One Word Meme

I got tagged by Beth - starting to feel like I got a target on my back here - for the one word meme. At least it gives me a break from the Grabbag Postings.

Clothes - I'm a jeans and t-shirt guy. I'd wear them all day, every day if I could. I also have notoriously bad taste in clothes (isn't my shirt at right 12 shades of awesome? No?). If left to my own devices, I'd probably be nominated for What Not To Wear. The G-Train doesn't allow me to be seen in public with some of my clothing choices, though. Also, I'm a khakis-dress-shirt-and-tie guy for work, so I don't look like a total slob there.

Furniture - WTF? I guess I'm a Farbman kinda guy. Oh, yeah, the Geico caveman commercials are hilarious!

Sweet - Anything chocolate sounds good to me. I especially like Baskin and Robbins peanut butter and chocolate ice cream and chocolate cream pie.

City - Well, there is only one real city in the world - New York City. All the others are poor imitations. Up-Bup: don't say anything bad about NYC - those things are absolutely true, but so? What's your point. It's still #1.

Drink - I drink Diet Pepsi by the gallon. I switched from regular soda to diet about 15 years ago when I figured out I couldn't work off the excess calories from my soda intake. From time to time people try to tell me to stop drinking so much, and I have a good time mocking them.

Music - Please, don't even get me started.

Film - You could check my profile. If I had to narrow it down to one movie, it'd have to be The Matrix.

Workout - I used to run a lot, but my left knee has given me problems for almost 2 years now. I consider myself trying to rehab the knee to try to get back to running. My best 5K time was 26:09 about 5 years ago before my laminectomy. That's not breaking any records but pretty damn good for an old, slow, 6 ft 4, 215 pound dude.

Patries - Mmmmm, Dunkin Donuts. Krispy Cremes suck.

Coffee - Don't drink it. I have Diet Pepsi for breakfast, occasionally milk.


Unrelated
I smashed my left middle finger yesterday in another Tom & Jerry-like episode with a hammer. I'm going to lose the nail with this one.

Congrats Dr. Zibbs on your Phillies winning it all. At least you'll experience some joy for a while until your Thanksgiving gets ruined when the 12 Shades of Awesome, 1st Place Arizona Cardinals, Probably the Greatest Team Ever Assembled - Ever! kicks the crap out of your Eagles.

That's all I got for ya!

More Shocking Political Scandals

Football Recap
UNC made my weekend by beating Boston College handily. I started 9-2 on the family football pool, stumbled in the 3:00 games and finished hot. I lost and I suck. The First Place Arizona Cardinals, Possibly the Greatest Team Ever Assembled - Ever! lost a tough one on the road after choking away a 14 point lead. They're getting better on the road, though. Good thing the division is so amazingly bad. I need Vinatieri to score 4 or fewer points tonight for my fantasy team to win.

6 Degrees of Musical Separation
Inspired* by Beth Coffey's challenge to come up with 6 songs musically linked, I posted my "Skateboarder" 6 Degrees of Musical Separation over at the West Point Skateboard Gang Blog. If you are planning on participating in Beth's GMMP (what she's calling it), you may not want to see my choices as you'll feel immediate shame towards your own choices. I may or may not do another here at ECV.

More Silly Photos
I posted a few more photos of me on Facebook like this one above. L-R: My sister Lisa, some fucking idiot with a moustache, the girlfriend whose name I have tattood under my ex-wife's name on my left bicep.

Unfounded Rumors

Um, Falwless, what have you been telling Grant Miller?

Why Pistols owns the internet.

Gotcha to look at the posting with the title, huh? I'm sure there some polical scandals out there somewhere. Why don't you Google it?

*Inspired to steal, that is!

Another Crappy Grabbag Posting (but not a guest posting by Ed Anger or Jackson)

Fake Gas Crisis Over
The Fake Gas Crisis in Western North Carolina has been over for about a week now. Shockingly, gas prices have plummeted to $2.77 from over $4 two weeks ago. Gosh, you don't think the oil industry made money on this do you? If we ever elect an educator as president and the education system completely falls apart on his/her watch, it'd be an embarrassment to educators everywhere. Yet our president with a background in oil has let the energy industry rape us for the entirety of his presidency. Ever since gas prices skyrocketed overnight during the Katrina crisis, people have been trimming their family budgets to make ends meet. Seriously, what did you do when you found yourself paying $20, $40, $50 a month more on gas? You cut back on clothes, shoes, movies, eating out, etc... A couple years of this going on and what do we have? A train wreck for an economy. I saw W the other night on the news taking about how now everyone is so confident about the stock market since we're putting $700 million in bailout into it. Who the hell is "everyone"? Jerkwad! How many more days of putting up with him do we have left? Here's a "crazy" thought, and by "crazy", I mean completely rational and sane. How about passing a law that beginning with the next model year, every passenger vehicle sold must get 30 mpg. Oh, but Mathdude, people buying Hummers wouldn't be able to go 0 to 60 in 10 seconds, and that would be a... er, uh, an outrage! After all it's the constitutional right of superficial citizens to waste gas at a rate extraordinary enough to cause problems for the rest of us! Another "wacky" idea: Kingston Steve says to make it a law that every car brought in for repairs has to have its tire pressures checked and adjusted to specs for a 25 cent charge.

The Bizarre World of Women's Marathons
Don't know if you heard about this one. At the San Francisco marathon this past weekend, 24-year-old Arien O'Connell finished in 2 hours, 55 minutes. However, she did not "win" the race. No, she did not. She "lost" to a woman who ran it in 3 hours and 6 minutes, a time 11 minutes slower than O'Connell's. I'm not making this up. O'Connell didn't register as an "elite" runner, so not only did she start 20 minutes behind the "winner" (which means she really ran the course 31 minutes faster), it apparently, by Nike's standards, eliminates you from the competition. Nike has gotten so much egg on its face for this one, they've decided to declare O'Connell "a" winner and award her a duplicate set of prizes they awarded "the" winner. I guess the world of Women's Marathons are just too complicated for me to understand. And I thought the infield fly rule was hard to understand!

Tracks of the Week
It's been a while since I added something new for you to listen to. All I've got to say about this one is no music collection is complete without Rob Zombie's Dragula and Living Dead Girl.

Grabbag Monday

The Amazing Race
TAR is kinda boring me (in addition to making my predictions look foolish). The separated couple keeps winning and winning. Where's the fun in that. I want bickering. I want self-destruction. I want finger pointing. The "Southern Belles" were eliminated last night, and I felt a little sorry for them, but they were completely clueless and deserved to go. I hope things get interesting soon.

Hot Stock Tip
Giving business advice isn't usually my strong suit, but I got a hot tip for you. Using the general principle of "buy low and sell high", you've got to act on this one immediately. You writing this down? I'll wait until you get a pencil...

Got one? OK, here it is: Kleenex. That's right Kleenex. With the Phillies headed towards disaster in the World Series, there going to be a lot of crying in Philadelphia. Hell, the Zibbs household alone will ensure a profit. Then, don't sell right after the World Series, hold onto it for a little longer. There will be another upswing in price when the 12 Shades of Awesome First Place Arizona Cardinals, Probably the Greatest Team Ever Assembled - Ever! play the Eagles on Thanksgiving Day. Of course, Boston Red Sox fans have already driven the price up a little already, so act now!

Movie Weekend
The G-Train and I watched 4 movies this weekend. Someone around here recommended Iron Man, and it was pretty good. 2 Thumbs Up. The G-Train grabbed Flawless for us to watch which turned out to not be about a one-eyed smoking blogger who once had a pretty decent blog until she abandoned it to fool around on Facebook when she ran out of things to write about. I didn't think it was because it was spelled properly. This movie, a Demi Moore jewel theft how'd-they-do-it, was ok though.

Baseball Recap
I don't know if you caught Manny Ramirez's batting helmet during the playoffs or not. WTF? Does he have a part-time job as a crash test dummy? Are the Dodgers too cheap to go out and buy a new helmet for him, and they just gave him the one no one was using?

Last night's winning pitcher, Tampa Bay's Matt Garza, is not related to David Garza.

The Red Sox don't have anyone to pinch hit for them? They finish with a guy batting under .100 in the ALCS and a guy batting .240. Pretty sad.

Picking up a fantasy football win and seeing Dallas suck in ways I wouldn't have imagined made my weekend sports-wise. My college football pool picks were sucky though.

That's all I got for ya!

Hot Sex! Angelina Jolie Nude Photos! XXX!

On some people's blogs (Katrocket's for example) they have a link to my site with my most recent posting's title. Can you say genius?!!!

I forgot to mention that over the weekend, one of my sister-in-laws, a high-school and college English/German teacher challenged me to a game of Scrabble. She had never lost a game before. Ever. So I beat her 280 something to 220 something. Not bad, considering I HADN'T PLAYED IN 10 YEARS! I dominated her 308-218 or something like that in the rematch. Falwless, you better backtrack on your Scrabble challenges! If being good at something that is totally useless in life and the opposite sex is completely unimpressed by your being good at it, I will undoubtedly excel at it. I defended my top Ping-Pong ranking over the weekend as well.

I posted at the West Point Skateboarder blog a story about cheating on a Chemistry test in high school. Nothing you'd be interested in.

I posted a couple pics on my Facebook thingie too. Nothing you'd be interested in either.

Best AC/DC Album Ever

You gotta go to the West Point Skateboard Gang blog where I posted it. Hint: it may not be Back in Black.

What A Weekend!

Family Time
13 members of the G-Train's side of the family were in town over the weekend, 4 generations worth - wow. It was a lot of fun, and the kids who are not well known for being well behaved were quite well behaved.

Facebook
I signed up for Facebook, but don't get too excited. I'm not getting sucked into spending tons of extra time on it. If I had known how much extra e-mail I'd receive, I don't know that I would have signed up for it. We'll see.

Football
UNC managed to come from behind to beat those jerkmo's from Notre Lame. That and USC's easy win softened the blow of a mediocre performance in the family college football pool. I also climbed back to respectability in my fantasy football league with a win over the weekend. Let's see, that's about it*.

*Ha! Are you kidding me? You thought that was it? How 'bout them Arizona Cardinals? Look up 12 shades of awesome in the dictionary and you'll see their picture! God, rooting for them entails such suffering though! You have no idea! All game - suffering! Dallas scores 10 in the last 2 minutes to tie with the help of the idiot who couldn't get off the field - suffering! We lose the coin toss - suffering! Then - incredible incredible incredible exquisite pleasure! Hahahahahaha - Dallas sucks! Incredible euphoria! You have no idea! Coming into Week 6, the last time the Cards were in 1st place in their division from Week 6 on was....1988! 20 freakin' years ago! Go on - try and mock my team now! Haters!

12 More Shades of Awesome

As I was moving boxes around in the basement, putting them on my "industrial shelving" I made that is nothing short of 12 shades of awesome, this picture fell out of a box with a bunch of others. It's my military ID photo from 24 years ago. What a rapscallion I was! I'd grow my hair that long again, but I've found that when you get old, your hair just can't do what it's supposed to anymore. This was about the end of my facial hair days, as well. My facial hair now is about 75% gray which is weird because so little of the hair on my head is gray. Haha TA.

Cowboys vs. Cardinals
Things are starting to fall apart for Dallas as Pac-Man Jones destroyed a hotel room fighting with a bodyguard! Ha! C'mon Cowboys, come and get your whuppin'.

Lehman Brothers CEO Grilled Before Congress
Don't know if you caught this, but it's hilarious if you add your own asterisks. Here's some excerpts.


...said Fuld. "I take full* responsibility for the decisions I made and for the actions I took."


"Is that fair, for a CEO of a company that's now bankrupt, to make that kind of money? It's just unimaginable to so many people." Waxman asked. "I would say to you the $500m number is not accurate," said Fuld. "I'd say to you, although it's still a large number, for the years you're talking about here, my cash compensation was close to $60m, which you've indicated here, and I took out closer to $250m [in shares]**."


Interrupting again, Waxman listed Fuld's collection of property – including a $14m ocean-front villa in Florida and a home in the exclusive*** ski resort of Sun Valley, Idaho. "You and your wife have an art collection filled with million dollar paintings," said Waxman. "Your former president, Joe Gregory used to travel to work in a helicopter."...Refusing to give ground, Fuld said his pay had been set by an independent compensation committee**** which spent "a tremendous amount of time*****" making sure executives' interests were aligned****** with those of shareholders.

Yuck-yuck-yuck.


Best. Halloween. Photo. Ever.


That's all I got for ya!

*no
**I mean, come on, everybody makes $310 million dollars in 6 years!
***12 shades of awesome
****my wife's idiot brother and his frat boys
*****around the water cooler
******misaligned

Grabbag Monday - 12 Shades of Awesome

12 Shades of Awesome
Hey, guess what my new catch phrase is? That's right, "12 shades of awesome"! I made some calculations over the weekend, and 12 is exactly the right number of shades to indicate awesomeness*. I'm going to use it as much as possible in my blog so that 20 years from now when people are curious about who started this craze, they can Google it (or whatever they'll be using then) and come back to Eating Chicken Vindaloo, 10-6-08 6:05 PM Central European Time. That'd be 12 shades of awesome!

No Bizarro Mathdude
I don't** usually take ideas from others, but Dr. Zibbs of That Blue Yak pointed out you can click the pieces of information on your profile and be shown everyone else that also listed that piece of information. So I was curious about who has the same information in their profile that I had. I found there are 3 types of bloggers who have common interests with me. First there are "Freaks". Then there are "What a Freak!". And then there's "FREAK! FREAK! Ahhhhh - FREAK!" My initial reaction was "maybe I'm a total freak myself", but no, there's just an ungodly number of unreadable bloggers out there. I learned that merely mentioning the bible in your profile is code for "I only blog about Jesus on this website." I checked out another guy who was in AA, thinking maybe he had something interesting to say about his trainwreck of a life. Nope. A blog about nothing but 12 steps is not that interesting. Up-bup: before you say these sound just as crappy as my blog, I'll point out that I did not see a single comment to these postings. How does someone have a 2 year old blog with 300 postings and not a single comment? Wow, that's bad.

Staff Cuts at ECV
Today I start teaching a class at another CC, and I start teaching a second one for them in November which will bring my courseload to 18 credits. Something's gotta give, and I hate to say it, but it'll be Eating Chicken Vindaloo. Since my illness and family reunion in July, I've been trying to post 3 times a week, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut back to twice weekly starting today. Now, now, put down that knife. Don't slit your wrists just yet. I also will have to cut back on checking out others on a regular basis. OK, now you can slit your wrists. This isn't the end - just a new beginning. So don't come here 37 gazillion times a week looking for a new posting, and don't take offense at my lack of comments at your site. At least you know why I won't be around so much *cough* Falwless, Guv'ner *cough*.

Football
I saved the best for last. The 12 shades of awesome First Place Arizona Cardinals, Possibly The Greatest Team Ever Assembled - Ever! won yesterday, kicking the previously undefeated Bills' ass all over the field. Next up: Dallas! I can't wait. Hey, Zibbs, how'd your Eagles do?

My 2 fave college teams, So. Cal. and UNC, also won, and looky who's at #22 - UNC! Hmmm, that sounds awfully familiar... Let's see, who said they'd be ranked by the end of the year... I think it was somebody...Oh yeah, IT WAS ME and everybody*** mocked me! What do you have to say now? I'm sorry, I didn't hear anything. I thought so. I almost won the family college football pool. I missed it by 1 game - doh! That would have been 12 shades of awesome.

That's all I got for ya!


*I forgot to carry the 5 the first time and got -17.238, which we all know is not an awesome number of shades to be.
**do
***mike

About Last Night...

I hate giving my opinion on these things because it makes it look like I care, but here's my take on the VP debate: Biden kicked her ass.

He looked like someone who's been there before, she didn't. Yeah, sure, she's cute and feisty, but Joe Biden looked "presidential" in my eyes for the first time. Of course I hated the "My running mate walks on water- yours eats babies and worships the devil" nonsense each couldn't resist resorting to.

The problem I see with the Republicans is the Wall Street Bailout. If this is a last second/last gasp-gotta-look-out-for-my-billionaire-backers ploy on Bush's part (which I think it is), whoever between O'bama/Biden and McCain votes for it is screwed. S.C.R.E.W.E.D. The American public will percieve them as looking out for the rich and vote the other way. I say that with a little bit of investments saved up and the possibility of my nest egg being greatly reduced.

When I got bored with the debate, I flipped over to the Cubs-Dodgers game. This just in: the Cubs totally fucking suck!!! The Dodgers kept hitting the ball to the Cubs' infielders' weak spot - their gloves! I'm actually rooting for the Cubs because of the common bond I have with them as an Arizona Cardinal fan (no World Series or Super Bowl appearances in my lifetime), but it must be mighty painful to watch my team achieve the best record in the NL, only to look like of bunch of little leaguers in the playoffs. My Cardinals haven't done that to me. Yet.

That's all I got for ya!

Grabbag Wednesday

G-Train: This Business is Killing Me
An "Industrial Disease" is spreading throughout the hospital the G-Train works at and she's got it. She'd kill me if I told everyone what it was - no, it's not an STD you asshole - so I'll just leave it at "Industrial Disease" (like the awesome Dire Straits song). Then, she came home from her other job last night with a broken foot! Who knew counting pills was so dangerous? On top of that, she's married to me! I think I heard her humming "Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me" in the ER.

Cardinals Still On Pace To Win Super Bowl
Following last year's Giants' footsteps, the Cards dropped to 2-2 over the weekend. You haters are way too excited about this. I'm not saving any spaces on the Cardinal bandwagon. At least UNC came up with a big win over Miami.

Homeowner Project Update
I fought with another power tool over the weekend. I wanted my electric drill to screw a screw in for me and instead it went for my thumb holding the screw. There was some blood, some bruising, and in the end, I kicked the drills ass! Don't know if I'm losing the thumbnail yet. One wall of the basement is insulated and finished. Looking to do another in the next week or so.

Updates
This week's Heroes was pretty good. I'm reserving judgement on The Mentalist which is basically an edgier Psych. So far it looks pretty good. I fared better this week but lost again in the family college football pool, and my fantasy team lost - Doh!

That's all I got for ya!