Found this game over at Ali's. Basically, you just list the famous people you've seen or met (I'm doing mine in alphabetical order, for no particular reason):

• Jamie Lee Curtis


• John Cusack


• Sally Field


• Harrison Ford


• Shaquille O'Neal


• John Travolta


• Vince Vaughn


• James Worthy

Actually, when you live in LA for ten years, you see a TON of famous faces, too many to list here. A couple of the ones above I did meet & hang out with (but I'm not saying which ones!).

This headline seemed better suited to the Weekly World News than a major news source, but I guess that's why they say that truth is stranger than fiction....

Giant Popsicle Melts, Floods New York Park

I love quizzes that make me feel smart.

Via AllanThinks:

Your IQ Is 135

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Exceptional

A Quick and Dirty IQ Test

A little meme for today, from Spanglemonkey:

1. How did your parents meet?

They met in college, at Butler University. He was in a frat (can't remember which one), she is a Theta.


2. What was the most frustrating thing your mother faced in your childhood?

I don't know. She never confessed to being frustrated. If I had to guess, it would be that it was probably hard to find someone that she liked who also had no problem with becoming an instant father to three kids.


3. How does/did your mother feel about her mother?

She loves her mother deeply, but doesn't seem to have much in common with her. But hey, isn't that true for most people?

...19 days to go...

We had one of those huge neighborhood garage sales on Saturday in my mother's 'hood. I have spent the past few weeks slowly going through every room of my house (except the kitchen, I should have made time for that), weeding through 17 years worth of crap that has accumulated since I've been living on my own. Wow, that makes me sound really old. Anyway, I spent most of Friday afternoon and evening hauling massive amounts of stuff over to my mother's house, and then got up at 5am on Saturday WHICH IS CRIMINAL in order to be there and get stuff organized before people descended at 7:45, because you know that any time a garage sale is advertised as starting at 8am, people will start showing up a half hour early. Only that didn't happen. They started to slowwwwwly trickle in about 8:30 or so, just a few at a time, until about 9:30, when we got slammed. We speculated that it was because there were so many homes participating (I think it was over 40), that it took people a while to find there way back to us, tucked away in a quiet neighborhood as we were. So by 9:30, there were mobs of people, a handful of women pawing through the mountains of clothes that I was parting with (8 full Hefty lawn bags full), some of which still had tags, and all of which were going for $2 a piece. There was still some junk left at the end of the day, but I made $350 and most important of all, the first thing I sold was A's hideous black lacquer yeah-i'm-a-bachelor dresser. Glory be.

Cool test, found via Beancounter:

Face Memory Test

Recognition score
(if you saw it)

Your score: 95%
Average score: 92%

This is a measure of your ability to remember the photos you've seen, regardless of the part in which you saw them. From all 24 photos shown in Parts 1 & 2, you recognised: 23 photo(s).


Temporal memory score
(when you saw it)

Your score: 91%
Average score: 68%

This is a measure of how often you recognised a photo and matched it to the correct part, instead of just remembering which ones you'd seen. From all the photos you recognised, you matched: 21 photo(s) to the correct part.

....22 days to go....

Song lyrics of the day: "...and it's you when I look in the mirror...sometimes you can't make it on your own...."

My local radio station, KBCO, tries to be eclectic, but I'll tell ya - every time I turn on the radio lately, they're playing U2. Not that I object to U2. I wish there were more bands like them, and more celebrities like Bono - not content to sit and count his endless piles of cash, but using his celebrity for good rather than evil. No, my gripe with KBCO is lack of imagination. Their morning guy, Bret Saunders, is fun to listen to and all that (although I usually listen to the local NPR station in the mornings), but the playlists in the afternoons and evenings are always the same stuff - U2, Coldplay (sick of them, thanks very much), John Mayer, and usually something from the 70's thrown in (usually the Stones). Makes me miss my favorite LA station, KCRW. They have an incredible program called "Morning Becomes Eclectic".

This brings me to my other topic for today - TIGER! I know, I know - you're looking for the connection between my fond memories of a Santa Monica radio station and the new OS for my Mac. Ha! One of my favorite new features with Tiger is the Dashboard and the widgets. It just so happens that I went and downloaded a widget called RabbitRadio. RabbitRadio lets you select an NPR station from across the country, and streams it! 10 seconds to download the widget, 2 seconds to drop it into my Dashboard, 5 seconds to figure out how to change the settings (yes, it's that easy), and I heard KCRW. It almost made me cry, it was such a beautiful thing.

....23 days to go....

Song lyrics of the day: "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good...oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood..."

The song of the day idea has been bouncing around in my mind for a while. Each morning, usually while I'm in the shower, I realize that I've woken up with a song playing. I don't know if it's from a dream, or some other thing that happened between my bed and my shower, but there's a song, and it's usually pretty obscure, or it's a nursery rhyme from my childhood, or some other weird thing. It occurred to me that it would be interesting (to me, anyway) to see which songs are popping up from day to day. What sort of information about my emotional state might you gather from seeing what random songs my subconscious presents each morning? I suppose the fact that there is a "song of the day" in my head probably says a lot already (haha).

Met w/ the restaurant owner last night from the joint where we'll have dinner after the ceremony. It's perfect, very low key, across the street from our hotel for that night, just a block from the Pearl Street Mall, where there is likely to be much drinking done after the wedding. We'll have a private room, pool tables, access to the bar - exactly what the boy and I were after. Check that one off the list...

Not guilty. What a disgrace.

Verdict is in....ooh, the suspense!

....30 days to go....

I'm spending time each day trying to tie up loose ends. I had to send payments/deposits off for the wedding site and the photographer, and have sent the programs to the printer. The first wedding gift arrived this week (very exciting!). I'm going to lunch tomorrow with a girlfriend, and we're stopping at a local florist to look at some of my options. My mother found a wholesale flower guy who will put together whatever we want, we just need to let him know what varieties. I know sh*t about flowers, so I have to go wander around and see what appeals.

My mother and I visited a furniture rental place to see about tables, chairs and a bar - but it was all crap and would have cost a few hundred dollars. There's a church near my mother's house that sometimes loans furniture to congregation members, so she's looking into that instead. I also posted a flyer in the breakroom at my local pub, looking for someone to tend bar at the reception.

Despite having a laundry list of things yet to do, I feel okay. I know so many people who got so stressed before their weddings, about what was not yet done, or about who couldn't make it, or whatever - I'm really not feeling that. I get the occasional, momentary flash of panic when I remember something that had been tucked away in the back of my mind - but it's all doable, and I have so many friends and family who have offered to help me get everything done. I'm so grateful for that.

On an unrelated note, my deepest sympathies go out to Mel Brooks and his son, on the death of Anne Bancroft. She was a class act.

....36 days to go....

I woke up early this morning (it's a wash-the-hair day, which means an extra forty-five minutes to get ready) and as I was showering, it suddenly hit me that the wedding is in just over a month, and I still don't have a florist or furniture for the party. What if the party rents place doesn't have anything available for me? I only have 3 weekends in town left before the wedding, and one of them is booked with a garage sale - how the hell am I going to get everything done? Will it be okay with you if my blog turns into a WedZILLA panic station?

I've been working on registry items, after reading on an etiquette list somewhere that you need to have registered for as many items as you have guests invited. Hah! I think I had 35 items on two different registries, but have invited 40 people to the wedding and another 60 are invited to the reception. The article suggested treating the registry like winning a shopping spree, and to register for the things you'd love to give yourself if money wasn't an option. So I went back and registered for a few more things, things that are more "love to have" than "need to have".