I had a bit too much to drink last night, and woke up this morning wearing socks. I never wear socks to bed.

But socks tell me that my blood alcohol concentration last night wasn’t too high … no more that 0.05, probably. In fact, on any given morning I can usually determine what my BAC was the night prior based solely on what I’m wearing when I wake.

Update: I posted the above to Twitter, with each BAC its own Tweet. I’d done this before with the Typical Reaction to the Revelation That I Do Not Own a Cell Phone, By Year list, which was fairly well-received. But the lesson learned today, I think, is that 10 items on your Twitter list is pretty much the absolute maximum before your followers start to hate you. (When I put out a call for suggestions, chris_knight replied “how about stop?”)

Still, some folks chimed in with some great additional entries. Here are a few:

* Not really something worn, but the judges will allow it.

If you have a suggestion, reply to this Tweet.

I am providing commentary for today’s match. Preview here, coinflip there.

Here are some upcoming dates and events that all citizens are required by law to know

Layer Tennis: A new season of Layer Tennis kicked off a few weeks ago, if I can mix my sports metaphors, and history suggests that I can. Last year, you may recall, I provided color commentary for the Halloween match. I’ll be donning the smoking jacket and doling out the bon mot again tomorrow at 2:00 EST. If you want to keep abreast of All Things Layer Tennis, you can sign up for season tickets here and follow them on Twitter over yonder.

The Academy Awards: The Oscars will be held this Sunday, February 22, and it’s not to late to whip up a quick Oscar Poll with the Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool Page. Well, honestly, it probably is too late. But you have only yourself to blame for that, slacker.

Customer Service: Hey, remember that short story I wrote a while back, the one called “Customer Service”? No? Don’t remember it? Then you are the target audience for Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll, an anthology of crime fiction will contains the tale. Be sure to pick up a copy, snuggle up with it on the couch, read the first three sentence of my story, and exclaim “aww shit–I did read this before, goddamn it.”

Me: Hey, it’s February 17th

The Queen: And?

Me: And it’s our wedding anniversary.

The Queen: Oops.

You know, I’m just going to assume that the “Oops” was in reference to her forgetting the date and not to her original decision to get hitched.

In fact, I strongly suspect that such assumptions are how we’re remained together for eight years.

We spent the weekend in Portland. On the drive down we saw no less than four abandoned mattresses by the side of the road.

The Washington State Department of Transportation should gather these and put them all in a single location. Not only would this help to keep our highways clean, but then skydivers with faulty parachutes would have someplace to aim for.

At The Morning News today I quantify and enumerate my favorite brand of film: movies during which you have no freakin’ idea what the hell is going on.

Pretty much any list of this sort is going to provoke violent “this list is worthless without ______?!” reactions. (Ha! Halfway through writing that sentence someone IM’d me the link to this Metafilter thread). The last minute addition of Donnie Darko to the list was an acknowledgment of this fact, but I had to draw the line somewhere.

I decided early to not include more than one film per director. Scanners and eXistenZ and absent because Videodrome is there; Mulholland Dr. precluded Eraserhead and Lost Highway; and so forth.

There were a fair number of other movies that I skipped because of the “premillennium problem”–that is, the huge spate of remarkably similar films released just prior to the year 2000 (e.g., The Thirteenth Floor) Given that, you may wonder how The Game got on there. Well, first of all, it perfectly fit the criteria I set out in the introduction, so it wins on a technicality. And I quite enjoyed it. It’s also significant because it sort of forecasts the rise of ARGs, but I somehow neglected to mention that in my review.

Here’s some others I considered adding to the article … and that you should consider adding to your Netflix queue:

• Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
• Stalker (1975)
• Liquid Sky (1982)
• House of Games (1997, doesn’t really qualify but I love it so).
• The City of Lost Children (1995, my review here)
• Pi (1998)
• Audition (1999)
• Fight Club (1999)
• Das Experiment (2001, my review here)
• Oldboy (2003)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, my review here)
• The Machinist (2004)
• A Scanner Darkly (2006, my review here)

Also, if you haven’t watched the 1967 BBC series The Prisoner … yeah. You should do that.

Thanks to this site for cluing me into La Jetée, and Fipi Lele who provided a ton of great suggestions.

Feel free to mention your favorites in the comments.

• Giving a slide whistle to a four-year-old is like giving a oh my god I can’t even concentrate long enough to analogize. Jan 7th, 10:23 AM
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• Going to the gym a few hours after eating at Denny’s is more exorcism than exercise. Jan 15th, 11:04 AM
• Discovered: if you accidentally hear “Single Ladies” just before going to bed, your brain will treat you to an 8-hour remix while you sleep. Jan 28th, 7:57 AM
• Seeing Angelina Jolie use to make me horny. Now it just makes me want to buy her chapstick. Feb 1, 07:47 PM
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• Days like this make me wish I’d taken my mother’s advice and become a lottery winner. Feb 4, 01:09 PM
• The sports bar that just opened in my neighborhood fills me with sadness. No, wait: porter. It fills me with porter. Feb 4, 04:21 PM
• I score 1 pt. if I get Louie into his Cat Carrier, he gets 1 pt. if he successfully claws out my groin. Today’s vet trip ended in a 1-1 tie. Feb 5, 09:35 AM
• Son has the croup and sounds like Darth Vader channeling Alvin the chipmunk. Feb 9, 07:16 PM