A little too ironic...and yeah I really do think

Had a random thought in the shower this morning...if liberals are so sold on evolution, isn't it a little ironic that they are the ones most in favor of government intervention/regulation/etc? Evolution seems like the biological equivalent of a free market, or I guess maybe that's natural selection I'm talking about, but still. How do the United Steelworkers feel about that? Was Mother Nature passing out foodstamps to the dinosaurs? I'm sure there are some subtleties that I am missing (I guess believing in evolution doesn't necessarily make you a proponent of it), but on the surface it was an interesting thought.

Watch This Wednesday #30: Even Stephven

Today, I bring you another clip from Comedy Central, this time from an old recurring segment on The Daily Show called Even Stephven, featuring Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell making a mockery of political debate television. There are several more of these if you go to Comedy Central and dig around, but this is the one that I remember best.

FSS 3: Lots of stuff going on

This past weekend was full of stuff, and yet somehow I still managed to feel lazy. Friday night I saw the new Indiana Jones movie, and while I've since read negative reviews that I can understand and somewhat agree with, I did still have an enjoyable time watching it, so I feel like 4 stars (out of 5) is fair given my experience. I probably won't go see it again, but it was still worth seeing. I went with a friend, and it was a nice evening.

Saturday I was mostly lazy during the day, but did make a jaunt over to Wal-Mart to have a key made for our new roommate, who then proceeded to call me and back out of moving in with us. :( We've (and by "We've", I mean "I've", as my roommates haven't done anything to look that I can tell) been trying for the last two months to find someone to rent out our master bedroom to, but have not had much luck in finding people, despite a lot of people wanting to come look at it. I would think that if they had a problem with the price they wouldn't even come look, but that doesn't seem to be the case. If we don't find someone before the end of June I'm going to start thinking hard about moving somewhere else.

Saturday night I went with a group of friends over to the U of U institute for a BBQ/Dance/Drive-in, where the BBQ consisted of hot dogs only, along with generic chips and pretzels. And I managed to spill catchup on my shirt within the first 20 minutes. Luckily I had a sweatshirt with me and was able to wear that over. We hung out for a couple hours and split about the time the movies were starting up, and headed back to my place where we enjoyed some Brian Regan on DVD.

Sunday was fairly full with church stuff, and hunting for roommates, and then Sunday night a large group was gathered at my first counselor's house for movies and fun. The end of the evening featured a fairly awkward situation involving myself and two girls, one of whom said, "Oh, I forgot something in the house", and the other of whom said moments later "I'm thinking you need to take me out either this Saturday or next. Which works best for you?" The whole story along with some other comments on dating probably deserves its own post, but for now suffice it to say that I felt put on the spot and somewhat manipulated into an uncomfortable situation. Also hearing girls complain that "guys need to date more" is starting to get pretty old for a variety of reasons.

Yesterday was Memorial Day and after a lazy start to things I headed out to my parents' house for the middle of the day where we played cards and Phase 10 Dice, and had BBQed chicken for dinner. I made back to SLC in time to catch up with some friends for dessert at Chili's and some Mario Kart Wii to bring the long weekend to a close.

Quick question for those of you who read this far: Are you enjoying these updates? If so, take the time to make a quick comment and say so.

Watch This Wednesday #29: Pre-Taped Call-in Show

Those of you who are familiar with Arrested Development are probably well aware of the comedic genius that is David Cross. If you aren't, and I know that the show can be a little off-color sometimes, here's a great clip from the Mr. Show show that David used to be on. In it, he's the host of a TV call-in show that is taped a week in advance. Yes, it does seem a little complicated, and as you'll see the host is really having a rough go of things. Make sure to stick around til the end, where the comedy goes to another level.



Upon rewatching this, I really have to say I love the old man who just sits there through the whole thing, as well as watching the transformation of the host from the first show to the current show.

The Return of Fin de Semana Stories

Remember when I was going to try to give more updates about what I'd been up to? Well its never too late for a second chance, right?

This past weekend was a pretty fun one. Friday night I went to Cafe Rio with about 10 people from my ward, and then after that we headed over to another friend's to watch Game 6 of the Jazz-Lakers series. The Jazz trailed by a lot for most of the game which made it pretty hard to watch. Then at the very end, they made a tremendous comeback only to fall 3 points short, with two chances to tie in the last 5 seconds. And thus ends the Jazz's season. I feel like it was a successful season, although if our goal is to win a championship, we need to make sure we've got all the pieces in place that we need. Right now, my hope is that they can hang on and stay healthy and outlive all the other current Western Conference contenders, but that seems like a bad way to try to win.

Anyway, Saturday I spent catching up on some errands that I needed to run (grocery shopping, paying bills, etc.) and then had a blind date Saturday night. It felt like a pretty typical blind date -- nothing to write home about, but thankfully not too painful. Maybe I should have a better attitude, but I rarely go into those things with high hopes. Not entirely sure why, but it does seem like if I have a hard enough time finding girls that like enough to want to pursue a relationship with, choosing from girls that I know, the probability of someone else (who in this case, doesn't hardly know me either) picking someone for me to go out with that I'm going to end up being interested is pretty low. I still feel like I went in with an open mind, but lets just say my expectations are pretty low on those things.

Finally, Sunday was pretty full of church stuff: ward breakfast, EQ Presidency meeting, church, three home teaching appointments, and ward prayer. In between some of those things, we managed to finally have someone come over and look at our room for rent and decide that they were interested in moving in. I'm not counting my chickens until they at least move some stuff in, and maybe not until I see that first rent check, but it sounds like a pretty done deal. So that was a pretty good thing to have happen. Finally, I finished off the night watching "School of Rock" with some friends, and got to point out the Spider move to some people who had never noticed it before.

Speaking of optimism, I'm tagging this post with "weekly feature", so we'll see if I can't keep it up.

Slowly but surely...

Last night my department had a graduation dinner to honor people who've recently graduated or who will be graduating soon. I was invited to attend. Thats right, I'm in the "graduating soon" category. How soon that will be depends mainly on how much I can buckle down of the next few months and do the writing that I have left to do for my dissertation, but I guess at this point, the fact that I will someday graduate with my PhD in Informatics is pretty much an inevitability. And that thought is still pretty foreign to me. I've been in school pretty much my whole life (not counting the mission), and the thought of finally leaving school behind and getting a "real" job actually feels quite welcome to me.

Anyway, the dinner last night was nice, despite my not feeling like a graduate at this point. My advisor was out of town, but another member of my committee had some nice things to say about me. That was nice, because its rare that I have much interaction with any of the faculty these days, and I don't get much feedback as far as what people think of me and how I'm doing with my project.

My current goal is to finish writing by July, so I can defend in August. I guess we'll see how that shakes out, but I figure its better to shoot for August and miss than to shoot for September and miss, right?

For all your hard-hitting news...

Browsing through the D-News tonight and read an article about David Archuleta and his dad being banned from being backstage or something or other. Anyway the second half of the article was about his visit to Utah, and had this gem of a paragraph:

The singer and his family declined to be interviewed at the event, but David Archuleta did speak with the Salt Lake City Fox affiliate, KSTU-TV. "Wow," he exclaimed as he viewed the cheerleading squad outside his stretch limousine.

Thats all the information they give about his "speaking" with Fox News. Glad they included that.

I don't know if this means if I'm doing better or worse

So...in the past week, I've had 4 separate people want to set me up with someone they know, and its happened at least 6 times in the past month. This is a huge surge in the frequency of this happening to me. Generally I don't get super excited over the idea of being set up, and I sometimes feel like it means people think I need some help (maybe I do need some help), but on the other hand, I guess I should be happy that people either care about me enough to be interested, or think highly enough of me to consider me for someone else that they are worried about, right?

Watch This Wednesday #28: More Mockery...this time for the Guammy Bears

I know I said I'm busy, but thankfully, my good friend CJ has had the foresight to recommend a video for you all to watch, featuring Stephen Colbert interviewing the congresswoman from Guam.



P.S. Iron Man gets two thumbs up from me! Feels like summer time at the theater.

Old Book, Old Book #5: Bringing Down the House

While I'm still working on GEB (hence "Old Book, Old Book"), and trust me its something that deserves a good, long read, I recently took a break for some lighter reading, and read the book "Bringing Down the House", the book that served as an inspiration for the recent film "21". Generally when I see a movie that is "based on" or "inspired by" true events, I like to find out the true story behind it. Often I find the true story to be more interesting, sometimes for the mere fact that it actually happened, but usually I just enjoy it better for other qualities.

I enjoyed "21" and I cruised through "Bringing Down the House" in a matter of days, so if you enjoyed the movie, or even if you didn't see it, I'd recommend checking out the book. It does have some adult language, so if thats a problem for you, you might want to skip it.

Busy Times

To the few of you who regularly check my blog and aren't just directed here by Google image searches for cartoon stuff or old McDonalds Characters, I just wanted to post a quick update. I've been kind of all over the place the last couple weeks. I went to Wisconsin for a job interview for half of last week. The first half of this week I went fishing/camping with my dad and older brother (and caught a fish with a flyrod for the first time), and today and tomorrow we'll be enjoying a family vacation to...a little place called Salt Lake City. Then next week I really need to get back to hitting the whole "trying to graduate this summer" thing pretty hard. So I probably won't be blogging tons, but maybe I'll just post a few shorter update-type blogs like this one.

Really? That was one of our presidents?

A few weeks ago I came across a website that has a bunch of listing trivia games, as in "Can you name all the Presidents of the US?" or "Can you name all the state capitals?" Stuff like that. There's a lot more where that came from. Its called sporcle.com and I thought I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't already seen it.

Watch This Wednesday #27: Pizza? Now thats what I call a taco!

Probably a fair number of you out there have seen this crazy SNL commercial for Taco Town, but if you haven't its pretty funny. My main point today is that if you haven't checked out hulu.com you definitely should. Its a video site where both Fox and NBC and the stations they own are hosting lots and lots of video online. There's the latest episodes of new shows, old seasons of old shows, even full-length movies. And new stuff gets added all the time. Check it out and you'll probably find something you want to watch.

A wonderful bird is the pelican...

So this morning on my way to "work", I was on the transfer ramp from I-15 Northbound to the 201 going west, and as I came around a bend right before I had to merge right onto another portion of the spaghetti bowl, up ahead on the road there was a pelican just sitting there chilling. At first I wondered if it was a real live bird or just a stuffed one or something, but as I got closer it was looking around and I could tell it was alive. It was just sitting there in the middle of the road. It wasn't in my lane so I just went past it, but I can't imagine it surviving long there. Weird.

Fin de Semana Stories

I'm having this idea that maybe if I come up with a good title/acronym I can get myself excited about doing more than just showing you a video once a week. So I've of course thought about writing on Mondays something called "Weekend Update" but that name has of course been taken by SNL and who knows how many other things. So I'm going to call mine "Fin de Semana Stories" which if you speak Spanish you'll know stands for "Fin of Semana Stories". :) Kidding aside, "Fin de Semana" actually means Weekend. Plus I figure with that name I can abbreviate it as FSS and maybe someone will thing I've got a new version of RSS going on.

Anyway to kick off this inaugural FSS edition, I'll tell you that Friday night I went to the "Grand Kerfuffle" an annual outdoor concert event up at the U. This year's show had three decent bands: Augustana, Hellogoodbye, and Shiny Toy Guns. There was also a local band that we missed. We only got there about an hour after the offical start time so we were surprised that Augustana was already playing. Personally, their music is my favorite of the three bands that played, but they were having a few issues with their sound and that really seemed to bother them a lot. Anyway, they were interesting and have at least two songs that I really like: "Boston" and "Sweet and Low".

Hellogoodbye was up next and they are pretty nerdy guys and played a fun set of songs that I really don't know. It was during this set that it became clear to me, if it wasn't already, that some people will mosh to pretty much anything.

Finally Shiny Toys Guns, who I probably am the least familiar with, finished off the show with a lot of energy, both on their part and on the part of the crowd. Like I said, I didn't really know any of their songs going in, but they were a fun concert band because they really were rockin.

Now, as for some metadata on the evening, I actually had a date with a long-time friend of mine, and we ended up doubling with her ex-roommate and her husband, who both happen to be good friends of mine as well. The sad part of the date was that about half an hour before I was supposed to go pick her up, my car died and refused to be revived. So, I was happy that this date was with someone I was already good friends with and I didn't feel too ashamed to have to call her and ask her to pick me up. My roommate joked, "You might as well forget your wallet while you are at it." But as I'd already acquired concert tickets it really wouldn't have made any difference.

I spent part of Saturday getting my car towed over to the shop and moving some furniture for my grandpa who's moving from a rehab center to an assisted living center this week. Then we went to a birthday dinner for he and my cousin at the Olive Garden, which I must say hasn't changed much in the probably five years its been since I was last there. It likely won't be breaking into my list of places I want to go out to eat anytime soon either. Just not a huge fan.

After family time, I ended up going to see 21 with some friends. I found it to be pretty entertaining, and it made me want to track down the book of the true story the movie was "based on", or perhaps "inspired by".

And finally, on a non-FSS-related note, a company in Wisconsin emailed last week to say they want to fly me out there to interview for a software developer job. However, when I got back to them with dates that would work for me in the time span they mentioned, they disappeared. Seriously, its been five days since I emailed them my available dates, one of which would require me to fly tomorrow night, and I still haven't heard back from them. Once again proving my theory that Germans love David Hasslehoff administrative incompetence is pretty much a universal constant.

Watch This Wednesday #26: Mississippi Mockery

In a second installment of obscure Daily Show clips that perhaps only I remember and find humorous, I today bring you something from 2001 when Stephen Colbert was still a correspondent for the Daily Show. I think my favorite part is when Colbert explains how the South won the Civil War. Then again maybe its the flag they propose for Mississippi to change to.

Oh, and P.S. 26 Weeks of Watch this Wednesday mean this has been going for more than half a year (remember I missed a week or two along the way). Does anyone care? Perhaps not.

Watch This Wednesday #25: I know its Thursday, but this is worth it

Just happened to be over on Comedy Central's website and found out that 1) you can now embed clips from their shows in your blog and/or website, and 2) that one of my all-time favorite Daily Show with Jon Stewart interviews is on there: An interview with Topher Grace back in 2001 in which Topher spends the entire interview giving his review of Wild Wild West which he'd recently rented. Enjoy.

Trip to NYC: Day 6

I'm sure you've all been waiting for the exciting conclusion of my trip to NYC, which ended now two full weeks ago. Anyway, on our last day in New York, the overcast but not too cold or wet weather we'd been having finally turned into a decent rainstorm. We were glad that we'd been able to see as much as we had in the previous days without needing raincoats or umbrellas. And given that we'd seen about everything we really wanted to see, we didn't feel any obligation to dredge through the rain to go see something just to say we'd seen it.

Instead, Randall's wife Traci was gracious enough to drive us around Queens in the neighborhood they live in and check out a few of the more local sites. And our first stop was a little place called Whitecastle. Of course, we'd heard nothing but bad things, but because we don't have Whitecastle here in Utah, we figured it was at least worth going to experience for ourselves.



Being that it was still breakfast time when we got there, I got a little breakfast sandwich combo, and luckily, they were still making their classic tiny hamburgers ("sliders"), so I got just one of those to go with my breakfast. Actually there was a special offer, so I got a "Savory French Onion" slider for only 89 cents (Jon picked up the Bacon Cheeseburger variation). Anyway, it didn't taste horrible, but it wasn't that great, and had the distinction of being a burger that kept on giving throughout the rest of the morning.



After our trip to Whitecastle, Traci wanted to show us a place called the "Socrates Sculpture Park" over by the East River. We went over there and it was basically a big grassy area with a few weird pieces of sculpture scattered around. Kind of a creepy place. Glad I wasn't there at night. It did give me opportunity to take a couple photos of the Upper East Side shrouded in fog.





After our stop there, we took a cruise over to a target-shaped Target department store to wander around for a little while longer before it was time for us to head to the airport to catch our flight home. Traci kindly drove us out to JFK and after a fairly normal amount of time at the airport we brought our trip to end, flying back to Utah.

Good times.

More photos from Day 6.

Trip to NYC: Day 5

After an exciting Monday, we decided to start Tuesday off with a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge. I'd heard good things about it, but was still impressed by the great views of Manhattan, some of the other bridges, and of the Harbor that can be seen while strolling across the bridge. The Bridge itself is also quite impressive.







It took us about an hour to get across the bridge, and to our next objective: Grimaldi's Pizza. We got down from the bridge and had to walk back to the area under the bridge to find it, and we arrived about half an hour before it was to open, so we strolled over to a nearby pier on the river and also admired the large buildings owned by the Jehovah's Witnesses located there. They didn't look very interesting though. Just big buildings that said Watchtower on the top.



Once Grimaldi's opened, we got inside and ordered ourselves a large New York-style thin crust pepperoni that turned out to be really good. Probably my favorite meal of the trip. After polishing off half a pizza each, we were ready to head back to Manhattan.



We found a Subway stop with a little help from a local, and made our way back. We stopped in lower Manhattan and made our way to a little place called TJ Maxx where I picked up a hoodie and a tie. From there, we got back on the Subway and headed North toward Central Park.

Before hitting the Park itself, we paid a visit to FAO Schwartz and looked around inside for a while, stopping briefly to stand on the giant piano. It was cool, but would have been cooler if 12 other people hadn't been standing on it at the same time. Hard to play chopsticks with that many people, you know?



After leaving FAO Schwartz, we ventured forth into Central Park. We walked around for a good while, strolling past the Bethesda Fountain, checking out Strawberry Fields, and then on to the Belvedere Castle. Given that it was a cooler, overcast day, it wasn't too surprising that there weren't many people out in the park.





We then left Central Park, paused outside the American Natural History Museum and considered going in, but it was only going to be open for another two hours or so, so we decided to pass. We realized we were fairly close to the Manhattan Temple, so we headed down that way. I have to say its kind of cool, the way its tucked in there with lots of other tall buildings. We went inside the building and the doorman suggested we might want to check out the LDS chapel that is on the 3rd floor of the building. That was kind of a surreal experience, because upon stepping out of the elevator it felt like walking into any other LDS chapel that I've been in. Never mind that its on the 3rd floor of a building in the middle of Manhattan. At this point my feet were pretty tired, and I took advantage of the sofas there to sit and rest for a bit while we planned our next move.



We decided to go swing past the TKTS booth and see if there were tickets available for any Broadway show we'd be interested in seeing. We headed down there and didn't really see anything that piqued our interest. Our backup plan was to check out a deli that a friend of ours had recommended on Times Square. He had commented on the huge pile of meat that came on his sandwich, and he wasn't lying. These sandwiches were pretty much all meat and only meat. Two tiny slices of bread and a thin layer of lettuce and tomato and cheese were the only things standing between me and a literal pound of turkey. It didn't really work for me. Sure, I like turkey, but just a big pile of plain turkey? Maybe I should have tried something else, but honestly I wouldn't recommend that place.



At this point we were pretty worn out, so we headed home with Randall, who'd shown up while we were eating. We finished off the evening by going out for ice cream at a diner in Queens near their place. Then I worked on getting my luggage in order, as we were heading home the next afternoon.

More photos from Day 5.

Trip to NYC: Day 4

I don't know if I was intimidated about trying to put the rest of our NYC trip to words or what, but for some reason I fell off the blogging wagon there for a couple days. But I'm back and ready to report on the 2nd half of my vacation, before the memories have totally faded.

Unlike Sunday, I did get my camera out on Monday for lots of sight-seeing and picture-taking. We started out Monday by taking the Subway down to Manhattan to scrounge up some real NYC breakfast and then in due time arrive at Randall's work, CNET.com's New York offices. We started hunting for bagels, but then were distracted by a Duncan Donuts, which is real New York enough for us, since we don't have them here in Utah. We got a couple donuts each and some HoCho (as I heard someone called Hot Chocolate this evening) and then we headed out to check out Madison Square as we had a bit of time before we needed to arrive at CNET.


The Flatiron Building. Taken from Madison Square.


Empire State Building, and me with my HoCho.

After strolling around a bit, we walked back to Randall's work and reported for duty. One of the things Randall does for work there is a daily podcast each morning talking about technology with a couple other guys there. Its called "The 404" and they broadcast live each morning and take calls and have a live chat room. They also record the show and make it available for download and/or subscription as a download. As I've been a listener since the very beginning, perhaps since before anyone else, they were gracious enough to let me join in on the discussion that day, and Jon also got to hang out in the studio as we were broadcasting. The language on the show is generally around a PG-13 level, but if you're okay with that, you can check out the show I was on here (none of the swearing came from me).


Randall & Jon in the studio

After The 404, we went to grab some lunch with Randall and ended up across the street at a deli where we got some paninis. We ate back at CNET and then left Randall to finish up work, while we headed back uptown with our ultimate goal being to get to the Ed Sullivan Theater to pick up our tickets for The Late Show with David Letterman. We took the Subway up to Grand Central Station and decided to walk the rest of the way from there. Coincidentally, it also happened to be St. Patrick's Day, and the St. Patty's Day parade was in full swing at this point. We were able to swing over to 5th Ave from time to time and catch parts of it as we worked our way northward. I guess I'm just used to Utah 4th and 24th of July parades, but this was seemed a bit underwhelming. No floats. Just marching bands and groups of people walking.


Grand Central Station


St. Patrick's Day parade

Anyway, we got to the Theater with time to spare, waited in line for maybe 30 minutes, and then were told to come back in a couple hours for the actual taping. We had some time to kill so we had back down to Times Square to do a little souvenir shopping. I picked up some mugs that I like, a deck of cards designed to look like the Subway/Metro passes, and a T-shirt from the ESPNZone. Then it was back to Letterman.

Our seats were on the 3rd row in the balcony, so to see Dave's desk, we kind of had to look down between the lighting rigs. The thing I was most struck by was how small the studio was. I always imagined Dave and the band being pretty far away from each other, and really there's not that much space between them. The CBS Orchestra was great, and played some cool songs, including some Green Day. The main guest was Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The Office), and he was followed by Mike (Golic) and Mike (Greenburg) from ESPN Radio. The musical guest was an Irish band (St. Patrick's Day theme?) called Bell X1 that was fine, but not that memorable. It was cool to be there, and was a fun experience.




I got yelled at for taking this one. I didn't realize the layout of the set was so top secret.

Once the taping was over, we started thinking of what we had yet to do. We decided it might be cool to go the Empire State building, and Randall had called while we were at the show, so we let him know that was our plan and he gave us a spot to meet up with him. We got down there, found Randall, and then walked over to the Empire State building. The waiting line to go up was pretty long, so we let Randall talk us into going to Rockefeller Center for our "go-up-in-a-tall-building" experience, which meant another trip back up a few blocks. Along the way, we made a brief stop in Macy's, the world's largest department store, and then it was back to the street.

Once we got up to Rockefeller Plaza, we got some pizza as we'd yet to eat some while we'd been in New York. I thought mine was pretty good, while Jon was unimpressed. It did seem a lot like Sbarro. From there, it was up to the Top of the Rock observation platform on top of the Rockefeller center. There was almost no line at all there. In fact the longest line was the line of people waiting for the elevator to go down. It gave some nice views of New York at night, including a green St. Patrick's themed Empire State Building.



Once we'd had our fill there, we headed back down to the street, and made a final stop of the night at a place called Junior's for some New York Cheesecake, that really was phenomenal. Great stuff. Very rich though, and I had to go back and buy a bottle of water to wash it all down. That was the end of our very full Monday.

More photos from Day 4.