so I saw the end of the State of the Union and the Democratic response: Tim Kaine's eyebrow is crazy. Despite the crazy eyebrow though, I thought he was a good speaker. But although I missed most of the president's speech, he did say a few things I was surprised about- he mentioned a couple times that public officials need to be accountable, given that a bunch of his boys are in jail or under investigation, and that he said we shouldn't think that America is declining. I have sort of worried about this, it seems like other countries disagree with us almost constantly, mostly about the war, but also about various other things - the environment, for example. I hope this is only a momentary glitch and the US will continue being a respected country once the current gentlemen is gone. But I'm not so sure. All empire collapse eventually, right?

so condo websites are pretty lame - I've been looking at a lot websites for new condos at work, most of them are pretty blah - same dumb intro, same design, same features, everything. However, this one is the stupidest - it's so pretentious and corny. (Turn your sound on). Honestly, "Proximity is Power"? That's stupid. If somebody told me they were living on the 400 block of Mass Ave NW, I'd say "huh, that is kind of a crappy area," not "wow, you must be powerful."

so sometimes I wonder if DC is being overbuilt. There are so many new condos going up around the city, and population dropped by 50,000 since 1990 according to the Census, that is seems like it's untenable. I mean, where are these people coming from to buy these fancy new condos and such? Are they moving out of other places in DC? If so, who's replacing them? If they're coming from outside DC, who are all the people leaving? I remember reading in geography classes that part of the reason Harlem was a not so good neighborhood was that there was a housing boom in the 1800s, and housing was built faster than demand could keep up with it, then the market collapsed - which seems like is going to happen in DC. Unless the people leaving are from the areas of the city where there isn't a condo boom (i.e. outside of NW and Capitol Hill), in which case the condos will keep going up, more rich folks will buy them, and whoever it is that is leaving will keep leaving. Assuming the economy doesn't take a downturn, in which case I think there will be a lot of empty condos with Italian marble counters and 12 foot ceilings and all that stuff.

so my pal Donkey Kong forwarded me this article about celebrity sex videos, which is pretty interesting. It basically says it's just another publicity tool, which is fine by me. The best thing, though, is that the professor talking about the videos is named Kuntz. That's classic.

so I found this cool site the other day, a site that maps sports team fan areas, commoncensus.org. You vote on what teams you like. It's pretty interesting seeing where various teams have their fans - the Washington Nationals, for example, have a pretty big area, including about half of Virginia and down into North Carolina, while the Braves have a large area of the south, including the rest of Va. And oddly, every Washington major league team's area includes eastern North Carolina - the Wizards, Nationals, Capitals, and Redskins.

so I like to look at people's away messages on Instant Messenger. I think the ones that say "I am away from my computer right now" suck - think of something creative, please.

But the ones that I think are odd are the ones like "I'm at dinner, call the cell." Is "call the cell" really that necessary? One would assume that if you aren't there, it wouldn't make any sense to send an instant message, so calling would be the only option. Right? I mean, maybe all their friends are retarded - "it said you were at dinner, and I sent you 50 instant messages but you never got back to me!! What gives!!!" Unless there is some option besides cell phone that I haven't thought of - maybe semaphore? a telegraph? I don't get it. Plus it's always a command - "Call the cell." not "call the cell if you need me" or "please call the cell." It's weird.

so I thought this sounded like a "Who's on First, What's on Second" joke:

WHO Calls for Halt on Malaria Treatment

"Who calls for it?"
"Yes."
"Who?"
"Right."
"What??"
"No, What is the health minister of Kenya."
"What?"
"Yes."
"Who?"
"Yes, they called for a halt."
"Who did?"
"Yes, they feel drug companties are marketing drugs improperly."
"Who is they?"
"They are who."
"Why are you asking me!"
"No, you is the UN Secretary General. U Thant."

so i dunno why I haven't mentioned this before: I have been playing this game called Yahoo Soccer Manager for awhile now. It's free (unlike a lot of sports manager games) and sort of like fantasy football, but you train players and set substitutions and strategies and all of that sort of thing. Plus you can name them whatever you want, like Johnny Underpants. It's really fun. You try to move up from the 5th division to the first (like in European soccer), and players get old so you have to get new ones, etc. It's fun stuff, check it out. Currently Ron Mexico is my leading scorer.

so I found some pretty funny stuff on the interweb today.

-First, my pall Jess sent me this really cool site called beermapping.com which has maps with breweries and brewpubs, plus where all the bars, breweries, beer stores, etc are in various cities. The guy who runs it tells me he'll have DC in the next week or so.

-Also, my pal Edmund wrote about this ridiculous movie called Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam, which is a Turkish rip-off of Star Wars, complete with inserted footage of the Star Wars movies and music from Indiana Jones and others. It looks ridiculously bad and funny. I personally like the quotes from IMDB, which sound like "All Your Base":

Cüneyt Arky'n: Begin to your famous whistle which no women can resist.
Aytekin Akkaya: [Whistles]
Cüneyt Arky'n: You whistle it wrong
Aytekin Akkaya: Why?
Cüneyt Arky'n: Skeletons came instead of woman

What the hell? This page has a hilarious review, and there's more about it from Wikipedia.

-DCist.com linked to a post about some DC cops riding on the hoods of police cars, being followed by three more police cars, with everybody yukking it up. I mean, I goof off at work so I can't be too upset. Actually, I think it's pretty funny. At least they aren't racing I guess.

-And finally, I read two articles on Yahoo about people being the ancestors of tons of other people - an Irish king has 16 million descendents, and four Jewish ladies are the ancestors of 40% of the Ashkenazi Jews. I guess everybody is sort of inbred.

so my boss sent me this today, pretty funny.

Top 20 most unusual excuses workers gave for missing work:

21. I was sprayed by a skunk.
20. I tripped over my dog and was knocked unconscious.
19. My bus broke down and was held up by robbers.
18. I was arrested as a result of mistaken identity.
17. I forgot to come back to work after lunch.
16. I couldn't find my shoes.
15. I hurt myself bowling.
14. I was spit on by a venomous snake.
13. I totaled my wife's jeep in a collision with a cow.
12. A hit-man was looking for me.
11. My curlers burned my hair and I had to go to the hairdresser.
10. I eloped.
9. My brain went to sleep and I couldn't wake it up.
8. My cat unplugged my alarm clock.
7. I had to be there for my husband's grand jury trial.
6. I had to ship my grandmother's bones to India.
5. I forgot what day of the week it was.
4. Someone slipped drugs in my drink last night.
3. A tree fell on my car.
2. My monkey died.

1. I locked myself in my own apartment!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

so I don't get what the deal is with people saying "Happy New Year." It's been 13 days, guys, but people around here are still saying it. At what point does it cease being a New Year? I mean, if you haven't seen the guy in awhile, say "hey man, how've you been?" not "hey let's refer to this holiday that happened a couple weeks ago." It's dumb.

And I wrote about cake pong at GW a little while ago, which was pretty funny, but it turns out there was a good reason - the students who had the party thought that UPD had busted an earlier party of theirs by finding out about it on Facebook, so they advertised the party all over Facebook, then duped the cops by having only cake and no alcohol. They did spell out the word "beer" on the cakes, and wrote "I love beer" on their shirts and stuff. The New York Times, of all places, reports about Facebook being used to bust students, and the party organizer's Facebook page has some funny pictures of the party (you may need to be a Facebook member to see it). The photo of the angry cop is the best - note the laughing girl behind him. My alma mater has some clever people.

so I am a professional blogger now - check out ColonialHoops.com, which launched this morning. Pretty cool! It's a GW basketball blog, if you couldn't tell by the name. I'm the big boss man there, which means I supervise one person, myself. It's part of a company that runs a number of college basketball blogs, including Pitt, Iowa, and Minnesota. I plan on putting a lot of interesting stuff on there, not just in depth stats or analysis.

so my pal Donkey Kong sent me this link: the World Series of Beer Pong. That is amazing. i want in. And the winners got $10,000! That's amazing.

so I really like it when people bring in those fundraiser boxes of Krispy Kreme to work - I ate 6 of those things this morning, and one more this afternoon. I can eat the hell out of those things, I could have easily eaten a dozen. I really think I could dominate in a Krispy Kreme eating contest, at least among my friends. Maybe not against Kobayashi, the small Japanese dude who always wins the hot dog contests. Plus Krispy Kremes taste really good, unlike hot dogs, which are fine, but nothing I'd go out of my way to get.

Also, looking for pictures of Takeru Kobayashi, the hot dog eating champ, I found this cool blog about hot dogs. He has an article about Ben's Chili Bowl too.

so I guess I am a geography nerd. I was curious the other day to see where the geographic center of DC is, so I figured it out. According to my calculations (well, my computer's) it's right at the intersection of New York Ave NW and 4th St NW, which is between L and M, and also right where I-395 ends. It's the star in the picture above. So that's sort of interesting.

However, lots of people on the internet seem to be think that the geographic center is under the center of the dome of the Capitol Building, which isn't true. The Capitol Building is the center point of the quadrant system, but it's not exactly in the center - if you look at the picture below, you can see that the NW quadrant is by far the biggest, and NE is second biggest, skewing the results to the north and west of the Capitol. It's a subtle difference of description, but it results in a pretty big difference on the ground.



Even if you consider the original borders of DC, which included Arlington and part of Alexandria, the Capitol dome is still not the geographic center. That geographic center is the circle, which is between Constitution and C, 17th and 18th NW - where the Red Cross building is.

Unfortunately, tons of people have it wrong, including the Washington Post and Brian Williams of NBC News. Lots of various blogs and websites have it wrong too (e.g. here and here. This one's kind of half right - it is the beginning of the quadrants, but that doesn't make it the geographic center. And you can comment on this guy's blog, so I posted about the geographic center, but he seems to have deleted it. I guess he doesn't like his geography skillz being questioned.

Only a few sites have it right, including Wikipedia's article on the Capitol building and this random one from 50states.com. The difference between 50states.com and my calculation probably depends on what you use for the DC border - if you include water or not, etc. I did, because technically the DC border extends to the Virginia shore, not the middle of the Potomac, which is pretty unusual. It also results for some quirks, such as part of the George Washington Parkway and that circle at the entrance to Arlington Cemetery being technically part of DC. So now you know, and knowing is half the battle. I dunno what the other half is.

so my pal Lucia sent me this, it's a take off on the Ying Yang Twins (who I think are pretty cool.) It's funny not work safe.

The Bing Bong Brothers.

so there's a lot of basketball related articles I've been reading lately:

GW Hopes to Avoid Another Swoon - from the Post, about GW's common problem of starting strong and slumping during the winter. it's happened every year during Hobbs' tenure.

The Secret World of College Basketball Managers, by a GW alum, Clay Travis. Very funny article about his experiences on GW's sidelines. Clay posts on gwhoops.com a lot, and also had a pudding strike against the NFL - he ate nothing but pudding (mostly Snack Packs) for about 50 days protesting the fact that he couldn't watch NFL games in the Virgin Islands, where he lived. A pretty hilarious page, he still keeps it going, even though the NFL didn't cave to his demands. And he answers reader mail, like my letter on day 49. Check it out.

New Toothpaste

brush
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

So I got this new toothpaste the other day, Aquafresh Extreme Clean. I am not a big fan. For one thing, it tastes like bubble gum flavored soap. It's kind of sweet, and I feel like toothpaste shouldn't be sweet, since that probably means there is sugar or something in it, sort of eliminating the purpose of toothpaste. It's also red, which means it looks like I have a mouthful of blood. Not too great. It does this weird foam thing too, which is odd. So as soon as this is done, I'm going back to the old minty stuff.