Who’s the best homebrewer in the house? Snookums is the best homebrewer in the house! He just won three places in the 2004 New South Wales Brewing Championships. His “English Mild” won 2nd place in the “Low Alcohol” category; his “American Pale Ale” tied for first in the “Pale Ale”; and his “Chocolate Cherry Stout” won Highly Commended in the “Fruit & Specialty”. Pretty cool, huh?

Retro coolness.
A few weeks ago I ordered a View-Master from Amazon for my little brother Joey’s birthday. I was lamenting to the Snook that nowadays you only seem to be able to buy the “themed” View-Masters, like Winnie-the-Pooh and Finding Nemo, and they only come with a few disks each. (I ended up buying some old disks of Disneyland and fairy tales off eBay.) Anyway, the Snook suddenly goes, “Hey, did you ever have a Talking View-Master?” I’m like, “Whatchoo talkin’ about, Willis?” I’d never heard of such a thing. He claimed to have a View-Master that took special disks with little records attached to them and the viewer would actually play the sounds as you watched the scenes. Wha?? I was skeptical. He kept imitating the voice of his Spider-Man disks, walking around for days going “The Amazing Spider-Man!” in a nerdy American accent. So, since his Mom happened to be coming down this week – and since the Snook family are notorious packrats that never throw anything away – he had her bring it over tonight. It actually exists! The sound doesn’t work yet but the viewing mechanism still seems pretty good. He’s got a canister with about fifty old disks in it too, like Disney stories and Star Trek and “Wonders of Asia” and Aesop’s fables. I have been having a total View-Master nostalgia trip. Some of them are live-action and some are cartoon, but most are those weird diorama-type things where the characters are little dolls set up in three-dimensional space. It’s so weird playing with one of these again, like falling through a time warp. We’re going to crack it open and clean it up and see if we can’t get the old record player working again…

The squeaky blogger gets the grease!
Remember the rant I had a few months ago about my frustrations with my local Apple service centre? Well, apparently somebody over there was vanity-googling the other day and turned up my site. As a result, I got an e-mail from the Service Manager apologizing for all the difficulty I had and offering to arrange an “extremely amicable” price to replace my monitor with a refurbed one they had. Isn’t that kickass? I’d basically been planning to put this sucker out to pasture when the new G5 arrives – what with my additional hard drive problems and all – but I’d love to still have an operational laptop if possible. He’s quoted me a price well within my budget for fixing it so I’ve asked the Snook to help me replace the drive. If all goes well, I should have double the Mac goodness is less than a month! (And of course, I’ll amend my earlier post so other Googlers get a better impression of the service.)

Behold the home-brewing cat!

Max made deep-fried Oreos! Max made deep-fried Oreos! *drools* Meanwhile, I’m back in ketosis after nearly a year of cheating on the diet. Hopefully I’ll be back down to fighting weight before I have to wedge myself into a bridesmaid’s dress in two months…

Thanks to the TiFaux, I’ve started watching Days of our Lives again on a regular basis. Yesterday I had a marathon session where I caught up with the whole past week. I’m still reeling from the whole “fast forward four years” thing. I don’t buy for one second that Sami would ever get together with Lucas, nor would Roman ever marry Kate. Has everyone gone insane? And why is Phillip suddenly way older than Belle and Sean? The worst part of watching all these episodes back-to-back is that you’re forced to confront (through repetition) all of the crappy, crappy tricks the producers use to pad out the show. Each episode has had, like, three dream sequences! Which leaves me confused about the big Friday cliffhanger… Did that crazy Jan girl really kill Victor “Jennifer Aniston’s Dad” Kiriakis by throwing a stereo into his bathtub? I don’t believe it.

If we were having a wedding cake, this would be it.

[Edited to remove our mailing address]

This “engagement” is only a week old and I’m already getting annoyed. The link to our address is down. If you want to know it, please mail us. I’ve also deleted the wedding registry. God forbid my motives were questioned or people thought I was being crass.

If I had a kid, I’d totally dress him in one of these T-shirts. Hmm, I wonder if I could work that slogan onto some sort of cat garment…

Arts and Letters is real!
I was just snickering along at this article about creampuff college classes and trying to recall if there were any at ND. Nah, even the weird ones I took – like “Ancient Wisdom, Modern Love”; remind me to tell you about that sometime – still had a lot of reading and writing and study groups to attend. So I was totally unprepared when “Notre Dame” leapt out at me. Check this out:

When Lou Holtz was at Notre Dame they used to give out a degree called Arts and Letters. – Don L.

Okay, first off, Don, Arts and Letters isn’t a degree. It’s a college. There’s the College of Science, the College of Business, the College of Architecture, etc. They’re like departments. And the one with all the humanities courses, like philosophy and languages and history and literature? That’s the College of Arts and Letters. What the hell do you think “B.A.” stands for? It doesn’t mean, like, finger-painting the ABC’s or something. In fact, it was the College of Business that was commonly known as the “creampuff” degree at Notre Dame (but only because everybody who failed out of freshman pre-med moved into marketing). Secondly, what was the point of mentioning Lou Holtz? Are you suggesting that a football coach has anything to do with the classes that are scheduled? Or that our last championship team only succeeded because they had easy courses available to them? Because that’s bull. Notre Dame has high entry standards for everybody, even the football team. We’re not Ohio State or Florida where we let every rapist and mouth-breather over seven-foot onto the team. Hell, every year we suck the chorus gets louder from the alumni to actually lower admissions requirements so we can get better players! So to conclude, “Don L.” was completely talking out his ass. Rant over. (Original link courtesy of Max.)