Tea Leaves

I typically avoid making political posts because, first, they tend to be boring, and second, they violate Peterb’s First Law of Human Nature, which, expressed concisely, is:

“You can never tell anyone anything.”

Lately, however, it has become impossible to turn a corner in Pennsylvania without hearing people discuss politics, and in particular the politics of personality that surround Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I think that these discussions are emblematic of a particular failure of the Democratic party, and will be the proximate cause of their close-but-no-cigar heartbreaking loss to John McCain in November. Since I’d rather not live under another 8 years of Republican misrule, I’m going to violate my own no-politics guideline and spend a few minutes talking to the world at large, and hope that it makes some small, hopefully positive, difference. Read the rest of this entry »

Seriously, everyone, your little April Fools’ Day fake news articles aren’t funny and you’re killing me. Let this holiday die. Please. I beg of you.

A couple of weeks ago, after reviewing RiffTrax and its cousin project, Cinematic Titanic, I had the happy opportunity to speak with Mike Nelson, the face of RiffTrax. In particular, I was most interested in talking to Mike about some of the business model issues I raised in that earlier article. He graciously agreed to discuss them.

You started RiffTrax in 2006. How long did it — let me just ask this very bluntly. Is it a living?

It is, yeah.

And how long did it take to become self-sustaining?

It’s interesting that you ask that, because it’s a topic that…I want to be careful about this. I think there’s a point where people think “If someone else is making money, they’re doing something wrong or they’re exploiting me” and we are not to that point, believe me. It is a living. But I also try to insulate myself from the financial part of it, and that’s why I teamed with a going company to create it. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve returned from my sojourn across half of the nation. Along the way, there were plenty of adventures: the Priceline reservation that turned out to be in a crack den, the fabulous KC barbecue, delicious and hard-to-get booze, and, of course, the disaster that ended in my being stranded in Indianapolis for an extra day. All of that will be written about in good time, once I’ve collected my thoughts.

But for today, I’d just like to share one discovery that has nothing to do with the trip other than it was an album I bought to keep me company: Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music Read the rest of this entry »

For a while now I’ve wanted a microscope for performing various silly home science experiments. This week, I found one. Read the rest of this entry »

For many years I was a fan of the cult classic TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. When I say “fan”, I mean this in the most derisive and dismissive way possible: I’m an utter fanboy. My love for the show was, and is, beyond any sort of rational analysis. So as I prepare to discuss two projects that the shows’ various members have launched, Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax, the reader would do well to remember that the projects’ creators would probably have to drive to my house and literally pee in my cornflakes before I could bring myself to say anything bad about their work. Read the rest of this entry »

I was really hoping that I’d be able to tell the 72 Dolphins to Suck It.

I guess I thought about that a little bit too much this past week.

We’re going to talk consumer home products today, because I have a story to tell, and a recommendation to make.

Slate had an interesting article today where they reviewed a number of warm mist, cool mist, and ultrasonic humidifiers.

This topic is of interest to me because I bite my lips. And so, every winter, when the heaters kick on, the air dries out, and then my lips dry out, and then I have to walk around for a month with dry, cracked lips. I recently did the same analysis of humidifiers as did Slate, and came to a different conclusion as to the best possible product. Read the rest of this entry »

In a special report, here is a summary of the breaking news over the past few days:

Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Obama Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Edwards Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Money Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Clinton Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Huckabee Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Romney Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa
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Y’know, I pretty much stay awake until 1 or 2 am every night of the year. Every single night. But something about the hype and circumstance surrounding New Years’ Eve makes me want to go to sleep at 7:30.

Bah, humbug.

As is traditional at this time of year, our brain capacity has been severely limited by a all the blood rushing to our stomachs. I can’t really remember what I was doing a week ago, much less a year ago. Still, here are a few thoughts that I can manage to locate in the fog.
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I watch too much football these days. Aside from being one of the few things that makes HDTV actually worth the trouble, I am also blessed with being able to follow two teams that are playing at a high level: The Patriots and the Steelers. Which brings me to Monday Night Football.
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The Steelers beat up the Bengals.

The Patriots completely crushed the Redskins.

Finally, the Red Sox finished off the Rockies to win the World Series again. Who would have thought.

I was trying to record the new PBS series The War in HD on my shiny new HD Tivo. The first few episodes came in fine, but the most recent repeat only recorded in SD even though the program guide said it was on the HD version of WQED. So I tried setting up a single recording by hand, and after it finished, I looked at it and it was a completely different program than was listed in the Guide. Some cooking show. No Ken Burns.

So tonight I am flipping around, and I compare what is on the TV with what is listed in the guide, and I realized that my Tivo is showing the programming listed for WQEDDT (200) on channel 220, which is WQEDDT2. Meanwhile, channel 200 is showing what should be on 220, or maybe the regular analog channel 13. I can’t really tell. In any case, this renders the Tivo service completely useless since you can’t actually record anything that is listed, you get the wrong channel.

I want to know who I should kill for this.

My hands are still a bit chopped up from this weekend, and I’m still in a bit of pain, so pardon me in advance as I prepare to overstate my case.

When I moved into my house, one of the things I liked about it was the cute little brick walk leading up to the front porch. It’s a bunch of concave bricks tiled next to each other, with no mortar or anything holding them in place. Very natural looking, very nice.

But, as I believe I have mentioned before, I’m not quite so good at maintaining my yard. In fact, I suck. In my neighborhood, I’m “that neighbor.” Oh, my neighbors don’t actually hate me, they’re all way too nice for that. But let’s just say I’m sure they would all love it if something really nice happened to me, like say I got a very lucrative job far away, forcing me to sell the house to someone who actually knows the first thing about maintaining his yard.

So now, several years after moving in, my nice brick walk is full of weeds and grass. And unlike the rest of my wild-grown yard, this particular thing sort of bugs me. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s what you used to do to buy a TV. You would go to Sears, look at the TVs, pick one that seemed to be the right size, take it home, plug it into the cable or antenna, and turn it on.

Because the consumer electronics industry has your interest and convenience as its highest priority, today I can write a 1500 word essay on how to buy a TV in the modern world. That’s called progress.
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I finally couldn’t take watching HD sports over the air, so I dropped some cash on the new Tivo HD. If you weren’t paying attention, this is the $300 box that does most of what the previously $800 and now $600 Tivo Series 3 does. You can get dual HD tuning, a disk big enough for all the programming I’ll ever need, and that same stylish and streamlined Tivo interface.

Of course, there is only one problem with this vision of Nirvana. You have to get the cable company to your house to set up the CableCard. And the cable companies hate CableCard.
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For today some short items that I never found the energy to turn into one of my normal-length wank-fests. These sit, like un-played games, on the pile for a while, and then I decide to just give up.

Mio Kitchen and Wine Bar

This is a new restaurant in Aspinwall that you should try. The chef used to work at Veritas in New York. Prices are high for Pittsburgh but for once the entrees are as good as the starters. I can’t comment on the wine list, I know nothing about wine. We’ve only been once so I can’t provide specific menu recommendations, but everything we had was good and everything we saw looked good. My only complaint was that the room is molded in the “if it’s really dark, the food will taste better” design style.
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I was walking around in my local Borders a couple of months ago just after they rearranged the Music and DVD section. My eyes scanned through the shelves of DVDs, and I realized something that was at once horrible and amazing. There, on the shelves, was most of the history of broadcast television archived in little boxes of silver disks. You could get anything, almost no show was too obscure or too low quality to miss the cut. All of this is made possible by the digital encoding of the content. With enough storage, you can capture anything in bits and then instead of being available only at the whim of the content producer, you can watch it anywhere.
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What is it with these stickers that come stuck on the boxes of CD, DVD, video game and other media disks? I notice nothing in the damn box. The box is full of nothing but the disk and various flyers and advertisments begging me to buy other shitty movies that happen to be made by the same company that just pissed me off by putting this sticker on the box so I can’t open the god damned item to watch the movie or play the game. Why are retailers such clueless, mean-spirited bastards?

The news came last week that Max Roach passed away in Manhattan. I was lucky enough to see Max Roach play live a few times while I was a graduate student at Dartmouth College. My most enduring memory of the man would have to be Max and the drum kit alone on the stage while he completely captivated the audience for five or ten or fifteen long minutes. It was a shame to see him stand up and exit.
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…it is because I appear to have lost my precious Nintendo DS, along with the game that was in it at the time.

Curses.

Update: The missing lamb has been located. The crisis has ended. Shop as usual.

The 80/20 heuristic states that in most computer systems, you spend 80 percent of your time in 20 percent of the code. Another way to say this is that 80 percent of your users will spend most of their time using about 20 percent of the application that you have so painstakingly constructed for them. This leads to a lot of meetings where we spend time trying to guess which workflows we must support in order to please the “80 percent” users. In my experience, concentrating on the 80 percent users allows projects that have limited resources and short schedules to get done and ship something that most users will be happy with.

Having watched this process a long time, I have noticed one paradoxical difficulty with applying this heuristic. The problem is this: many users (mostly the dorks) are convinced they are in the “special” 20 percent rather than the happy 80 percent, and you can’t do anything about it.
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10. Clifford The Big Dead Dog (peterb)

9. If You Give A Mouse Some Serum (peterb)

8. Horton Hears His Doom (peterb)

7. Goodnight, World (peterb)

6. Where The Dead Things Are (kosak)

5. Bedknobs and Boomsticks (peterb)

4. Olivia’s Favorite Flesh Eaters (psu)

3. One Vein, Two Vein, Red Vein, Blue Vein (peterb)

2. Click, Clack, GGGGgggaaaarrrrrrrgggghhh (psu)

1. Green Eggs and Hand (peterb)

Please feel free to pile on with your own suggestions in the comments.

I was at the library the other day and realized that I still hadn't seen The Bourne Identity. So I said to myself "Hey, I'll just pick up the book instead." Perusing the shelf of Robert Ludlum titles, I realized they all had these very stilted, cold war, nouny sort of names. The Osterman Weekend. The Holcroft Covenant, The Chancellor Manuscript.

So I wrote a little script to autogenerate Ludlum titles for me, just in case I should ever need to ghost write a book for his kid.

Here is your randomly generated Robert Ludlum title. To get another one, just reload the page. If you enjoy it a lot, consider clicking on one of our convenient ads to help sponsor the site.

Your next Ludlum book is:

Dear NPR:

It’s 18 months before the election. Only a true mental cripple would actually have more than a microscopic level of interest in what is going on in the Presidential “race”. And yet you find it necessary to waste literally hours of your expensive broadcast time “covering” this story which does not exist yet, analyzing events that have not happened, and “predicting” results that, given your complete lack of meaningful data, have no possible link to any future reality.

Please stop it. I’m begging you.

Pete

I used to love my receiver. It gave me a sense of dork pride to know that sure, I had suffered great pains to get everything hooked up, but my reward was a rich stereo sound experience that the other losers in the audience were missing. No TV sound for me. Like most things though, as I got older, the inconvenience of dealing with the machine started to overtake the enjoyment of the result.

When we got a new TV stand this week for the big TV we bought last year (the old cabinet had the TV at the wrong height) I realized that there was almost no activity in the universe worse than rewiring the receiver.
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“Keith Richards snorted his father? Who would imagine he’d be that crazy?”

The answer, of course, is “Dave Sim”, whose model of Keith was apparently too conservative (click the image to enlarge for readability):

See also here.

There was a break in the bleak weather and a small break in the workload at work, so we spent the weekend doing weekend things instead of surfing the web and finding some dork topic to spout off on. Instead, I have some short thoughts on things that are not worth a whole article.
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One bit of fallout from the Wii “Everybody Votes!” channel is that you’ll find yourself going along through your work day when suddenly you’re overcome with the inability to comprehend: who the hell are all these people who aren’t mad when they get stood up on dates?

Or the people who don’t brush their teeth right before going to bed. You people sicken me.

To my way of thinking, every major genre of music has its quintessential forms. There is the three minute pop song sung by a group of three or four young freaks with long hair. There is the large scale Classical/Romantic Symphony. And in Jazz, there is the piano trio or quartet. With all due respect to the other instrumentalists, there is something about the piano trio that connects with the part of my brain that enjoys Jazz and just makes it tingle in a particular way that other records don’t.
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The decline and fall of civil society is not the sort of thing that will be immediately obvious to someone observing the process on a day to day basis. It happens in a series of small steps, none of which seem all that fatal on their own. In these “new media” days, one of these small steps is the slow decay of the American Newspaper in the face of new forms of information delivery that cater to those with the attention span of a small house fly.

In what I can only imagine is a strange and pathetic attempt at holding on to a neurotic and affluent reader base, there seems to be an increasing number of stories in, of all places, The New York Times these days that I can only characterize as “rich parents in NYC do stupid things.”
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I like to wear shoes inside. I didn’t used to be this way, but over the years the fact that my parents always used them and the desire to keep various sorts of mess off my socks made me a happy user. For years I used an old pair of L.L. Bean deck shoes as my inside shoes. The leather had broken in nicely, and they were heavy enough to take outside if needed, but light enough to not be a burden.

A couple of years ago, my beloved inside shoes fell apart. And then I was screwed.
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I was feeling pretty good about myself last week. I was able to read an infuriating article in the New York Times and because I am more mature and grounded these days, I was able to see past all of the little peeves in the piece and write an impassioned critique of the big picture problems.

No such luck today. Today the drooling mega-pedantic nerd returns.
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As a general rule, I don’t like covers. This makes me Pete’s mortal enemy. Part of the nature of modern music is that much of it is performed and recorded by the people who wrote the music, and these recordings form what I perceive to be the correct way to perform the piece. There are exceptions to this small psychological tic, but not that many.

I particularly dislike covers of the Beatles. There is a famous family incident wherein Karen’s grandfather asked her in hushed tones if I disliked music because a MUSAK arrangement of Eleanor Rigby came on over the radio, causing me to slump my head into my hands and sob like a little child. The Beatles should sound like The Beatles. It’s just wrong if they don’t. With this in mind, I find it amazing that I have enjoyed this new record, Love, which mixes and matches and layers and deconstructs the classic songs in unexpected ways.
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Left to my own devices, I tend to listen to older music which is arguably for older people. I like Classical music, especially from the late Classical through the Romantic periods. The more modern stuff is OK, but you have to pick and choose carefully. I also like a lot of old Jazz, up through the classic period of the middle to late 1960s. I also like modern recordings of modern groups that are stylistically similar to music like this.

This leaves me in a bit of a bind with respect to pop music. I don’t pay attention, yet I need a certain density of the stuff for car trips and whatnot. Well, with the aging of the Baby Boomers, I have found my happy medium, so to speak. I only buy pop music that I hear about on NPR.
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It’s the time of year to do “best of the year” or “most of the year” or “worst of the year” lists. I couldn’t focus on any one theme, so after spending some time in a food-induced coma, I came up with the following hodge podge of “of the year” topics.
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When I was in high school, I was a bit of a dork. No really, it’s true. Back then, even a passing interest in the emerging digital technologies was looked upon with suspicion and would get you beat up during study hall. We geeks were antisocial outcasts, relegated to self-created school ghettos while the normal people did normal people things while dressing better.

Over time, the things that used to amuse us dorks have slowly wormed their way into the everyday lives of normal people. So while they may still be better dressed, a sociological flip-flop has occurred. The evidence is all around us. Normal people have turned into bigger dorks than any of us could have imagined possible. Collectively, we have become Dork Nation.
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I’ve been watching some football in HD on my big TV this year. Since all HD broadcast options at this time in our history are about as appealing as drinking sewage for lunch, I’ve been doing it over the air. Today my antenna would not pick up FOX, so I watched the game on my Tivo instead. As a result, I missed much of the experience of the live broadcast.
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It’s the United Atheist Alliance that has the correct answer to the Great Question. Science damn you!

Pink isn’t a stupid girl

I’m sure J.K. Rowling gets enough acclamation from everyone in the world that she doesn’t need my approval as well. But nonetheless, here’s a tip of the hat to her for writing this short essay on the common obsession of worrying about one’s looks and, specifically, fat.

It’s not simply for the content of her essay, which is typically simply written, personal, direct, and to the point, but because she pointed me towards the artist “Pink” and her song “Stupid Girls” (iTunes link).

The song is good.

The video, however, (YouTube link, iTunes link) moves beyond the realm of “good” into “magically awesome.” (Used in a sentence: “Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s novel 100 Years of Solitude is an example of the literary style known as magical awesomeness.”)

Winter in Pittsburgh can be a cold and cruel time. The weather turns gray, with a chilly wind and the occasional slushy rain. It has been this way this week in Pittsburgh, but I haven’t let it beat me down because I have made two small but uplifting discoveries.
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When briefed on election results, President Bush declared that the Republican Party was on a path to victory. He further chided media reports that emphasized results in House races.

Tip of the hat to Rochberg for the joke…

There is a great scene in the film High Fidelity where one of Jon Cusack’s buddies comes over to see if the wants to go clubbing, and finds Cusack on the floor of his apartment surrounded by piles of records. He asks how he is filing the albums, and after some discussion, Cusack spills the beans: “Autobiographical.”
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When I still used to DJ regularly, I conformed to all of the college radio stereotypes. I spoke in the obligatory disinterested monotone (MP3 recording of a simulation here), played obscure bands on minor labels, and inflicted unlistenable electronic garbage upon my listeners.

I was sophisticated. I was hipper than thou. I was, in short, a complete jackass.

As I’ve gotten older, my tastes in music have both expanded and calcified. I’m willing to listen to almost anything, but there needs to be some hook, some immediate accessibility to let me in to the music. Noise and industrial soundscapes are simply not in the equation: when someone asks me to listen to something inscrutable, I ask myself: why am I wasting valuable time that could be spent listening to Tom Waits, instead?

While I’m sure this might deprive me of a lot of exciting new music, all is not lost, for there is one side door I have left open: I’m an absolute sucker for covers.
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Just over five years ago today, Apple Computer invited members of the press to an event in which Apple would introduce “a breakthrough digital device”. The all-knowing Mac rumor mill quickly swung into action, revealing that the device would be a music device, possibly a portable MP3 player, not a portable MP3 player, a wireless standalone cd-writer, a floor wax, and a dessert topping. Six days later — five years ago, today — Steve Jobs finally got on stage and introduced an overpriced MP3 player, and everyone yawned. Hindsight being 20/20, I’d like to put on my product manager hat and opine on why it’s something anybody cares about today.

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When I drive to visit my extended family, we take a route from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts that crisscrosses through upstate New York. It’s not a long drive, but it is not a trivial one either, so it’s important to have distractions in the car.

In the past, this has meant radio, but there is a problem with radio. There are large patches of the route that are, for all intents and purposes, radio-free. In these areas, the only strong signals are filled with strange genres of pop/country music or people preaching the true word of the Lord.
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I’ve written about my need to get rid of books before. Tonight I made another pass, and achieved my short-term goal: I’ve taken enough books off of my shelves to free up one entire bookshelf. Which means I can move that bookshelf out of the room it is in.
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I’ve had my current road bike since I moved back to Pittsburgh in the early 90s. So, I imagine that it is almost 15 years old. In this time, I have spent a lot of time shopping for my “next bike”, the perfect machine that combines versatility with technical and aesthetic excellence. The problem is, whenever I ride my bike I realize it’s perfect (except in the rain).

This didn’t stop me from building a list of attribtues in the perfect road bike. This piece overlaps a bit with my previous rant about road bikes, but not too much.
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Pittsburgh doesn’t like one of my favorite bands, Me First & The Gimme Gimmes.

(via Pittsblog)

PS: It occurs to me after the fact that this could simply be something that sucks about baseball. Somehow I can’t imagine the band getting a better reception in whatever they’re calling Candlestick Park now.

Dear Astronomers:

You seem to be having some trouble making up your minds deciding which of the celestial bodies orbiting our star is a planet. I read your revised definitions where you explain that Pluto is “not a planet” but is a “dwarf planet” (could you make that any more confusing?).

You are lost. But do not fear. I am hear to lead you to the truth.
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Since they’re changing the rules on me, I need a new mnemonic to remember the names of the planets. This one is mine and mine alone.

“My Very Earnest Mother, Camille, Just Served Us Nine Pickles (Cornichons, eXactly).”

(Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, Xena)

I found out today that my favorite record store of all time closed last month.
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What we drive speaks volumes about us. But sometimes, the message that we think we’re giving off isn’t the message everyone hears.
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For this afternoon, a short meditation on one of modern life’s stupidities. I write this rant in my head every time I have to take the wheel off my bike. Here is why.
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Yesterday Floyd Landis was cooked. 10K from the top of the last climb, he looked up the road completely helpless as the group he was riding in rode away from him. You could see in his face and his body that he had no way to follow, no energy left in his legs. The bike practically stood still. He lost 10 minutes in those last 10K, and, it seemed, the Tour.
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Tonight I helped a friend change a tire on his car. I was calm, efficient, and helpful, and we got the tire changed in under 10 minutes.

The funny part about this is that I know that if it had been my car, I would have anxiously dithered around for a half hour before working up the will to fix the problem.
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I’ve been laid up with a bug for the past few days. This, coupled with my recent vacation, has allowed me to catch up on my reading list. Here’s what I’ve been reading recently.
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On my block, I’m the Bad Neighbor.

Oh, I’m not terrible or anything. I’m nice to people, and polite, and I don’t have my car on blocks in the front yard. Nor do I blast music at 3 in the morning, or hang out on the porch getting drunk and whistling at neighborhood girls.

But I’m the Bad Neighbor for one very simple reason: my lawn is terrible, and I don’t care.
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Today during lunch we were talking about style, and one of the gang opined that if only he was incredibly rich, he’d have more style.

I disagreed: you don’t need money to have style. Having money doesn’t give you style.
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All fitness hobbies require appropriate accessorization. In many ways cycling is one of the most accessory-intensive activities that you can be involved in. As a public service, I will provide you with a list of things you need, and the real reason you need them.
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We were in the local Border’s a couple of days ago. I guess we hadn’t been there for a while, because all the books were in different places, and the store had cunningly replaced inventory with empty floorspace in order to maximize profit in some way that only makes sense to someone who has studied modern retail more closely than I have. I also noticed that the name of the store should be Borders BOOKS and Music because the selection of available CDs has been constantly shrinking over the last few years, replaced by new shelves of basically nothing, and more floor space.

However, on this night, neither of these annoyances were foremost in my mind. This is because from entering the store until I paid for the couple of CDs that I did manage to find, it was absolutely impossible to avoid eye contact with some piece of the Da Vinci Code hype machine.
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Recently Jeff at work asked me where to go to buy a bike. As I recall, he didn’t really ask what kind of bike he should buy, but being the self-absorbed dork asshole that I am, I could not help but provide my opinion.
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It was just last year, in my mid-30s, that I learned how to tie my shoes. Yes, at a time when most other men are getting ready to buy a Porsche, get a stupid little French-style beret to cover their bald spot, and maybe start visiting a tanning salon, I finally learned how to tie my shoes properly. It’s not my fault, though: I blame society.
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The little boy had been off by himself for a while while the rest of us were near the stream pretending to fish. When he came back had a net full of frogs.
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We heard some good new music at the PSO this weekend. I can see all of you out there rolling your eyes. “New” Classical Music is assumed to be some soulless abstract exercise in collecting clever compositional tricks and throwing them out at the bewildered audience, while very little of actual interest happens.
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It started, as it always does, with a random connection, a set of neurons in my brain that misfired in an amusing way.

Someone was talking about how someone they knew was wearing hideous pants. The word “hideous” made me think of a book by the execrable C.S. Lewis (yes, the Narnia one) called That Hideous Strength. This book is about the Asskicking Jesus. Earth is under threat from space aliens, so the Asskicking Jesus flies to Mars to beat them up until they stop.

No, really. That’s what the book is about. I swear. God, I really hate C.S. Lewis.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had blurted out, as if it were the title of a book, “THOSE HIDEOUS PANTS”. And we were off to the races. We changed the rules about halfway through, but it doesn’t really matter. Even though we’ve done this before, it’s still pure comedy gold.

Enjoy, and as always, feel free to add your own.