Kudos to The Daily Show for this hilarious spoof on how ridiculously hyped Barack Obama is. The episode from which this clip comes was recorded right before Obama's Thursday night speech at the DNC.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Culture... REAL Culture
I'm a college student. My wife is an extremely bored sales associate at a department store. Neither of us really interacts much with people outside of our personal social sphere. Tonight, we were exposed to a decent cross-section of some of the other types of people out there.
Lauren had a craving for burgers tonight, and for some reason that neither of us really understand, she was craving, of all places, McDonald's. Going to McDonald's is an experience in which we take part once every six to eight months. Naturally, anything more often that that just isn't good for one's health (twice a year is bad enough). Below are some of the scenes we observed during tonight's semiannual gastrointestinal trials.
Horny High-Schoolers
I know you've seen this. A boy and a girl just beginning to enter sexual maturity, but they have no idea what to do with it. Consequently, they spend all their free time all over each other, completely oblivious to other people. There was a couple tonight who actually bothered to order some food, but spent most of the time with the girl sitting on her boyfriend's lap, straddling him and eating his face, rather than her food. It was awful.
Bad Parents
We saw two examples of this. We saw a man with three kids: a little boy and girl who were both enjoying their own Happy Meals, and a baby who spent the majority of the time sleeping in its little carseat-carrier-thingy. The two toddlers happily played with their Happy Meal toys while their father spent almost the entire time talking to someone on his cell phone. He completely ignored his children. So sad. We also saw a father get some food to go, and then loudly threaten his son of probably 4 years that "If you open that Happy Meal before we get in the car, I SWEAR I'll throw that toy away. I SWEAR." Nice. That's the way to get your child to love and respect you: verbal abuse and public humiliation.
Grifters
I'm not really sure if 'Grifters' is a word, so in case it isn't, I'm referring to an 'Artful Dodger' kind of person.
I don't know the details of what happened. I just overheard the tail end of a conversation between the manager and a man with dyed-black hair and several facial piercings (somewhat unusual, for Provo). This man claimed he had spoken to a woman last night, around midnight, and that she had written something down somewhere, and for some reason, this man was entitled to three free sandwiches. I'm guessing someone messed up his order or something, and he didn't realize it until he got home and called back to complain, but didn't want to return to the store. Not only did the manager have no notification from this 'girl' this man had spoken with, but the manager also said that there were no women working that time of night at all. The man persisted. This story is kinda boring, but what shocked me was that in the end, this man kept pushing until he got the three sandwiches he was demanding: two double quarter pounders and some chicken sandwich. That's about fifteen dollars' worth of food, for a story that was CLEARLY made up. I could easily make up a more airtight story than that. Easy.
Who knows what we'll encounter next time we feel like punishing our stomachs with a few ounces of putrid grease? Maybe we'll see a homosexual? A lion tamer? Or, perhaps most rare of all in Provo: a black person?
Lauren had a craving for burgers tonight, and for some reason that neither of us really understand, she was craving, of all places, McDonald's. Going to McDonald's is an experience in which we take part once every six to eight months. Naturally, anything more often that that just isn't good for one's health (twice a year is bad enough). Below are some of the scenes we observed during tonight's semiannual gastrointestinal trials.
Horny High-Schoolers
I know you've seen this. A boy and a girl just beginning to enter sexual maturity, but they have no idea what to do with it. Consequently, they spend all their free time all over each other, completely oblivious to other people. There was a couple tonight who actually bothered to order some food, but spent most of the time with the girl sitting on her boyfriend's lap, straddling him and eating his face, rather than her food. It was awful.
Bad Parents
We saw two examples of this. We saw a man with three kids: a little boy and girl who were both enjoying their own Happy Meals, and a baby who spent the majority of the time sleeping in its little carseat-carrier-thingy. The two toddlers happily played with their Happy Meal toys while their father spent almost the entire time talking to someone on his cell phone. He completely ignored his children. So sad. We also saw a father get some food to go, and then loudly threaten his son of probably 4 years that "If you open that Happy Meal before we get in the car, I SWEAR I'll throw that toy away. I SWEAR." Nice. That's the way to get your child to love and respect you: verbal abuse and public humiliation.
Grifters
I'm not really sure if 'Grifters' is a word, so in case it isn't, I'm referring to an 'Artful Dodger' kind of person.
I don't know the details of what happened. I just overheard the tail end of a conversation between the manager and a man with dyed-black hair and several facial piercings (somewhat unusual, for Provo). This man claimed he had spoken to a woman last night, around midnight, and that she had written something down somewhere, and for some reason, this man was entitled to three free sandwiches. I'm guessing someone messed up his order or something, and he didn't realize it until he got home and called back to complain, but didn't want to return to the store. Not only did the manager have no notification from this 'girl' this man had spoken with, but the manager also said that there were no women working that time of night at all. The man persisted. This story is kinda boring, but what shocked me was that in the end, this man kept pushing until he got the three sandwiches he was demanding: two double quarter pounders and some chicken sandwich. That's about fifteen dollars' worth of food, for a story that was CLEARLY made up. I could easily make up a more airtight story than that. Easy.
Who knows what we'll encounter next time we feel like punishing our stomachs with a few ounces of putrid grease? Maybe we'll see a homosexual? A lion tamer? Or, perhaps most rare of all in Provo: a black person?
Monday, August 11, 2008
Waterboarding
Check out this video from CNN.
I'm not sure what shocks me more: the fact that there's actually a place where you can actually WATCH someone get waterboarded (even if it is just a robot), or the fact that most people the reporter asked had never heard of it.
No wonder this country is in the state it's in. People just don't pay attention.
I'm not sure what shocks me more: the fact that there's actually a place where you can actually WATCH someone get waterboarded (even if it is just a robot), or the fact that most people the reporter asked had never heard of it.
No wonder this country is in the state it's in. People just don't pay attention.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Picking Up Chicks
I've been married for a few months, and I've known my wife since mid-May 2007. Before we met, I was stuck in the BYU dating scene: I was single, and painfully aware of it. Not having a girlfriend, or even having something past a second date, made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Thankfully, those days are over.
When you're single (whether or not you're stuck in the dating atmosphere I was in), you have some kind of plan or approach for how you flirt. There are several things about yourself that you like and try to emphasize to the opposite sex, while trying to hide those things you're insecure about. For instance, among the people I knew, being outdoorsy was really cool. When my roommates would meet women, they'd find ways to bring up all the hikes and campouts in Provo Canyon they had done recently. I didn't do this at all, because I, like my sister, am "Indoorsy". I had to find other things to discuss, to emphasize ME. I'm a DORK. A HUGE dork. I'm 66% Geek, according to one site. I've been spending some of my spare time this summer reading one of my immunology textbooks, for fun. I read all 1500 pages of Les Miserables when I was in ninth grade, and it wasn't for a class. When I was in high school, I was President of the Band and the German Club (twice), and I regularly played Dungeons & Dragons. As you can probably imagine, I struggled a little bit in my flirting.
I tried emphasizing my major (Molecular Biology) and my career goals (Lab research in infectious diseases), but this always led to details about my research, or questions people had about specific diseases. This caused trouble, because, as my wife explained to me after we got together, most people aren't comfortable speaking casually about genital warts, anthrax, or 'bloody sputum'. Who knew?
Earlier tonight, I pulled "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" by David Sedaris from my shelf, and it reminded me of a technique I only used once before I met Lauren (so I'm not completely sure how good it was). Rather than doing something on a date that I hate, like hiking or bowling, I decided to do something I enjoy: reading books. Before going to pick the girl up, I'd take this book and pick out a story or two that I enjoyed and that was safe (some of his writing is a little too risque' to read with someone you don't know very well). After dinner, we'd sit down somewhere quiet, like my living room, and read to each other, taking turns at every section break. Those were my favorite dates I ever had. As I opened the book tonight to read it, several stories still had the corners of the pages folded in, to mark an 'appropriate' story to read.
These days, now that I'm married, I can do more shameful things, without fear or retribution. For instance, guess what I did this weekend, while I was sick, and my wife was busy reading silly books about vampires and teenage girls? Here's a few hints:
I saw this...
Also this...
A little of this...
And some of this every once in a while, too...
I played Super Nintendo on my computer! A lot! I beat Final Fantasy 2 (#4 in Japan, it's the source of the top three images), and dinked around a little with Super Mariokart.
Isn't Lauren lucky to have a winner like me?
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