Random Thoughts That Stayed in My Brain Long Enough for Me to Write Them Down...

I think that combinations of sounds that have a clear, unambiguous meaning should be accepted as words. For example, Melissa did something silly and I made fun of her for it. She said "Don't make fun of me," so I replied "Then don't be so makefunofable." If you can think of another word that means the same as 'makefunofable' then well done. But why shouldn't this be a word? If everyone knows what it means, and it's clearly made up of English sounds, then I say go for it.

If my last name were Case or Tyme, I don't think I would be able to resist the urge to name my son Justin. Ditto for if my last name were Much, and naming a daughter Justice.

The parking garage elevator at Maryland has a sign next to it that says "In case of fire, use stairs." When was the last time you saw cement catch on fire? Not to mention the fact that the stairwell is also, in fact, made of cement. So, even if the whole garage miraculously caught fire, I think going into an enclosed area that's on fire is probably worse than, say, jumping off the roof, or even getting in an elevator.

Dr. Pepper has made a commercial bragging that their soda has 23 flavors in it. First of all, I'm really not sure this is something to brag about. And what about cherry-vanilla Dr. Pepper? Isn't it basically admitting that those 23 flavors they bragged about weren't enough? Second, am I the only one who can see Dr. Pepper as being accidentally created when all the leftovers from a party were poured into a cup and some guy lost a bet and had to taste it, only to find it tasted kind of good.

Is it just me, or would the word "dude" be much cooler if it were spelled "dood"?

When I own a TV channel, I'm going to make it publicly known that I will give a huge discounts to any ads that I consider to be funny, and the price of an ad will increase with the number of times it's run. Think how much better watching TV would be if all the commercials were funny and you didn't have to see the same ad 6 times in one hour. I would certainly go out of my way to watch this channel.

Things it's impossible to look cool doing:
1) Eat french onion soup
2) Drink through a straw (if you're a guy)
3) Pick a ping pong ball up that's rolling around the floor after you've already tried once and missed

Gravity - it's not just a good idea, it's the law. There's a mattress commercial that talks about how their material is "gravity defying." Occasionally you hear references on TV or other places to gravity defiance. Let me spare you the suspense. Nothing actually defies gravity (that we know of so far). Things resist the force of gravity to varying degrees, but nothing sits there and stares gravity and the face and says "no, bitch." Most of the things that "defy gravity" are boring, like inertia. If gravity had its way, the moon would have been pulled into the surface of the Earth eons ago. But inertia keeps trying to make it go away from the Earth and the two balance happily to keep it floating around us permanently.

Is it just me or is stepping on a nice, fresh pine cone on the sidewalk way more satisfying than it should be in principle. Why is it not even close to as fun when somebody has partially squashed it first? Some pine cones are clearly better than others for this. You need one that's long and thin, but not too thin or else the crunch isn't as good. And am I the only one who secretly wonders if this is so enjoyable because adding entropy to the universe is fun.

I think we should call the dead "human beens"

When I make a horror movie, I'm going to screw with people. Normal situations where the slightest thing seems weird I'll play very tense, horror-movie music like I'm building up to something. For example, a single guy comes home from work and his umbrella, which was leaning against the wall, is now on the floor (DUN DUN DUN and zoom in on the umbrella dramatically). So the guy starts suspiciously walking around the house looking through each room, but nothing happens and eventually he forgets it. Then later he's randomly walking down the street with a friend and a guy just shoots him in the head. I'm not sure why but this seems funny to me.

In northern VA (and probably other places too) there is a sign which says "speed limit enforced by aircraft." I have this vision in my head of a police helicopter swooping overhead, lowering a big claw down, grabbing an offending car off the road and dropping it in a lake or something.

Have you noticed that whenever somebody begins a sentence with "no offense" or "don't take this the wrong way," what they're really saying is "I'm going to say something offensive" or "you're going to take this the wrong way." I had a student call me over during an Astronomy final I was giving and start with "I'm not asking you for the answer, but..." and I knew I wouldn't be able to answer. He ended up asking if this term he was supposed to define had something to do with our atmosphere. Which of course I couldn't say. I guess it bothers me that we do things like this - and everyone seems to. I think you might actually be better off saying "I'm going to offend you now - you smell" rather than "No offense, but you smell." At least the first one would be funny.

Something this society desperately needs - people whose only job is to carry big, tall poles around with tarp or some other kind of opaque fabric draped between them. Whenever there is a car accident, these people will be called to the scene, and make a wall around the wreckage, blocking off any view of the accident from either side of the road (this is particularly necessary for highways). I'm tired of losing valuable hours of my life because some schmuck (or in this case, many schmucks) can't contain his curiosity, or at least drive at a reasonable speed while sneaking a peak to see the carnage. I don't understand what's so entertaining about a smashed up car, but apparently there's something. Auto racing exists for these people - don't they get enough of crashes there? It's high time we removed this temptation from people and kept our roads moving smoothly. Because now they back up on both sides of the road until every single vehicle and/or body part has been removed from the scene.

If I were a criminal chasing somebody through a crowd of people (you know, like you see in the movies), I think I would hold up a fake police badge and yell "stop that person, he's a criminal." People would definitely help you.

Is anyone else bothered by action movies where the bad guys open up whole clips of machine gun fire at a good guy who's running along and don't hit him (or her)? It's bad enough if they fire a whole clip out of a hand gun and hit nothing but air, but, at reasonably close range, trained soldiers just aren't going to miss completely with that many bullets. The newer James Bond movies are particularly bad about this.

When driving up to a traffic light that's red, you frequently have a choice of which lane to get in. I have a theory about which lane you should get in (assuming that you don't have to be in any particular lane within less than a mile or so). You should always get in the lane with the fewest cars in it, unless one of the cars in that lane is known to be very slow. Maybe this should be completely obvious, but there exist other factors to consider (the leftmost lane is usually a faster lane than the rightmost lane). I noticed that I was frequently violating this principle, usually out of laziness. The reason why I've found this to be true is that even though slow people tend to frequent the right lanes more often, they seem to end up in lanes randomly at lights. To some extent I think this is because they tend to get into a lane they will need to occupy eventually much sooner than other cars. So, assuming your goal is to avoid being behind a slow person, you should choose the lane with the fewest cars, since that has fewer chances to hit a slow person (not to mention that fewer cars take, on average, less time to start up).

If I were extremely rich and famous (think Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods), I wouldn't let companies pay me millions of dollars to endorse products. Instead, I would pick products or companies that I really liked and offer to endorse their product for free. I really don't believe ads on TV where the person is being paid all this money to say the like/use a product. But, I bet you could really have an impact if you came on TV and explained why the product was so good and that's why you offered to endorse it for free.

I saw a guy wearing a shirt in the mall the other day that said "Overworked and underf*cked." Just thought I'd pass that one along.

A few nights ago at about 11:30 PM, there was a guy biking along the side of MD 29 (a 55 MPH, limited access highway for anyone not from this area) dressed in all black with no reflectors on his bike. I must admit I've never heard of this particular method of suicide before.

What a stupid definition. In an article describing how adults binge drinkers prefer beer, whereas teenagers prefer liquor, they happened to mention the definition of "binge drinker." Their definition was anyone who'd had at least 5 drinks on at least one occasion in the last 30 days. If you go out to a party from 7-12 and have 5 drinks, you could be stone cold sober the whole time, but you'll be a binge drinker.

Biggest waste of money ever - when you enter the state of Maryland, (at least on a major road) you are greeted by a welcoming sign with the governor's name on it. What possible good could it do anyone to know the governor's name? "Oh look, honey, I know I've never been to Maryland before, but since some guy I don't know is governor, I feel better. How thoughtful of them." And now the sign must be changed and a new sign made every 4 years or so for all 8000 places where you can go from any other state into Maryland. Everyone who voted for this should be shot.

Here's the problem I have with reality TV (at least in principle). We watch professional sports teams because they are really good at their sport. You watch cooking shows because the people on there are really good at cooking. News anchors get their jobs because they are good at reporting. Reality TV is completely the opposite of this. It's watching people live who are, as a rule, bad at life. Why do I want to spend my time watching people do something they're terrible at?

A headline from CNN's science section today: Men want hot women, study confirms. Really? Are you sure? Just exactly how many scientists and research dollars did it take them to figure this one out?

Just as an added thought to the last item, the results of the study were actually amusing (at least to me). Basically, they ran a speed-dating thing where 20 men and women met each other then had the opportunity to offer a date to a few of the opposite sex afterwards. Beforehand, they had given each man and woman a questionaire asking them what they were looking for in the opposite sex, so they could compare with who they actually chose to offer dates to. What happened is that the men completely ignored what they wrote and offered dates to the women they thought were most attractive, and the women also completely ignored what they wrote and offered dates to the men they thought were the closest to their own level of attractiveness. Hurray for human nature.

I really wonder how many accidents are caused each year by funeral processions. I couldn't find any statistics on this, but it must be a pretty high number. In a rural town with one stoplight, sure it's fine. But going through a major intersection between two 3-lane roads with 50 MPH speed limits and trusting the cars in the other direction to see you and stop is not something you will EVER catch me doing. So if you die, and you want a funeral procession, I will not be participating. Get over it. In major suburban and urban areas, this is outdated, dangerous, and needs to be made an obsolete practice. Who really cares whether all of the cars get there at the same time as the dead guy (or girl).

We have this vague notion in our society that we should respect and listen to our elders simply because they are old. I don't really buy this. Our society works so hard to put idiot-proofing warnings on everything that just surviving til you're 75 is no longer a real feat. Besides there are enough people nowadays that simple statistics tells us -some- of the dumb ones must survive to reach old age. The elderly should have to earn respect just like everyone else if they want to be listened to.

Currently on TV there is a commercial for a pickup truck that depicts a large airplane landing, opening the back cargo hold, and letting out a pickup truck that's chained to the plane. The truck then brakes and supposedly slows the plane to a halt. Now I could quibble with their physics, and I'm sure there's no way the truck could stop the plane in any normal amount of distance (they don't show how long the runway is, nor whether or not the plane is helping at all with the braking). More amusing to me, though, is at the bottom when it says "professional driver on a closed course. do not attempt." Who exactly are they worried about attempting this? Yeah I'll just run out, hijack a cargo plane and try this on my own private runway for kicks. And moreover, why do they need a professional driver to do nothing more than push the brake pedal? Children can be taught to do that. Also how many "open" runways have you heard of? I'm pretty sure most of them that could land a gigantic cargo plane fall into the "closed" category.

I happened to have the late news on the other night (aaand now we know why I never have the news on TV), and they reported on an incident that happened at the airport. A small plane was coming in without its landing gear deployed. Fortunately, the plane landed safely, no one was injured, and the incident caused no delays or disruptions of any kind. Well, thank you for taking the time to tell me! There must be something better for them to tell me on the news rather than that a plane landed safely.

For some reason it bugs me when movies have a fixed timer ticking down to the end of the world or some such, and then the movie takes way longer than that amount of time to resolve the conflict. I just seems like if there's 5 minutes until the space monkeys destroy the human race with their ultimate doom lasers of death, then they really ought to do it when they promise. Who can I trust at the movies if not space monkeys? Frequently movies violate their own time constraints by significant amounts, and there should be a law against it or something.

How you know it's not your day: A friend opened a fortune cookie the other day and inside were two fortunes. The first read, essentially, "Forget your cares for a while and take some time to relax." The second read "Idleness is the work of fools".

So I was listening to the song "The Background" by Third Eye Blind today, and I realized that I didn't actually know all the words. So, naturally, I looked them up online. Well that all went fine, but as I was at the end they had a list of some more Third Eye Blind songs that I might want lyrics for, which makes sense. Now below that they had links to some more songs under the title "related lyrics," which contained the following songs: Thunder Road (Bruce Springsteen), How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (The Bee Gees), Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin), Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Will Smith), She Don't Move Me No More (B.B. King), Into the Mystic (Van Morrison), and One (U2). Now, I don't claim to be a music expert. However, I would be shocked if somebody can find something these songs have in common that is in any way related to "The Background." In fact, other than the fact that they seem to have all been made before ~1990, I'd have trouble believing anything other than that they were taken at random from a database of songs for which they have lyrics.

I passed a bench in Baltimore City yesterday that read "Baltimore, Greatest City in the World." Yeah... the accuracy of this statement could easily be improved by replacing the word "greatest" with just about any other adjective in the English language.

My brother-in-law's ringtone for when my sister calls him is "Crazy Bitch" by Buckcherry (if you aren't familiar, look up the lyrics). I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to be amused, concerned, annoyed or any number of other emotions. The frontrunner is definitely amused.

Quick, what's the opposite of "inside-out?" I bet at least 90% of you thought to yourselves "outside-in".

I read an article today about a man who fell off a non-moving escalator and fell two stories to his death while leaving a baseball game. A relative who was with him described the incident as him walking down the escalator, while holding the railing when he "lost his footing." If you are really, truly walking down effectively stairs, and you trip, you don't fall over the 3-foot tall barrier, unless you are the most topheavy human being ever. You fall down the stairs, it hurts, you're embarassed, but you don't die. And honestly if he was holding the hand rail and tripped, he shouldn't have even fallen! This all sounds like a load of crap to me. When I read a second article on another site, it said there are witnesses who say they saw the guy sliding down the banister, while the family continues to reiterate he was walking down. The direct quote was "He wasn't moving or nothing; he was just walking down. I guess he tried to say something to us or something, and I guess he just lost his balance and flipped over." Well that convinced me! I mean all the time people try to say something to me, then lose their balance and fall over a perfectly good railing. Seriously, what was this guy's blood alcohol content if he really truly just suddenly fell sideways over the edge.
Me <------- not buying it. He was doing something dumb and got what he deserved, and nobody wants to admit it.

When I'm king of the world and I need to extract information from spies or something, my preferred form of torture will be to find a way to give people the sensation of being about to sneeeze for hours (days?) at a time, but never letting them actually do it.

Roadkill is really a poor name for it - it should be called carkill. When was the last time you saw a road kill an animal?

So I'm running along a trail and there's a squirrel in the trail. Naturally, I just kept running and eventually he scrambles out of the way and up a tree. I wonder what squirrels are thinking after this happens. Is it "OH YEAH, that guy had no chance! I totally faked him out." Or do they realize "I mean I got away, but it really didn't seem like his heart was in it..." I find it kind of comforting that if food ever becomes an issue for humans, we are slowly training all of the other animals on the planet to be less afraid of us.

Speaking of squirrels and running, in high school one of my friends actually stepped on a squirrel while running. We weren't even paying attention to it, and it faked left, then faked right, then left then finally froze. This tactic was not a success. I think he got mostly tail since the squirrel kind of just emitted some disturbing sound and skittered away.

Can someone explain to me what's so horribly offensive and lewd about nipples. Why is it that showing the other 95% of a female breast is perfectly acceptable but if you add in the nipple it becomes indecent and inappropriate for the public to view? It's not as though this standard is applied to any other supposedly indecent body parts. Not that I'm complaining about the 95% that -is- allowed it just doesn't make sense to me.