fair, that was only half of Zep, and they weren't calling themselves Led Zeppelin. A band calling themselves Led Zeppelin pretty much HAS to play their biggest hit, don't they?

If it were me, I'd open up the show with Stairway. "We've got so many freakin' great songs, we can OPEN the show with Stairway. How you like them apples?"

But they probably won't play it. Just like Styx won't play Mr. Roboto anymore. Both cases are extraordinarily disappointing.

Its an old cliche, really, but I'll be damned if it isn't true: ladies love cute babies. How do I know this to be true? Because Saturday, I took my niece to the mall and the results were nothing short of a revelation.

I had offered to take her so that my brother and his wife could do some Christmas shopping, which seemed like a nice thing to do, because once you have kids, you don't get to do things without the kids very often. So it was that I wound up in the mall. Now, just me in a mall, by myself, is an odd sight in and of itself, because you just won't find me in a mall very often. It isn't that I hate shopping, I just have about 16 other things I'd rather do on a given day.

So we split up, my brother and his wife at one end of the mall, me and my 14-month-old niece at the other. If me in the mall is odd enough, imagine me pushing a baby around in a stroller! Yeah, you bet. But we had a ball. We ate some free fudge samples from a candy store. We enjoyed a cinnamon roll. I introduced her to the genius of Eric Clapton. Mostly, we just strolled around, with me hamming it up and making her giggle incessantly. Now, this is where that ol' cliche came into play, because if I had a nickel for every time a lady approached us to find out what was so hilariously funny...well, it would be a lot, I'll just put it that way.

At one point, we're sitting by the fireplace in the food court, and she was applauding her own stellar effort in successfully identifying her nose. Really, she was clapping, and I was clapping right along with her. I was trying to feed her tiny chopped up pieces of chicken strips, and she was trying to feed them to me. She does that a lot -- frequently picking up pieces of food from her plate and holding them out for you to eat -- mimicking you trying to feed her, obviously. A nice gesture, though. We were laughing about something when a trio of ladies came up to us, and when they found out the answer to their Daily Double inquiry (a bachelor hanging out with his niece) I might as well have been Tom Selleck at that point. One of them told me to call her sometime.

That happened three times. Inside of two hours. And I am not sh**ing you. Problem was, the mall we were at was in Des Moines, so that totally does me no good at all. But hey, its a good story, isn't it? You bet.

I told me brother I would give him my Creighton tickets for a weekend game in January so he and his wife can have a night out on the town, and even offered to pay for their dinner. Because that's just the kind of guy I am. Of course, while they're out living it up on my dime, I'll be at the mall with my niece...

Saturday morning, amidst the ice storm that made driving a treacherous exercise in futility, I went out to buy tickets for the Van Halen concert in February. They went on sale at noon, and while its true I could have waited until later in the day to go out, I had a suspicion tickets wouldn't last that long (or at least, not the $47.50 ducats I was willing to buy). It was a fair suspicion; VH has sold out the majority of their dates on the tour thus far, and Omaha sells out every Qwest Center concert unless its Prince. How Motley Crue could outdraw Prince beats me, but I digress.

And don't get me wrong, I like Motley Crue, and actually considered going to that show. But given the choice between one or the other...its Prince every time. If you doubt me, ask yourself this, and answer honestly: which is better choice when its on cable, "Purple Rain" or "Tommy Lee Goes To College"? Or that strange show where Vince Neil tried to get back into shape...yeah, its Purple Rain. You bet.

When the ticket window opened at noon, I was about 20 deep in line, having waited for a robust half-hour. That's the level of dedication I had (sic). The line was moving slowly, and I don't know what made me think of it, but I pulled out my iPod Touch and used their free Wi-Fi to jump on Ticketmaster's website. Inside of three minutes, I had purchased my tickets and received PDF e-tickets in my email. The scary guy in the "Fair Warning" t-shirt from 1982 behind me was both mesmerized AND jealous, which is not a good combination from a guy whose breath reeked of Jack Daniels.

Then he coined a term I had never heard before -- hence me crediting him with coining it. "Hey, dude, you can't virtually budge in line! That's not fair."

Virtually budge? Hmm, I'd never thought of it that way. Is that really what I'd done? I mean, I suppose so, but is that really bad manners? Can I get a ruling on this?

I didn't really have time to think, as Big Bad Bill began rambling some incoherent soapbox speech about "Once you're in line, you can't use your fancy computer to buy tickets online. You made the commitment to the in-person line, you can't just change your mind and go online while you're in line! What about the rest of us who have to wait another 20 minutes to get to the front of the line? You're a virtual-budger...an e-budger, that's what you are!"

Nice. I was curious what his next irrational - slash - preposterous argument would be, but I also valued my well-being...so I thought to myself, "Get out of here now!" So I said to myself, in my mind, "So long, sucker!" and bolted for the door. For the record, I did not lose any sleep over my virtual "budging in line". Nor should I have, because it wasn't wrong. Right?

You bet.

This has officially gone too far. During the Bears-Giants game on Sunday, Omaha's FOX affiliate interrupted the game to show...a press conference announcing Nebraska's new football coach. Even if I was a Husker fan, which I most certainly am not, I'm pretty sure I would have been pissed about this. And I'm not even a Bears or a Giants fan! Seriously...interrupting an NFL game to show a press conference?

Absolutely absurd. Patently ridiculous. All I can say is its a good thing for my TV that the Vikings played the noon game, because if the Vikes game had been interrupted to show a dadgum press conference -- A PRESS CONFERENCE! -- there would have been serious repercussions. Soft foam bricks would have been hurled at walls. Made-up words bearing minor resemblances to actual cuss words without being actual cuss words would have been loudly exclaimed. Vaguely demeaning phone calls to the FOX affiliate would have been made from a random pay phone. Shoes would have been thrown. Simply put, it would not have been pretty.

I know Nebraska football is more important than just about everything to most people in this state, but interrupting a live NFL game to show a PRESS CONFERENCE? Wow. At this point I'm pretty sure that if the weatherman had already broken into programming to warn us of an impending tornado, with majestic hook echoes, wall clouds and all that dangerous gobbledygook, and Nebraska called a press conference to announce that Tom Osborne tried to take a crap but couldn't because he was constipated, they would interrupt the interruption to tell us so. Because, you know, Nebraska Football is the Most Important Thing In The World. Right.

By the way, it is a shame that my boys up on the Hilltop lost their "other" football game on Saturday. You know, the other football, the one where they actually settle things on the field in an actual tournament, which is such a crazy concept that American Football refuses to embrace it. Its called soccer in America, but the rest of the world calls it Football. Creighton lost in the NCAA tournament to Illinois-Chicago, a team they should have beaten, in a tournament they could have won. I was kind of hoping they would make it to the National Championship Game, because I couldn't wait to see them interrupt the TV coverage to bring us a press conference from Lincoln to tell us about how new coach Bo Pellini adopted a dog from the humane society, and isn't he the cutest puppy EVER? That would have been dominant. But alas.

You bet.

Everyone's favorite New Jerseyan, Carl Brutananadilewski from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, takes on the BCS. My favorite line, though, concerns his boy Eli Manning's four-interception game against the Vikes.

"I saw Eli Manning after the game, saying he learned a lot from the game. Oh, is that right, Eli? Did you learn not to throw the ball to the big guys in the purple shirts?"

Ha. You bet.

(Warning: This is most definitely NSFW*!)