Irrelevance Glorified

Back in May, I took a long weekend and traveled back to Chicago for my nephews very first birthday. It was the first time I had seen him since last August, so he had grown up quite a bit, and was on the very verge of walking. My other sister was traveling up from Florida, and a bunch of rugrats were invited over to ensure that chaos would ensue.

Interacting with Sachin is interestingly different from a lot of other kids. In the limited interaction that I’ve had with my other friends’ young kids, I feel like I’m met with a bit of skepticism. Like, they are not sure if I’m for real or not, and they take a while before they feel like they can address my existence. For Sachin, he took to me pretty quickly. I think that the most simple explanation is that unlike my other friends with little kids, I look a lot like his Mommy and Daddy. Sachin showed little hesitation in crawling up to me, pulling on my pant legs to bring himself to his feet, and then asking to be picked up.

In the pictures below, you’ll notice that there aren’t a whole lot of actual birthday party pictures. That’s because I was pressed into camcorder duty, and was thus unable to use my own camera. However, there are a lot of other pictures of doing cute little Sachin things that I’m sure people can enjoy. You can blame the graininess of the pictures on the fact that I used a high ISO setting to combat his fidgety-ness.

Flickr Set Here
Slideshow Below
Pictures and Descriptions after the jump.

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I don’t know of any recent food product launch that has gotten as much publicity as KFC’s recent Double-Down. In case you are unaware, the Double Down is a “sandwich” composed of two pieces of breaded & fried chicken surrounding cheese, bacon, and sauce. If you are watching your weight, you can substitute grilled chicken for the fried chicken. That was not a mistake by the way — it’s a sandwich with no bread (but breading optional). I normally read a bunch of tech and political blogs, and many of them have come out with opinions. Consumerist had their review, and also included a review by Consumer Reports. Gizmodo ate theirs while using their iPads, because they are hipster nerds. Even one of my favored political blogs, FiveThirtyEight, got in on the fun (with a focus on numbers and statistics, because that’s how they roll). If you follow me on Google Reader, I’ve shared a few items on it, because it’s hilarious in concept; you just get the feeling that it should be an SNL commercial (Taco Town!!!). Anyways, I saw a clip from the Colbert Report that includes it. It starts with mentally-ill food mascots, segues in to a Double-Down taste test, and caps it all off with a visit from the “German Ambassador to the U.N.” to try out some cupcakes. Pitch perfect

I recently realized that I had a severe backlog of Daily Show videos to get through, over a month. Well, I buckled down one weekend when I had to do other computer work, and watched a bunch at a time. There were a number of good ones, but only a few that really had the level of sarcasm that I was looking for. I have found that John Oliver is really the best for this sort of thing; I think it helps that he’s British.

First up, a visit to an RNC meeting in Hawaii to discuss fiscal responsibility.

That video is good, but I don’t necessarily think that its all that hypocritical to have a summit on fiscal responsibility in Hawaii. Maybe they got really good group rates.

However, this next clip is delicious.

Last Thanksgiving, I decided not to go back to Chicago, mostly because flying back to the Midwest is a pain in the butt and sorta expensive as well. I like to travel within the time zone, to minimize those hassles. So when Bruce and Tina extended an invitation to me to visit for Thanksgiving, I accepted it before they could explain that it was mostly sarcasm.

Visiting them is “interesting”, mostly due to their two young boys, Nile (20 months when I visited) and Cyrus (3 months), who are slowly draining their parents’ sanity. This was actually my first time meeting Cyrus. He was still blob-like at this age, but I liked Cyrus; he did not fuss when I held him, and we had some good conversations during tummy time. Nile was a bit suspicious of me, but allowed me to read some books to him. He’s pretty verbal at this age, although Tina is much more skilled at comprehending him than I am.

We were pretty ambitious for this Thanksgiving meal; I convinced Tina to try out the Good Eats Brined Turkey recipe, which makes for a deliciously moist turkey. It turned out well overall, although we were hampered by not having a true probe thermometer. I also made a slow-cooker cabbage dish that turned out pretty well, and a sausage stuffing that was delicious, although I should have chopped the walnuts within it a bit finer.

Overall, though, this was just an excuse to visit Bruce & Tina, two of my favorite people.

Anyways, here are some pictures of my visit, which will probably be used as evidence someday by Child Protective Services.

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures And Descriptions After the Break.

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As some of you might have noticed, I managed to score a Bag of Crap on Christmas last December. I was helped by the fact that they employed an “anti-cheat” mechanism. That is, if you just went to the site front page, it said it was sold out, but if you took the time to read the text for the time, it explained that you needed to click through to a special page in order to order the Crap. This is intended to foil any sort of automated buying program/script anyone was running. And it worked! I was actually able to score one, something that I hadn’t done in just about a year.

However, I did experience a problem : it didn’t arrive. Well, the tracking indicated that it did in fact arrive, but when I got home…nothing was there! Was there a thief in my area? Was there an incompetent mailperson? We may never know. Luckily, Woot believed my sob story and was nice enough to send me another Bag of Crap. This in itself was awesome, as I was expecting them to just refund my money. Apparently they have redundant crap in their warehouse that they were willing to send me.

See the video below to see my dramatic unboxing. Hit the jump (and scroll down past all the whitespace I’ve added so as to not spoil the video) to see individual pictures of my loot.

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I’m a man of obsession. Obsession over stupid things, mostly, but obsession nonetheless. My latest obsession has been Top Gear. I don’t claim to have discovered this show, of course; Top Gear is a British car show that’s been around for decades. They had a reinvention of sorts at the turn of the century, though, and became quite a bit more eccentric. I had seen some clips of the show on YouTube, so I was aware of the crazy stuff that they did, but it wasn’t until I caught Series 10 on Netflix streaming that I realized just how often they did awesome, hilarious stuff.

As I watched that series (originally aired in 2007), I came across this segment, where the Top Gear crew pay an homage (of sorts) to the quality of British craftsmanship. It’s four YouTube videos (32 minutes total), and it’s just about the funniest thing I have watched in the past six months, perhaps even the past year. If you aren’t laughing hysterically at some point in time while watching this, I’m afraid that we can’t be friends.

Back in November, I used up some of my vacation days and visited Japan. Not just on a whim, mind you; when I travel, I travel to visit people. In this case, it’s my good friends Yusuke and Tomoko, old compatriots from High School (Yusuke) and undergrad (Tomoko). While I flew in from San Francisco, another friend from undergrad, Becky, flew in from Boston along with her boyfriend Steve. So in many ways, it was a little reunion with a lot of my favorite people.
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When delivering their distinct brand of satire, the folks at The Daily Show make heavy use of sarcasm, with devastating results. These two clips were from the January 5th show, and they are fantastic.

I don’t normally post stuff from the Colbert Report, because I don’t really have time (or make time) to watch both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, so I’ve picked TDS, and rely on other websites to recommend any extraordinary segments. Talking Points Memo posted this one a week and a half ago, and I finally got around to watching it. Overall, a solidly hyperbolical segment, with a great use of elemental symbol humor.