Ski Fashion Rant

1) Is Steep and Cheap rapidly becoming the disposal outlet for ugly-ass 70's style huge sunglasses?

2) Reminder: chunky, plastic, white sunglasses don't look cool on anyone, nor do they make anyone look cool. They just make the wearer look like a Joey.

3) Observation: a helmet with a helmet cam atop (so you can record every precious POV moment of your trip)....

1. instantly brands you as a touron

2. in sunlight at the right angle, casts a shadow that looks remarkably like the silhouette of a condom. (Empirically proven this past season by Guidocam(TM))

Jack Nicholson's Pick Up Line

Jack Nicholson has revealed his #1 pick-up line:

Jack told Heart FM DJ Harriet Scott: "You walk up to someone you like and you're feeling relaxed, they think, 'Oh, here comes the shark' and you say to them, 'When did you get pregnant?'

"You will have somebody off balance after that particular line."

Excuse me? He's freakin' Jack Nicholson. Wouldn't his #1 pick up line be: "Hi. I'm Jack Nicholson."?

Things to Retire #4238

To the ever expanding list of things that need to be retired thanks to merciless overuse we can add:

You go, girl! : really, enough already. This was trite and hackneyed approximately 90 seconds after it was first said and was immediately interred when the evil Oprah started to use it.

The passive voice in ski writing, as in "All of the turns we made today were had off the gondola." or "Good skiing was to be had in the protected woods." Talk about an artificial air of importance! C'mon folks, it's just ski writing, not War and Peace.

Michigan Surprise

A lot is being made in the media about Romney's win in the Michigan Republican primary. What is arguably far more interesting is that Ron Paul, the Republican that Republicans despise, beat both great-hope Fred Thompson and Rudy 9iu11ani. In fact, Paul beat Thompson in all but 7 of the 83 Michigan counties and beat 9iu11ani in every single one. Sure, both of them basically phoned in their campaign, concentrating instead on South Carolina and Florida, but still, Ron Paul isn't supposed to be doing this according to conventional wisdom.

Are They Really This Stupid?

I wish I knew what store this was....

Kitty Wig

Please for the love of god don't do this to your pet. And is it just me or is there a curiously strange resemblance to one of the Tori Amos personae on her latest album?

Random Questions

Cheney has a heart? Who knew.

I always suspected Mary Poppins was a horror picture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic

After Star Wars I, why did anyone let George Lucas continue to write dialog for II and III?

Enough

Enough already with the phrases that should have been banished a long time ago. For starters....

(only) time will tell: Yeah, and all babies must eat. Injecting this nugget into any discussion is far from sounding wise and sage-like. It just says "Hi! I'm Captain Obvious!"

we shall see: as above, but also regularly used as ominous warning in postings on extreme right and left wing blogs.

At the end of the day: a sorry excuse of a linguistic crutch.

Each and every: direct to you from the department of redundancy department.

Language Abuse

In the Deseret Morning News there was an article about underage drinking and, specifically, parents giving their kids alcohol and even sponsoring parties (where they take all the car keys from the kids - the assumption that a controlled environment without driving keeps the kids safer). But the unintended hilarity was in one of the comments, obviously from an underage drinker:

Drinkers will drink, when they have the chance to do the deed. Why not supply to the inebriated and interested? These are the days of our lives, growing up in a dry state with hyperventilated ethics and murals! When will we all understand that alcohol doesn't kill, and that kids will be teenagers eventually and adults certainly?

Wow! I didn't know our ethics were hyperventilated! And we have murals!!!

Be Careful About The Songs You Choose

I'm frequently surprised, sometimes even shocked, at what songs advertising and marketing execs use in their ads. Do any of them actually listen to or even bother to search out the full lyrics of the songs they use? Do they look up the references in the songs? Do they try to understand what the song is actually saying? The most recent one brought to my attention was the use of Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" in Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines current ad campaign. I wonder how the RCCL execs, reveling in the cleverness of the "Lust for life" chorus lyrics, would react if they knew the contents of just one of the verses:

Here comes johnny yen again
With the liquor and drugs
And the flesh machine
He's gonna do another strip tease
Hey man, where'd ya get that lotion?
I've been hurting since I've bought the gimmick
About something called love
Yeah, something called love
Well, that's like hypnotizing chickens

Sure seems to match well with the Royal Caribbean brand image, doesn't it?

From The Delusional Actors File

Steven Seagal (who? remember him?) seems to think that an FBI probe ruined his career:

"False FBI accusations fueled thousands of articles saying that I terrorize journalists and associate with the Mafia," Seagal told the newspaper. "These kinds of inflammatory allegations scare studio heads and independent producers -- and kill careers."

Seagal, 56, was once a major star of action movies such as 1992's "Under Siege," which earned $156 million at worldwide box offices, but now he makes straight-to-DVD releases such as "Flight of Fury and "Attack Force."

Gee, Steven, it's just a wild guess, but maybe your career was ruined because you can barely act and most of your movies just plain suck. (Although the Under Siege movies were OK guilty pleasures.)

Stop Opening Attachments From Unknown Senders!!!

For the love of god stop opening email attachments or clicking on links from senders you don't know! It's mid 2007; the fricken Web is well over a decade old. Do people still need to be reminded of this? Really? Are people still not running and/or keeping up-to-date anti-virus + anti-spyware + firewall software? Really?

For the past few weeks there's been an ever-increasing wave of spam claiming "You've received a greeting card from a friend/colleague/worshipper/family member/neighbor/classmate/business partner/random asshole." Click on the enclosed link, often a PDF file, which is sometimes sent as an attachment, and your PC has just contracted the Storm worm and become part of the Storm zombie network that sends out even more spam - or worse. According to security firm SecureWorks, 1.7 million idiots have done just that. The number of Storm attacks blocked by SecureWorks has skyrocketed, from 71,342 for the first five months of the year to 20.2M since June. The scary thing is that computer security experts are concerned that a botnet of that size is capable of an ginormous DDOS attack - one that big enough to bring down a small country or big chunks of the US government.

So do your eyes light up in eager anticipation when you get an email that Ronald Reagan has sent you an e-card and you rush to click the link? Quit being a moron! And make sure your security software is constantly updated. Or at least buy a Mac fer crissakes!