I’ve already watched this about five times in a row. There’s something hypnotic about the way James Lipton says “booyah”.

The best parody is always self-parody.

Lately, I’ve had to ask people to repeat the last thing they’ve said to me. Usually it will go something like this:

Friend: Yeah, so after the bar we decided to go to the mhxhpd.

Me: I’m sorry?

After six years of living in a noisy city and riding the subway with my iPod turned up, I can’t say my hearing hasn’t changed. At the very least, I can stand in a very quiet room, close my eyes and not hear any of the high pitched buzzing or ringing that’s symptomatic of hearing loss.

I do mishear a lot of things that people say but I’ve always figured that was my internal monologue getting in the way of their words. I’m definitely one of those people who hear what they want to hear but I think in some cases that’s not always a bad thing.

Example #1 - Like most folks, I like listening to catchy songs with ambiguous lyrics. If something doesn’t make sense, my brain will fill in the gaps with the words that do. And sometimes I’ve been disappointed to learn that the actual words are less interesting than the imagined ones.

For years, I could have sworn that the refrain to “El Scorcho” by Weezer was:

I’m a liar like you,
So come on, I’m here,
I’m waiting
I think I’d be good for you
and you’d be good for me.

Neat right? It’s teenage crush song where the narrator is playing it way too cool in 1st and 2nd verse, but during the refrain he comes clean because he knows that his crush is doing the exact same thing with him. It’s like “Hey, I’m a crook and you’re a crook. We should work together.”

Sadly the actual lyrics are:

I’m a lot like you
Some come on, etc…

Which is okay, but a little vanilla.

Example #2 - Last week I was at a noisy bar and I was talking to a friend’s girlfriend. I’d met her before and the only I could remember is that she’s from Wisconsin and her hometown is… uh… Madison?

Me: So how’s your summer going?

Her: Good! I’ve been doing a lot of zmphxing.

Me: What?

Her: Traveling. I’ve been doing a lot traveling.

Me: Oh cool. Did you go home? Back to Madison?

Her: Yeah. (amazed) Wow. That’s really cool you remembered Ashland.

Me: Oh yeah. Sure.

Okay, so she was from Ashland, WI instead of Madison, WI. But thanks to the surrounding noise, she thought she heard the right answer and the conversation kept rolling.

I’m not even sure why I said Madison. I think my brother’s girlfriend went to school there. But probably not. Like I said, my internal monologue tends to get in the way of what other people are saying.

I’ve got one year left in my twenties. Better make the most of it.

Mmm… That new site design smell…

Okay, so things don’t look terribly different on the surface, but under the hood I’ve given the site the proper tune-up that it’s been needing for years.

The biggest change is that I’ve upgraded Wordpress 2.5 which is very media-savy and it will allow me to post just about any video or picture that I want. The second big change is that I rebuilt my page layout and style sheet on top of the default Kubrick theme that comes with WP 2.5 and I’m 95% sure I didn’t break any of the code along the way. So for the first time in the 6 years since I started this site, absolutely all of the publishing feature & plugins on this will actually work.

Boring stuff, right? Well here’s something to try out: dynamic picture viewing! Click on any of the the flickr photos below to open them in a light box.

Cool, right?

Update: I’ve disabled the Twitter widget from the sidebar because their messaging server runs slower than an old Tandy and ends up slowing down this site a bunch. Which is kinda of lame of them because how hard is it to spool out 1k of information at a time? Lame.

I was feeling a little frisky this morning, so I decided to treat myself to some Starbucks. I hadn’t indulged for a couple of mouths and I’d heard that they’d recently taken strides to change the flavor of their coffee from “burnt charcoal water” to a “smoother and fresher” variety.

Of course, nobody really goes to Starbucks for the coffee: We go there because we want to pick up the latest in adult contemporary easy listening music. Death Cab for Cutie, Neil Diamond (as reduced by Rick Rubin) and such. The better of us buy it wirelessly with their iPhones while the rest of the proles browse the CD rack by the register. Anyway, that’s what I was doing when I noticed that Carly Simon had a new CD out. It’s called This Kind of Love and it’s a collection of songs “filled with emotion and Brazilian influences.”

Whatever. I bought it just for the album cover.

Okay, so maybe I didn’t buy. And yeah, her figure was likely aided by Photoshop. But it’s nice to see that even at the age of 62, Ms. Simon is still game to play the part of a high society tramp.

Bonus musical trivia: Mick Jagger sang backup vocals on “Your So Vain.” And while he is very vain, the song probably isn’t about him.