Archived News starting from 05-21-2009 and earlier
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All the Taco Bell locations in metro Detroit are being either renovated or torn down and rebuilt completely. The new "classier" building that replaces it looks more like an upscale restaurant than a fast food location. I'm classifying these new buildings as "
Demolition Man prepped" since sometime in the near future, Taco Bell will be the only restaurant to survive the franchise wars, and will sport this same upper class appearance. The building itself doesn't bother me, but having the drive through operator introduce himself before taking my order, and finding peppermints mixed in with my food creeps me out. At Taco Bell I expect my order taker to say nothing and maintain a look of disillusioned defeat, my food to be crushed into pieces, and the building to have heavy amounts of grease and dust in every corner. Changing all 3 at once can only mean the new morality laws will soon be passed and they'll start serving the protein paste in place of tacos. On the plus side, I'll finally discover how seashell buttons can replace toilet paper, and Lisa will finally have to stop dumping salt on her food as it will be illegal. Hopefully Denis Leary and his counter-culture gang can bring back the Taco Bell I used to know and love.
A half-off
deal on floor coating prompted me to
take the plunge and apply it to my barn floor. After dropping off a truck load of junk at salvation army, filling three trash cans with garbage, and reorganizing I finally had enough room to completely empty the barn. My initial power wash yielded gallons of gunky water, with the follow up de greaser resulting in even gunkier black water. 4 more wash cycles later and the water finally ran clear. Fast forward to today after the floor completely dried, add 4 more hours to apply the coating and the transformation is complete. While the price indicates it won't last forever, it's definitely an improvement, and oil spills should only require a wipe instead of kitty litter. A barn inline skating party is in order.
The
Morlock sent a
game console selection chart that's
the most accurate I've seen yet. I'm happy to say I've made the right choice for my situation. The only thing they forgot to add is consideration for achievement point whores such as myself.
After my bout with
H10N7 flu, I discovered I lost my ability to taste anything. Thinking it was related to the congestion, I ignored it at first, but today I'm relatively decongested and still can taste nothing. Half a bottle of hot sauce on spicy mexican food resulted in nothing, and a follow up ice cream was like eating glue.
Enorym said he's had the same problem and it lasted a month along with a disgusting cold, and I'm pretty confident I'll one day taste again, but not knowing if the food your eating is rotten or not is scary. On the plus side, I could probably win any spicy food eating contest easy.
After a screening of
Fanboys at
Excelciers house, it was time for the
Canadian exclusive beta of
1 vs 100 on Xbox. Why it's exclusive to Canada I'll never know, but my US Xbox LIVE account worked just fine on his Canadian Xbox for the "show," which was actually pretty fun, despite some hopefully beta phase issues such as dropouts and early endings. The show looks pretty slick, with hundreds of avatars (including yours) waving/booing/etc at the command of your Y button (hooray). The game randomly chooses "the one" who faces off against 100 randomly chosen "mob members" with the other players being assigned to the crowd. I can't be sure, but based on our consistent selection for "the crowd" I think the entire country only had one game to participate in, which meant of the 13,000+ people online only 101 got to compete for actual prizes. The game starts with a 3-choice trivia question that the one, the mob, and the crowd all answer simultaneously. "The one" can then answer or choose a "help" which consists of "trust the mob" - most popular answer, or "trust the brain" - answer from the mob member with most correct. Mob members that answer incorrectly are eliminated, but if "the one" answers wrong the mob splits the winnings among those that answered correctly. For every 10 mob members that drop out, the amount of xbox marketplace points up for grabs increases. The farthest we saw was 1 vs 3 which put the total at 5,800 points (about $50). "the one" can choose to take the money or the mob every 3 questions, which means leave with the cash or keep playing. The prizes must not have been real as the one almost always chose the mob, a route which consistently ended with the mob winning (even in the 1 vs 3 scenario). With 13,000 people playing, our odds of actually getting a
chance to win any prizes was 128 to one. I'm guessing in full blown release it'll be closer to 200 to one, which means it's a fun game to play but not if you expect to walk away with any prizes, but for the low price of free it will definitely be worth the download.
Feeling metallurgically inadequate after
Stavos' dad weld-converted my whimpy flat tongue hidden hitch into a full blown 2" receiver for my Cougar, I decided to
cut my bike rack insert shorter, which created lots of sparks and helped me feel useful again. The
end result was definitely unprofessional, but not nearly as bad as the
final result. Satisfied with the
overly complicated solution to transporting my mountain bike, I ran to tell Lisa, who was so excited she
raked up the front yard, again raising suspicion that she is a replicant. With Keith, Morlock, Stavos and now me on board for biking, it looks like an adventure is ripe to be planned.
After cutting in front of
Stavos, meeting
Nicholas Cage and
waiting another hour, I finally got to see the new
Star Trek movie. If you've heard anything about it you should have figured out time travel is involved, so when I say aliens go back in time and splinter the Star Trek universe into a new reality, you can't say I spoiled the movie for you. What you can do is forget all the other Star Trek movies because they NEVER HAPPENED! After you watch this movie you'll have to delete any copies and trash any DVDs of every Star Trek movie because THEY ARE ALL LIES! After you're done, start saving your money and cross your fingers the rebooted franchise will document this new reality as carefully as the last. If they meet the quality of the new movie I'll gladly hand over my money, but also keep hope a trade-in program becomes available.
After Keith
threw down the Windows 7 RC challenge, I had no excuse but to try it out on my main computer as well, despite
Stavos having fallen in love with it. Much like the iPhone, netbooks, and continuously variable transmissions he also favors, I was expecting the devil to consume my soul, but instead was titillated to discover a new Experience Index that
went beyond 5.9. A whole new era of nerd wars will soon be upon us, with 7.9 as the new cap (for whatever reason). Fortunately I have a secret method nobody else knows about to
cheat and win! As with Vista, not a single third party driver was required, leading me to believe the old days of Windows 2000 are finally behind us. The evil empire of Stavos did not achieve victory though, as I restored my trusty Vista backup shortly after the test drive.
EternalOne got a bottle of the new
throwback Mountain Dew today and poured me a sample (along with some of his swine flu). It's definately got a different taste which can best be described as a hint of vinegar, but not nearly as nasty as you would imagine that combination. Perhaps the years of corn syrup have me conditioned to it, but I still prefer the traditional
post-1984 formula. I'm also afraid to prefer the promotional sugar version based on how my love affair with Crystal Pepsi ended.
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