giving five$

Hey, check it out, it's a metaphor! If you make it through the interview part, you get the 3X5 deal!
------------------------------------------------
Five tips for landing a job

1) Begin the interview by showing that you're not passive. If the interviewer's office door isn't 100% open, kick the door AS HARD AS YOU CAN and force it so. Walk into the room with elbows locked at a 90 degree angle, keeping your palms facing each other, with fingertips pointed the direction your body is facing at all times. Think tense, think rigid. Avoid smooth movements as you approach the interviewer, this will make them think that you are too laid-back to hire.

2) Avoid eye contact at all costs until spoken to in harsh tones. Begin reciting pi to as many decimal places as you can in a nasally voice. Keep those eyes away from the interviewers!

3) Ignore their attempt to shake your hand. This is a trap. If you shake their hand, they force you to take your arms out of the "power position" that they have been in since entry. If you feel bad about leaving the interviewer hanging, you can turn your body such that your fingertips graze across their hand.

4) When they offer you a chair, do not respond to the first offer, or even the second. With any luck, you're still reciting pi; just keep doing your thing. You don't want them to think that you're the lazy type who will just sit down the first chance they get. Only sit down if they offer a third time and you can take a seat without losing muscle tension.

5) Keep avoiding eye contact as long as you can. Eye contact is only useful when people are in love or when they want to fight. Do you want either of those feelings to be communicated to the interviewer? Didn't think so. However, you probably won't be able to avoid it for the entire interview, so know the proper damage-control protocol: immediately lock eyes, turn your body, raise your shoulders (to make yourself appear larger) and begin hissing loudly. Wet your chair. Continue hissing until they look away.
--------------------------------
Five more of the "lesser spiritual gifts"

*Slowness
*Overreacting
*Deodorant
*Noogies
*Toastmanship

--------------------------------
Five of the least popular flavors of Best Yet soda
(only available in unwieldly 3L- bottles!)

*Pine
*Eggplant
*Butter
*Salsa con queso
*Yam

--------------------------------

Five of the weirdest allergies you could have

*Beaks
*Communism
*Limericks
*Static
*Bling

Fobonics as a second language

Those of you that are still with us in radioland, thank you, we're sorry about the technical difficulties. [I'll think of some excuse later and insert it here].

It seems that some, and by some I mean one, of us was confused by my resolve to give up arson for lent. To them, I say: It's a freakin' joke. Of course I'm not really going to give up arson; I will continue to burn buildings down recreationally. Stopping just for lent would be blatant legalism.

I've been told that the common thread that runs between all things funny is the element of the unexpected. I guess I buy into it. Like in the case of the joke above, it's funny because the claim goes in the opposite direction that you expect it to go. Kinda like the tech stock I bought in 2000. Grrrr.

So I wonder, why is Engrish so funny? Is it because my brain expects people to follow the rules of my native language and gets surprised when they don't? Or is it because of some repressed ethnocentrism? Or just straight-up ethnocentrism? I should probably find out eventually, but in the meantime, hopefully I can continue to enjoy things like this trip down memory lane.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Addendum, 2/24/07
After further thought, I've become inclined to pick up a new pet project: the web-based crazy excuse generator. I'll let you know when I have some sort of product ready.

95 theses (give or take a few)

I feel great today. So good, in fact, that I will put several of my own pet theories on the chopping block for the benefit of my readership. Happy hunting?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It seemed pretty natural to wonder why I was not enjoying the situation as I sat stopped on 35 southbound. I was really pissed about not having taken the smart way, West River Parkway to Minnehaha Parkway, even though it really wouldn't have cut that much off the trip. But, at least I would have been moving the whole time, and that would have somehow been way better.

Postulate #1: We hate being stuck in traffic for the same reason we want more money.

So what I decided was that the universal hatred of being caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic is not because it makes people late but because it makes us feel powerless. You can't go forward, you can't go back, you can't change lanes, you just have to sit there until a gap opens up. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing you can do from the inside of your auto to make the cars in front of you move (and if there is a way, please share this knowledge with the rest of us). And because of that, you lack the freedom to go where you want to go and do what you want to do. And the freedom to do what you want to do is exactly the reason why you want more money than you have. So maybe the greedy among us really just appreciate personal freedom to a larger degree, or maybe people that take the roundabout way are also, in general, greedier than average, or maybe I'm just off base.
-----------------------------------------
Not to brag, but I'm pretty sure I have the spiritual gift of Tetris. If there was a Tetris section on the SAT, I probably would have gotten a free ride to Stanford. So, of course, I play a lot of it, and I've observed that when I do, the most comfortable position to put my legs in seems to be with my left ankle on top of my right knee. This is weird, because in almost every other situation, I prefer the mirror image of that position, with my right foot on my left knee. Why?

Postulate #2: The right hemisphere of the brain handles tetris, and increased activity in the right brain causes the left side of the body to be used preferentially.

We know that we all have our wires crossed when it comes to motor functions. The right side of your brain controls the muscles on the left side of your body. This is why when people flash a fake smile at you, the left corner of their mouth often goes higher than the right. Faking a smile is mostly taken care of by the right half of the brain. So it would make sense that the spatial abstraction required of my right brain by tetris "overrides" my default left-brain dominance, causing me to change the way I sit.
------------------------------------------------------
Who was this Valentine dude? The patron saint of corporate pawns?

Postulate #3: A rose by any other name would still be a ripoff.

Sweet lemons? Yeah, maybe. But I still think it's true.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Have you ever noticed that the vast majority of the memories you have from high school were from 11th and 12th grade? I realize that the contained events of the last half of high school happened more recently, so they should be fresher in your head, but still, there has to be something else going on here.

Postulate #4: The improved recollection of your junior and senior years of high school is caused largely by being able to legally operate a car for their duration.

Sometimes, you forget stuff because it's just not worth remembering. And it's amazing how much more interesting stuff I did once I didn't have to run it by my parents.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Ice-cream headaches, or brain freeze, or whatever you want to call it is caused by constriction in the blood vessels in your throat. The heat contained in your neck is transferred to the cold matter sliding down your esophagus as a consequence of thermodynamics, and as the temperature in your arteries decreases, they contract ever so slightly. This means less blood gets to your brain, so it complains.

Postulate #5: Wrapping a warm, wet towel around your neck will enable you to slam your milkshake as fast as you want.

This is actually verifiable by experiment, and I would have tried it already but I never have any ice cream around. A dollar to the first person to test this.

Doh!

I was going to write about something tonight, but I just hit my head *really* hard on the stairwell ceiling overhang thingy... I can't even think of what it's called right now. Brain... is... angry... No more overzealous descents down the steps please.