MQotW – Work Edition Vol 1. Issue 4

If I Listened Long Enough To You I’d Find A Way To Believe That It’s All True,

Last edition’s quote was: “How do you like that? The guy gets laid more times dead than I do alive.”

The correct answer is Weekend at Bernie’s. Starred Terri Kiser, Jonathan Silverman (who’s less entertaining than his hot sister Sarah), and Andrew McCarthy. It also starred the idea that Staten Islanders are too stupid to recognize when their dead neighbor has been tied to & escorted around town by two New York hooligans, who are pretending he’s still alive so that they can prevent their own death. My personal belief is that this idea is WAY funnier than any of the actual actors, and it should be remade over & over.

Last edition’s winner, from the sunny city of Venice Beach, is none other than Stephanie “I’m Dating A Guy With The Same First Name As My Brother And It’s NOT Unsettling For Anyone In The Family” Hansen, who is dating a guy who also happens to be named Brian, who also happens to be from Pennsylvania, and who ALSO happens to have a sister named Stephanie, and who ALSO is a super-nice, clean-cut guy with a good head on his shoulders & aspirations to be an actor of some repute. Not ill repute. Healthy, desirable repute. (He also happens to like it when people correctly use the noun “repute.”) Aside from her eerie-but-eerie-without-being-unsettling-because-we’re-all-too-afraid-to-be-unsettled-by-it taste in gentleman suitors, Stephanie has many characteristics that make her one of the most unique denizens of the City of Angels. See, she grew up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, then went to college in Boston, and moved to L.A. without the slightest hope of becoming an entertainer. Also, she is not a trust-fund baby, has only all-natural facial structure, has never even been on a surf board, and only has a passing fancy for gay men who hide their homosexuality behind a thinly-veiled drug habit/Woody Allen obsession. ‘Why would one move to L.A. without being any of those things, and without wanting to be at least marginally involved in ‘the business’?’ Good question, Reader, but please refrain to using the phrase ‘the business’, as it has several connotations of ill repute (!), as in “I just gave that toilet ‘the business'”, or “The kid has ‘the business’ in his diaper,” or “My wife refuses to give me ‘the business’ during American Idol” (note that the first two connotations are poo-related, and the third one is NOT). Sadly, I cannot answer your question, Reader. Nor can she. Neither of us can even BUY a clue as to why she would CHOOSE, without ANY of the usual reasons, to move to one of the dirtiest, smoggiest, smelliest, fakest, shallowest, greediest, most dangerous, traffic-jammed metropolises in the entire country. I stand before you, Readers, stumped, baffled & bemused. I cannot conceive of any reason that she chose to live there. Although I hear the burritos are pretty good. So her prize this week: a feasible, believable answer to that question that she can finally employ, instead of sputtering something about beaches & umbrella drinks: “Because the burritos are good, and I love me some burritos.” (This is not even remotely true.)

Last edition’s runner-up, a dear friend from my days at Penn State, Seth “Ballroom Blitz” Rohrbach, is known for his flagrant flamenco, his ravishing rumba, and the always lascivious La Bamba. We met in a class on Alliterative Dance, which he passed with flying colors, and I failed – while my command of the alliterative dance names is strong, his mightily milky Milkshake and his laughable Lawn Mower outshined everyone else in the class and totally screwed up the curve, leaving me to simply write about the experience (and hope that people know what alliteration means). Blitz, as he’s known to his fancy friends, is currently attempting to publish a flip-book of his dances. This is particularly curious, because no one has ever successfully captured the magical merengue or the sexual Samba on the small comic-strip-sized pages of a flip-book. Flipped too fast, and the dancers appear to simply be flying around a room from one scene to the next, like poltergeists with no sense of rhythm or aesthetics. Flipped too slow, and all of a sudden it stops looking like a dance and more like an instruction manual for saving scantily-clad girls from large dance-floor-type crowds whilst also wearing a tuxedo with the chest torn out of it (Blitz’ signature costume). While MQotW certainly wishes Blitz the best of luck in this imminently ill-fated illustrative impulse, his prize is nothing notable at all: an alliterative assortment, including but not limited to a sack of seashells secured from Sally who sells seashells down by the seashore, a peck of pickled peppers picked by Peter Piper, and a windfall of wood chucked by a woodchuck who would not, could not, chuck wood without knowing how much wood a woodchuck could chuck. (Alliteration, audience!)

Be the first to guess the title of the movie from whence the below quote was taken, and you will receive a grand fake prize from yours truly. If your correct response is received second, you will receive no prize whatsoever, but will be mocked for your inferior movie knowledge and/or less-than-catlike reflexes.

Please note: The point of MQotW is to acknowledge those with a completely useless mental database of movie knowledge, NOT to reward you for book marking IMDB.com or some other movie site & being able to type quickly; therefore, if you are found guilty of such high treason, you will be summarily dismissed from the distribution list. And I will flame you on MySpace. Research at your own risk.

Because this contest has some timing aspects to it, and to be fair to all my homies, I will distribute the MQotW at noon every Tuesday. Unless I’m busy.

Without further ado, I give you this edition’s…

Movie Quote of the Week:

“(raised voice) Jason, how many times have I told you to pick that damn thing up? (lowers voice sheepishly) A lot, I think. (lowers further) Probably several, maybe.”

Good Luck!

The Super Bowl Is An Excuse To Eat Like Roseanne Did Before She Got Religion,

Brian “I Wish Roseanne Hadn’t Found Religion” Hansen
Master Quotidian
MQotW Creator In The Non-Religious Sense Of The Word
“Stop Using Capital Letters In Your Signature. Makes It Religious. It’s Pretentious. So Is The Word Pretentious. Especially In Capitals.”

White Collar Archie Bunker

I think that about sums me up. I come home, I grimace at Edith (R), and all I want is to be left alone to sit in my chair (sofa) and drink my beer (soda) and watch Walter Cronkite (‘Friends’). Main difference is that I’m just as likely to put dinner on the table as Edith, and I didn’t spend all day mucking through whatever Archie mucked through. I muck through spreadsheets, and while this is indeed mucking, it is not the type of mucking that would generally be an acceptable mucking excuse for my grumpiness.

Stop saying mucking. Word’s lost all meaning.

Aside from the fact that my disorders are Seasonally Affected and that The Guy In Charge has seen fit to pee all over San Francisco for the last week & shows no signs of stopping, I really shouldn’t be grumpy. I try not to be, and manage not to be a lot of the time, but Edith still has to put up with it a little too often. Bless her for doing so & still being a generally happy person who, no matter how grumpy I am, refuses to stop talking to me.

… Those were the days.

Nerd-Lonely

I tried to use Craigslist to start a new social group for current & former nerds in the Bay Area.

Not a single response in 7 days. And you know these are the type of people that use the technology at their disposal. Problem is, rare is the nerd that embraces his Nerd (capital N) and looks to join up with other Nerd-embracing nerds. Especially if there’s no promise or even mention of MMORPGs, Meat Space RPGs, or hacking Prius batteries (so bay area).

I’ll try again. There’s gotta be at least two, and maybe they were both at BOTCON that week.

I’ll keep you updated. Meanwhile, notice that Wyltie here just turned 50. I offered to throw him a party, but he just wheezed, which I’ve learned to take as a sign that he’s less than interested. Also, that I’ve personified him to sound a lot like my grandpa Pete.

Today’s LONG Run and my missive to The Guy In Charge

Alright, so we stayed up ’til 2 last night with Mike & Tina, which obviously made the 8am start time with Punchie an unreasonable expectation. He graciously agreed to wait ’til 9, but my head was closer to 10. So I did, unfortunately, punk out on my running partner today. BUT, importantly but not more importantly, I did NOT punk out on the long run. I did 8.5 miles, all by my lonesome… and I didn’t walk. At all. I stopped 4 times for a 30-90 second stretch break, which at a minimum added 15 seconds to my pace, but then I kept going. So it wasn’t a GREAT pace… but it’s better than I’ve been doing. And what do we always say is the most important thing? (“Breakfast.” “No, family.” “Oh, I thought you meant of the things you eat.”) Going the distance. Pace & effort & elevation & heart rate can suck it. Distance is what matters when you’re going for the twenty six and two.

Let me also say it was f’ing WINDY on the way to Hopper’s Hands. And of course, by the time I got turned around to come back with the wind, it wasn’t freakin’ there, and I had a word or two with The Guy In Charge Of The Weather. Because he also happens to be The Guy Who Already Engineered My Body Not To Be Able To Do The Things I Want To Do But If I Maintain Dedication And Train Consistently I Should Be Able To Do Them, I asked him what the f was up with the wind holding me back on the way out and not helping me out on the way back. He wasn’t online, of course, being it’s his “day of rest” or whatever. But man will he get an eyeful when he opens his email tomorrow. That frikkin’ guy. I question whether or not he truly has my back.

Dear Guy In Charge,

Do you have my back? You f’ed me up with the wind today, and then you didn’t even hit me back on the flip side. What the f? And don’t say it has anything to do with the fact that I say ‘What the f’ all the time – you know as well as I do that the words themselves are only given meaning by the emotion behind them, and you know damn well what my emotions are: occasionally passionate but never evil.

If I’m going to accomplish this feat of human dedication & physical conditioning, I would APPRECIATE it if you’d just lay off with the frikkin’ wind. And the rain. In fact, if you were a TRUE friend, for the next 3 months you’d turn off as many of the less-than-beneficial-to-my-training parts of your weather system as you can. I’m not asking you to cause droughts or make the flowers bloom artificially, but to the extent that you can just let a brother get his training in & give me a pleasant frikkin’ environment, a STABLE frikkin’ environment to do it in, it would be much appreciated.

Also, while we’re on the subject, enough with the digestive instability. Make me regular again. I don’t mind the burping and “turning on the afterburners” every so often whilst running, but having to stock so many ponds with brown trout is beginning to affect my sunny disposition. That’s all I have to say about that.

I don’t want to end on a sour note, but I did want to make sure I said what needed to be said. I know, in the end, you’re a friend to be counted on. And you have REALLY great ideas & intentions most of the time. (I still think the whole “Women Shall Have Breasts” thing was your finest hour.) But I’m trying to accomplish a Life Goal here, and I just think you forget that sometimes. It would just be nice if you paid a little more attention & were a little more aware of the results of your actions.

Anyway, hope you’re enjoying your day of rest. Hope we’re still solid. R sends her love. Thanks for including us on your holiday card list – we’ll return the favor next year.

Rock On,
Brian

Wyltie made a linkback to Technorati!

I realize it’s not really that big a deal, but hey, a man can dream that one day his blog will be a staple of the blogosphere. Right? Maybe one day 1 million people show up to read Wyltie once or twice a week while they eat their Muesli or wait for the laundry.

It could happen…

My hopes and dreams began with a Technorati appearance (Wyltie’s there twice!)

Today’s 5 Miler

Below is a map of today’s 5-miler that I did with Punchie (or Mr. Smith). Definitely a gorgeous trail out there along the ocean, but the knee has got to get better if I’m going to keep doing big climbs or staircases. Coming back down hurts. But at least I didn’t have to stop to drop trou after the 2nd mile. More than I can say for some people.


$#*%

I just dropped a pair of scissors on my crotch.

They don’t teach you how not to do that in elementary school… though I understand it should be naturally assumed, given the whole human propensity for self-preservation and species propagation instincts.

Somewhat interesting that the same biological reasoning that explains why sex feels so good is the same reasoning to keep shearing objects safely in-hand as opposed to dangerously in-crotch.

Still hurts.

MQotW – Work Edition Vol. 1 Issue 3

The New Wii Fit Game MUST Revitalize My Enthusiasm For Psuedo-Exercise Because My New Year’s Resolution Is To Play More Video Games,

Last edition’s quote: (whisper) “He’s cooking our garbage.”

The correct answer is Uncle Buck. Starred Macaulay Culkin before his heyday, as in pre-Home Alone. Oh, and people sometimes forget that it also happened to star JOHN CANDY, funniest man from Canada in recent history who has shuffled off this mortal coil.

Last edition’s winner responded in less than 5 minutes with not only the full title of the movie, but also with the name of the actor (though not the name of the character in the film). Our trigger-happy winner was Andrew “Why? Because I SURSA!” Ysursa, who is from Idaho but may as well be from Kraplechistan, because he NEVER meets other people from Idaho. Not only does he have to deal with the solitude of being an Idahoan (not to mention the challenge of correctly pronouncing “Idahoan”), but he also has to deal with geographically-deficient individuals confusing his home state, from whence God Delivers Potatoes, with IOWA, from whence God Delivers Corn. In an interview with Andrew, he says “You’d be amazed how many people f*ck up that basic piece of 5th grade geographic pop culture. It totally spuds my taters.” When I asked Andrew about this “spuds his taters” comment, which appears to be a hyperlocal colloquialism, he could not recall having said it. “I could swear I didn’t say that. I said it totally spuds my taters.” Sensing what may be going on, and being ever the quick one, I asked him to write down this last sentence. He WROTE “I could swear I didn’t say that. I said it totally boils my [censored].” Just as I suspected, Andrew Ysursa is suffering from Idahoatuberism, where he vocalizes discontent in terms of potatoes instead of other, more widely accepted euphemisms. I’ve seen it a hundred times with people from odd states. The two friends I have from Iowa say “That really shucks my husks”, my friend from Wyoming … crap, what does she say? … I can’t remember what she says about Wyoming… hmm… what would she say about Wyoming? It escapes me. In any case, as his prize for winning MQotW, Andrew’s affliction, though not entirely unpleasant and simultaneously vegetarian-friendly (as opposed to the Chicago phenomenon involving the phrase “cases my kielbasa”), will be immediately treated, gratis, by my good friend Dr. Poopsteihn. (Pronounced ‘POOP-sten, not poop-‘STANE.) He’s from Alabama.

Sadly, even after weeks of hiatus, we had no second place winner for Issue 2. While this is unfortunate for my ever-growing popularity & widening distribution list, it suits today’s situation particularly well, as I’m completely spent after the whole “spuds my taters” thing.

Be the first to guess the title of the movie from whence the below quote was taken, and you will receive a grand fake prize from yours truly. If your correct response is received second, you will receive no prize whatsoever, but will be mocked for your inferior movie knowledge and/or less-than-catlike reflexes.

Please note: The point of MQotW is to acknowledge those with a completely useless mental database of movie knowledge, NOT to reward you for book marking IMDB.com or some other movie site & being able to type quickly; therefore, if you are found guilty of such high treason, you will be summarily dismissed from the distribution list. And I will flame you on MySpace. Research at your own risk.

Because this contest has some timing aspects to it, and to be fair to all my homies, I will distribute the MQotW at noon every Tuesday. Unless I’m busy.

Without further ado, I give you this edition’s…

Movie Quote of the Week:

“How do you like that? The guy gets laid more times dead than I do alive.”

Good Luck!

Potatoes are Tubers,

Brian “I Missed My Calling & It Didn’t Even Leave A Message After The Beep” Hansen
Master Quotidian
MQotW Creator & Founder & President & CEO & Ampersand User & Title Acquirer & Pennsylvanian
“That really clangs my Liberty Bell.”

Counter Update

Old counter pooped out on me, and the last number I know I saw there was 561, so have started again. Let me know if I’m off.

More later, maybe.

Scallions

Most recent lesson life has taught me: I can’t digest large pieces of scallions. Takes a few days to exit, and when it passes, it looks like rope. I noticed this because I saw it and said, ‘When did I eat rope?’ (Also could’ve been a candle wick, but I’ve stopped eating those as well.)

Hey, you asked.