The O's Are Depressing

I really need to turn off Orioles score notifications on my phone. Every day for the past two weeks, I have been reminded how horrible they are:

Tue, Jun 28 vs St. Louis L 6-2
Wed, Jun 29 vs St. Louis L 5-1
Thu, Jun 30 vs St. Louis L 9-6
Fri, Jul 1 @ Atlanta L 4-0
Sat, Jul 2 @ Atlanta L 5-4
Sun, Jul 3 @ Atlanta W 5-4
Mon, Jul 4 @ Texas L 13-4
Tue, Jul 5 @ Texas L 4-2
Wed, Jul 6 @ Texas L 13-5
Thu, Jul 7 @ Boston L 10-4
Fri, Jul 8 @ Boston L 10-3
Sat, Jul 9 @ Boston L 4-0
Sun, Jul 10 @ Boston L 8-6

One win in 13 games? Ugh.

Simpsons Predictions for 2010

Remember that Simpsons episode where the fortune teller shows Lisa her future and she meets that Hugh guy? Well apparently that took place in 2010. Let's see what they got right:

The Simpsons's 2010 Predictions
Simpsons' Prediction	Reality?
Holographic trees in memory of real trees	Nope.
Soy-based snacks (Soy Pops)	Yep.
Robot librarians	Does Kindle count?
Jim Carrey having starred in 40 films	No. Only 33.
Rolling Stones "Steel Wheelchair Tour"	They announced in January 2010 that they would not tour in 2010, despite the rumors.
quint-planes	Nope.
Digitized Big Ben clock (flashing 12:00)	Nope.
Communicator watches	Do smartphones count?
Video phones (rotary)	Yep.
Robotic nuclear power plant employees	Nope.
Digital fridge	Yep.
33% higher nuclear capacity (if the fourth cooling tower at SNPP is indicative of the entire nation)	Surprisingly, kinda. Our nuclear capacity has increased since 2000.
Pepsi-sponsored education	Eh, not really.
Virtual classrooms	Sure. There are online college-level classes.
1500 cable channels	The numbers on my TV go past 1000, so I'd say it's close enough.
Prince had several more name changes	Yes.
Virtual pool/darts	Does Wii count?
Fox became a hardcore sex channel	Close enough.
6-eyed fish	Not yet.

Not bad, TV. Not bad.

The Heaviest Heavy That Ever Heavied

Great news! All Metal/Hard Rock promotion has been reduced to a single adjective: HEAVY.

Everything is heavy! It's going to sound heavy! It's heavier than the last one! Heavy! Has the word "heavy" been ruined for you yet? No? Then keep reading!

SOUNDGARDEN Guitarist On New Album: 'The Vibe Of The Songs Is Definitely Very Heavy'

Well that clears everything up, doesn't it??

TESTAMENT Bassist On New Album: 'It's Coming To Be, And It's Heavy As S**t'

Okay okay I get it. You don't know what the album sounds like, do you?

EVANESCENCE Singer: New Album Is 'Probably The Heaviest Record We've Ever Done'

Gah! Choose a new word!

SEBASTIAN BACH Says His New Album Cover Is 'As Heavy As Rock 'N' Roll Can Be'

Sigh. At least no one is using it as a verb.

"We've decided that we wanna heavy it up a little bit on this next record"

Well, at least they're calling the music heavy and not just calling anything and everything heavy.

SLIPKNOT Singer Says Two Minutes Of Silence For Fallen Bassist Will Be 'Pretty Heavy' 

AHGHGHAHGAHG

Epic Meal Time is Incredibly Stupid

I hate Epic Meal Time. In their YouTube videos, a bunch of douchebags get together and make ridiculously unhealthy food. The premise itself is pretty solid: hilariously unhealthy food. I mean, If someone told me they were going to make an 84 egg sandwich, I would definitely be intrigued...

Until I saw these morons bro down on eachother. The lead bro guy yells at the camera like he's about to rape you. I'm fairly sure these guys all play lacrosse. I bet they use the word 'mancation'. They probably all have raised Jeeps or Mitsubishis or something else equally douchbaggy. The magic of the word 'epic' is wasted on them, not to mention how much the awesome power of bacon is ruined by them.



If I wanted to watch a douchebag cook, Bobby Flay has like 10 shows on the Food Network.

Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time is the exact opposite of Epic Meal Time. Clearly they did it to mock EMT, but then it took a on life of its own. Just have a look:

The Missing Link: Soda Machines

You are no doubt familiar with the humble soda fountain:

And you may be familiar with the newfangled touch screen soda fountains:

If you haven't seen these things, they're wonderful. Basically, Coke went into the future and brought this back. You can choose from your standard products (all of them: Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Sprite, Sprite Zero, Pibb, Diet Pibb, Vault, Barq's, Diet Barq's, "Lemon"ade, Powerade, like 34 different Fantas, and crappy old water), but then it will let you add flavor to them! For Coke, you can add cherry, vanilla, lime, cherry vanilla (not pictured, but I've seen it!), orange, or rapsberry. Orange coke is godawful. Stay away at all costs. Rapsberry coke is quite amazing.

I recently found the Missing Link in soda fountains, though:

Thousands of years from now, after the soda fountains have become sentient and eradicated mankind with type 2 diabetes, soda fountain archaeologists may one day find this many-choiced, yet sparsely-nozzled machine. I imagine it won't slow the debate between the sentient soda fountain creationists and the sentient soda fountain evolutionists, but it will be a breakthrough for sentient soda fountain scientists!

Alabama

Last month, I went to scenic, beautiful Mobile, Alabama!

This is Mobile, AL's actual skyline. ...You can stop laughing now.

I saw the sight there. (Yeah, there's only one.) The USS Alabama (BB-60). It was a World War II-era battleship. (Interesting fact: They filmed parts of Under Siege on it.)

It's got everything from giant guns of death...

...to what must have been the worst thing about WWII.

That's right. Sailors had to poop into troughs while sitting on two planks of wood in a doorless half-stall. What you can't see in this picture is that the half-stalls all face another stall, so you had the added bonus of watching the dude in front of you, too!

At least the sleeping arrangements were ni-- OH GOD! Now I know why they call beds on ships "racks". Nowadays, they have the much more comforting name of "coffin racks". As horrible as they are, at least they're not like this!

It is quite an epic buoyant deathbringer!

Later on, on the way to Mississippi, I saw this:

That chalkboard says "THIS PoLiTicain Don'T Lie" (sic). This... thing... was on a property along with a doubletall trailer. It looked like the landowner built a lower level himself, mostly out of plywood, then stacked his mobile home on top of it. I didn't get a picture of it because I was fleeing for my life at that point.