Assorted Thoughts 37: I Have To Look Up The Volume Number Every Damn Time Edition

• Christmas Eve 2010: I watched The Exorcist.  Christmas Eve 2011: I watched the X-Files.  Christmas Eve 2012: I plan to watch… the apocalypse?
• A lamprey who writes mystery novels: Agnatha Christie.
• As far as I can tell, you could basically write Christmas thank you notes entirely in lorem ipsum and it'd be okay, because the substance is so much less important than the fact you actually sent something.  I plan to test this on my mother.  If you don't hear from me anytime soon, it's possible I was killed and dumped by the side of the road.
• I hate the faux Old English suffixed E.  Besides the fact it's inaccurate and obnoxiously pretentious, it is quite capable of detracting from the ambiance, rather than adding to it.  I certainly wouldn't want to eat at Ye Olde Downe-Towne Brewe Pube.
• "Waiter!  There's a hair in my soueeeurrrgh."
• "Did you read the name over the door?"
• My grandfather, who retired after over half a century practicing medicine, shared with me an aphorism he created which I think deserves passing on: The rungs of the ladder of advancement in academia are the handles of the knives in the backs of your associates.
• While it certainly has some noble effects in helping the poor get the things they need to survive, I can't help but be struck by the idea that dollar stores are the ultimate expression of American capitalism.  Endless amounts of cheap plastic crap, with some good deals buried amongst the rest, entombed upon bleak shelves in drab strip malls under dim fluorescent lighting.
• Some artists produce work so distinctive it can't be mistaken for anyone else.  When you see a painting of melting breasts draped over a country landscape, you know you're looking at the work of Salvador Dali Parton.

The Bowls of Bowl Season

I realize that of the three people two people, a ball of lint, and my imaginary friend who regularly read this blog, approximately none of them pay even the slightest attention to sports, so nobody will either read or be amused by this.  That being said, it is indeed "bowl season," and I feel it is worth my while to point out a few of my current favorites in the grossly bloated slate of bowl games to cap off this college football season.

• The Inequality Bowl, with an SEC practice squad facing off against the best team in Conference USA.  While CUSA's side loses every time by an average of 42 points, all analysts agree they did their very best and deserve a gold star for effort.
• The Disappointment Bowl, with Boise State and whoever they end up playing outside a BCS bowl.
• The Sponsor Us For The Love Of God Bowl, where a locality decided to host a bowl and never thought about how to pay for it.
• The Corporate Whore Bowl, which is to say, all of them.
• The Underachievers Bowl, where the best teams with losing records meet to determine who is the mediocrest.
• The Alleged Bowl, which does not actually exist.  It is merely a convenient fiction on the part of ESPN.  Of course, since ESPN is the only way most people know of the various bowl games, we then have to question whether any of them at all are real.
• The Unnecessary Bowl, the most recent addition to the pack, which is the result of some jackass seeing 70 teams going to a bowl each year and thinking, "You know, that's really just not enough."
• The Ha Ha Suckers We've Got Ours Bowl, which is no longer affiliated with anything but a roving horde of corporate sponsors who charge into a different town each year, hold the mayor hostage, and play a football game before vanishing into the hills with the loot.
• The Rules Committee Bowl, where the two teams with the worst NCAA rules violations of the year play to determine who takes home the coveted title of Most Scandalous.  The exciting matchup this year features the Penn State Molesters versus the University of Miami Payolas.
• The Subpar Bowl, which pits the two worst teams in the nation together for the mockery of the rest of the country.  The winners never play football again; the losers are fed to SEC linemen to fatten them up for market.
• The "BCS" "National Title" "Game," which in theory matches the two best teams in the nation in order to I can't even type this with a straight face.

Assorted Thoughts 36: Random Arrangements Of Characters Counts As A Post Title, Right?

• My usual tactic when picking what forum topics to read is to look for those most likely to contain flamewars and amusing conflicts.  This probably a warning sign about my personality.
• I would like to write a book called "My Faults Are Your Fault: An Introduction to Inheritance Patterns for Rebellious Teens."
• During some serious political debate, I want to see someone rebut a point by saying "[Opponent], I want to bear your children.  By which I mean I want to capture them and feed them to bears."
• The concept of a "gag gift" becomes rather more disconcerting when you have friends who are into bondage.
• While sitting at the gate waiting for a flight, I noticed a dot-matrix printer at one of the agents' counters spewing out a constant stream of pages.  It was like listening to history.  I'm strangely glad that there are still these dinosaurian relics of the age of green-on-black screen computers and 5" floppy disks living amongst us and howling like mechanical banshees while they print.
• Also, tearing the strips off each side of the page is still great fun.
• Dear lady sitting across from me in the airport lounge: bouncing your crying kid on your knee is not shutting him up.  It is merely adding a weird vibrato effect to the cries.  While this is appreciated as a change of pace, I'd still prefer you sedating the damn creature for the duration of forever.
• Your child is also very ugly.  Just thought you should know.
• Traveling over the holidays is an exercise in being punched in the dick by all the worst aspects of humanity.
• When taking a Greyhound-esque bus for an extended period, it's almost worse to have wifi that's really slow than no wifi at all.

Assorted Thoughts 35: NO MORE CLASSES YAAAAY But Still An Ungodly Amount To Do Edition

• I hate to say it, but although I loved my undergraduate institution very much, when it comes to a choice between throwing a few hundred bucks on top of the two hundred million or so already in the endowment or making rent, my choice is pretty clear.
• There are three basic outcomes for the people who graduated within a year or two of me: they heard the call of more school, heard the call of work in the real world, or heard the call of the job search, which breathed heavily into the phone and then hung up.
• I've decided that the best part about cooking for myself is that I can eat straight out of the pan/bowl/whatever and not have to worry about serving it into more containers I will then have to clean.
• At this point, I'm so afraid of misusing the word "ironic" that I try to avoid it, so I don't slip up and lose my right to be pedantic.
• Movie proposal: "JESUS II: Our Vampire and Savior."  You've eaten his body and blood… now he wants it back!
• Another movie pitch centers around a bunch of Colorado mountain men who are under attack by a band of werewolves.  They eventually manage to hunt down the werewolves and defeat them by shooting them with Silver Bullets, namely, Coors Light cans.
• I know someone who made an elaborate automated Excel spreadsheet to generate things to make for dinner.  Were I to attempt something similar, it'd be much more along the lines of flipping a coin to decide between frozen pizza and a quesadilla.
• Actually, let's be honest.  Even if it was just those two choices, I'd still probably roll a d12, simply because I can.
• I just realized that the worst part about being a grad student is that when you finish your last exam of the semester, you can't really just turn your brain off and sleep and vegetate forever.  You have work to do.  Of course, now you actually have time to do said work, unlike the rest of the semester.
• It kind of sucks when this is the thought you have while walking out of your last final.

Music For An Internet Age

I've taken the liberty of updating some of the songs on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time for a more internet-filled time.

• "Like a Trolling Stone," Bob Dylan
• "Smells Like 1337 Spirit," Nirvana
• "London Skyping," The Clash
• "In My Second Life," The Beatles'
• "Sympathy for the Furry," The Rolling Stones
• "Anarchy in the Wiki," The Sex Pixels
• "Califorum Girls," The Beach Boys
• "Porn to be Wild," Steppenwolf
• "Won't Get Trolled Again," The Who
• "I Wanna Be Aggravated," The Ramones
• "Information Superhighway to Hell," AC/DC
• "We Will Shock You (And/Or Your Parents)," Queen
• "Don't Fear the Griefer," Blue Öyster Cult
• "Enter Goatman," Metallica
• "Loli," The Kinks
• "White Man in Mommy's Basement," The Clash
• "I'm Eighteen (No, Really, I Swear),"Alice Cooper
• "Goldland," Ron Paul Simon