Often when I see a child playing, I long for the days when my life was easy, when simply spinning around in a circle could keep me occupied and laughing for what seemed like hours. I get the same feeling wishing I could walk around all day with bubble-wrap on my head.

( And finally... )
location: Emotopia

Why hasn't anyone ever told me that there's a band out there which consists of four dudes with cellos who like to play Metallica covers?

You are all fired.

doesn't mean they're not out to get you:

Recently, James' mother replaced the batteries in "Elmo Knows Your Name" and is now convinced that the doll is homicidal.

You see, James' mother thinks that Elmo is saying "Kill James."

From: The Consumerist

I've lived with Engrish/Chinglish all my life. I still have a pencil box from grade school emblazoned with the phrase "Space Shuttle shall be realize to answer your dream." Engrish.com catalogs some of the more amusing offences (To everyone thinking they'd never do something so foolish, however, turnabout is fair play)

This (long, slightly complicated article) is a pretty amusing account of how poor software and lazy proofing (update: and the simplification of the written Chinese character) are combining to create something that China definitely wants to eradicate before the Olympics come to town.

batnandu: yeah
batnandu: if i grew up exposed to that language [Ogg Vorbis audio link -tps]
batnandu: i'd probably be all into lego video games too
batnandu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
batnandu: your people really freak me out

On my drive home just now, it was snowing in Midtown Atlanta.

Happy Birthday, bratsey!

flattop: dude.
flattop: i had the strangest dream last night,
flattop: you were a spider.
flattop: that sang.
flattop: i don't know how i knew it was you, seeing as you were a spider.
flattop: whatever paul newman puts in that pasta sauce really did a job on my brain last night.

( And finally, a short video of a small man laughing at a camel )

One of my cow orkers has the domain control-escape.com, and he recently implemented a redesign of the site. As part of the redesign, he created a new logo out of his domain's eponymous unicode symbols. I, however, maintain that the Unicode standards body got the symbol for "Escape" wrong--the arrow should be pointed down to the left. Can anyone guess why?

I'm probably way behind the curve on this one, but it's just so hypnotic. It's a good thing I have headphones, otherwise my cow orkers would probably kill me.

Dear Santa...

fiyero2005 gives me the following quote which reminds him of me:

Veronica, I think when you get out in the world a little more, you'll discover that not all well-dressed, articulate, detail-oriented men are gay. Many of them are just...Asian.
-- Mr. Wu, Veronica Mars

And batnandu and I watch way too many movies:

thepeopleseason: Dude.
batnandu: dude.
thepeopleseason: dude.
batnandu: dude.
thepeopleseason: ok I see your point.

Chatting with countessmary last night, we discussed the sadly-absent, random links I used to send to her when she was online for the majority of the work day. Well, Mary, I now present to you, the random link to out-random all other random links (Found on boingboing.net).

Also, GIP: an icon for the Pink Gator (to make up for the Steve Perry one).

For some idiotic reason, I have the magic words "Inuk-Chuk" stuck in my head.

Woke up this morning after a very weird dream.

I was working as a production assistant on Alton Brown's Good Eats, and for some reason we had a gigantic blowtorch going--imagine you can feel the heat of this thing from like ten feet away. The guy running the blowtorch, was pointing it here and there to singe stuff on the set. At one point he gets careless, however, and manages to burn someone up on a ladder, and to correct himself, he swings it my way. I fall to the ground shielding myself with my arm. Other people manage to shut it off, and I feel alright, perhaps a bit in shock/numb, despite looking at my arm and finding that most of the hair is gone.

Everyone looking at me is deeply concerned, however, so I find a mirror and look into it. Somehow the flame has managed to melt my face into two faces--another face sticking out the right side of my proper face, frozen in a look of shock from being hit with the blowtorch. All around the edges of the second face are the trademark swirls of skin that's been through severe fire.

I turn back to the set, trying to get anyone to help me out, but they've all gotten back to work.

I think to myself that this can't get any worse, when a man, high up in some scaffolding falls to the floor of the stage and in my mind, dies.

I reconsider my position on how bad things are.

And then I woke up.

This is what comes of eating dairy and sleeping in weird hotel beds.

Tylenol PM which expired a while ago will do nothing to help you get a full night's rest, unless your intention is to wake up at your usual 6:00 AM with an additional stop at 4:00 AM, along with the requisite Harry Potter-esque dreams, where you've gone into hiding in your old Miami neighborhood with a female Minister of Magic.

Yeah, I don't get it either.

You remember learning how to play soccer during P.E. in grade school? You remember how they told you if you wanted to stop the soccer ball's motion in any direction, you could pretty much just step on top of it?

I learned a long time ago that doing that with an out-of-control superball will just leave you with a formerly-spherical crunchy mass of rubber.

So if you're going to drop two hundred fifty thousand superballs down a street in San Francisco to make a commercial, you should be sure you know a way to stop them all.

I challenge you to watch the commercial without smiling.

Sweet: a 2.5 minute long version of the commercial

Via Boingboing.net, forget the dog--I want a pet tortoise.

As tagged by ludditerobot, ( The 20 Questions Meme )

The icemaker here makes ice that smells like garlic.

Go figure.

My dad called me as I was driving back from lunch today.

He had just received a call from a woman named Nicole, asking about me and something about "final affair." He had some pointed questions for me--did I know what she was talking about? Have I done something to be concerned about?

Now I suspect the presence of the word "affair" in her query makes him think that I'm up to my old imaginary lifestyle of whoring and womanizing that he's long suspected me of leading when living some 650 or so miles away from him. "Final affairs," however, to me suggests something entirely different, unless you're a complete sicko perv.

I call him back after I get to the office so I can get Nicole's number to call her and figure out what's going on. After bouncing around on hold, I finally get her on the line.

"Hello, this is Nicole."
"Hi, Nicole, this is James Hsiao. You placed a call to me earlier. Can I help you?"
"Umm... yeah. According to our records, you're deceased."

Apparently, I'm dead.

She asked me to verify the last four digits of my SSN. I wonder what would have happened had I said that she had a match...

Last night, I met up for dinner with a friend from out of town (let's call her Shana). Shana recently moved away from Atlanta to the left coast to go to grad school--she's getting an MBA with an eye toward taking some law classes as well. Since she basically knows no one in California, she went to one of those MBA program to get hooked up with a roommate.

She decided, when looking at her prospects, to go with a particular guy (let's call him "P"*), because he's Chinese (she's Chinese, too). From what she's told me, however, he's quite standoffish--he doesn't ever interact with her unless she initiates the conversation. She's told me that their MBA program colleagues have invited the two of them out through him, and he made it a point not to mention anything to her. She did mention that he doesn't quite approve that she's dating a white guy (because growing up in Miami and living in Atlanta gives all of us Chinese people ample opportunity to interact daily with dateable members of the opposite sex of our own race--pfeh).

So, in the course of our conversation, she happens to recount a story about bathroom garbage. In their apartment, they have separate bathrooms ("thankfully," according to Shana), and because P was in the process of taking the garbage out to the dumpster, Shana asked him if he would wait a second and allow her to add her bathroom garbage to the bunch ( Note that my recounting of this tale is hardly verbatim, names have been changed to protect the innocent, I don't even know what a poopaw is, yadda, yadda, yadda. )

One of my co-workers just used the word "bunghole" in complete seriousness. It took all of my willpower not to bust out into laughter.

I went rock climbing at Atlanta Rocks tonight, and now my left pinky toe is sore.

Met up with Anna and Thomas this evening to hit the mini-fair/carnival that set up next to Turner Field. After we'd hit a couple of rides (I made the mistake of playing Beyond Good and Evil prior to coming out, so I was feeling quite woozy and unwilling to ride anything too adventurous), we were walking toward the entrance of the fair, when a man accosted our group, myself walking in front of Thomas and Anna. I distinctly hear him say "Hey! Speaka English?"

And, unfortunately, it only occured to me to respond appropriately, after he had passed me by to accost Thomas:

What country do you think this is...?

Oh well.

Surfing around Hanzi Smatter, I've come to discover that one component of my old* Chinese name, which I've previously described as meaning either "swamp" or "radiance," is a combination of the characters for water and, umm...testicle.

*I have a new Chinese name. I might write about why it's suddenly changed, eventually, but that would take me a bit more time than I feel like taking right now.

When I was younger, my parents would always take my brother and me on these long roadtrips to Disney World. In hindsight, it only takes like three hours to get to Disney from Miami, but I think time passes slower when you're younger--I remember the whole no eating/drinking for thirty minutes after getting a fluoride treatment at the dentist was interminable.

So invariably, on one of these roadtrips. we would stop at some random gas-up rest stop, and we'd find a big, garish, Orange-decorated sign advertising "Sundries." If you've ever taken a trip through the Sunshine State, Florida being it's whacked-out, hurricaned, can't-vote state of worship to the citrus fruit, you'll find these odd little candies, shaped like flat half-slices of oranges and grapefruits. I think at some point, etymology be damned, I decided that those candies were "sundries"--candies which looked like citrus fruits dried in the sun.

To this day, I can't hear or see the word sundries without picturing those candies, which oddly were never all that appetizing to this sugar-fiend.

My neck is killing me.

I woke up this morning all twisted, sleeping on my stomach, my left arm around a pillow, my right under a stack of two thin pillows under my head. I could feed a dull ache from the right side of my neck. I'm not sure if I slept on my neck wrong, or if some in-dream tension hit me.

I dreamt this morning of playing poker, some Omaha variant, where I had wired Kings, a Queen and a rag. Trip Aces and a pair of Kings show up on the board (which in that strange dream-logic which only makes sense at the time, also included an eight and perhaps a Queen), and for some reason, I move all-in. Someone else, of course, shows an Ace to snap off my quad Kings. I wouldn't be surprised if in that moment, that switch that turns off your muscle control while you sleep overloaded for me, and I wrenched my neck in dream-anger.

The dream is probably directly influenced in no small way by my playing of a Hoyle Casino Omaha Hi-Lo tournament, where not once, but twice, I had the nut boat snapped off by quads (from the same computer player, even).

I think I need to play some live poker soon.
Current Mood: sore

Apart from an interview with Joss Whedon and Bruce Campbell, NPR's Talk of the Nation has a segment ("Internet Animation Goes Mainstream") where the original founder of Quizno's called in to comment on the new owner's use of the Spongmonkeys. He don't get it.

Incidentally, hearing Strong Bad on National Public Radio is both hilarious and off-putting.

From a cursory perusal of blogs and webforums on the subject, it has come to my attention that Quizno's Subs' use of the Spongmonkeys in their advertisements has some people so squicked or creeped out, that they vehemently vow never to step in another Quizno's location ever again.

To that I say, YOU ARE DUMB.

I had a dream last night that I was marked--on the back of my arm was something that looked like a 1 cm x 1 in rectangular tattoo which kinda looked like a squared, block "8." On the same arm, near the wrist, I had a raised portion and a crevasse in my skin, both of which looked like crude stone daggers, except the crevasse-dagger was broken near the tip.

For some inexplicable dream reason, a group of people (something makes me think they were Greek) looked at me as if I were a major player in something that was going to happen, and I consequently took great care to hide the mark and the daggers from other people.

I had the distinct feeling of some looming apocalypse, and that the people who knew my secret were spiriting me away for protection.

Somehow, when I woke up, I also got the vague notion that I'd had this dream before, or that the dagger forms were something which had figured into previous dreams.

Does work have you down in the dumps again? Is your interpersonal relationship kicking your ass?

Just remember, we like the moon.

(But not as much as a spoon--coz that's more use for eating soup).

The things people think up...

aviationwolf: Did you ever think that if people really had wings (like fairies or something) that they would be made out of flesh? Sort of like birds wings are made out of feathers?
thepeopleseason: you mean like bat's wings?
tmhsiao: it would follow, yes...
aviationwolf: yeah...so all these fairy pictures? Wouldn't be so attractive, would they....
tmhsiao: then there would be the possibility that they'd grow hair.
aviationwolf: or costumes...
tmhsiao: and make the whole "back hair" phenomenon even more gross.
tmhsiao: well, sheer fairy wings can be flesh, they'd just be sheer flesh.
aviationwolf: so how do you make flesh wings for a Dragoncon costume?
tmhsiao: leather?
aviationwolf: Then it's leather
tmhsiao: still fleshy.
tmhsiao: gotta find a soft leather.
aviationwolf: Skin harvesting for fabric is probably illegal
tmhsiao: yes.
aviationwolf: and thin I think
aviationwolf: it was just a stray idea and I thought I would share
tmhsiao: makes sense.
tmhsiao: you should make them hairy wings.
aviationwolf: oh, I'm not making wings...
aviationwolf: idea was the wrong word
aviationwolf: stray thought
tmhsiao: well, I'm just saying
tmhsiao: if you ever get the urge to make wings for a costume.
tmhsiao: make them hairy flesh wings.
aviationwolf: but what about winged cats....shouldn't their wings be hairy? Instead, I always see them with feathers
tmhsiao: preferably oddly curled hair.
tmhsiao: so it looks all kinked and everything.
tmhsiao: winged cats = bats.

I'm pretty sure "make them hairy flesh wings" is a sentence that has never been uttered in the long, gruesome history of human civilization, but I may be wrong.

I dreamt about the Great Love of My Life this morning.

For some inexplicable dream reason, I was trying to move people from one cruiseliner-sized ship to another. I don't recall the details, but I couldn't just move the ships side-by-side and use some conventional means--I had to think up some Odyssey of the Mind-type, critical-thinking, brainstorming, creative bullshit solution. I thought one of those old-style firefighter people-catchers would do the trick, and, of course, in your usual dream fashion, one appeared.

The entire time I'm trying to solve this problem, she's there, helping me. At one point, however, our hands end up clasped together in what is, at least from my perspective, simply a friendly gesture. She turns to me and says, "You know, this doesn't mean anything"--the implication being "We're not getting back together." My response is an indignant, "What? Of course, this doesn't mean anything."

This scene actually repeats itself sometime later in the dream.
Current Mood: awake

I dreamt last night that I was sleeping with the lover of one of my close friends. Not a specific lover, mind you--just a woman who had many traits similar to a lot of the women in my life. She was the aggressor, too--she insisted that we sleep together (not that I was in any particular state of mind to object with any sort of vehemence).

Here's the kicker--I've got some minor misgivings about where things are going, when she has a screaming orgasm. I mean it's loud enough to where I'm surprised it doesn't bring people in off the street to see what's going on. I think about, but ultimately give up on trying to shush her or cover her mouth, and that's when I see my friend, watching from behind what I seem to recall are a pair of saloon-style swinging doors (Note to those who don't know: there are a pair of these doors at DuPree's, the pool hall where I usually spend my leisure time).

And then he just walks away.

I don't get it.
Current Mood: confused

He knows that I'm going to Vegas next week, and so he had this advice for me:

• Don't gamble too much and
  
• Don't mess around with the wrong kind of woman

He ended that with "You know what I mean..."

This just reminds me of my favorite father phone call. He had called me at my old job, and ran through the usual concerns:

"How's your health?"
"Doing fine, dad."
"How's the car running?"
"Not too bad."
"How's your apartment?"
"Nothing new."
"Ok. Well, take care of yourself. Don't spend too much money...

And don't fuck all the time."

Go figure.
Current Mood: amused

After sending this link to batnandu, we had an extended discussion on ice cream utensils.

batnandu thinks that sporks are the most useless eating utensil ever. I quote:

...making [a spork] out of titanium is like saying: dude, have this, the most useless utensil on the planet, FOR THE REST OF YOUR FREAKING LIFE. IT WILL OUTLIVE YOUR GRANDCHILDREN...

I think, however, that a titanium spork might be useful for hard ice cream, especially if you could warm the metal before you sink it into the carton (because what's the point of eating ice cream if you can't eat it out of the carton?).

He told me that Indians (or, as he proudly put it, "The brown people") solved that by making square ice cream spoons, where the forward edge can cut into the ice cream. It makes sense from that perspective, but I'm having a bit of trouble with the back of the spoon's bowl.

If, in fact, the entire spoon is square (and it doesn't just have a "squared" front edge), then wouldn't the back edges of the spoon ruin the ice cream experience? My personal feelings on ice cream (at least with a spoon) are that part of the gestalt of eating ice cream is the whole smooth-roundedness of the experience.

With the image I have of a square spoon, you wouldn't be able to smoothly lip-rake ice cream off the top of a large dollop without getting some of the square edge on the back (and maybe even a little on the front). In order to avoid this edge, you'd have to puff out your cheeks more, instead of enveloping the dollop.

So, my question is this. Does anyone have a picture of this Indian ice cream spoon? Or is my concept of it (essentially, like one of those wire fish tank nets with a bowl instead of a net) just wrong?

Help me out here...
Current Mood: curious

This Monster Cheeto can be yours for a mere five hundred dollars.

Did my taxes yesterday. I have to wait until my Roth IRA contribution makes it into my Roth account, but I'll file as soon as it's in there. I was and still am a bit uneasy about using TurboTax for the Web. Aside from the 45 dollars or so that I need to pay for filing, I'm quite used to TurboTax, but since their product activation controversy, I'm a bit wary of doing anything with Intuit. They say they're going to use a different product activation system next year. Hrmm... How about we stop assuming all of our customers are potential criminals?

The good news, however, is that I'll be getting some money back, which should offset the funds I used to refinance.
Current Mood: anxious

What defines the chin and throat? When I think "chin," I think of the bony part that juts out; when I think "throat," I think of the hard voicebox portion. So what do you call the soft part in between--the part which approaches the horizontal?

I suppose you could just say it's your neck, but neck really implies some verticality--thinking of "upper neck" makes me rub the part of my neck where my hair falls to.

"Upper fore-neck" might be a good word for it, but it's a bit cumbersome... "Second chin" might offend those who don't really have double chins. The "lower chin," maybe? The "upper throat" has a bit of potential.
Current Mood: weird

Following a freak Frigit mishap, I now have only three of the original twelve marbles that came included with the toy.

I need more marbles.