thoughts that aren't quite worthy of their own post

We have some cleaning to do around the post-karmic house. Every so often, the “thoughts that aren’t quite worthy of their own post” pile up to the point where I need to release them in order to maintain my sanity. So, in no particular order…

-Did you know that libertarians and far-left liberals actually have a lot in common? We're exploring the possibility that if you get far enough to the edges of the political spectrum that you actually meet on the underside...

-Why is there lipstick on the nozzle of the office water cooler?

-An office mate of mine takes Crestor for his cholesterol. Couldn’t they make that in a spread or a seasoning, so he could just sprinkle the Crestor on top of his cheese-fries? They could make the Crestor look like bacon bits. Why am I not running a pharmaceutical company?

-Familiar with Stockholm Syndrome? I think it is my favorite syndrome by far…

-Remember the Beijing Olympics? Doesn’t that feel like it was 30 years ago already?

-I was recently given the new Ben Folds album in exchange for my lung (long story). I think Ben is having an identity crisis. Either that or he just became self-aware after years of delusional thinking in which he only thought he was self-aware. So, in an attempt to prove that he really is self-aware now, he completely refused to make the music that made him famous (and as a by-product convinced him prematurely that he was self-aware). Instead, we get the bones of a great Folds album (songwriting and melody) but covered in the skin of somebody who was sick of doing the same thing and wanted to completely ruin people’s expectations (bizarre tech-noise and less than clever lyricism). Confused? Me too.

-We’ve only been back from Africa for 7 months.

-Japanese people drink something called Pepsi Cucumber Ice. These are things I think you should know.

-Is anyone as disturbed as my wife with regards to what is happening between Jim and Pam on The Office? She is deeply concerned. I, on the other hand, am just happy that Dwight is still around and that Andy intends to move to Celebration, Florida.

-Celebration, Florida makes for a really funny, really subtle laugh. I wish I hadn’t read so much about the place, but it is fascinating and disturbing and wholly American.

-I noticed that not many people are taking Columbus Day off. This definitely bodes well for my plan to eventually replace Columbus Day with Amerigo Vespucci Day and then to eventually replace Amerigo Vespucci Day with No One Discovered Anything Since There Were Already People Living Here Day.

-My cubicle neighbor tells me that I have the same ring on my office phone as the people in the TV show “24”. Now you know.

-I think we need to have a well-written and realistically haunting “end of the world” movie come out. Not one with monsters and bazookas and spaceships and spider-men. I am talking about emotion, grit, and a renewed sense of our own frailty.

-Winter is the best season.

-If for some reason Stef pops out twins in December, the second child will be named Reverend Willie Dengler Burkholder regardless of gender. Cross your fingers.

-Can I admit to watching this season of Survivor? Survivor was an entertainment life-saver in Africa. Somehow, out of a sense of loyalty and a consistent fascination with how hunger skews judgment, I can’t bring myself to turn it off.

-Why does it take $4/gallon gas (petrol) to tell us that being more efficient makes sense? And with the price dropping to $2 soon, how many of us will now relax our efficiency standards? Wouldn’t it be wise to always seek ways to maximize the return on an investment? I don’t see what the price of gas has to do with anything. No matter where it is, you save more money if you drive a more efficient car.

-It’s Truck Month!!

-I don’t like Diet Coke or any other artificially sweetened drink for that matter. I once blogged about the study I read that showed how zero-calorie artificial sweeteners actually caused weight gain lab mice because the human body doesn’t recognize the amount of “sweet” it is taking in (since it’s artificial) and therefore ends up eating more because of a false sense of modesty... I really like Diet Coke with Lime. The fake lime covers the aspartame and the sweet taste helps me forget about the cancer that the drink is probably causing in me. Good stuff.

­-A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony.

-If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be taking pictures with a cell phone, buying diapers on something called amazon.com, listening to music stored on a flash drive, ignoring the World Series, connecting to something called “the internet” without wires, living in 78201, voting for Democrats, preaching at a church, and reminiscing about the years I spent in Africa…I would have checked myself into an asylum right then. Still, none of that is really all that impressive. We still have people starving all over the world and no amount of touch-screens is going to solve that problem. A little perspective...