One of the simple pleasures of life:  Needing 13 file folders and realizing that you grabbed exactly 13 out of the box.

One of the annoyances of life:  Looking at a clock that reads 8:38.  It’s one of the ugliest times possible when written in blocky digital numbers.

A friend of mine once coined the phrase “Audioslaving.”  It was meant to describe the act of combining two things that are awesome (e.g. Chris Cornell and Rage Against the Machine) and ending up with something horrendous (e.g. the phrase’s namesake).

It occurs to me that the opposite could also exist.  The Reverse-Audioslave, if you will.  I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but I’m willing to bet that countless food recipes are, to some extent, Reverse-Audioslaves.  Plenty of ingredients are pretty terrible on their own, yet somehow compliment eachother when mixed together.  It would be an interesting experiment to try combining awful artists to see what miraculous results could occur.

Similarly, I’ve recently been reminded of the existence of The Tyler Perry.  This is when two terrible things come together to make something astoundingly even more terrible.  If I might speak directly to Tyler Perry for a moment:  You aren’t good at comedy, nor are you good at drama.  Stop trying to combine these things into dramedies.  In fact…stop doing either, period.

Tyler Perry’s works are like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, except made out of dead puppies and Jerry Lewis routines.

He couldn’t just bow out gracefully. He had to be a pussy and take The Tonight Show back from the much better man Conan. Now Conan’s got some serious issues from just trying to get something new going. Fuck you Jay.

Anyway…here’s the link to the story. Not much info yet, but it definitely sucks to hear:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TOPSTORIES/04/01/conan_tiger_prank/

While waiting to pay two months worth of electric bills one day (I realized a while back that Xcel’s late fee is actually cheaper than King Soopers’ charge for processing the transaction each month. Add the extra interest from leaving that money in my bank account for an extra month and I’d be stupid not to pay my bill late…right? But I digress.) I happened to notice a brand of cigar called “Game.” Trendy gansta’ writing and everything; it looked like a Snoop Dogg album cover.

I was reminded of a conversation with Autumn about the inherent meaninglessness of the phrase “change the game.” Ironically, it’s consistent overuse in hip hop and rap has turned the very concept of “changing the game” into a tired worn out cliché.

I’m thoroughly convinced that anyone still uttering these words is simply whipping an idiomatic dead horse.

On a completely unrelated note:

While leaving King Soopers that day, I saw someone wheeling their cart full of groceries towards the boundaries of the parking lot. He edged ever closer to the yellow line on the ground, unaware that crossing it would activate the wheel locks on the cart. I decided to pull into a parking spot just so I could watch the moment where he found himself jerking to a stop. The confused look on his face was priceless. When he realized what had happened, he tried in vain to bring the cart back within the lot’s boundaries. Obviously this didn’t help.

Satisfied, I went home.

At 7-11 this morning, I saw a woman standing in the corner of the store, head down, holding a chocolate muffin to her face.  She licked and nibbled away at the top part of the muffin like a squirrel eating an unshelled peanut.  It was very odd.

That’s all I have to say right now.  Go about your business.

I once had an idea for a video game.  In one of the game’s early boss encounters, you would fight just long enough to trigger an event where you become incapacitated.  As it approachd you to finish you off, an unseen helper would suddenly take a carefully aimed head shot from off screen, saving you.

The twist being that later on in the game a time travelling side story begins and you discover that you were the one who had saved yourself.

I suppose this idea was obvious enough that plenty of people had thought of it already, but it didn’t stop me from feeling extremely disappointed when I saw the exact same plot device used in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  In fact, I’m almost certain that the book was written before I had come up with my version of the idea.

I bring this up because I have experienced far too many cases of this phenomenon in my life.  I’d have to go back to remember them all because I’ve generally tried to forget most of them.  One question that remains for me, though, is this:  Does this happen to me so often because my ideas are mundane enough that anyone else could come up with them, or is it because my ideas are so great that they are bound to become famous when another more dedicated person has the same one?

What was my point, again?

Ah yes…Beard Watch.  For several Novembers now, I have been bringing Beard Watch to you, the viewer.  I started doing this way back in 2005.  A few days ago, however, someone alerted me to the existence of something called “No Shave November.”

Supposedly, “No Shave November” is some kind of popular American unofficial holiday modeled after some Australian moustache-growing-month-kind-of-thing.  Whatever it is, I can’t seem to find any record of this event prior to 2006 (after a thourough search* of Wikipedia revisions of the entry for ”November,” I finally found the date upon which the phrase “No Shave November” was first added, as well as a page for the “holiday” itself that was eventually deleted for the reason, “Obviously a hoax article…“).

The worst part?  Blogger, Brian Cromer, recently made a post about his past experiences with “No Shave November.”  He even took daily pictures à la Beard Watch, but waited until the end of the month to mash them into a video citing that daily updates ”would have been super boring for you, thus guaranteeing the loss of all my consistent readers.”

Well, all I have to say to that is:  Fuck you Brian Cromer!

Mainly, though, I simply no longer have an interest in continuing the tradition of Beard Watch.  I don’t want to sound like an anti-trendist here (i.e. “My favorite band became popular so I must stop liking them.”), but this whole business has just left a sour taste in my mouth.

And let’s face it…none of this helps with my eternal question.  Beard watch wasn’t a mundane idea or a great one.  It was just plain stupid.  So what the hell is going on?

It’s a conspiracy, I tell you.

*In my search of Wikipedia revisions, I also discovered that the most common edits were made by people adding their own birthdays to the page, changing words to “gay” and/or talking about how one thing or another sucks a badly mispelled version of a dick.

While Dewey passed away a couple of years back, I just now stumbled upon the story of Dewey, the library cat.  When Dewey was left in the book return one night, library employees decided to adopt him.  He lived until the ripe old age of 19; during those years he ”worked” for the Spencer Library with the following job description:

1. Reducing stress for all humans who pay attention to him.
2. Sitting by the front door every morning at 9:00 am to greet the public as they enter the library.
3. Sampling all boxes that enter the library for security problems and comfort level.
4. Attending all meetings in the Round Room as official library ambassador.
5. Providing comic relief for staff and visitors whenever possible.
6. Climbing in book bags and briefcases while patrons are studying or trying to retrieve needed papers underneath him.
7. Generating free national and world-wide publicity for Spencer Public Library. (This entails sitting still for photographs, smiling for the camera, and generally being cute.)
8. Working toward status as world’s most finicky cat by refusing all but the most expensive, delectable foods—and even turning up his nose at those most of the time.

I’m surprised, but delighted, that they were able to get away with this for all that time without some whiny bitch complaining that this violated the rights of library-goers who are allergic to cats.  Good for you, Spencer Library.  I wish my local library had a cat hanging out.  Who knows?  Then I might actually go there and pay my late fees.

So, the pills I’ve been taking these last few months have a couple nasty side effects, one of which is that I tend to get fairly tired for a brief period of time each morning.  Rockstar energy drinks help greatly.

This morning, though, I forgot to bring my precious stay-awake elixir and happened to be hit by the worst bout of tiredness I’ve experienced in a long, long time.  All I really remember is 2 hours flying by and some futile attempts to do bits and pieces of work in between nodding off repeatedly, despite my best efforts to keep my eyes open.

At lunch I picked up a triple sized Rockstar, perked up immensely and have since gotten down to business.

The best part of this whole thing was looking over the handwritten notes I had taken while still in my delirious stupor.  The chicken scratches are barely legible remnants of what appear to be a child’s (or drug addict’s) ramblings.  My favorite sections?  “Hospital” became “HStippal,” while “Nebraska Medical Center” somehow transformed into “hexase Nebrsta Nmbra Mede Centre.”

There’s something mystical to me about the “unsolved” math problems of the world.  Occasionally I find myself obsessing over things like the Busy Beaver function and the concept of π.  The thought of all those numbers just sends me into a ponderous daze.  The idea that any number could be too big or too complex for humanity to master is just amazing.

I’ve also spent many hours staring at lists of prime numbers, placing them in tables, trying to discover some discernable pattern.  I like the idea that solving such a problem would somehow lead humanity into a new renaissance (or perhaps into an era of our destruction, reminiscent of the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey).  I always envisioned that by simply placing that one final digit on a chalkboard somewhere, the universe would somehow instantly change.

Or imagine, if you will, taking an incredibly long piece of white yarn, where each centimeter of the yarn equals one number.  Now, take each prime numbered length of yarn and paint it black.  I like to think that were you to take that string and coil it outwards on the ground in a spiral, it would somehow end up drawing the answers to the mysteries of the universe.  Some concrete proof of purpose in all things…a pixelated version of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam or something.

Even if I had the time to attempt such an experiment, though, I don’t think I would.  I’d be too afraid that I would end up staring at a random collection of dots.  Frozen static on the floor.

Edit:  Nevermind.  I just Googled “Prime Number Spiral” to make sure I had never mentioned this before and discovered that my idea is, in fact, not a new one.  The people at numberspiral.com have actually done this already.  The result is not very miraculous, looking more like a basketball than anything else.  Still pretty neat, but not quite the epiphany I had hoped for.  I knew I should have left this idea in my head where the possibilities remained endless…

After completing my order at the McDonald’s drive-through this morning, the lady at the other end of the speaker said to me, “Good job, sir.  That’ll be $9.86.”  Accent on the “job.”  Good job, sir.

“Good job?” I thought to myself.  At first, I waved off the non sequitur as a simple misstatement…something akin to replying, “You, too!” when the pizza delivery driver tells you to enjoy your meal.  However, as I drove around the building, I began to wonder.  Maybe, just maybe, I had displayed some unusually high aptitude for drive-through ordering.  I had, after all, been quick, decisive and polite…all in all, a fairly good showing.

Alas, my suspicions were confirmed when I reached Window #1.  As I held out my debit card, she handed me a large stack of coupons for free breakfast sandwiches (with purchase of a McCafe item, of course).  There were about 20 coupons there.  I can only assume that they must be my reward.  A prize, if you will, for excellence in the field of McMuffin ordering!

I’d like to thank all the little people…