I just witnessed a skateboarding dude doing an eenie-meenie-miney-moe to decide whether to go into the Tully’s Coffee which he was standing right outside or the Starbucks which was just across the courtyard. He chose the Tully’s. Good boy.

The event went well. It was a lot of fun!

Edit: In case you are curious, in the video I am standing on the stairs with my group.

Note: Details taken from the Facebook event page (which you need to have an account to see, bleh)

Event Info Name: Improv Everywhere freeze in Seattle
Tagline: Seattle Local group freeze (not directly affiliated with Improv Everywhere)
Host: not me
Type: Music/Arts - Exhibit

Time and Place
Date: Saturday, February 23, 2008
Time: 2:45pm - 4:00pm
Location: Parking lot on the SE corner of 2nd & Pike
Street: 2nd & Pike
City/Town: Seattle, WA

This event will be much like the Improv Freeze in Grand Central Station.

First we’ll meet at the big parking lot on the SE corner of 2nd & Pike to organize the freeze and synchronize our watches. Then we’ll spread out and walk over to Westlake center like we don’t know each other and freeze in public.

Meet first here at 2:45 pm.

Then walk over here from all directions (see picture)

As of today, Jules and I are debt free! We completely own our car now (the loan is paid off) and all of our credit cards have a zero balance. :D Thanks to help from our respective parents when we moved to our new place we were able to make it to this day much quicker than otherwise, and for that we are grateful. (M&D: The last of the checks will be in the mail next week and the following week.)

In the 10 months since Jules arrived in America and the 3 months prior to that, I was unemployed for 4 months and Jules for 7 months. During that time we got married and moved to a new apartment. These things considered, I would call this damned near a miracle.

There is a great weight lifted from my shoulders. I feel so much better now. Let’s celebrate!!

OptOutPrescreen.com allows you to permanently consent to never allow credit card and insurance companies to pre-approve you for offers. You’ll never get those irritating and wasteful envelopes in the mail anymore and trees everywhere will rejoice in your effort to rescue them from certain death.

I’ve been getting 2-3 of these daily for the last 5 years or so, and the volume doubled once I changed my name. Ever since then I’ve been getting two copies of each offer, one for each name! I was getting so tired of opening them up and tearing them to bits that I finally read over one and saw a clause near the bottom stating this program existed. YES. I recommend all of you take this step and get rid of this irritation.

If you’d rather not take care of this online, you can call 1-888-567-8688. (Since the form asks for a US address and SSN, I am guessing this only applies to America, so those of you who live elsewhere might want to research an equivalent program in your own country.)

The highlighted section is where Jules and I will be sitting. Yes, sitting. After my experience with Death Cab at Key Arena I am never buying main floor tickets again. Hopefully we won’t have the same type of inconsiderate Weezer groupies in front of us that we had last time Foo played Key Arena…

It’s been a few years now since I last saw them (which was either #4 or #5, I’ve lost count)…seeing them play their home crowd in Seattle is an experience unlike any other! However, I’m still lamenting my missed opportunity to see their live acoustic show. At least I have the DVD to watch. My one wish has always been to hear them play “Walking After You” live. I hope the acoustic show was not the only time they’ll ever do it.

YAYS! :D

Since my earlier post about the eeePC lacked a worthy illustration of its diminutive size, here is a familiar object next to it for comparison.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is larger than the eeePC in every dimension.

This beautiful archway just went up down the street from our place, unveiled for Chinese New Year after months of construction. I really appreciate the fact that money is still spent on efforts like these to beautify our city.

While playing a hijacking mission in Saint’s Row we encountered this bug. We tried to exit the car and another driver took control before we could properly leave and our character got trapped in the model. Our character could not move and was trapped about 3′ outside the passenger door. While the driver took the car all over Stilwater, our character was impervious to damage.

Saint’s Row is a very special game to Jules and me. On the surface, it’s a terrible game; essentially it is a Grand Theft Auto ripoff with the soul taken out of it. There are some improvements, like setting waypoints and GPS-style navigation, but for the most part it’s not that different. As mentioned before, it’s buggy as hell. (The above video is a response to the original “Buggy Saint’s Row: The Musical” video that’s made its rounds over the last year or so (which you absolutely must watch as it is brilliant.)

The most notable improvement in this game is the ability to create a custom character. The system is almost identical to the one used in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (it probably uses the same engine) which means it is extremely flexible and allows for minute adjustments to the character’s facial structure. Last January when we first got the game Jules made the hideous freak of nature shown in the video. I cannot begin to tell you how ugly this guy is–he is nature’s abomination. And we love him to death. Since we are never made aware of the character’s name, we’ve arbitrarily been calling him Derek (imagine saying the name in the voice of someone who was raised feral who has basically no verbal skills and that’s about the level of intelligibility we have assigned him since the character rarely ever speaks.) It’s amazing how much personality you can assign a character who basically has none. For example, his gang is supposed to be decked out in purple but we’ve dressed him completely in green so he looks like an overgrown leprechaun. No particular reason other than it’s hilarious.

So here is my dedication to this character who has provided us with hours upon hours of mayhem-filled entertainment over the past year: Derek.

Continuing on yesterday’s topic of childhood memories that become a permanent fixture in your mind, I now turn to imagery. In a child’s world, images are a very powerful tool for conveying messages. Children do not have the world experience or language skills (written or spoken) that adults do, so they garner a great deal of information from pictures. I’m sure all of us can remember the covers of favorite books or movies we watched hundreds of times.

Even as a child, I was extremely interested in supernatural phenomena (which I’m sure could be partially attributed to my parents who often talked about their own interest in the subject.) I watched scary television shows and of course read countless scary stories. During elementary school a series of books came out called Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (written by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell.) The tales themselves weren’t particularly frightening to me (even then I didn’t scare as easily as some) but the illustrations were absolutely terrifying! I have read some criticism about the images in these books being too gruesome and frightening for the target audience (young readers, ages 8-10), which the adult Anny tends to agree with, but the child Anny would fervently disagree with because she delighted in scaring herself. (Even as an adult I still enjoy this but find fewer and fewer things to give me that same thrill.)

After a quick search I located a repository of scans from the books. I was able to uncover the image that scared the crap out of me every time I saw it thought about it. The story was called “The Dream” and it can be found on page 53-54 of Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones.

The following is the text from that story (© Alvin Schwartz & Stephen Gammell):

THE DREAM

Lucy Morgan was an artist. She had spent a week painting in a small country town and decided that the next day she would move on. She would go to a village called Kingston.

But that night Lucy Morgan had a strange dream. She dreamed that she was walking up a dark, carved staircase and entered a bedroom. It was an ordinary room except for two things. The carpet was made up of large squares that looked like trapdoors. And each of the windows was fastened shut with big nails that stuck up out of the wood.

In her dream Lucy Morgan went to sleep in that bedroom. During the night a woman with a pale face and black eyes and long hair came into the room. She leaned over the bed and whispered, “This is an evil place. Flee while you can.” When the woman touched her arm to hurry her along, Lucy Morgan awakened from her dream with a shriek. She lay awake the rest of the night trembling.

In the morning she told her landlady that she had decided not to go to Kingston after all. “I can’t tell you why,” she said, “but I just can’t bring myself to go there.”

“Then why don’t you go to Dorset?” the landlady said. “It’s a pretty town, and it isn’t too far.”

So Lucy Morgan went to Dorset. Someone told her she could find a room in a house at the top of the hill. It was a pleasant-looking house, and the landlady there, a plump, motherly woman, was as nice as could be. “Let’s look at the room,” she said. “I think you will like it.”

They walked up a dark, carved staircase, like the one in Lucy’s dream. “In these old houses the staircases are all the same,” Lucy thought. But when the landlady opened the door to the bedroom, it was the room in her dream, with the same carpet that looked like trapdoors and the same windows fastened with big nails.

“This is just a coincidence,” Lucy told herself.

“How do you like it?” the landlady asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Well, take your time,” the landlady said. “I’ll bring up some tea while you think about it.”

Lucy sat on the bed staring at the trapdoors and the big nails. Soon there was a knock on the door. “It’s the landlady with the tea,” she thought.

But it wasn’t the landlady. It was the woman with the pale face and the black eyes and the long black hair. Lucy Morgan grabbed her things and fled.

To save you (and indeed, myself) from the horror of having to look at the illustration whenever I look at this page, I will offer you the choice of whether or not to reveal it. Are you sure you want to see this image?