Category Archives: humor

Twin FAQ

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Being a twin, I’ve been asked many twin-based questions in my life. So for the benefit (and maybe even amusement) of all, I’ve put together a twin FAQ.

  1. Are you identical? No. She is a girl, and I am a boy. This question has been asked frequently after these facts are already known, which always provides a laugh. I think people are hard-wired to ask this question of a twin, no matter what.
  2. Which is older? She is, by a minute. And she’s used that minute to her advantage all our lives. 🙂 (You know I love ya, sis.)
  3. Which is smarter? I don’t know. There’s no good way to determine whether one person is smarter than another. Is it based on number of facts alone, or subjects, or real-life applications, or common sense? How do you weigh those areas? Suffice to say that she knows more than I do in some areas, and I know more than she does in some areas.
  4. Do you look alike? In some ways, although she definitely favors our mom, and I our dad.
  5. Can you tell when each other is hurt or sick? I don’t think so, but I do remember feeling something was wrong the day that she broke her arm back in 6th grade, before I found out.
  6. Which one is the evil one? I think that’s best left a mystery. 🙂

Any other questions that I’ve forgotten?

Double your fun

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Ah, grandparents. My grandfather is something of a kidder. He’s always trying to push your buttons if he can, and he’s pretty quick-witted.

The other day, he bought one of those Sam’s-sized bags of Dubble Bubble bubble gum. You know, the pink, cylindrical gum that loses its flavor in about thirteen seconds? Anyway, he had a couple of pieces in his mouth, and they got stuck. He couldn’t get his mouth open enough to get them out.

As he tried to remove the gum, I joked that it was the first thing that I had ever heard of that could keep his mouth shut. I haven’t heard my grandmother laugh that hard in a long time. 🙂

Well, that makes me feel loved

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I just received an e-mail from my financial advisor. At least, that’s what the “From:” field tells me: “Your Financial Advisor”.

That’s great. I didn’t even know that I had one…but then, I guess they’d be a better financial advisor if they knew that I didn’t have any finances to give me advice about.

Memphis is just up the road

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With your favorite guitar riff in the background:

Well, I’ve got 15 pounds that I could stand to lose,
Well, I’ve got 15 pounds that I could stand to lose,
I’ve got the 23-years-old-and-already-developing-a-middle-age-spread blues.

Yes, there really is someone this dumb…

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Witness Scott Larson, 26 years old. Mr. Larson lost his baseball cap while looking at Kilauea, an active volcano on Hawaii. Mr. Larson wanted his cap back. Mr. Larson decided to go fetch his cap. By reaching over the edge of the summit crater. Mr. Larson proceeded to fall into the volcano.

As you read this article, a good question to ask yourself is this: Mr. Larson is an officer in the United States Navy. Shouldn’t there be a test or something for entrance into the military so that we can weed these people out?

Question 1. What would you do if you were right by the opening of a live volcano and your $10 baseball cap flew off toward the molten lava?

I would just let it go like any sane person.
I would go after the $10 cap like an imbecile.

Yeesh…

Yossarian should have it so good

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I have one of the best coaster makers in the world. And it only cost me a couple hundred bucks.

Today’s adventure begins, amazingly enough, today. I have been realizing that my CD burner wasn’t getting much use lately. To justify its initial purchase by reducing its variable cost per CD burned (man, that MBA education’s getting good use), I decided to make a “compilation compilation” CD. This term refers to my favorite songs off of what are known as “compilation” CDs, all put onto one CD all their own.

Now, recently, I had been getting irritated at RealJukebox. It’s free and all that, but there’s a lot of problems that I just can’t overlook:

  • It’s a real memory hog.
  • On my computer it’s got a crash rate of approximately every 3.2 minutes.
  • In addition, no matter how many boxes I uncheck during the installation process, no matter how often I change the preferences to not make it my default CD player, it reclaims CD-playing abilities.

Sigh. So I deleted it.

Anyway, I picked out the songs that I wanted, and recorded them as WAV sound files using the “Easy CD Creator” software that came with the CD burner. What the “Easy CD Creator” people don’t want you to know is that “Easy CD Creator” doesn’t seem to think that if skips happen during the recording process to a WAV, the user might like to know about this and recopy the song. Oh, no…the program just happily copies the files to the hard drive.

So I get all of the files copied to the hard drive, and start recording the CD. I even put it through “testing” phase (read: wasting another 10 minutes in the name of ensuring the success of the copying process). 20 minutes later, my CD is ready.

I note that in my haste, I misspelled compilation in the title. Twice. My CD is now known as “The Compliation Complilation” to Windows CD Player. No biggie, I say to myself…I’ll be the only one to see that. So I make the jewel case covers and everything (changing the title there), and I pop the CD in the drive.

Two minutes, 32 seconds into the first song, the CD skips.

Now I’m somewhat irritated. So I go and listen to the original WAV file that I copied earlier, and I find out what I told you earlier…those two WAV files were copied badly, but “Easy CD Creator” didn’t think that was important. I guess it would have been too difficult to prompt the user to copy the song over. And “Hard CD Creator” just isn’t as catchy a title.

This is when I remember our friend RealJukebox. For all its flaws, I remember that it does a great job of recording WAV files. I jump online and grab a copy of RealJukebox, all the while listening to my now destined-to-be-under-a-glass CD for problems with other songs. Good thing too…song seven is also messed up.

Eventually the RealJukebox installer is downloaded. I go through the install process, unchecking all of the boxes, telling it I do not want it to be my default CD player, etc. Finally, that whole process is complete. Time to try again.

I get the two CDs that I need to get the songs off of, and copy them using RealJukebox. I listen to them this time, just to make sure. Everything’s perfect. I close out RealJukebox.

I now go back to “Easy CD Creator” and set it up to use the two new WAV files when burning this copy. I don’t bother to test this time, and everything turns out fine again. I get the CD out and label it.

Ready to hear my now perfect CD, I close all programs and put the CD back in the player. And what pops open as my default CD player?

That’s right, friends…RealJukebox.

This turn of events elicits a caterwaul from yours truly.

So now, of course, I’m stuck with a piece of software that doesn’t do one thing that I need it to do, but is great otherwise, and a piece of software that I hate, but have to use to accomplish that one thing.

And one new coaster.

futile attempts at Christmas cheer

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I will never be a match for Martha Stewart.

I already knew that, but I lent even more credence to that theory recently. I went to a store to buy some garland to put up on my porch, and some “garland ties” designed to fasten said garland to said porch. I also bought a couple of “Christmas sprays”. This was the store’s terminology, not mine. I would have called them “pine branch-looking thingies.” I was going to fashion these into a centerpiece for my dining room table.

About an hour later, I still hadn’t gotten the garland formed into a fashion that I liked. It was bitterly cold outside, and I was suffering from numb fingers trying to fasten the garland ties to the garland and the porch. The garland ties, made out of plastic, kept breaking when I tried to lock them into place. Each time one snapped, a little piece of my sanity snapped with it. I noted that the ties were “Santa’s Best” brand ties. I submit that if that’s the best Santa can do at making garland ties, he needs to outsource garland-tie making and stick to toys.

Finally, finally, I got the garland in a somewhat festive look. It’s still up, so I guess that the garland ties are doing their jobs. Well, at least the ones that didn’t break. But it was a lot harder than I thought it’d be.

Moral of the story: when you look at a box (or whatever it comes in) of Christmas decorations, resign yourself to the fact that you will either:

  1. Never get the decorations to look as nice as they look on the box, or
  2. Spend an amount of time roughly equivalent to a week per each of these you use to make it look so.

I had better luck with the so-called “Christmas sprays”. Luckily, these are for the most part idiot-proof. All you do is take them and place them opposite each other so that the piece of wire coming out of it (which, for some reason, is approximately as long as the spray itself is) is hidden underneath it. And lo and behold, there you have it!

Now don’t get me wrong. I still love decorating for Christmas. I just know that I’m never going to get anyone to pay me to do it. 🙂