• A Palm by any other name

    A week or so ago my wife dropped a Best Buy bag in my lap. “Here,” she says, “this is for you.”

    I peeked in the bag and what did I see? A new Palm handheld just for me.

    Since my PDA is basically my life (while I’m at work), and since I’ve been carrying around two half dead PDAs for the last four months (each was broken in a manner that complemented the other), a new one was just what I needed.

    Here’s the icing on top… the new PDA is wi-fi capable… and so are the area malls. So this Christmas shopping season, while my wife has been in the stores, I’ve been outside browsing the web with the kids. We went shopping with Cheryl’s parents, and me and her father hung back and followed the play-by-play for the game – via ESPN.com.

    It’s not a lot, but sometimes even the simplest pleasures can make all the difference.

  • Television

    One of the hallmarks of the low self-esteem personality is a tendency to poke fun at others. Having said that, I’d like to share an amusing tale about my wife.

    Lost isn’t just something I do out in public, it’s also a television series on ABC. My sister is hooked. Several of my co-workers are hooked. Me? I need another television show to watch like I need higher interest rates. So of course, I rented season one through Netflix. I watched disk one and I was hooked. I couldn’t wait for disk two to get back to me… so instead I asked Netflix to send me disk three, and I bought the episodes from disk two from iTunes. So there I was, settling down to disk three, and Cheryl walks into the room. I ask her if she’s sure she doesn’t want to watch with me.

    “I watched two episodes and I thought it looked stupid.”

    Insert knife, twist, remove, repeat.

    One night later Cheryl sits with me to watch the next episode.

    “So, you’re slumming tonight Cheryl?”

    “Well, there’s nothing else on TV and I’m bored.”

    Three nights later… two days after disk three goes in the mail to Neftlix…

    “John, when’s the next Lost disk going to get here? It seems like it’s been, like, a week.”

    “Dude, it was, like, yesterday, you know? Like, climb down off your cow man. I thought you didn’t even like, like lost?”MARY–
    EXTENDED BODY:

  • Fun with physiology

    One of the cool things about fingernails… they grow. Evidence of this phenomenon can be had by cutting a notch in the nail with an ordinary pair of household scissors. You can kill two birds with one stone by using the scissors to trim unsightly cuticles. Simply open the scissors and use the leading edge of the scissor blade as a makeshift knife. In most cases the blade is not sharp enough to cut through the nail, but just sharp enough to cut through the cuticle. (I considered a witty Geraldo Rivera reference for this spot, but I reconsidered… hasn’t he been picked on enough?) A few extra passes with the scissors will leave you with a notch suitable for displaying the wonder of human nail growth.

    (Note: the author wishes to advise his readers that they should never use a pair of scissors on themselves without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball.)