No time for a full post right now – as you can see, we’re neck deep in our belongings right now, and the truck will be here in the morning. See you in a few days!
* IHTFP: No, really, it stands for I Have To Finish Packing!
IHTFP
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Monthly Archives: July 2005
New Search Phrases
I’m happy to report that I have some goofy new search phrases in my log files:
ninja photos – Sadly, I’m not sure what these guys were looking for. I got 6 hits for this, and they must have been disappointed. I’m not in the top ten for this one.
outlaw biker – Only six hits, and I’m not in the top ten results, but I’m sure they were sent here for this post.
pirate bar – Nine hits, and I’m in the top four results! Obviously, they’re coming for my post about the awesome pirate bar we went to.
spirit journey formation anniversary – This is the one I’m most proud of. 21 hits, and they’re all going to my birthday program. Since this one isn’t a blog entry, it might stay near the top of the search results for the goofy phrase (which is from the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force).
Awesome Power
I love Wikipedia, and if I’m not careful, I can get sucked in and wind up spending hours just jumping from article to article. Tonight, while researching an upcoming post, I stumbled across the entry on Pokey the Penguin, which is how I found out that there is an official Wikipedia entry explaining that “Chicago-Style” means “to do something without pants.” I hope this helps the phrase catch on. We use it constantly around here.
The coolest thing, however, is that Wikipedia told me that Maroon 5 based the name of their band on Yellow 5, “also known as Yellow Number Five, a fictional band which is best known for sharing their website with the web comic, Pokey the Penguin.”
What? Awesome!
Further digging has not found anything that would contradict this. In fact, it looks like the band was originally called “Kara’s Flowers,” then changed to “Maroon,” and then had to change again due to a name conflict. So they settled on Maroon 5. Is it possible that these guys appended the 5 to their band name because of the fake band I made up?
How cool is that? For me, that ranks right up there with the letter that Christopher Randall of Sister Machine Gun sent me requesting that Yellow Number 5 quit covering his band’s song.
I should probably put the website back online. It’s been homeless since Steve took it off yellow5.com.
Filthy Smut
“I want to shoot people in the face, bang prostitutes, traffic drugs, steal cars, and terrorize police officers without this filthy smut in my game.”
– Maddox, responding to the “Hot Coffee” mod for GTA.
Old People Talking
I’m a loud person. I don’t mean to be, but especially when I’m around kids, it seems I’m constantly getting shushed because I CAN’T CONTROL THE VOLUME OF MY VOICE. Lucky for me, everyone seems to be understanding about it. Still, last night Oskar was falling asleep (by which I mean, standing in his crib and screaming), and we were all outside eating dinner and talking. As I made a joke, I got a bit excited, and raised my voice too much. Annie shushed me, and the conversation moved on.
A few minutes later, Dave pointed out that Oskar was asleep, and had fallen asleep pretty quickly. I joked that he quit screaming after I was yelling. Clearly, it was me yelling that put him to sleep. From there, the joke evolved to Dave and Rose replacing the white noise CD they play for Oskar to fall asleep with one of me talking and yelling.
But there might be something to this. As a kid, did you ever fall asleep listening to the adults talking? You couldn’t really understand what they were talking about, but I remember falling asleep upstairs listening to adults at a party downstairs, and Dave mentioned falling asleep around a campfire while adults chatted.
So we think we should release a series of CDs for kids called “Old People Talking”, which are just recordings of a group of adults having coversations. Some tracks would be more distinct, like just a few adults talking over cocktails, while others might be more muffled, like several conversations filtering into a kids’ bedroom.
The best part would be that to record it, we would find a group of people like my grandparents and their extended network of friends, and put them all on a bus and drive them down to a sound studio. We wouldn’t tell them we were recording anything, we’d just set out some nice rugs and couches, and some plates of snacks and drinks and let them start talking. A single microphone would record the whole thing. I’m sure we’d get the “kids these days don’t know what they’re doing” track pretty quickly, and I bet we could get a “world war II stories” track without too much prompting.
We were joking around, but I bet a CD of old people talking would put a kid to sleep just as well as a white noise CD.