Gas is expensive. You don’t deserve to be paying less than $2 a gallon for it. So stop whining.

The backslash will pop up absolutely everywhere, and when you least expect it. And it’s never appropriate.

Probably the most ridiculous concept of the eighties: clothes that will fit everybody.

On September 27th, the City of Lewisville, TX is hosting a tamale-eating contest as part of their Western Day 2008 festival.

This is the closest annual event to home that is sponsored by the International Federation of Competitive Eating, and seems like a great place to start.

A couple of weeks ago, I was out having dinner with Brandon and Jaime, and they watched me eat an entire pizza by myself.  I was hungry, but they insisted I should enter the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.

I figured I should probably start off on an even other than the Super Bowl of eating contests, so I hit up the Major League Eating website to find out what other contests are out there.  Turns out there’s one three hours away in a couple of weeks.  Object: Tamales.

So on Labour Day, we decided to head on over to Pancho’s (all you can eat!) to begin my training.

The girl at the buffet line seemed bemused that I would request “as many tamales as would fit” on my plate.  She needed a number.

“I’ll start with a dozen”

That dozen lasted all of six minutes.

A second batch was on its way as I completed the initial dozen, but that batch was so sub-par (even by Pancho’s standards) that I couldn’t keep them down.  It wasn’t that I was full; I followed up the crushed tamales with a pair of enchiladas and a sopapilla.

It wasn’t record time by anyone’s calculation.  Eater X set the world tamale record last year in Lewsiville at 71 in ten minutes.  The second-place guy was up there at 51.  But since I’d never had a tamale before, setting a twelve-minute pace of 24 isn’t that shabby.  Wasn’t that pretty, either.

I’ll keep working on it.

I should have kept my mouth shut.  It’s honestly the worst idea I’ve ever had.

Danny’s Return

Danny’s moving back home.  How long before we start handing him crap?

So I’m cleaning up two Vista laptops right now.  Evidently August is the time to snap them up.  In trying to clean off unwanted and annoying pre-installed apps, I noticed that Norton doesn’t really play nice like you would expect a well-respected name in software to.

Uninstalling it on the first laptop didn’t even complete, and after going guerilla-style on it in the registry, it still had some hooks in the OS that prevented AVG from taking over as the system’s anti-virus of choice.

Then I found this helpful tool from Symantec’s website.  Hm.  Reminds me of Gator from back in the day.  Hey, Symantec, if you know your uninstaller doesn’t work, why not include the Norton Removal Tool with your installs?  That could have saved me 2 or 3 hours.

On a related note, I still don’t less-than-three Vista.  Sure it’s got patches and a service pack update, and as long as you’ve got 2GB of RAM, it doesn’t chug.  But power-down modes still suck at the battery, and when I’m booting up, I can’t tell if it’s hung up or just slow.  No statusbar or anything: just a black screen.

This is exactly why I turned off quiet mode in Grub.

I had to break down and get an iPod.  Do I like them now?  Quite the opposite.

Last night, in covering a story on a new US tourism ad campaign in the London Underground (whose ads proclaim “South Carolina is so gay”), Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA took a shot at Civil War hero and my Great-great-great uncle, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard.

While I admire your meticulous pronunciation, Mr. Colbert, I must stand up and ask you, if his nickname, “The Little Creole” is the gayest thing about the Civil War, there’s not a lot of gay to be mined from the whole situation, is there?

This episode was filled with other homophobia-filled taunts directed toward Sir Elton John, which makes me wonder.  Why would you devote so much airtime to how gay everyone else is (or could potentially have been)?  Perhaps to deflect suspision of your own deviance?  Now I know why you want your Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream flavor so close to the Brawny guy.

This morning, I experienced a touch of Double Vision. I hope this doesn’t happen every day.

In other news, Gaffigan was hilarious. The only material he recycled from Beyond the Pale was the Hot Pocket thing, and he’s been doing that for about a decade. Afterwards, he did a big meet and greet. We got photos with him and he signed some stuff. Check out the photos.