Captcha the memories

Just a thought on something I've noticed in commenting at some of your blogs and elsewhere:

When I begin typing various letters in those CAPTCHA boxes*, Firefox helpfully suggests to me some of the past strings I've typed, and I can't help but wonder how much such completely useless information my computer has saved up in various nooks and crannies.

But then, how much do I have myself? And more importantly, which of us has more?

Regardless, I suppose saving the entries in CAPTCHA fields isn't always useless. Recently it helped me remember that one time I was asked to type out xgvzd before commenting somewhere, and that other time I had to type xftwp... what heady, groundbreaking times those were!

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* I got rid of mine a couple weeks ago, to stop annoying everyone, and I haven't yet had to deal with any spam comments at all.

Driving: A love story

While I was driving us home from the mall the other day, J- selfishly decided that she and her throbbing brain wanted a time-out from the glorious wonder that is Arcade Fire's Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels), but being a sane person, I reiterated my insistence that it be played at full volume at all times from now until I close my eyes.

So, to compromise, she reached for the Balance knob to push the sound over to my side of the car. We all know how horribly this ruins the acoustics, so you can recognize my level of sacrifice in allowing this.

Then, as her inexplicable treachery was almost complete, a brief insight into the plans of whatever force put us on this Earth was revealed to me, as a clear reward for my Job-like patience and tolerance of the weaknesses of others.

As she rolled through the 7 levels of Balance, for a brief second, a word flashed in my peripheral vision that promised to make the whole ordeal worthwhile. I nearly slammed on the brakes, but instead I continued driving while choking out, "Gobackgobackgoback!!!" In confusion, she complied, and I stopped her when the Balance was towards the Left at level 5.

Sure enough, slicing through the dark night in bright blue capital letters, flashed the word BALLS.

And I love my car more than ever.

Pantsed in Candyland

For those of you not down with the C-Land lingo, you may as well stop reading, because you don't understand my people.

In the spirit of a great blues musician, I've come here to proclaim my troubles to the world in hopes of gaining some relief:

Like golf*, Candyland is a game of sheer chance and luck designed to illustrate the futility of continuing to live. I'm a relative newcomer to this game, having come from a house full of boys and a wannabe-boy, but we bought it for my daughter at Christmas because J- is a lifetime fan, and D- has since wanted to play it at least once a week.**

So without toughened skin from years of experience, I was distinctly unprepared for the feeling of the potent one-two punch in the gut that is your opponent drawing a single orange block card and then the pink Lolly card. I got Rainbow railroaded. Even with him getting stuck in some licorice and losing a turn, I was toe-tagged after only 20 cards.

Twenty cards! That's ten turns. There are over 60 cards in the deck, and we've been known to go through all of them before finishing.

This site, which is my kind of site, states that the average two-person Candyland game takes, mathematically speaking, 52 cards.*** So this was clearly an aberration existing only to balance out the 200-card games out there, and my son was given the plum role of The Hand of Fate.

Care to guess what I heard from this little upstart, who regularly has to be reminded (incredibly unselfishly, I might add) which direction he's supposed to be heading on the board, and whose backside I've so graciously returned to him 95% of the time we've gone head to head? "Oh wow Dad, what luck I'm having! That's the way the cards were cut, I guess," or some such zen platitude?

How about instead you guess, "Ha, ha" as he cruised towards the finish? You'd be warmer than Gloppy on fondue night.

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* For instance, I once spent a week going by the nickname "Tiger" and during that time I did not win any sweet green jackets or get paid millions of dollars to wear one hat versus another. Go ahead and try to explain that one away.

** Once equals one session of at least three games...

*** Am I revealing too much about myself in having sought out this guy's painstaking Candyland analysis?

Respect my Au-THOR-a-tie!

I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that after much watching and wonderment on my part, my Technorati Authority rating has gone up to 68,* which apparently puts me within the top 97,000 blogs out of many millions, and surely entitles me to some kind of cash prize, secret club membership, or that many virgins awaiting me in the afterlife. Or maybe I'm confusing several different brochures I've been handed recently.

What I can say for sure is that while I may be no Dooce or Sneeze or Black Hockey Jesus or even Brittany the Barefoot Foodie, I'm pretty happy with dropping below six digits.

Of course I must acknowledge that this is not so much a reflection on me or anything I've done, but instead it's an indication of how many of you kind people have linked to me in a forgettable drunken haze or whatever other extenuating circumstances explain it. So thanks for that, whatever the cause.

Having as short an attention span as I have, though, and as well-developed a sense of entitlement as I do, I'd now like to double this figure within, oh, say the next week or two. Anybody know any of those crafty spamming folks who so efficiently create and abandon junk blogs every day? If so, could you ask them to link to me before abandoning their pages? I just might be able to become virtually more popular than Dooce, and then wouldn't some people not existing solely on the Internet be mildly impressed THEN?

The cake under that icing is that once the systems get cleaned up and my artificially inflated rating begins plummeting, I have reason to believe I will receive several billion dollars from the federal government, to help cushion the blow for me and to feed their hope that I won't wipe out my entire blogroll and start a chain reaction that will bring down the egos of the entire blogosphere.

If anyone is deserving of that kind of power, grandeur, and unrestrained discretion, it is undeniably yours truly. After all, I can almost see Canada from my house.

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* I'm gunning for you, Kevin.

Book Review: I Went Walking

As a blogger with most of the word literary in my name, I think we can all agree I'm a logical choice to review books for the masses not so terminologically blessed. Whether or not you defy me by not readily agreeing with my assertion, a presumably large number of book publishers and authors' representatives do agree.

After recently becoming inundated with review copies of books*, I decided it was time to stop ignoring my cultural mandate. To this end, I figured I would begin by offering the world some unsolicited but obviously very welcome reviews.

Thus, I offer you my inaugural book review here at LiteralDan: Sue Williams' I Went Walking:

Now, if you're like me, you can't help but be struck by how horrendously grotesque the drawing of that child on the cover is, and you're too terrified to open the book itself.

I'm sure it's a very nice story.

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* One copy** is enough to validate this statement-- every flood has to start with a trickle, right?

** It was not this book... I'm still preparing to read the one I was sent. It's only been a month: it's still good, it's still good!

Brother, can you spare $700 billion?

The following is an only mildly sarcastic note I sent to my Congresspeople* yesterday. If you'd like to send one, too, you can go to VoteNoBailout.org for a quick and easy method (including a prewritten letter, if you don't have time to write one of your own).

Note: Feel free to reuse my letter below for writing your own representatives, if you're so inclined.

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Hello,

I'm writing to register my feelings on the massive bailout package proposed by the Bush Administration and currently being considered by Congress.

The people controlling the giant banks that run our financial system knowingly put themselves, and the rest of us by extension, in position for this disaster for the sake of making increasingly huge profits for over a decade.

Let them use some of these riches they made to bail themselves out, and save the people's money for those of us who don't have such resources to dig ourselves out.

If these corporations didn't have a contingency plan to avoid bankruptcy, then they're no better than the homeowners so derided lately for signing on to mortgages they couldn't afford to pay.

Of course, it would seem that the banks' first-level backup may have been to get the Bush administration to use its still-impressive power to publicly bully and belittle politicians into going along with whatever they demand, in this case a free pass to tear up the piles of IOUs the bankers wrote without any ability to back up.

Why are "socialist" programs and efforts only acceptable to Republicans when the beneficiaries are huge corporations and wealthy individuals? They spend all their time when profits are up preaching about the simple beauty of capitalism-- they can use some time dealing with the less fun side of it now. I'd hate to incite what would normally be a huge outrage for them by encouraging the "government to interfere with the free market."

Whether this bailout money goes to them or not, we're all on our own to sort through the effects of their unchecked greed and irresponsibleness, barring whatever assistance to individuals the government decides to offer. That assistance is much less likely to be substantial once this incredible sum of money, pulled from who-knows-where**, is gone.

Please vote No to Bush's Bailout, and instead urge these people to use all their business school training and financial intelligence to sort things out for themselves, so the rest of us can get a helping hand as needed from our representatives in government.

I hear there's $700 billion dollars just laying around in our emergency fund-- maybe we could use that?

Thank you for your time.

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* Which includes, of course, the Distinguished Gentleman From Illinois currently running for president.

** I know where-- China!***

*** No, I didn't include any footnotes in the e-mail itself. But I should have.

Hey buddy, can I get a spot?

Don't get me wrong: I fully appreciate that as a freshly 20-month-old baby-o, M- is handling the toilet training process way ahead of her time. On paper, that is.

But my new rule is, if you're old enough to say, "Oh, thanks" like a full-grown man having his basketball bounced back over to him when I wipe your backside, you're old enough to start taking care of that business all by your lonesome.

Is that so unreasonable?

The finest in casual dining

A couple of days ago, the kids and I took a jaunt down to the massive outdoor mall* near our house, which meant that we got to bite into a juicy cross section of what passes for Americana these days.

Among the stores we passed was a Chili's**, which caught D-'s eye immediately. He said, "Hey look, there's that 'rons-traunt' we went to that time." I acknowledged this and praised him as usual for his good memory, since it was quite awhile ago. He stared at the window as we (happily) passed it by, and his brain began to slowly warp itself before he continued with a second thought. I was all over it two words in-- I don't know why I'm so tuned into his brain patterns most of the time, but I just knew exactly what he was thinking.

D-: Remember we went there that time 'cause Momma's friend works there, and she...

Me: Nope, that was a different place.

D-: No! It was that place right there! We went there and Momma's friend...

Me: You're right that it's the same kind of place, but it's a different restaurant, from a different company.

D-: No it was that place! We went there that time and Momma's friend gave us cookies and they sang Happy Birthday to you!

Me: I promise you, that was a Bennigan's. This is a Chili's. They're pretty much exactly the same restaurant, with the same kind of food, but they have slightly different decorations on the walls. They're from two different companies, and they have two different names, but I can see how you could get confused.

He walked on in silence, since my Imperious Kung Fu is much stronger for the time being, but it was clear from his posture that he still believed he was right, just like I would. As I caught him gazing innocently off in the direction of the Outback Steakhouse, rather than go through this all over again, I immediately veered off the sidewalk to instead cut through the parking lot in the general direction of a big box store whose name willfully escapes me.

Who says America doesn't have any culture?

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* Not to be confused with the other massive outdoor mall also in our town but another mile farther away in a different direction.

** I had to quickly double-check that it wasn't actually an Applebee's, Ruby Tuesday, Chotchkee's, Flingers, Fuddruckers, Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag, TGI Friday's, or one of the others.

Classic quotes, Vol. 7

That's right, another list post, this one a new collection of lines uttered by this ragtag bunch of slugs:

D- (to me, from across the room): Can you throw me a pencil?

M- (after spitting): Spit-tinnn'!

Katie (in awe of the mangled English mocked at Engrish.com): Why don't they just hire English-speaking hobos and pay them in sandwiches and alcohol to fix their signs??!

Me (to J-, on the phone): Is that someone who'll wanna hear that M- just made pee in the toilet?

M- (quivering with rage while reaching for a toy in D-'s hand): I take it from you!!!

D- (standing there helplessly while trying to get dressed): Mom! She's pulling down my pants... and... now she's playing with my butt.

M- (during the above): Squishy tush!

Indisputable facts, Vol. 1

The following is a list of indisputable facts, according to the ultimate authority:

1. If you have to wonder whether the water you're wringing out of a ruined basement carpet is composed even partially of sewage, you may as well just stop wondering. It will only make the carrying of the giant, dripping rolls to the garbage less pleasant.

2. It is inadvisable to allow a four-year-old to put his finger in your mouth, especially if you have not personally washed his hands thoroughly within the last 13 seconds.

3. In the entire history of their existence, car alarms have never served any purpose other than to go off at inopportune times and irritate the s*** out of everyone, a group which most importantly includes myself.

4. Vin Diesel's best movie is still The Iron Giant.

5. I have a problematic compulsion to shave the world down to multiples of five.