Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Created by OnePlusYou

Seriously, no Gog and Magog? Or Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Not even Old BOB?

Amateurs.

Posted by at 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've seen this site, which enables you to make maps of places you've been in your travels, a couple of times before, but I've never really played with it. Ilya's map this morning has inspired me, though, so here's my own map of all the states in the U.S. I have visited:

create your own personalized map of the USA

Not very impressive, is it? Certainly not for a guy who fancies himself a big traveler, anyway. According to the helpful statistics provided by MyWorld66.com, I have visited 11 of the 50 states, or only about 21% of the country. (I've actually set foot in several more states, but I figured passing through an airport doesn't count as actually visiting.) Ilya has done much better. However, in my defense, I would note that I have seen large tracts of many of the states I have visited, rather than just one or two cities or sights. I'll elaborate a bit below the fold (and explain the title), if you're at all interested...

Continue reading "Reading Departure Signs" »

Posted by at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...so, in lieu of a proper entry, here's a silly Internet quiz!

Which Star Wars Character Are You?
	You are Luke Skywalker. You are adventurous and love to be where the action is. Your curiosity runs wild and you have to seek out the answers to all your questions or else you will not be at peace. People see you as a great leader, although you are uncomfortable with this because you don't see yourself the same way. You just believe in being honest and focusing on the good in the world. You are sweet and lovable and have many friends that would be lost without you.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

What do y'all think? Does that sound at all like me? I do have a curious streak...

Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Over the past couple of days, I've noticed some items in the Tribune that may be of interest to my local (or formerly local) readers.

The first is a feature story about the handful of drive-in theaters that still operate in Utah; it focuses primarily on the Motor Vu in Erda, which I briefly mentioned in an entry a couple weeks ago.

The other, somewhat more exciting news concerns the Road Island Diner in Oakley, Utah, which I first wrote about just over one year ago. This is the authentic 1940s-vintage prefab diner that was shipped cross-country from the east coast to a small town at the edge of the Uinta Mountains. To cut to the chase, the renovation is complete and it opened for business this weekend. Details are here. According to the linked article, it's one of only about 1,200 diners left in the country.

I've also found an official website for the Road Island that includes an extensive photo gallery of the renovation. In classic-car terminology, it was a complete "frame off restoration," i.e., it was stripped right down to the bare bones and rebuilt from the ground up. It looks fabulous now, like a time traveler from the Greatest Generation plopped down right here in the 21st Century. I'm very pleased to see that the new owner went for authenticity after all. (I heard a rumor a while back that he'd planned a huge, two-story addition that would've completely overshadowed the original structure, but that was either untrue, or someone talked him out of it.) Of course, it's not entirely authentic. The Trib article notes that the there are flat-screen TVs, which I could've lived without (I realized today just how ubiquitous video displays have become in our society, and how distracting they frequently are; it'd be nice to escape them once in a while), and the tabletop jukeboxes are described as "remote controls for iPods in the back," but I guess you can only go so far in recreating another time period.

Oh, and it wouldn't be a Utah attraction if there wasn't some element of cheesiness to it: all the employees have been given "diner names." Oy. What is it with this state anyway? It's like people just can't help but find some way of being cutesy.

Still, I'm pretty eager to try the place out, even with TVs and cutesy-ness. The Girlfriend and I plan to take a little road trip within the next couple of weeks...

One final note: if you're interested in reading those articles, don't hesitate: in only a few days, the Tribune will drop them behind a pay-wall... I really wish they'd follow the New York Times' example and quit doing that...

Posted by at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I realized the previous entry was getting to be ridiculously long, so I moved the book list over here. Read on...

Continue reading "Top 100 of the Last 25, Part 2" »

Posted by at 1:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Great, more lists. This time we're looking at Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 Movies and Top 100 Books of the last 25 years. I'm not going to quibble with the actual rankings of these titles, since such things are almost entirely subjective in my opinion. My super-bestest faves aren't likely to be yours, after all. But what I will do is follow in Jaquandor's footsteps and bold the titles I've seen or read, with occasional commentary when I have something to say.

Continue reading "Top 100 of the Last 25 " »

Posted by at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

There seem to have been a lot of "list memes" floating around lately, that is, lists of book or movie titles that compulsive bloggers such as myself then feel, um, compelled to comment upon. Here are a couple I recently picked up from Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog, respectively...

Continue reading "Chick Flicks and Making Men Cry" »

Posted by at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

No time today for a proper entry, alas, but I just spotted this over at Screen Rant and was sufficiently amused I had to share:

The look on the boy's face is simply priceless... and heart-breaking, the poor kid...

Posted by at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, the news this morning was the now-usual drumbeat of rising gas prices and calls to begin exploratory oil drilling in Alaska and protected coastal areas, and I was thinking of my dad's irrational certainty that the high prices aren't merely the result of supply and demand, that someone has just got to be behind the abrupt and seemingly unstoppable increases, and suddenly I had an epiphany. My idea was paranoid and sounded like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory cooked up by the lunatic fringe, but maybe, just maybe... well, consider this:

Continue reading "Just Because I'm Paranoid Doesn't Mean..." »

Posted by at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I don't know if teenage boys still go through a phase where they're obsessed with comedy albums -- my guess would be "not," since the "album" is an endangered species these days, and stand-up doesn't appear to be quite the cultural force it used to be -- but back in my increasingly far-off youth, it was almost as if every thirteen-year-old male in the country was issued one at the door as he left that infamously awkward, boys-only puberty lecture in seventh grade. You know, the one where red-faced PE coaches mumbled dire warnings about how we were going to start "noticing hair in new places" and we'd need to start showering every day if we wanted girls to like us. Maybe the comedy album was supposed to be a consolation prize for having just been made to feel impossibly icky about our own bodily functions. Here's a record, kid; go listen to somebody making fun of the stuff you'll be obsessing over for the next few years.

We all had our favorite comedians in the middle-school crucible of the 1980s. As I recall, my buddy Keith liked the absurdities of Steve Martin, while my neighbor Kurt Stephenson grooved on the earthy 'n' crude acts like Richard Pryor and the up-and-coming Eddie Murphy. I liked those guys just fine, but my comedy hero during those harrowing early-teen years was George Carlin.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: George Carlin" »

Posted by at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

From a post over at Boing Boing that really has nothing to do with anything (at least nothing I'm more than momentarily interested in), I managed to glean the following:

...anything invented before you were 18 has been there forever, anything that turns up before you're 30 is new and exciting, and anything after that is a threat to the world and must be destroyed.

I like that. Reminds me of that great quote from Grandpa Simpson: "I used to be 'with it.' Once, I even knew what 'it' was. But then 'it' changed; it got weird and scary. And it'll happen to you." Or something like that. In any event, I increasingly understand the sentiment...

Posted by at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)