There’s not much left of it today…
Category: Daily Life
Amazing Race scorecard
UPDATE: WE HAVE A WINNER!
Best choice of winners goes to… Larry, with only 2 team changes and 3 stage wins, barely beating out Jane, Wren, Reiley and Nick by one stage win, and tying me (but I’m disqualified since I’m the scorekeeper!).
Best choice of losers goes to… Larry by a landslide, with 5 correct eliminations!
I’m heading over to deliver Larry’s prizes now…. :>
—
Trying to get everyone hooked into an Amazing Race contest…
- Pick the team you think will win, and pick the team you think will be eliminated next.
- If your winning team is eliminated, you have to pick another. Least picks wins!
- If your losing team is eliminated, you score, and get to pick another. Most scores wins!
Hopefully simple enough, here we go!
| Team | Symbol |
|---|---|
| Yoga vegans | V |
| Asperger brothers | A |
| Gay brothers | G |
| Dad/son opposites | O |
| Harlem GT’s | H |
| Poker pro women | P |
| Miss America interracial | I |
| Weighlifters | W |
| Nashville Christians | C |
| Columbian fire couple | F |
| Internet 50’s | 5 |
| Young soccer stars | Y |
WINNER PICKS
| Viewer | Ep01a Y |
Ep01c O |
Ep02 H | Ep03 G |
Ep04 Y | Ep05 Y | Ep06 G | Ep07 H |
Ep08 Y | Ep09 Y |
Ep10 Y |
Ep11 Y |
| Larry | P | Y | win! | |||||||||
| Jane | H |
|
Y | |||||||||
| Andrea | G | |||||||||||
| Mike | P | Y | ||||||||||
| Wren | H | Y | ||||||||||
| Reiley | H | Y | ||||||||||
| Nick | H |
|
Y |
ELIMINATION PICKS
| Viewer | Ep01a V |
Ep01c F |
Ep02 5 |
Ep03 A |
Ep04 W |
Ep05 C |
Ep06 P |
Ep07 (O) |
Ep08 O | Ep09 (I) |
Ep10 H | Ep11 I,G,Y |
| Larry | F |
F |
5 |
A | W | O | O | O | G | win! | ||
| Jane |
V |
P | P | I | ||||||||
| Andrea | W | W | I | |||||||||
| Mike | C | C | I | |||||||||
| Wren |
V |
P | I | |||||||||
| Reiley | W | W | P | P | I | |||||||
| Nick | W | W | P | P | I |
Poetry flows…
Wren’s recent poetry assignment turned out this gem…
I looked in the corner and there sat fear, small and hunkered, His big, googly eyes darting around the room, not missing a thing. I heard him, quietly, slowly mumbling to himself, staring blankly at the wall. When he stood up, his eyes darted toward me and stayed on me. He slowly strode across the room with big steps. Although his head was facing straight, his eyes stayed turned to me. I felt a little bit sorry for him, But when he shut the door without a sound, I got the chills.
9.5 Weezer – Ratitude!
(oops, I wrote one of those lame Rolling Stone-type “record reviews” where I rant and rant about some tangent and hardly even mention the band…rofl…)
Why does most new music sound so mediocre and slapdash?
I realize it’s become easier and easier for anyone, talented or not, to make music and publish it to the masses. And I realize that’s A Good Thing, as long as there is some form of quality filtering available. Social networking should be the perfect tool to provide this quality filtering, but it seems to fail me over and over. Grabbing the “most popular” music just isn’t working for me. There’s too much quantity, and too little quality. I’d gladly have access to twenty times less music that was consistently 20% better.
Do I really miss having all those AOR music reps vetting music for me? Am I that lame? Maybe I just need to try harder – I don’t scrobble on last.fm, I don’t use Apple’s Genius thingee, and my Pandora filters are crufty, full of old bands that don’t tie me to good new music.
The bottom line is… I want music that has a certain base level of polish and effort. In the early 80’s, I used to say that all I needed to be happy was a beatbox, but I’ve heard so much empty worthless copy-and-pasted MIDI techno nonsense, often excused with a trance or d&b tag, that I swear I will take the gaspipe if I hear one more set of empty looping beats. And one more lame meandering acoustic-guitar-strumming effortless “look at me, I’m special without trying” “modern” band will send me over the edge. And what happened to innovative rap or hip-hop? What cookie-cutter nonsense it all is! Seriously people, life is too short, stop publishing crap.
Anyway, what HAS sounded good lately is music that has a little spitpolish without losing the rock and roll edge. Weezer and White Sripes type stuff. It’s a bit embarrassing, I feel like I’ve gone back to high school and fallen in love with Van Halen, listening to Weezer sing “The girl got hot”, “Screw rehab, I love my addiction, I can’t stop partying, partying..”, etc. or the spoken rock of the White Stripes’ Rag and Bone (I swear they are channelling “Hot for Teacher”).
Help me out. What’s the best way to find good new music?
Girls ham it up
The girls have been whipping up creative little plays for us ever since they had a “dress-up bin” from which to pull costumes. Here are scenes from “Little Dead Riding Hood” (with the Prevost clan) and “The Noodle Master” (with the Dobbs clan). Best entertainment around!
Mum goes under the knife
…and she’s back out and all is well, as of this afternoon. She had a three-hour spinal surgery so keep her in your prayers as she heals…
Bright lights big city…
Finally fulfilling my dream to get some BIG CITY hang time! All my Chicago friends can laugh when I brag about working in a 19-story “skyscraper”, but I am loving it. I’ll add my favorite restaurants so u can meet me downtown and we can do lunch! Whoop!
Click thru to a site with all kinds of great pics of the Raleigh skyline…
Big Weekend
Had a great weekend, starting a little early on Thursday with dinner with Sammy at the Raleigh Times. A great veggie burger with great toppings (avacado, grilled mushrooms and onions, lettuce, tomato, ketchup and mustard, mmm), and the beer list is to die for. I had a Belgian triple – three times the hops and barley of a normal brew. It was delicious and effective, one beer was plenty. Then we went to Escazu, the chocolatier I’ve been obsessing over for a year or more. They have the best bars at Whole Foods (out of 200 or so, it seems), and the actual shop, on Glenwood Avenue, is adorable – a converted house with a display case full of painstakingly handcrafted chocolate delights. Then it was time for Halloween, and we partied like twentysomethings. You’ll have to hook up on Facebook to see all the good semi-clean fun we had. :> Except for this one blurry picture I found on my iPhone…
Wrenny and I get bohemian
Wrenny and I spent Sunday afternoon at the local coffeehouse. We had a great time drinking a “frappé” (latte blended with ice) spiked with chocolate syrup, yum… Kept us fuelled up for a nice long game of Elfenland. In the end it was a dead even tie, broken by Wrenny smashing my remaining pieces before I could get hers. :P
We also played Bluetooth games across the iPhone and iPod touch. Whee!
A-PAXing we will go…
PAX 2009 flew by like a sonic jet. Dan and I met out in Seattle again this year (we did it once before in 2007) for the Penny Arcade Gaming Expo. In my quest to find work, I picked up a pretty nice Macbook Pro so I can do iPhone development. It turns out that it has a nice dedicated GPU, can boot into Windows, and with the latest Bootcamp set of Windows drivers that came with the latest OS X (10.6 aka Snow Leopard), it fully supports Windows 7 RC, to the point where I was ripping it up with all the latest games. What a deal! Dan kept the party rolling with a new laptop purchase in the 11th hour, so that by the time the games began on Friday morning, we had covered half of Seattle on foot but managed to be fully geared up.
On Friday we spent a lot of time in BYOC setting up the shiny new rigs. Saturday was a full day of joyous fun, from 10am ’til 2am (that’s 5am EST, for those keeping score). We played Legions on a local instantaction.com server (I was happy to place in the middle of the pack in the deathmatch tourney), a 100+-player Trackmania Nations Forever contest, Call of Juarez, Fallout 3, Eve Online, Marble Madness, board games including Puerto Rico, and most of the PAX 10, including Tag, Osmos, Puzzlebloom, etc. And we caught a minute here and there of the excellent panels, incliding watching Gabe and Tycho put together the strip for that day. Sunday we kept plugging away while managing to collect over a dozen t-shirts – LOTS of Tribes loot! On Monday we gamed the most, with our homebrew LAN-out-of-a-suitcase setup in the hotel, shooting each other endlessly in Juarez, and still managed to get to the mall to buy the wives something. And there was so much good food… Red Fin tempura, Cheesecake Factory, cyber-dogs… the Teriyaki rage of 2007 has been replaced by Pho on every corner (HOT hot salty yummy soup). When you get it to go, you get a vat of hot water and all the ingredients to build it yourself. And of course, literally, Starbucks on every corner. In central Seattle I had a triple-shot latte that made my day. Too much fun. Thanks Danno!!
