Remember this summer when I didn't post much?

Well this week may see sporadic, at best, posting. Some residual crap from this summer to deal with.

For now check out some 90's fashion and tell me if you own/owned any. Personally I didn't have any. Although if they had ripped jeans in this I'd admit to destroying about a dozen pairs. (via)

All we see anymore is Ronald?

What happened to all the other McDonalds' characters? You never see them anymore. No Hamburglar, no Grimace, no Mayor McCheese. WTF?

Shallow thought

Dudes that pop boner pills wouldn't have to take them if a hot naked college girl wanted to sleep with them.

What the hell happened to Snapple?

They sold the hell out of that shit and then it just seemed to disappear from the 7 Eleven refrigerators. A lot of it tasted good, too. Weird.

I suppose I could just Google it, but I'm one lazy blogger.

Father Doug speaks

Remember when you heard the good times take its final breath?

Mr. DOUGLAS COUPLAND (Author, "Player One"): I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, make sure the person in the photograph is smiling. And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness.

In the future, it's going to get worse: no silver linings, no lemonade. The elevator only goes down, and the bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

Please use texting as your main form of communication. Please?

Okay, it took me forever to own a cellphone, but it's obvious that texting is the most efficient way to communicate 95% of all dialogue. I'm at a point where if someone calls me I don't answer, let it go to voicemail, listen to their voicemail and then send a response back via text. Got it baby boomers?

For example, a Baby Boomer is approximately half as likely as a member of Generation Y or Generation X to own a smartphone. Only eight percent of younger Baby Boomers and six percent of older Baby Boomers say they use a mobile device for work E-mail, compared with 12 percent of Gen Xers. Understanding how different generations interact with technology will help you tailor your implementation and training strategies so that all employees can make the most of your initiatives.

"You know"

Noticing an annoying speech habit people have. When in the act of describing something that I don't know they continually say "you know".

For Example: "I wanted to get a better Metal crunch for riffing on my guitar, so I, you know, dropped the E string down to D tuning".

If you don't play guitar how the fuck are you supposed to, "you know", realize it makes sense?

Most Useful Course in History of Education

You laugh, but I'm tellin' ya Zombies are coming. (HT: to the world renowned Kath)

Students taking the class will watch 16 classic zombie films and read zombie comics. As an alternative to a final research paper they'll be allowed to write scripts or draw storyboards for their ideal zombie flicks.

The university isn't the first to have a class on the undead. Columbia College in
Chicago has offered a course on Zombies in popular media for years, and at Simpson College in Iowa students spent the spring semester writing a book on "The History of the Great Zombie War."

Awesome Prank

Suburbia Created Mall Rats

I grew up in suburbia like a bazillion other kids from all generations and I gotta say they kinda suck.

I know parents think they're doing a good thing by raising their shitty little kids like me out in the land just past the city limits, but until I got my drivers license I felt trapped within the confines of a bland neighborhood that didn't exactly cater to my needs as a pre/early teen. Public transportation was virtually non-existent, I got kicked off every piece of land that was skateboardable, and it inconveniences parents since even a simple trip to the movies involved major planning that involved them.

And guess what parents? Just because we lived outside the city we still found "city trouble". Particularly since there was never a shortage of drugs and booze outside the city limits.

It’s a trend demographer Bernard Salt says is growing, as more Generation X and Y families shy away from the suburban dream.

‘‘There’s a shift coming in apartment requirements,’’ Salt says. ‘‘Traditionally, the model is as soon as you have the child at about the 12-month mark you sell up and you move out to the ’burbs."

‘‘I think what we’ll now see is a generation of apartment inner-city aficionados who cannot abide the thought of suburbia and who will make compromises to their lifestyle and living arrangements in order to remain in the inner city. I think that’s going to place pressure on the types of apartments that are being built"

Well I'll be goddamned

I'm def not included in this movement. Although I consider myself a Porn Again Christian.

Generation X, the set of Americans who came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is often branded as a rules-rejecting, authority-questioning group.

But when it comes to religion, new research has revealed that Gen-Xers are surprisingly loyal to their faith – a finding that also suggests the rising non-religious tide in the United States may be leveling off.

I'm for it

Well sorta. I can't fully embrace the death penalty, but it'd be nice to see a bunch of rich dudes get the punishment others have received for much less.

Brad Pitt says he would consider the death penalty for those responsible for the BP oil spill.

Helicopter Parents

I think I'd still prefer the standoffishness parents than the kind that are always in my shit.

Since the New York Times never gets tired of running "Kids these days!" stories, I geared myself up for yet another one when I saw the headline "Students, Welcome to College; Parents, Go Home." But this time it was a twist on the usual narrative. Instead, we got a "Parents these days!" article. The article comically addresses the various ways that universities have tried to convince overly clingy parents to leave when they drop their kids off at college, but for once, the kids themselves are portrayed sympathetically.

Most articles I've seen in the past couple of years about "helicopter parents" address the anxious parents of very small children trying to get their kids into the best kindergartens and making sure that their coloring books get them diagnosed as geniuses. Boy, those kids aged faster than the kids on a soap opera, because now we have an article about parents of children 12 or 13 years older. But for all the hyperbole, the writer Trip Gabriel actually paints a touching picture of parents who've just spent the past 18 years making their offspring the center of the lives and now, having to set their cubs free, they don't know what to do with themselves. And so they find excuses to linger, even as the kids are eager to get on with it.

Good, I hate these fucking things

McMansions have destroyed so much scenery in Florida over the past 15 years I can't feel more happy than to see their owners take it in the ass. Besides, truly wealthy people don't try to impress by stuffing as much house as possible on an acre of land.

They've been called McMansions, Starter Castles, Garage Mahals and Faux Chateaus but here's the latest thing you can call them - History.

In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of references made to the "McMansion glut" and the "McMansion backlash," as more towns pass ordinances against garishly large homes, which are generally over 3,000 square feet and built very close together.

What sets a McMansion apart from a regular mansion, according to Wikipedia, are a few characteristics: They're tacky, they lack a definitive style and they have a "displeasingly jumbled appearance."

Well, count 2010 as the year the last nail was hammered into the McCoffin: In its latest report on home-buying trends, real-estate site Trulia declares: "The McMansion Era Is Over."

Embracing one's inner X

As soon as I realized baby boomers were a bunch of pat-my-own-back azzholes I knew I was of a different generation. This personal event happened at the age of 4 months.

There's a psychological as well as a pop-cultural component of being a Gen-Xer too, of course, but that's harder to write about. Unlike a lot of my generation -- at least as the official story of us goes -- I didn't feel alienated from the work world. Within a few months after college I had a job in theater management with good prospects, and throughout my 20s I almost always worked second jobs or attended classes in the evenings. But I do feel there's a certain quality of skepticism about Gen X, and I share that.

Are you "formally hot"?

Personally I've found some grey on the chin whiskers over the last year. Whatever though, I guess I'll embrace becoming the 'creepy old guy'.

This morning, Generation X awoke to discover that its favorite jeans no longer zipped up effortlessly, its laugh lines stayed put even when it most assuredly had nothing to laugh about, and an entire generation knew Courtney Love only as that crazy lady on Twitter. Sure, it continued to make plans for Burning Man and enthuse about the new Arcade Fire, but it also found itself adjusting its reading glasses to take in the crushing news that it was now officially a "Formerly." As in, "Formerly Hot."

That's the verdict from author and (surprise!) women's magazine editor Stephanie Dolgoff, who according to this week's New York Times story most likely to make you want to drink a quart of Botox, is "currently struggling" with being "just the other side of young." Reporter Pamela Paul breaks down Dolgoff's approach to the passage of the time thusly: "You no longer have to be annoyed at being ogled by strange men on the street. Then again, you no longer are ogled by strange men on the street."
Welcome to the age of mixed blessings, you rapidly wrinkling Janeane Garofalo wannabes!

Deer shoots back

Not in Florida, but still noteworthy nuttiness. (via Fark)

"I've never seen an accident like this," Chief Deputy Coroner Paul Cycak told Channel 4 Action News reporter Jennifer Miele on Monday.

Cycak said state troopers saw a dead deer on Route 819 in Salem Township, and a wrecked bike with 47-year-old William Mark Amos underneath it, and they thought the man died from injuries he suffered in a crash Friday morning.

Amos, who was not wearing a helmet, was pronounced dead at the scene about 100 yards south of Ridge Road.

But when they lifted the 1982 Harley Davidson off Amos' body, they found a gun belonging to Amos -- and then discovered a bullet wound in the back of his head.

I guess this will become the buzz phrase for us over the next decade

More on our perceived mid-life crisis.

Sad white guys! The culture’s lousy with them: ruminative, melancholy, more or less privileged dudes age 35-49 wondering what it all adds up to. Last month the Times’ A.O. Scott called it the Gen-X midlife crisis, citing as evidence Sam Lipsyte’s hilarious sad sack novel The Ask and two spring movies, Greenberg and Hot Tub Time Machine. Add to Scott’s piece The National’s recent LP of gentlemanly malaise High Violet, and Bret Easton Ellis’ new novel Imperial Bedrooms, which finds the sociopathic boy drifters of Less Than Zero—Clay, Trent, Julian, Rip—still drifting, still sociopathic, but now unhappily hitting their 40s.

Glug-glug. Vroom-Vroom!

Vince got a DUI. And OMG! OMG! OMG! he was wearing the same shirt he partied in a few days prior.

My Eddie Van Halen "Frankenstein" Replica

I bought a cheap Strat wannabe, stripped off the paint, and created my own "Frankenstrat" for less than $120 in parts and supplies. Doesn't stay in tune long, but it sounds surprisingly awesome with the pickup taken from a Jackson ghee-tar.