doodledee

The undeniably gifted LeBron James inked another big money endorsement deal the other day. This time around he's planting his image on some good old fashioned chewing gum. My understanding is that he's mostly going to whore for Bubblicious, but Trident, Dentyne, and an as-of-yet undeveloped sports-gum-like product may also end-up being part of the mix.

[Related Aside] I remember when I first tried "sports gum". It was when I played hockey as a kid. Some other hockey playing kid brought this 'quench' gum to practice or something. It was basically worthless when you played because chewing gum with a mouthgard in your mouth is impossible, so we'd all save it and chew it after we got off the ice. I think the idea was that the gum was supposed to be so sour that it made you salivate and than you'd drink your saliva to rehydrate or something. Gross, yes, but that didn't stop me from begging to go to Herman's to get my own 10-pound box. [End Aside]

Anyhoo, this new deal will net LeBron a cool $5 million. That's some serious flash for agreeing to let people put your picture on a 5-pack of Gonzo Grape, eh? You wonder if guys who make such huge endorsement money ever start feeling guilty. Or maybe just start feeling like a tool. I bet they do. Then I bet they go count their money and the moment passes pretty quick like.

I wonder if I'll sell-out?

And I wonder if the money could really be better used? I'm sure people have self-righteously thought - and most likely blogged - about how the $5M would be better spent on a Bubbicious Women's Shelter or something. But who's to say LeBron won't give back, too? I bet he does. Ok, not right away I don't, but I bet he will someday. But give him a break. He's still in that "buy my mom a huge house" phase, and once that passes, I picture him as monster philanthropist. Or at the very least an NBA Hall of Famer. One of those two has gotta be true.

And am I the only one thinking about the poor gum-factory workers? Chew some LeBron gum, people! Those workers need us!

Bubblicious deal reportedly worth $5 million [espn]
240-piece tub of Quench Gum - $27.40 [onlinesports]

Things that happened while I was violently ill over the last couple of days:

• Bush held a press conference to reassure the world that the Religious Right still 0wn3z the White House. On Mardi Gras, no less. Shouldn't he have been flashing his boobs or something instead?
• KDWB almost - and I mean *almost* - finished turning itself into B96.
• That Wayne Brady guy got his own talk show. He had the Mean Doctor from Scrubs on as a guest. He wasn't that funny. He was all angry and political. Relax, dude, it's daytime TV.
• I confirmed that I get nervous whenever I see Wally try and dribble-drive to the basket.
• Libby officially became a stay at home mom.

I may have hallucinated some of this. Except the Wally one. That, my friends, is pure fact.

If your kid gets some kind of horrible puke-inducing stomach virus that all the nurses say is contagious, YOU WILL NOT BE IMMUNE JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU SHOULD BE.

Who knew?

I was riding in an elevator today and my mind was wondering and I was looking down at all the buttons and the lights and all that stuff. There were like 25 different buttons. Seemed like a lot. It was mostly due to the fact that I was in a tallish building at the time, but there were also quite a few 'miscellaneous' type buttons. One said 'bell'. I assumed it rang a bell. I didn't push it.

Fascinating.

As expected, next to each button was a little metal label showing the floor number that to which you would be magically lifted if you were to push the neighboring button. In addition to the printed number itself, the labels had the [again, expected] brail translation so that [presumably] blind people would be able to work weekends, too.

That got me wondering. With all those buttons, are blind people really able to get into an elevator and fumble around the instrument panel and not accidentally push a bunch of incorrect floors? I tried closing my eyes and finding the button for "4", but then I remembered I don't know how to read brail, so I pretty much gave up right away. From that experiment I concluded that yes, a blind person would most definitely hit a bunch of extra buttons while trying to locate the one for their floor.

Then that got me wondering. Would a blind person even notice if they were riding in an elevator with Gerry when he decided to break out one of his patented "push every button right before he gets off oh-my-god-it's-so-funny-i'm-gonna-pee-my-pants" tricks. ("Classic!" - Star Tribune)

Part of me thinks they wouldn't know what happened, but a bigger part of me hopes they'd beat him with their cane.

Urban Outfitters has a new t-shirt out that's causing quite a stir. That's right, a t-shirt. Causing a stir. Wow. Must be quite a shirt, right?

Well brace yourself, people, because here it is:

'Voting is For Old People', eh? Hmm. I suppose that's hiply ironic. But I guess I don't see the reason that everyone is upset. Like voting was ever cool in the first place.

Whatever. It's a stupid t-shirt. If people want to wear a shirt that says "I'm a dumbass", more power to 'em. I don't see why anyone would think otherwise.

HOLD UP. $28 FOR A FRICKIN T-SHIRT? It's a cheap ass baseball t-shirt with a big ugly decal ironed on the front! How is that worth 28 bucks?! You could get like two trucker hats for that.

I guess now I see why people are outraged.

Voting is For Old People T-Shirt [urbanoutfitters]
Urban Outfitters Peddles Political Irony [mtv]

Today was downright balmy here in the greater Twin Cities area.

How balmy, you ask?

I think it officially hit something like 40 balmy degrees out. It was so balmy that Dunn Bros drug a couple of patio tables out onto Nicollet Mall for the first time this year. It was so balmy that our broomball league's one-night-only marathon playoff tournament had to be cancelled at the last minute because of mushy ice. It was so balmy that for the first time ever I heard someone on the street remark about how balmy it was.

But don't be fooled! Winter has not ended! For amidst all of today's balm there remained a certain, shall we say, 'nip' in the air. True, it wasn't necessarily perceptible to all, but if the window mannequins at Marshall Field's are any indication, none of us should rush to put our coats away just yet.

You could put your eye out on one of those things.

Every time I go get something to eat or drink out of a vending machine I push the button a couple six times in the hopes that I'll somehow magically get more than one of whatever it is that I'm buying. I know it sounds stupid, but it's a habit I've carried around since I was a kid. See, back in the day, my neighborhood buddies and I used to ride our bikes down to Soldier's Field pool and go swimming quite a bit. You could swim all day for like $1. It was a great deal, even then. Add an extra $2 to that and you could even stop off at Mr. Pizza on the way home to soak up some A/C and get some garlic cheese bread and play a couple games of Super Sprint or, in the later years, a couple of games of Super Dodgeball. That game ruled. On a good day I could play for an hour on one quarter.

But I digress. Let's go back to the pool

Inside the "building" at the pool was a little snack bar and vending machine area. We never bought anything at the snack bar, but some of us would occasionally get something from the vending machine. Usually a 3-Musketeers because they were the biggest candybar around and if you were giving up your video game money for food, you better damn well get a substantive piece of candy. (Note: salted nut rolls were also an option because they were so filling.)

The vending machine in question was one of those old-school ones where you would see like 10 items lined up on these little angled shelves with a button above each one. You pushed the button above the one you wanted and the shelf it was on would kind of flip back and throw your candy into the collection area below. Then a new piece of candy would fall - as if from nowhere - and take the place of the one you just bought. It was so exciting.

But not as exciting as the day that this older kid told us how - if you kept pushing the button just exactly right - that the machine would keep flipping the shelf over and over again and keep dumping candybars out until it was empty. We obviously didn't believe he could do it, so he offered to show us.

He got it on his first try.

He must have taken home 25 Snickers that day.

He gave one to each of us.

He was a god.

We tried for years to reproduce what we'd seen. In dozens and dozens of attempts we maybe got the machine to give up multiples a small handful of times. And we never came close to emptying the machine; I think our best was maybe a triple.

So that's why I do it.

I believe.

Having a Valentine means never having to find someone to share a chairlift with.

Unless your Valentine ditches you and goes up the chairlift with her sister.

In that case, you ride alone, lover boy.

But that only happened once, and it was kind of my fault because I said I wanted to go in and warm up because my hands were cold because I was wearing stupid mittens instead of warm gloves but then I didn't go in and my Valentine thought I did.

Oops.

So tonight I finally remembered to go check out the quasi-scandalous pictures of Rachael Ray on FHM's website. [See suggesto link to the right.] Only five pics, but hey, worth a look. After I watch the slideshow thingy, I noticed this link in the nav bar for something called 'sexy desktops'.

"Hey," I think to myself, "my plain jane dark-blue desktop could using a little sexing up. I better go check those out!"

So I click the link and it pulls up a bunch of wallpaper type images. Hot chicks in bikinis and the like. They all look kinda greasy and shiny. I'm not sure what that's about... seems kinda gross to me. But anyways, I'm scrolling down the page a bit and hold-up, what's this? Leilani Munter? That's odd. I went to elementary school with a girl by that name. She was like half Hawaiian or something. She was also one of those girls who really really really liked horses. Could this oiled-up FHM model and my southern minnesota schoolmate be one in the same?

So here's where I fire up the Google. Looks like this Leilani is some kind of actress and/or NASCAR driver depending on which link you follow. She reports for Nascar.com, she stands in for Zeta-Jones in movies, etc, etc.

Hmm. Inconclusive.

Then I find her official site and read her bio. Yep, it's the same girl I grew up with. How mint is that?

Oh wait. Did I say grow up with her? What I really meant to say was that I grew up with her and, oh yes, I may have also MADE OUT WITH HER AT A SPIN THE BOTTLE PARTY IN 7TH GRADE.

That's right, I lip-wrestled with the future "hottest woman in NASCAR" and - according to her website - the future sister-in-law of Bob Weir.

Boo and ya.

I am 2 lip-degrees away from Weir. That rules so much.

Leilani's Official Site [leilanimunter]
Drivers of NASCAR - Leilani Munter [driversofnascar]
Official Ratdog Site [rat-dog]

So there's the global warming stuff, then. My understanding is that it's supposed to be pretty bad when/if it happens. Nobody actually knows how bad, but depending on who you listen to, we could be dealing with some seriously whacked out global climate changes. Stay tuned for an example of what might happen. But before we get to that, it's time to flashback to my days as a geologist-in-training.

The whole idea behind why global warming is going to trash the earth is rooted in the behavior of the ocean's currents. Right now, when things are "normal", the world's oceans are hooked together in what is basically a big ass conveyer belt. Warm water moves northward in the Atlantic where it gets colder (and denser) and eventually it sinks. The cold sinking water then flows around the earth, until [in a nutshell] it gets over to the Pacific and warms and rises and starts its long trip back to the North Atlantic. Here's a diagram. Wee!

Ok, now here's the bad part: if global warming is true and the earth actually does start to warm up, a bunch of ice in the North Atlantic will start melting and draining into the ocean. Combine that with a [predicted] large increase in the amount of rainfall in that area, and suddenly all that warm water that rode up on the magic conveyer belt won't be able to get cold enough and dense enough to sink.

No sinking? Conveyor belt stops.

No conveyor belt? No cozy warm water moving into the Northern Hemisphere.

No cozy warm water? Northsiders start getting colder. Burr.

Seems backwards, but it's true. Global warming stops the conveyor belt and we all actually get colder. Who knew?

Crazier still, all this can happen over a super short period of time. Maybe even short as in like 10 years short. Buckle up.

So back to the details of what might happen. The latest thing I read was an interesting - if not somewhat frightening - article in Forbes about what some eggheads in the Pentagon are predicting. It was neat because they didn't just focus on the environmental impacts, they also talked about the geopolitical impacts. And really, that's the worst part. We can all put on a scarf and try and stay warm, but that's not really gonna help us when Mexico invades over access to shared water resources. Or when Pakistan, India and China start going nuclear because they're all starving.

I won't bother pasting in huge chunks of the article here. Go read it for yourself. It's only three pages. And it's freaky deaky.

Oceans are cool.

The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare [Forbes]
Thermohaline Circulation Explained [SOC]

If someone has resolved an issue for you and you want to be sure that they're confident in their resolution, asking them to 'state categorically' that the resolution handles the issue entirely can rub them the wrong way.

This I did not know.

I can't decide what hurt more last weekend: getting my ass kicked 8-0 in soccer or getting my ass kicked by a hellacious couple of tubing runs at Ekobacken. Ouch ouch double ouch.

And don't get me started on the "cities best chicken strips" at the new KFAN restaurant. What a joke! KC was dead-on when he dubbed them "chicken scabs". At least the beer was reasonably cheap and the rings were good. And anytime you drag Colin to a sports bar you're guaranteed at least a few yucks, so it wasn't a total loss.

In near chronological order but probably not exactly:

• Prince is a guitar god. He's also a reclusive wackjob who wears women's shoes, but hey, that shouldn't change the fact that he rules. He brings it. End of story.
• Sometimes I think Xtina does those big vocal numbers just to stick it to Britney. Kinda makes Britney's lip-synched dance numbers seem even sillier than they actually are. Not that I'm complaining about the belly dancing with snakes while [optionally] ripping off your outfit to reveal a flesh toned body stocking or anything - it's just that she can't sing.
• Hey everybody! White people like OutKast! (And I'm one of 'em.)
• JT can play the shy boy better than any other former boy-band member who later went solo and grew a beard than I can think of. The humble smile, the fluttering eyelashes, the shout out to his mom, the appearance with the Black Eyed Peas... genius.
• And talking about the Black Eyed Peas, what was up with the legwarmers on the chick? Are those making a comeback now? Flashdance style? Lordy.
• Sting looks better in a kilt than most other rockers his age. Chicken legs be damned.
• Madonna's fakey British accent makes me laugh every time I hear it.
• Yoko Ono looks bad. Bad like walking death bad. She's like 70, so I should probably cut her some slack, but she's so pretentious I give myself some leeway.
• I think when musicians say things like "don't forget to vote" what they really mean is "don't forget to vote for whomever is running against Bush". And when they say things like "agreeance" what they really mean is "I'm a moron".
• George Clinton getting up in Ellen DeGeneres' face and screaming "WE WANT THE FUNK!"... A little too surreal for me, thankyouverymuch.
• Some old dude came out near the end and lectured the camera about why it's bad to break the law and download music online. Uhh, thanks for respecting the integrity of your viewers, old dude
• Marching bands on stage are always a nice touch.

That's about it.

Brace yourself folks, because two weeks in, the Martha Stewart trial has cranked-up the fun meter yet again! Who would have thought that a simple case involving shady investment transactions of the super-rich would have turned out to be so exciting for the rest of us to watch? Not me, that's for sure. Hell, I didn't even know it was illegal for rich people to sell stock in a company based on "advice" from their stockbroker when the only reasons the stockbroker is giving them that "advice" is because they also are the stockbroker for some other super rich guy who happens to be selling tons of the same stock and oh by the way is also the bossman of the company in question.

Oh wait, I guess I totally knew that was illegal. Silly me.

But anyways, after the whole pursegate thing died down the other day - without, as far as I know, resolution as to the actual cost of the purse - I figured the trial was headed for Blandsville. But then today Douglas Faneuil, the Merrill Lynch bobo who handled the questionable trades, took the stand for a second day of testimony. And while he didn't really add any more substance to what he said yesterday, when he basically admitted that he and his manager broke the law, he did manage to dish some dirt on Martha. And really, who doesn't like that?

Check out the emails that were shown in court. (Note that these were written in October, months before the questionable trades took place.)

"I have never, ever been treated so rudely by a stranger on the telephone. She actually hung up on me! And she had the nerve _ the NERVE _ the [sic] mention the layoffs in her anger. She said, 'Do you know who the hell is answering your phones? You call and you know what he sounds like? He sounds like this.' And then she made the most ridiculous sound I've heard coming from an adult in quite some time, kind of like a lion roaring underwater. I laughed; I thought she was joking. And then she yelled ... 'Merrill Lynch is laying off ten thousand employees because of people like that idiot!' And then she hung up."

Lions can swim? This I did not know.

Then 3 days later:

"Martha yelled at me again today, but I snapped in her face and she actually backed down! Baby put Ms. Martha in her place."

Baby, you sure did! You don't have to take any crap from any super rich clients! You just tell them to take all their money to some other place, because baby, you don't need their business! I'm sure your boss won't care, baby!

I honestly can't see the trial getting any juicier than this. And, in retrospect, I think these emails seemed a little juicier the first time I read them. Funny how that works. Either way, it's great stuff.

Full Disclosure: I fake tivo Martha's cooking show. I also read her magazine when Libby's grandma gives us her copies after she's done with them. Yes, I know that makes me a woman.

Witness in Stewart Case Feared Losing Job [nyt]
E-mails from broker's assistant focus on Stewart [newsday]
Jane Clayson goes all 60-minutes on Martha when the story first breaks [cbs] [17M real video]

_Dear Citibank_ User,

Thiss E-MAIL was sennt by_the _Citibank_ sevrers to
veerify _your email_ addres_.
You mmust cmleptoe this persocs by clicking on the_link
bellow and enttering in the small window_ your _citibank_
Debit_ Card Number and _pin_ that you_use on Atm Machine.
That_is donne for Your prceottion -u- becouse some_of our
_members_ no lgoner have access to their email adssrdees
and we must verify it.

>snip<

People seriously fall for this stuff?

Huh.

Webopedia: Phishing
How not to get hooked

As the primary results rolled in this evening, CNN conducted one classic of a social experiment. They had this deal going where they took 8 people who were "undecided" about the presidential election before the night started and they parked them in a room and forced them to watch Team CNN's nation-trotting coverage of all the candidates. Within just a couple of hours - after covering NONE OF THE ISSUES, mind you - 5 of the 8 people had decided which candidate they would be voting for. Four of them went for Kerry. One young chick went for Edwards.

Behold the power of Wolf Blitzer.

I went on record before Iowa that I thought that Edwards would win the nomination and I still believed it up until tonight. Now I'm pretty sure I was wrong. Funny how that works.

Hey! How about all that snow! And man, that's a long commute, eh?! And how about the people who call in to a radio station so they can bitch on the air about how everyone on the roads is a total dumbass except them! I just LOVE those guys! Let's all just pull over and let 'em through!

Seriously, this winter has already taught me a lot. It taught me that when I'm sitting around wishing it would snow, what I really should be wishing for is just enough snow so that it looks pretty outside and that I get a little something to shovel. It also taught me that I'm just fine at, say, 18 below, but once it gets to 22 below I actually start whimpering as I wait for the bus. Whimpering! Who does that?

And I'm really not sure what to think about this whole Pawlenty Plowgate deal. I know that roads aren't getting plowed, but I guess I don't know why. Part of me wants to believe the problem is related to shortsighted budget cuts, but another part of me wants to believe that it's really just a bunch of MNDoT employees stickin' it to 'em. Either way, it's a good thing god created jeeps. Vroom vroom!

Go snow tubing at Ekobacken
Inuit words for snow
Strib poll on plowing

Went to Gopher puck vs. Wisconsin last night. (Snaps to Gerry for the freebie tix.) It was a sell-out madhouse and was a great time - except for the part where I got a hot dog when I should have gotten a barbeque sandwich because they looked way better when I saw them later but by then it was too late and I was thinking about getting some minidonuts anyway so I just ate my dog and tried not to let it bother me.

The U changed some of their student ticket policies this season and in doing so brought an abrupt end to the loophole moochfest I've enjoyed over the last 4-5 seasons. Student "guest" tickets now cost "full price" which means "nobody will buy them" because now the per game price is "too expensive". It sucks to be so cheap because the games are a lot of fun and it was good opportunity out with all your buds and pretend that all the college kids around you can't tell that you're 30. Or sober.

After the game HOLY CRAP I JUST SAW JANET JACKSON'S BOOB!

Huh.