Night in ND

So I have moved out to Chicago, but I still don't have a place to live. My goal on Friday was to spend the day finding a place to live. Instead I spent the entire day playing GTA IV. I actually started playing at 10:30 and only ended at 5:30, which is when I went across the street to buy a case of Bud Light. At 7:00 I got a call from my buddy Dan, to drive out to South Bend and that one of our friends was out there. Of course I couldn't turn down a novelty trip to a school I hate. I decided to see if I could make it to South Bend on three gallons of gas. I couldn't, but I did get to stop an the Knute Rockne Transportation Center.

When I got to South Bend I was treated to a shot of Makers Mark and Crown Royal. I then went to the bar with my friend and his parents. It was the coolest Irish pub that I have ever been to. They actually had a live band. And each of they members had Irish kilts on. I don't know too many Irish songs but I really want a CD of that shit. One of Dan's neighbors was there and tried to come on to me. Dan if your reading this, your neighbor is married and a slut and instead of coming on to me she should be going to the farmers market.

After we left, we went to a Notre Dame bar and Dan's girlfriends aunt was working the bar. She made what I could only call a badtini. I got really hammered and started hitting on girls. I went 0-2 on account of boyfriends. I mean I really don't know what to do if you start to hit on a girl and her boyfriend comes over and claims his dominance. Do you do this? Luckily the third girl was a charm because I got her number and email. I am such a ladies man. I then passed out and woke up 8 hours later and went to breakfast.

This lead to one of the funnier moment of my life. After breakfast we were driving back with Dan, his girlfriend and his GF's little brother in a conversion van. They type with like the built in TV and shit. As he pulls up to his GF's house, her little brother stands up to get out. The van is still moving a little bit. Right when he stands up Dan slams on the breaks and kid's head hits the overhead console and knocks him back down.

I drove back to Chicago and found a place to live.

College OTR sucks my balls.

My freshmen year roommate would sit on our futon all day every Saturday and browse Facebook. He had one of two standard responses to everyone on Facebook.

1) This chick is hot. I'm going to facebook her.
or 2) He's in that frat? They're so gay.

Every time I read the blog College OTR I am reminded of his level of commentary.

If you've never heard of it, and I pray most of you haven't, College OTR (On The Record) is a college blog with contributors from schools around the nation. And it sucks. My issue isn't that there is a really crappy blog out in the internet. It's that people think that this blog is awesome, and give it awards (US News and World Report).

My first real complaint is the content. Along with what is noted above, the entire site screams look at me and look at these really cool people I'm hanging out with. Look how much fun I had. No one could have this much fun! it's like the Eleanor Roosevelt quote, "Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." This site discusses people. Here are a few of the categories: Wacky Faculity; Campus Characters; and of course Hot People.

The most notable content on the site has been:
A) Coolest Frats + Sororities on Campus
B) Hottest Girls on Campus
C) Definition of a "Hook Up"
D) College Sex Diary

The entire site is fluff. Links to McLovin Videos?

Even the occasional post that would be considered news is lacking. Still no mention of Michigan Baseball post-season play. And the news they do get is usually late. I broke the Taco Bell story almost a month before it was posted on OTR. But I'm not trying to compare my blog with theirs. Their blog "is the country's premiere college blog, capturing the best of everything that happens at college." My blog is simply a shrine to my own awesomeness.

The idea is that a few contributors are selected to blog about events. The job description is this:

CollegeOTR Seeks the Next Generation of Campus Celebrities:

For the upcoming school year CollegeOTR is looking for a group of incredibly hooked-up scenesters to show the world what's happening at their school.

Submit your photos, gossip, breaking news – and anything salacious you can tell us about your campus.

We’ll select one Chief Contributor per campus and pay them $500 a semester for great work. CCs will be required to post 15-20 photos per week (with captions).

So these people get selected to be the voice of their school and write about gossip and shit. But why would anyone want to read what they have to say? Furthermore, who would want to become a Chief Contributor? That's like 100 hours of work for 500$ of pay. It's clear though that the people who do contribute are obviously the type of people that would think that is a good gig.

College OTR is like the trash TV of the internet. You read it not because it's informative or interesting. You read it because it's there and you have nothing better to do. Just blindly eat up whatever is given to you, and just convince yourself how great it is. It's the exact same reasons why I try to convince my grandmother to stop listing to Dr. Laura. I swear if that bitch wasn't given a platform everyone would realize how dumb she really is. But somewhere, someone decided that she is relevant, just like someone did for College OTR.

I'd do Anything for Salina

Two weekends ago I was at a party and met a girl named Salina. She seemed interesting enough and I offered to walk her home. She had written her name on my hand, but didn't include a number. When we got to her place I assessed the situation and gave her a kiss on the cheek and told her goodnight. I always leave them wanting more. When I got home I immediately facebooked. But while facebooking I realized that between the time I had left her front door and the time I had gotten home she had entered a FB relationship. I simply chalked it up to such a magical kiss on the cheek. What girl wouldn't be ready to go steady after one of my kisses for the Mrs. (Worst. Sentence. Ever.) Four days later she accepted and wall posted.

yeeeay for cheese!

On Memorial day instead of looking for an apartment in Chicago (where I was about to move in 2 days) I instead spent the day doing nothing. First I put up the American Flag outside the house. Then, I helped Ross write the Wikipedia Article for Julie "The Cat" Gaffney. It was immediately taken down and his user name "Poopstainpapadopoulos" was revoked. An excerpt from memory:

Julie "The Cat" Gaffney was born to mortal parents in the year of our Lord MCMLXXIX. After dominating the Bangor Maine junior division hockey program she joined Gordan Bombay's rag-tag district 5 mighty ducks...

After that we went over to Coop's house for a bbq on his roof. I drank my lunch and dinner and 6 hours later I was drunk. That's when Hannah, who works with Salina as an athletic trainer asked me about her. The girls said if a guy walked them home and only gave them a kiss they would be pissed. Sounds like they're a bunch of whores to me. The guys thought it was the smart play. Hannah then asked if I wanted her number. I thought this was a great idea. With everyone watching I left her a voicemail where I invited her to the Ann Arbor Hands On Museum followed by dinner at Grizzley Peak. I recall the message going well and my prose excellent, my contemporaries disagree. There was some group discussion whether the Ann Arbor Hands On Museum really existed or whether it was a thinly veiled innuendo for second base. Either way I figured she would be in.

Today she called me and I had to break her heart and tell her that I was leaving for Chicago and she had to break mine that she was already seeing someone. Ohh the love that could have grown. It appears I don't have a knack for picking the right girls. BTW, she was a gymnast. Dammit.

Best Subs on Campus

I swear I am constantly making top 5 lists. I do it so often that sometimes I feel like Dick and Barry from the book Hi-Fidelity. I drive my bus thinking "Top five Harold Ramis Films"* or "Top five University Presidents"** I should start a separate blog just for top five lists. Well F that, I'll just add them to this blog.

Today: Top 5 Places to get a Sub on Campus.
Based solely on taste. No consideration given to size or price.

5: Jimmy John's. Notebly the State Street and South U locations. The Packard and Ann Street locations are shit.

4: Quiznos Pierpont. Quiznos is delicious, but I may be biased by the fact that I used to work there. Too bad it's all the way on North Campus.

3: Bell's Grinder. Bell might be dirty and the quality of ingredients is questionable but those grinders sure are tasty.

2: Pizza House. The meats on a Pizza House sub can't be beat. It tastes like what I would imagine cocaine would taste like if cocaine was a deli meat.

1: Joe's Sub Shop. Hand's down best subs on campus. Hell of a philly cheese steak. Plus I'm pretty sure that Joe has connections to the underworld. Every time I'm in there Joe is talking to some guys about breaking some wise guys legs and backroom card games.

*
5: Knocked Up
4: Ghostbusters 2
3: Stripes
2: Orange County ("You're my same height, That is neat")
1: Ghostbusters

**
5: Robben Fleming
4: Harry Hutchens
3: Alexander Ruthven
2: Henry Tappan
1: James Angell

Same Result, Different Sport

Yesterday my dad came up to Ann Arbor and took me out to lunch at Pizza house. After I got home, I really didn't have much else to do. So Ross, Brick and I loaded up a backpack with beers grabbed some lawn chairs and went to watch some Big Ten Baseball. We refused to pay the 4$ admission, so we set up shop behind the chain link right field fence, cracked some brews and watched Indiana beat Penn State with a walk off grand slam. We got some more friends and made some with the gentlemen that chill out in right field. The beauty of the location is that it is not patrolled by event staff. But regardless at the top of the second inning the inevitable happened. DPS officer strolled up and kicked us out. Not that we were ever in. He also made us poor out our beers. I treated him with politely with the utmost contempt. Michigan won anyways.

No reason to stop the aggressive day drinking though. We played some cornhole and decided that we should get a keg. Then other things happened and eventually this happened:

Fun with Window's sounds

Cable went out today. No internet and no TV. I tried to watch a DVD, but I couldn't do it. It's weird how you can watch terrible movies when there on tv, edited and with commercials, but you can never sit down and watch DVD's of movies you love. For example on Friday I watched Osmoses Jones in it's entirety on HBO family, but today I couldn't even make it through an entire episode of Band Of Brothers. I used to think it was because when movies were on TV you didn't know when they would be on again and thus only had a fixed window to watch it. But I watch movies I own when there on TV even when I could throw in the DVD and get the tits, and not the commercials. I'm pretty sure thats the first time I've ever said "tits" on my blog. I would check that, but I can't access my blog because the internet is down. Luckily I happened to have a "Create Post" page open in Firefox when the internet went dry.

So when the internet goes down it's important to remember that there are things you can use a computer for that don't involve the internet. Did you know, Windows has a built in Calculator? After about an hour of that and a few more of freecell I got really bored. Bored enough to change my Blue Screen of Death to a *Red* Screen of Death. I can't wait for the next time windows crashes. I'll be all like oh no BSOD, oh but wait it's red. It will be just like when I switched the LCD's on my Xbox so that the status light was red when it was working and green when it was broken. Why? Because I like to live on the edge.

There was one more thing left to do on my computer before I was going to actually start organizing my 20,000 mp3's. That was to have some fun with my standard Windows sounds.

I changed my Windows logon and logoff to these:






My start Windows and exit Windows:




My USB device connect and Disconnect:




Just in case the USB device fails to connect:


The beep whenever a dialog box opens is now:


For some reason on my computer after this point I need to refresh my browser for the sound to work on the next 4 bytes. I don't know if you will have the same problem.

Low Battery:


Standard exclamation ---> Excellent!


Some events don't come with a standard windows sounds. So I put this for the event "question":


And this one for "Print Complete":


Of course to do this I was lucky enough to have a .MP3 to .WAV converter lying around from when I had me yelling "SHIZZZAM" as my Windows logon. Also for some reason Blogger was cutting off the last few frames of a few of the sound bytes. Whatever, this is awesome.

Cedar Point + Alcohol = Fun

Yesterday I found myself in a parking lot in Ohio sitting in the back of an Escape slamming bottles of Budwiser at 3pm.

Last fall when I went to Cedar Point I had what was definitively one of the best/funniest days of my life, but we were just hung over, not drunk. Yesterday we woke up at 6:30, hungover and hit the road. After one run in with the Bloomfield Hills police, we made it to the park and got 4 deep before going in. Decisions to not eat or drink water and to stay in the sun all day were great. So after our trip to the parking lot, the lines seemed a lot shorter, and the everyone slightly more interesting. Observations like Ohio State fans are also fans of jorts (JORTS!) became obvious. After getting "The Boot" from the Red Garter Saloon the obviously next choice was to ride the Mean Streak twice (No puking yay!). Of course when we went on the Millennium Force and Maverick we had to hide our boots down our pants, but that came with all the added benefits of carrying a 32oz boot in your pants. So what am I drinking out of right now? A dirty boot that yesterday was in my pants.

The good news was that Paul and I were the first 2 people to ride Snake River Falls all year.

Last Week...

Things that have happened in the week since my last post:

*I hi-fived a transvestite
*Went to 4 Michigan Baseball games in 48 hours
*Air Guitared "More Than A Feeling" at Charley's ala Chris Turk and the Cool Cats
*Walk of shamed it back to my house at 7 am on a Sunday, only to pass people going to church.
*Ate a Loaded Steakhouse while on the clock
*Got the stare down from the Ohio State baseball coach
*Scored a point in Poop War '08
*Saw Phucking Phil, only to have him FB message Emily the next morning
*Was on FSN
*While singing Heat of the Moment at the Heidelburg I replaced the lyric "Teenage ambitions you remember well" with "Teenage abortions you remember well"
*I drove the Michigan Baseball team to the airport, and when we got there the assistant coach goes "You were fucking flying down 94, brother"
*Climbed to the peak of Mark's roof
*Watched all three Back to the Future movies
*Got terribly bad every night

Pucking Phil is the new Wednesday

I went to Heidelberg for the first time tonight. I had imagined from the exterior that it would be St. Paulie Girls serving bratwurst in steins to men in Lederhosen while the sounds of pre-pubescent boys yodeling filled the tavern. It's really just like a bar. They have specials on Miller Lite, and tonight they had karaoke. I will say that I have never been at a bar with so many girls and so few guys. That is until Phucking Phil showed up. You may remember Phucking Phil from such post as "Phucking Phil". This isn't my most recent experience with the Phil.

Just last week I was walking down State Street when PP was outside the neighbor's house asking Sweet Baby Gwen if Kiki was home. Of course he was in plaid shorts, and shirtless.

Tonight, he showed up with some guys for a birthday, and you guessed it, they were drunk. Phil had his signature sombrero, sunglasses and harmonica on. He was dancing with all of the girls, organizing crowd surfing, and signing Piano Man. I couldn't want to be Phil more. I did learn some juicy Phil secrets from the girls at the bar, and best of all is that he has no idea that I secretly envy him, or know who he is. Even though I am pretty sure he has had alumni status for awhile I guess he is living across the street next year. Yay Phil!

The good news is that karaoke is freaking awesome. It was a good crowd and I came with 9 girls and no other dudes. I got my freak on. After my rendition of Jessie's Girl brought down the house, it was pretty much straight freaking after that. It's far away but I might have to squeeze it into the regular lineup after Bar Louie Tuesday's.

Shirts

I have a problem that I own too many shirts, and it is a problem that has been growing since 2001. The issue is that I gain shirts at a much greater rate than I get rid of them. The real problem is that over the past two decades I have garnered a great collection of shirts that I really don't want to part with, but I really can't handle any more shirts. Luckily some shirts naturally fade away, get destroyed and lost. But the problem is that every year I get a few shirts that I want to keep for a long time, and will probably never get rid of.

It is this reason that I have shirts from when I was in 1st grade. That shirt is the immortal Square Lake Indoor Soccer shirt that I have worn to bed for 16 years and amazingly still fits well. I would guess that shirt has seen every significant event in my adolescent life. There are others, my TWO "Russell Reunion" shirts are from 1999 which puts them at 9 years old this July. I still have all of my high school class shirts (although I threw away my graduation shirt). My problem is that I can't keep these shirts forever, and I don't wear most of them.

So I developed a plan to systematically remove shirts that I don't wear. I started hanging all the shirts that I washed on the right side of my closet. So every time a shirt got worn and subsequently washed, it would get put on the right. My plan was that after a few months all the shirts on the left side of my closet would be the ones that I never wear and thus should get rid of. Unfortunately my plan failed for two reasons.
a) I found that there were shirts that were on the left side of my closet that I liked, but didn't get to wear often, like my Jim Davidson Tree & Lawn Service shirt which I inherited from my father who is cousins with Jim Davidson. Also, I don't get to wear my 1992 Ross Perot campaign shirt a whole bunch except on special occasion. Also in the winter all of my T-Shirts would end up on the left side, and in the Spring all of my sweaters would filter down to the left, but I still need them.
b) I unconsciously started to wear things from the right side of my closet. I realized that when I went to pick out a shirt I would start looking at the right side, because I knew that was where the good shirts were. So if somehow a bad shirt got placed on the right side of my closet, it would continue to be worn, and remain on the right side of the closet, while perhaps potentially better shirts were making their way down to the left side of the hanger rack.

But this did have the advantage of making my shirt seek time decrease dramatically. Also during the summer I wouldn't have to look through warm clothes to find T-Shirts, because they had all ended up on the other side of the rack. It also gave me an idea of which shirts I hadn't worn in awhile, so I could be able wear a good variety of shirts. So while it failed in its original goal of being a benchmark of unwanted shirts, it ended up being a good system for organizing my shirts.

So there you have it 600 words on my shirt situation.