I can across a few really good youtube clips this weekend. The first one is short and sweet. The other ones take a bit more time, but are well worth it if you don't have anything going on.

Nothing better than a kid on drugs.

I watched a documentary on 2pac the other day. I believe it was called Tupac: Resurrection. 2pac's story is so fascinating to me. He lived in complete poverty his entire childhood. His dad abandoned him and his mom was a reasonably high ranking member of the Black Panthers. Not your typical family makeup

He moved to Baltimore right before high school and was lucky enough to go to what seemed like a pretty good school that focused a lot on the arts. I didn't catch how he got into that school. The important part was that he got exposed to a lot of classic writing like Shakespeare. I think what he learned at that school influenced his future writing a lot. Around that time, his mom became a crack head. The thing is that he was clearly brilliant. He just had so much anger from his childhood. I don't think anyone has lifted up the black community while tearing it down at the same time as much as 2pac. In one song he's asking why men treat women poorly and asking that to stop. The next song he's talking about killing people and smacking bitches around. It's pretty crazy. Of course, he justifies it by saying that not all women are bitches. He says he's only referring to a certain type of woman. I think there's merit to the argument, but I think he still did damage to the black community when he rapped like that.

He had guys like Bob Dole trying to say that record companies shouldn't put out music with the type of lyrics that he had. I think he has every right to say what he wants. The fact is that he was speaking it how he saw it, even if it was a terrible picture to paint. At the end he talked a lot about how he knew he was going to die. He just felt it coming. His goal was to record at least 3 songs a day so that he could leave as much material as possible. You gotta give him credit for working as hard as he could so that he could leave something behind. They showed the intersection that he got shot at and it's one I've driven through many times in Vegas. I'm going to check it out again next time I'm out there.

Another quick note on rap - there was a pretty big thread in OT recently talking about the top 5 rappers. I don't know how you can't put 2pac at #1. The way he rapped was so different than any other rapper I've ever heard. He was a poet. Plan and simple. As much as I like someone like Lil Wayne, there is no way the guy is a poet. He just gets high on drugs and spews nonsense. That's fine. It's entertaining. 2pac had a clear message that meant something. That puts him at the top for me.

I was searching for something on Obama the other day and one of the top google dropdowns was "Is Obama the antichrist?" I was pretty taken aback. I thought that was worth mentioning because how crazy it is. It also got me thinking about the google dropdowns. I wonder how much they influence people. What if a crazy person clicks that link and becomes some fanatical antiobama person when they never would have come across it otherwise. I'm not saying that's likely to happen, but it could. I know the idea would have never even crossed my mind if it wasn't for google. I'm sure there are plenty of other instances where a dropdown affected someone's search in a negative way.

I looked into the google autocomplete some more and found some interesting things. It won't complete on the word kill. Illegal drugs seem to be fair game. You type "how do you do smoke" and it will complete with pot, heroin, you name it. Does anyone know their policy behind this? How does this autocomplete even work?

I mentioned the Wrestler in CTZ last week, but it's worth bringing up again. That movie is really good. It's the type of movie that sticks with you. I was still thinking about scenes from it days after I had seen it. I watch a shitload of movies so that doesn't happen too often. The acting is amazing. The story line is as good as it is sad. There are some good wrestling scenes too. It was one of the best movies of 2008 (even if I didn't see it until 2009). It better win some Oscars.

It's shaping up to be a bad day for me each year. I'll start with how the day played out for me last year. The Giants were being spotted 10 points last year and I thought that was too much given how they had been playing. I ended up betting 1k on them. Obviously, I won that bet. We decided we should go out afterwards and celebrate the victory. This lead to many many shots. It was a great night. The next day I got up and went to the office. At 1130 I got a call from my mom. She was calling to tell me that she was about 15 minutes away. Shit! I had forgotten I was supposed to go have lunch with her. I had two problems. I was so hungover that eating lunch didn't sound like the best idea. I also hadn't spent anytime thinking about what to wear that day. I had thrown on some sweat pants and a sweatshirt. This was not good considering I was going out to a nice lunch. I thought in my head about how I could fix this problem. I quickly decided there wasn't really anything I could do about it. I would have to go out to lunch wearing sweat pants. My mom understood and didn't care, but I felt like a jackass at the restaurant. I'm glad they didn't say anything to me. I was able to get the meal down, but I still felt terrible. I ended up laying down on the ground at the office for awhile and eventually threw up in the bathroom. I'm not one to really ever throw up, so that shows how bad I was feeling.

I feel terrible again this year. This time around it's not an alcohol hangover, but rather a food hangover. I'm not sure if it was something specific I ate or just the fact that I ate so much, but my stomach is not feeling good today. My guess is that the massive combination of spicy chili, peperoni rolls, pasta, meat balls, 7 layer dip, guac, wiener dogs, ice cream, cinnamon rolls and brownies did me in. I ate a ton of food and none of it was even remotely healthy. I don't even feel like moving today.

I was pretty disappointed that the Steelers didn't cover. It looked like they would most of the game. It wasn't until the safety that I knew I was screwed. I knew them kicking the field goal at the start of the game when it was 4th and 1 would come back to bite me. I was pissed when they didn't go for it there. That cost me the win. I went 0-4 with my playoff bets. I also incorrectly bet on BJ Penn in the UFC fights on Saturday. That means I'm 0-5 in my last 5 sports bets. Pretty shitty. I'm a terrible sports bettor.

While I'm on the topic of bad commercials, I want to mention the new Pizza Hut campaign. It has got to be one of the worst campaigns I've seen. If you haven't seen it, what they are trying to do is sell new products. They have added pasta, wheat bread pizza and lasagna. Basically, they are trying to be classy. The way the commercials work is that they bring in a bunch of "random" people and have them sit down and eat food. The place they are in looks like a nice restaurant and they have nice waiters, etc. At the end of the meal they tell the people the food is from PIzza Hut and everyone is shocked. It's the stupidest shit in the world. One of the pastas they are trying to sell is mac and cheese with bacon on it. It looks like it came from my high school cafeteria. There is no chance anyone would be fooled into thinking its gourmet. Not to mention, mac and cheese is never gourmet. Just stupid. The newest one probably pisses me off the most because they make it look like they are in Italy with real italians. The italians are blown away by the piece of shit pizza hut lasagna.

edit: I wrote this on the plane this morning.


Everytime I have to get up at the crack of dawn for an early flight, I'm reminded of how much I'm not a morning person. It's brutal. I have trouble functioning normally when it's 5 in the morning. I always end up tripping somewhere or banging my head or something to that effect. Today I had to get money from the ATM and started to walk away without my money. If it hadn't beeped, I may have hopped in a cab and then gotten to the airport only to realize that I had no money. I'm glad that didn't happen.

I'm on a flight to Dallas right now for some CR management meetings. You'd probably think, "That's nice. You can get away from the freezing cold Chicago weather." Wrong! It's 30 degrees in Dallas right now. They had some huge ice storm yesterday. I had just assumed I would only be packing shorts. I didn't pack one pair.


edit: When I got here they told me that school had been canceled. There was literally no signs of any type of storm except for a little ice on the tops of the trees. Insane that they didn't have school.


edit 2: I never know how to spell "canceled." I feel like sometimes it's one L and sometimes it's two L's. I think spell checks fuck with me just to piss me off. Maybe I'm just a terrible speller...

Have you seen the new Gatorade ad campaign? You probably have, but you might not even realize it was Gatorade. They have been running ads on TV that say nothing about Gatorade, but talk about the letter G (see below). These ads have a ton of high profile athletes and celebs in them, so you know it's for something big. I suspected from the start that it was for Gatorade, but I had to google it to be sure. They are also putting up a ton of billboards. There was one in my gym that was up for 2 weeks with no reference to Gatorade. Again, I suspected it was for them, but I didn't know for sure. The ad looked like this:

NO

EXC

USES

That was all it said. It definitely caught my attention. They eventually replaced it with an ad that said:

FO

CUS

This new ad had a picture of Tiger Woods and the Gatorade logo. I've seen ads around the city that are similar. They have also had a lot of ads that just say G. After doing my googling, I found out that they are renaming most of their flavors. It seems like the names are trying to copy Vitamin Water. That makes sense, because I'm sure Vitamin Water has been giving them a hurting lately. Anyway, I just find it interesting how they are rolling out a huge campaign like this where they don't even say the brand name in the early part of the campaign. It's working though. It's getting me to talk about it here...

I'm walking down the street to get to my apartment yesterday and I see just stacks of yellow books in front of everyone's door. I'm talking stacks a couple feet high. WTF? Why in the hell do yellow books still exist? I promise you no one in my area uses them. I live in a young area where everyone knows how to use a computer. I guess I could see why a 80 year old person would use one, but if you are under 80, there is absolutely no reason to use a yellow book. They also have those retarded "ask dex" commercials. Maybe they don't know that the name Dex is now associated with a serial killer. I'm thinking two things when I see Dex yellow book commercials.

1. Yellow books suck. I will never, ever, use one again. This commercial sucks
2. Serial killers are bad. Damn, I'm looking forward to the next season of Dexter

I've decided that I'm an awful sports better. It's not that I'm betting a ton, but whenever I do bet, I'm wrong. So far in the NFL playoffs I've bet on Minnesota, Carolina and Tennessee (all of them lost). Awesome. I was also going to bet the Giants, but overslept and didn't get my bet in. I was also going to bet the games last weekend. I was all ready to bet Arizona until I saw that Bodog was charging 25% juice on the bet. That is insane and I refused to pay that much. Of course, I would have won that. I opted instead to bet the next game where I took Baltimore. I didn't want to bet that game, because I thought it could either way. I expected Pittsburgh to win, but giving up 6 points is a ton in a game that could have easily been 7-3 or something shitty like that. I always like betting the Super Bowl. The problem is that I want to root for Arizona, but I'm not sure I have faith in them to beat Pittsburgh. The line is 7 right now. I'll probably go ahead and just bet them anyway. I was thinking I'd put a G spot on them and either end the playoffs as a winner or a big loser. We'll see if I follow through on that.

Rickey Henderson recently was inducted into the Hall of Fame, so he's been in the news some. The guy is a complete character. Very entertaining to watch/listen to. Whalen sent me a link of his top 25 quotes/moments. It's hysterical. Do yourself a favor and spend 5 minutes reading it.

There were a couple of crazy news stories on ESPN this week. First, Michael Irvin got pulled over by two guys with a gun. They soon realized it was Michael Irvin and rather than robbing him just talked about the disappointing season the Cowboys had. The better story was Donovan McNabb's vacation home in Arizona getting vandalized. It wasn't so much that someone burnt "Go Cards" into his lawn as it was the fact that the guy left the box with the fuel on the lawn. The box had his address on it. Not to mention the guys' name was Rex and he was 37 years old.

We bought our "season tickets" for the White Sox the other day. This is the second year in a row that we've done it. We get the Ozzie Guillen package which is for 13 games. You get a pretty good deal and it comes out to about $300 per person. I really like going to baseball games, so it's well worth it. I had a great time going last year. When I first moved to Chicago, I loved going to Cubs games and went to a ton of them - it helped that I live in the neighborhood. Overtime though I grew somewhat disenchanted with cubs games. For one, the seating sucks. You either get seats in the 200 level and you are scared you are behind a pole or you get bleacher seats and then you have to get ot the game at least a hour early to have a seat at all. That sucks. Not to mention the bathrooms and food stands are terrible and the fact that the NL is simply worse than the AL. As I went to Comisky more and more I just realized it's a better baseball experience. As of now, I haven't bought any tickets to the Cubs this year. I'm sure I'll go to a few games, but my ratio of cubs to sox games is way in the favor of the Sox now.

Someone made a comment about my brother looking like Carrot Top. That reminded me that I never posted about meeting Carrot Top in Vegas this summer. I don't know how I didn't post about it. Better late than never though. As we were leaving the Wynn at like 3am after going to one of their clubs, we ran into Carrot Top. He joked around with us for a few minutes and took a few pics. Guy was weird, but nice. He's also jacked as hell. When we got back to Chicago we convinced everyone we had gotten into a fight with him. Luckily, Whalen had received a black eye from an aggressive game of pool basketball so it went along perfectly with the Carrot Top fight story. A few people actually believed us.



Carrot Top holding out money to me for some reason.



Carrot Top and Trevrob



More crazy looking, jacked Carrot Top

We've been getting tons of snow in Chicago over the past few days. I'd say we have about 12-16 inches of snow. I've let my car slowly get completely buried in. I've also managed to lose both my snow hats. I think I will need to dig my car out today and go buy a hat, because it's supposed to be a high of 4 degrees on Thursday with a low of like -5. Awesome. Right now I'm cooped up inside. I woke up today and noticed I was out of clean underwear. Therefore, I'm working from home now and doing laundry. Our kitchen is a mess too, so I'll probably clean that up.

Couple notes on the beer taste test. It was blind. We went in a few shifts and we numbered the cups from 1-10. We didn't include Sam Adams Light, because we were trying to do it with "cheap" beers. I personally don't think Michelob should be included in the "cheap" category. We are talking about doing it again and knocking it down to beers that are accessible and cheap. These beers would be Coors Light, Miller Lite, Bud Light, Keystone, and Busch.

I saw one horrible and one great movie in the past few days. Over the weekend, we watched Wanted. I figured it would be kind of dumb, but would have some good action and likely be pretty entertaining. I was wrong. It was terrible. I ended up falling asleep for part of it towards the end. Bending bullets is just an idiotic concept. Last night I watched the Last Samurai. I'm pretty surprised I have never seen it. I think the reason that was the case was because I just don't like Tom Cruise. His movies in recent years all suck. However, Last Samurai was during that transition period when he went from being a legit actor to a fucking nutjob who made shitty movies (ie. War of the Worlds). Anyway, Last Samurai was badass. It was the best movie I've seen in a longtime. I was strongly debating this morning if I should keep the movie and watch it again before I sent it back to Netflix. It's a good story with good acting and a bunch of awesome sword fights/battle scenes.

Don't have a whole lot of interesting stuff going on. I've been spending a lot of time wrapping up financial and other loose ends from 2008. I'm nearing an end to that. I took it pretty easy over the weekend. I'm going to see the Bulls - Cavs game on Thursday. I can't wait. I've been wanting to see Lebron up close for a long time. It will be fun to hang out with my brother before he heads back to Iowa for school. I'm going to take some pics at the game and put them up here.

I'm considering taking a trip out west for a weekend to do some skiing. Any suggestions on where to go? I've been to Aspen and Telluride, so I'd like to try somewhere new. I'm a good, but not great skier. I like to ski black diamonds. Doubles are typically too hard for me.

I got both my Snuggie and Shamwow purchases in the mail the other day. I have to admit, I was immediately disappointed. I knew I was getting minimal quality considering I was ordering from a infomercial, but I was hoping for better. I'll start with the Snuggie.

Overall review: 2/10


The snuggie is a glorified piece of felt with two sleeves attached. I had imagined a nice fleece blanket that could be worn kind of like a hoody. That is not the case. There is no way to fix the blanket behind you. That makes it hard to use for family sports outings and such. Due to the fact it's a thin piece of felt, it doesn't keep you very warm. It it was $5, it'd be worth it, but it was much more. One of the common things between the snuggie and shamwow was the shitty purchasing process. They screw you over as much as possible. The snuggie required you to get a "free snuggie" with your purchase but you had to pay like $12 shipping on it. The shipping costs were pretty outrageous for both products.



Notice the fact that it's a regular blanket with two holes in it.

Shamwow: 5/10
My biggest beef with the shamwow is how bad they fleeced me in the purchasing process. They have nonstop offers that got me good. They also make you pay shipping on their buy one get one free offer that you must accept. It's not cheap shipping either. There is no question they are making a profit on it. They also offer a ton of other products like mops and window dusters. My apartment needed a new mop, so I went for that. At the end they tell you shipping will be 4-6 weeks unless you pay another upcharge that can get it to you in a week. 4-6 weeks seemed way to long so I went for that. The actual product is ok. It soaks up liquids quite well. Probably not as well as advertised, but that's ok. Two things turn me off about the product. It's cheap appearance. They don't feel all that more durable than paper towels. I don't see them really lasting that long. They also have tons of dye in them so when you ring out water, the water comes out yellow. You may be able to fix that by running them through the dishwasher, but I still don't like it. What really chaps my ass about the shamwows is that you can go to walgreens and buy them at face value with no shipping costs. I learned this a few days after I got mine in the mail. I was home and my mom informed me that my little brother had bought some from walgreens. I could have avoided both the shipping and the double down deal. Ugh.



I think by the end I had spent over $100. Trust me when I say that's way too much to spend on this stuff.

I saw Taken last night. Great movie. It's not great in a sense that the acting was amazing or that it should be nominated for an Oscar or anything like that, but it was flat out action packed fun. I was on the edge of my seat the entire movie and there is great fight scene after great fight scene. It's only 90 minutes which I think fits the movie well. It's basically the perfect length for a storyline with some holes in it.

Liam Neelson is an absolute badass. It reminded me a lot of the first season fo 24. He was going after his daughter who is kidnapped and basically just destroys everyone in his path. It's a bit ridiculous at times, but nothing like the later seasons of 24. It stays close enough to reality that you can let it fly. It's definitely a movie you will want to see in the theater so go see it.

I have long had a theory that there is no noticeable difference between Coors Light, Miller Lite and Bud Light. It always pisses me off when I buy Bud Light and people go, "Oh man, I hate Bud Light." Shut the fuck up. Everyone thinks they are master beer connoisseurs and can tell the difference between these beers. We decided to put it to the test and have a taste test. We got 10 different beers (all light) and about 10 people. We asked everyone to rank the beers from 1-10 and the overall lowest score one. Below are the results

1. Michelob Light
2. Bud Light
3. Coors Light (tied for 2nd)
4. Natty Light
5. Bud Select
6. Keystone
7. Busch Light
8. Old Style
9. Miller Lite
10. MGD 64

Michelob Light one by a mile. It was clear that it was the best taste. That wasn't a surprise. I figured that would win. I personally rated Coors last and keystone 2nd to last (they are similar beers). I always thought I liked Coors, but I guess it's my leas favorite. I thought my favorite out of the big 3 was Bud and that ended up being true. I was surprised at how well Natty did. We also thought that the Miller Light might have been skunk which would explain for it's terrible rating. MGD 64 obviously sucks as it only has 64 calories.

In the end, I'm not sure we accomplished much besides stating the obvious that Michelob Light is the best light beer. It was fun though. If you're looking for a way to kill an hour, I'd recommend doing this.

I've been buying clementines lately. They are delicious. If you don't know what they are, go out and buy some. They are basically tiny oranges with less or no seeds.


I've been running on the treadmill a lot this week. Something I hate about new age treadmills is the fact that they will tell you how many calories that you have burned. I am not trying to lose weight so I could give a shit if I'm burning calories, but it still frustrates me. I'll run for like 20 minutes and burn 150 calories. That's like not even enough to cover the Gatorade I drank while running on the treadmill. For someone that is overweight (see below) and trying to lose weight they have gotta hate that the treadmill is rubbing in their face how little progess they are making relative to the effort they are putting out.