You ever notice how advertising will back people in insanely close together? There’s a Bacardi add where a bunch of people on boats build an island to dance and party on it. Leaving aside the degree of unnecessary effort involved, when they’re on their little fake island and dancing, they’re packed like sardines. Likewise, I remember seeing photo ad for a pool of some kind of another. They had like five people in a pool about the size of two and a half hot-tubs with some of them swimming around. No way five people are moving around in that water without running in to one another.

Speaking of Bacardi, isn’t there or wasn’t there a ban on liquor sales on TV? Liquor-makers used to sidestep this by advertising for their girlie-malt drinks, but now it seems that they’re advertising rum. Is this a cable vs broadcast TV thing? Did some law get passed? Am I hallucinating in thinking that the ban existed in the first place?

When I get some free time, I enjoy driving around the old ‘hood in my folks’ Ford Mustang convertible. The car has no MP3 player, so I listen to a Mix CD with select songs that I don’t typically listen to the CD for. A disproportionate number of these songs are of the Easy Listening genre because I used to listen to Easy Listening radio when I was young but was too poor to ever buy the CDs and bec0me familiar with their entire catalog. So I drive around town in a Ford Mustang convertible jamming it out to Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud” and England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “I Really Want To See You Tonight”.

The first decade was only nine years long. Stop trying to use technicalities to prove yourself smarter than everyone else. That’s the type of stuff I pulled when I was ten.

I cannot keep track of my melatonin bottles to save my life.

Contacts have also been a problem. I somehow ended up with only one set of pods for two different sets of prescriptions (one of which had a blurry left eye and the other a blurry right eye). There was no way I was going to be able to keep that straight. I should have just thrown out the blurry lenses.

Sometimes I wish Clancy were more into television. But then I find myself in the middle of a conversation about some modelling and fashion designer reality TV show and I realize that at least this way I’m not stuck watching completely uninteresting.

TV is much harder to watch when you can’t pause it. If I got a DVR, I swear that would be as important a component for it as the ability to timeshift and far more important than skipping commercials.

I found out that my brother retired his wireless router. That means that between the one I bought from Dad, the one he ordered before knowing that I was going to give it to him as a Christmas present, and Mitch’s old router, we’ve got three. Oh, and my father-in-law gave me a broken one that’s mine if I can fix it. Plus, Mitch’s router is apparently the same make and model as the one I got Dad. An embarrassment of riches.

When I was a kid, all I wanted for Christmas was a Nintendo and I didn’t get one until long after I really cared. Concerned for our grades, my parents were vaguely anti-video game. A year ago, my father heard about this handheld thing where he could do crosswords and other mind exercises. Mom got the thing and the thing that it works on. So now Dad has a Nintendo DS. And I don’t.

I am typing this from my father-in-law’s old ThinkPad. It’s older than my older laptop. Still runs quite well… except that Windows XP has a lot of trouble on 512MB of RAM. Microsoft says the minimum requirement is supposed to be 128MB. Liars.

I was so proud to get Clancy a laptop with outstanding resolution (1600x1200). But she can’t read it. I had to change the resolution to the standard (1280x1024).

I really, really hate that they changed the 1.25 aspect ratio for 1280x1024, but have everything else at 1.33. People have told me why this is the case (maybe even in the comments here, though I can’t find it), but I still think it’s stupid. I guess widescreens are rendering this irritation obsolete. Still: Dumb move.