The Snook and I were watching a TiVoed Friends episode yesterday when we suddenly recognized the location: Ross and Rachel’s drunken Las Vegas wedding was at the same chapel as ours! Well, ours wasn’t drunk and they definitely glossed over the paperwork issue, but the sign out front was definitely for the Little White Wedding Chapel.

DeskCam: Red alert! Yeah, I had another trip to the hairdresser yesterday…

Llook out, Llarry, it’s the llandllord!
Hooee. The Llama Song is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on the Internet in a long time. I don’t know what it is or where it came from, but it’s going to be making me giggle all day. GO WATCH IT! (Link courtesy of news from me.)

A few random Apple complaints, since I haven’t whinged about them for a week or two:

• I often drag links in Safari to the tab bar to open them in a new tab. That’s all well and good. It works really nicely when you’re viewing an RSS feed. When you’re on a regular web page though, and you’ve scrolled down at all, when you go to drag the link upwards the whole page scrolls up really fast. You lose your spot. When you do it in an RSS feed, the page stays put. I want it to always stay put.
• The Safari Features Page claims that I can “search across all of your bookmarks, RSS bookmarks and history.” How? I can’t for the life of me figure out how to do this. I printed out a recipe last night for sweet potato stew. How do I find that page again? Spotlight doesn’t find it. CMD-F doesn’t find it. The Google searchbar doesn’t find it. Am I missing something here?
• I haven’t seen this listed anywhere else, but the Snook found this Register article that says that Apple is extending the original warranties on iMac G5s to two-years because of all the problems people like me have been having. And lucky me, my new machine – the one they brought me to replace the old dead one – is still one of the ones covered. Great. What I can’t figure out though, is what this means for my AppleCare warranty. I paid for two years beyond the one they give me, so does that mean mine lasts for four years now? Do I get a rebate or something? Or am I going to get screwed once again?

Rant over.

Matt asks: “If you had a gun to your head, what album would you and/or could you write 25,000 words on?” In my pathetic case, it would probably be either REM’s Out of Time or the RENT soundtrack. In either case the resultant book would be a melancholy and insightful look into a self-obsessed moody teenager growing up in the Midwest in the 1990’s. Not really going to set the publishing industry afire with that, am I?

As The 40-Year-Old Virgin hasn’t even come out here yet, all I know about it is what I’ve read through online movie reviews… which means I didn’t realize at all that the studio created a grammar controversy by incorrectly hyphenating the title on most of its marketing material. (According to Ebert’s site, this sort of thing happens pretty frequently.) That would totally irk me if I had to see those posters everywhere.

KA-POW!
So… boxing rocked! Last night the Snook, Albie, and I headed over to Boxing Works for their “Kick-Start Foundation” class. We’d all filled out the special $20/8 days offer on the website, so all we had to do when we got there was pay up and collect our gloves. “Whoa, this place smells like stinky feet!” I said when we got up to the workout room. I had no idea what was to come. Our teacher was this tiny little woman, and in fact, most of the class were women too. (The only other men were a gay couple.) We started with a few minutes skipping rope to warm up, which was pretty amusing. I haven’t jumped rope in years, but given that I spent every recess from Grades 2-5 perfecting my skills, it didn’t take long for it to come back. Even the Snook managed to get a little rhythm going, though none of us could go longer than about thirty seconds. Then we all faced the mirrors so the teacher could take us through our technical instruction: proper boxing stance, moving the feet and shoulders, throwing a straight punch, a hook, and an uppercut. Finally we got to put our gloves on and head to a bag. The stereo came on and the Snook and I – sharing the same bag – got down to some punchin’. Damn that’s a good workout! We were all using pretty good technique too, I have to say, mostly because Fearless Leader threatened us with ten push-ups if anyone dropped their non-punching hand from the guard position. Then it was time to kick. We all took off our gloves… and that’s when I made the mistake of smelling my hand. GOOD LORD, THAT WAS FOUL. Think of the nastiest, smelliest old tennis shoes you’ve ever smelled in your life, and then imagine wearing them on your hands while you punch and sweat for ten minutes. Then think of how your hands would smell afterwards. Plus you fall into this awful psychological conundrum of thinking, “Whew, that’s really bad! Wait, how bad was that smell again?” and then SMELLING THEM AGAIN AND AGAIN. (My co-worker Leanne had warned me of the dangers of puking, but she meant as a result of overexertion… not of smelling my own stinky hands.) Anyway, I finally managed to drag myself away from obsessively sniffing my rotten hands in order to learn how to do push kicks and roundhouses. Then, back to the bags. I screwed up at first by connecting my kicks up too high on my shins; it was KILLING. A nice chick nearby told me to connect lower and that helped. (I still think I’m gonna have bruises today.) Kicking was a lot more fun that I expected though. I can’t wait til I can go all Jean Claude VanDamme and knock somebody’s block off with my foot! Eventually the gloves came back on and we put it all together for an all-out barrage on the bags. I have to say, my right is pretty damn tough; I actually managed to scootch the bag (which was touching the floor) over towards the Snook. My left is my Kryptonite though; I’ve got about as much power with it as my cat does with hers. We finished up with some group stretching, which felt pretty nice. All three of us decided that we’re definitely going back next week, and that we’ll mostly likely buy a ten-visit pass and share it. I highly, highly recommend it… as long as you’ve got a strong stomach. (I’m going to try to find cotton under-gloves today.) Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash my hands for the twenty-third time.

I’m addin’ this Indiana girl t-shirt to my Christmas list. They’ve got lots of Chicago, Boston, and Seattle designs for you lot too… (Link courtesy of Gael.)

DietBlog: Yeah, so I stayed the same this week. I was a little bummed at first til I remembered the Una’s… and the Quizno’s… and the Chili’s… (I went to a lot of restaurants with apostrophes, I just realized.) Anyway, I figure that avoiding a gain in a week like that is probably the best I could hope for.

For no reason other than the Snook and I passionately debated it this morning, this page explains the difference between transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs. Because when you get old and you haven’t studied grammar in ten years, sometimes this stuff atrophies in your brain.