I like taco salad because you get to eat tacos and say you ate salad.

Stop procrastinating.

I was just on the website for Pinnacle Foods, and discovered that these guys own a crapload of the most well-known food brands. I also noticed that every product page on their site featured a logo for a brand, and a piece of clipart that presumably portrayed the target demographic for that food. Can you match ‘em up?

Click for the quiz.

Further cementing my reputation as a “tardy-adopter,” today I bought a scanner, only a single decade after they became mandatory for any self-respecting geek.

First picture scanned:

My father and I, October, 1971.

Not only is Pa Baldwin an all-around great guy, but he’s also a regular reader of this site. Hi dad!

Update: “Don’t you have a similar picture of you and the Squiggle? I think a side-by-side comparison would be nice here.”

Extrapolations: every generation of Baldwin will have shorter hair, a higher BMI, and more ridiculous headgear.

February 1: Ball Sweat

February 2: Fiction Deaths

February 3: Assorted Bargains

February 4: Chinese muslims studying overseas

February 5: How to Successfully Complete Online Offers for Free Stuff

February 6: Fog pump

February 7: Air Poo

February 8: Influence of Music

February 9: Ultramaterialism

February 10: Polydimensional industrial bio-cosmic psychology of microscopic bacterium

February 11: Saturday (Carpenters song)

February 12: Random Article

February 13: Temple of the Jedi Order (Real)

February 14: Clown Suit

February 15: FIFA World Cup 2022

February 16: Characters in Sonic Riders 2

February 17: Scouting in Greater Manchester East

February 18: Jabba and slaves

February 19: Goatsurfing

February 20: Sigil Studio

February 21: The Angry Video Game Nerd

February 22: Medieval crimes and punsih ment

February 23: Dark Super sonic the hedgehog

February 24: Workin Title (Myspace Comedy Series)

February 25: Cheesemonger

February 26: Straid Lazed

February 27: Ape jazz

February 28: Pewter Report (magazine)

• I will be on the teevee this evening, telling a story for the pilot of A Guide to Visitors. You can see it on The Seattle Channel, this evening at 9:00. Or, if you are one of the seven people on teh NetarWeb that has “RealPlayer” installed, you can watch it online here (my story is third).
• I am currently getting a ton of traffic from this URL: http://buzzfeed.com/buzz/Asslessness.
• I was just joking about having written “a novella which retells Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope from the point of view of the Garbage creature,” but the number of people sent email expressing interest in reading it was, frankly, terrifying.
• Oh man, this I love.
• A Google search indicates that no one has ever formed a heavy metal Christian band called “BC/AD.” That’s just unacceptable, people.

Here’s a self-working card trick my dad showed me when I was but a wee lad. It sounds pretty uninteresting in the telling, but try it out–in practice, people are amazed at the outcome.

1. Take a standard, 52 card deck and randomly discard ten cards. I prefer to do this before the trick starts and never tell the audience, but you can do it in the middle (step 6) if you’re feeling honest. These ten cards will play no part in the trick.
2. Deal the 42 cards into piles using the following method: Flip the top card from your deck face up, announce the value aloud (e.g., “seven!”) and place it on the table as a foundation of a pile. Now continue to deal cards onto that pile, counting upwards with each card, until you hit thirteen. So after putting the 7 card face up, for instance, you would deal five cards onto it, counting “Eight”, “Nine,” “Ten,” “Jack,” “Queen,” “King!”. If the foundation card is an Ace you will create a 13-card pile; if it is a King it will constitute a pile unto itself. When a pile is complete, turn it face down and start a new pile with the next card. If the final cards in the deck do not make a complete pile (e.g., you flip over a “Three” but only have five cards remaining) set them aside for the moment.
3. Ask your audience to pick three of the face-down piles. Take all the unchosen piles, combine them with the remainders from step 2 (if any), and hand the deck to your audience.
4. Tell your audience to flip over the top card on one of the three, face-down piles. After he has done so, tell him to discard that many cards from his deck. So if he flipped over a 9, he would discard nine cards from his deck.
5. Tell your audience to flip over the top card on a second pile and, again, discard that many cards.
6. Only if you did not remove cards in step 1: tell your audience to discard ten more cards “for good measure”.
7. Tell your audience to count how many cards he has left in his hand. Then tell him to flip over the top card on the last of the three face-down piles. If you’ve done everything correctly, the value of the card will equal the number of cards he holds.

The best thing about this “trick,” I’ve found, is that there’s is no trick–it’s just math–so you can feel free to reveal the secret when you’re done (where “secret” = “just take out 10 cards before you start and do what I did.”). This is especially good for kids because, requiring no sleight of hand or misdirection, it is virtually un-screw-up-able, so long as they follow the recipe.

If, on the other hand, someone is dismissive because it is “just a formula,” hand him all 52 cards and challenge him to recreate the trick. Assuming they don’t know to take out 10 cards ahead of time, their attempt will end in gloatworthy failure.

I used to write stuff for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine back in college, and I’m thinking about getting back into it. Does anyone know of a crime / mystery writing circle in the Greater Seattle area?

Until I find one, though, I guess you guys can serve as my writing group.

I’ve posted a short story here, and I’d appreciate your constructive criticism.

Update: I got a ton of great feedback–thanks to everyone who took the time to comment. If you’d still in the mood for crime fiction, may I recommend the archvies of Thuglit.

The Vanishing Date

I wrote one of the many ghost story endings appearing in The Morning News today.

Encyclopedia Brown For District Attorney

Speaking of The Morning News ..

TMN and I are holding a contest, in which we’re asking participants to make a display campaign paraphernalia for fictitious candidates. And while the event has attracted considerable notice on Teh Intarwebs, it grieves me to report that submissions have been scarce.

The deadline for submissions was supposed to be today, but they have extended it to November 3rd. Also, all participants now get buttons!

I’ve heard a few people say that they would participate, but they lack a “large-format printer.” The assumption, apparently, is that I used one of these new-fangled contraptions to print out the examples. Honestly, I don’t even know what a large-format printer is. My signs were mocked up in Microsoft Publisher; printed out, section by section, onto normal-sized pieces of paper; and then taped onto a real political sign that I had appropriated from a local median. (Fun fact: in Seattle it’s illegal to place political signs on medians, traffic circles and other conspicuous roadway locations, so if you filch one from one of these locations, you are actually enforcing the law.) I realize that sounds like a lot of work, but, honestly, I made all three signs shown in less than an hour. And you don’t even have to go this route, if you don’t want to: handmade signs are welcome. In fact, my favorite of the signs we’ve received thus far is a pen-on-posterboard affair.

Also, you are not limited to political signs. Although that’s what I made by way of example, the contest calls asks you to create a “sign, banner, flier, etc,” so less ambitious stuff is certainly acceptable.

Anyway, I know you guys are a literate bunch, so please send something in if you have the time and inclination. Plus, TMN gets a lot hits and they’ll include a link to your site along with your entry, so this is a perfect way to simultaneously showcase your creativity and drum up traffic.

A Modest Proposal

Last week I heard a radio commercial for Fred Meyer advertising Christmas decorations. They spent most of the 30 seconds justifying their decision to unleash the yuletide juggernaught in October. “As you get older, your family gets bigger,” the announcer said. “Which means you need more time to prepare for the holidays. So, see? We’re only hawking these dancing Santas nine weeks early as a favor to you!”

Sure enough, I stopped by Fred Meyer this morning to grab another bag of candy (I ate all the ReeseSticks — saw-whee), and found the “Seasonal” aisle cram-packed with wrapping paper, artificial trees, and wreaths — and no candy, except for a few picked over bags of sugarfree gum and Hershey BigYuk Bars (semi-sweet chocolate with creamy asparagus filling).

American holidays have become like suburban strip malls, expanding outward to the point where they’ve merged into one continual year-long festivity. I have no doubt that the Fred Meyer guys have Peeps and Easter Basket grass all queued up, ready to put on display come November 12th.

Why don’t we just make up a new holiday: Tomorroween. Tomorroween is the holiday which, regardless of the date, falls the day after today, the one where people exchange gifts, eat candy, send cards, drink alcohol, bake pumpkin pies, set off fireworks, plant trees, put colored lights on the eves of their house, wear costumes, buy roses for their loved one, and fly the flag. Stores could just have an aisle devoted to Tomorroween merchandise, and never have to rotate their stock; the guys who make M&Ms could stop changing the color of their candy every three months (black & orange in October, red & green in December, shades of pastel in March).

And maybe, in exchange for Tomorroween, we could ask the stores to keep their mitts off our Holidays. Wouldn’t that be a treat?

Squirrelly in the Punk’in Patch

Apparently I have been “tagged” with an “Internet” “meme.” I don’t generally do these, but the tagger, Mother Reader, was kind enough to play along with my silly little game, so I feel obliged to reciprocate.

Five Little Known Things About Me

1. Upon taking the first sip of carbonated beverages, my body responds with a little hiccupy-spasm. When I was young and still getting used to this quirk, I would routinely take a swig from a Big Gulp and then do a Jack-Tripper-like spit take, spewing Pineapple Crush onto all nearby. Now I take a small sip and wait out the reaction before quaffing the rest.
2. I refuse to watch trailers for movies I intend to see. If, while in the theater, they show a trailer for an upcoming movie that I have the slightest interest in, I will turn my head away from the screen, stare at the floor, and aggressively think about Catherine Keener in an attempt to avoid hearing the dialog. I have, in my travels, met two other people who also do this, and we cannot figure out why the rest of you don’t. “Who’d want to see the best scenes before the movie comes out??” we ask each other rhetorically, and then sadly shake our heads.
3. I do not pronounce my Ls correctly. I make the sound in the back of my throat, rather than by touching the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I was given speech therapy as a child but, as with the soda spasm, I eventually just figured out how to work around it, and when it got the point where no one could tell the difference they stopped trying to correct it. Still, it has a few practical ramifications: when choosing names for our child we steered cleared of those that contained Ls. Curiously, I make the L sound correctly when singing, reading aloud from a book, and shouting “Devil! Devil! Devil!’ at passing cars on the corner of 5th and Pine.
4. I think hate crime legislation is stupid. If one guy punches another it’s assault and should be treated as assault — I don’t care what words he was saying at the time. More to the point, hate crime legislation pegs the severity of the punishment to what the assailant is thinking at the time he commit his crime, and I don’t think the government should be in the business of regulating thought — even the thoughts of ignorant idiot assholes. This fact is “little-known” about me because, whenever I mention it while around my liberal Seattle friends, they’re heads tend to asplode. And that’s a total drag, as most of my clothes are dry-clean only.
5. Speaking of assault … (Fun fact: all the best stories start with the phrase “speaking of assault”). I have only once, as an adult, punched a guy. Except, I didn’t. I was in my early 20′s and working on a Conservation Corps crew. We all gave each other copious amounts of shit — heaping slander and slur upon each another in the name camaraderie — and no one ever took offense at anything. But one time my coworker Paul said something that made me see red. I don’t recall what it was — in fact, I can even imagine what it could have been, given the stuff I do remember simply laughing off at the time. Whatever it was caused me to go berserk: and I took three quick steps toward him, cocked my fist back, and started to throw a punch. But then the tiny part of my brain that was still rational pointed out that this would almost certainly result in the loss of my job, and not having a job seemed like a bad thing at the time. (What can I say? I was young and foolish.) So I arrested my swing and, instead, kicked him in the shin like an petulant, eight year-old, be-ponytailed-girl. And Paul, who could have easily kicked my ass (did I mention he was an ex-con?), looked down at his shin for a moment, dumbfounded, and then looked at me, and said “Dude, what the fuck?” And I was, like, “Whoa! I do not know what just happened to me there!” And then we laughed and went to work. Because, in the best of worlds, this is what young men do.