LOST

Damn that show is good. It almost makes wednesday as good as friday.

I ain't even gonna half step and pretend I'm not hooked, cause I am. I've been in withdrawal since last week. The summer was even worst. I had delusions about the show. In my mind, they decided to capitalize on the success and spin-off another show about the tail section of the aircraft.

There was a whole different pack of survivors on another part of the island, and the wacked out french chick was the only one who knew. She leveraged this information by pitting each side against the other under the guise that they were the others. In the case "the others" refers to other survivors rather than other inhabitants of the island.

The hatch contained Jeff Goldblum who took a career leap and played a nerdy scientist. Ok I made that last part up just now.

On a side note, I heard the numbers are all retired Yankee Jerseys.

Tribiani for the block

Oddly enough, the second most popular choice in my democratic battle royale was "Future stars of Hollywood Squares." Until a day or so ago, I truly felt ill prepared to handle such a discussion. Truly, I felt it would go unnoticed, similar to how those wily politicians decided to put the whole draft thing up for a vote again. Both cases were incorrect.

So in a vain attempt to satiate the good samaritans of topic15, my first prediction of a star headed straight for the center square goes to...

Matt "boom boom" Leblanc.

How could I do such a thing? Well let me count the ways.

1. Leblanc's spin off "Joey" recently lost in the Neilsen ratings to a ball of lint. Never underestimate lint, especially belly button lint.
2. Word on the street is that Jenny Craig is eyeballin' swollen post friend's Joey as their next representative now that Kristie Alley weight is back undercontrol (and she is no longer having an adverse gravitational effect on the moon).
3. Some people will argue that monkey's thespian skills are far superior.

You can't judge a book by its cover (or can you)

It the case of Freakonomics versus The Tipping Point, heck ya.

Who's gonna win in a fight? A match or an orange in fuji apple clothing. No contest. Freakonomics layeth the smackdown on The Tipping Point, beating it like a government mule that owes money to Levitt and Dubner.

And that's with not even the cracking of the spine. Popping these literary works open illustrates an even more pronounced disparity. Freakonomics is peppered with top drawer examples of fodder for cocktail hour discussions for weeks on end. What do the KKK and real estate agents have in common? Why Sumo wrestlers and teachers cheat? These are the questions I have been asking since 7th grade and now I finally have answers!

I was eager to get my next fix courtesy of Mr. Gladwell. For some reason, in my mind the tipping point was going to be in line with the 100th monkey theory. Sadly, it was more in line with that scene from america's funniest home videos where a monkey picks its butt, sniffs it and falls off a log. Seriously, half the stuff out of there is psych 101 and common sense. I reached my tipping point at page 111 and decided watching german mtv was more intellectually stimulating. Then again, I am but a simple man.

In the TP's defense, its initials are the same as toilet paper and the part about the effect of reordering social networks on outbreaks of the clap in charm city was cute, but in no way compares to a book with a chapter on name selection that puts "Benjamin" among the top 5 high-end white boy names among the well educated population.

Take that Jordan!

Pssssst! one more thing....

Fill up your gas tanks today.

I'm not a slacker, (well I am, but not really)

I'm no dummy. I hear the grumblings of the masses resulting from the B-league posts as of late.

The inactivity is not for lack of want as much as the lack of time and technological impedances. For example, for some reason if my post is more than 6 sentences, they won't publish from work. Secondly, for the next few weeks, Shannon and I are living in a van down by the river. Ok that's a lie. But our stuff (including my computer) be in storage, so I don't have any other places to blog from.

So keep hope alive. topic15 will return to its formerly glorious site in a few short weeks. Until then, enjoy this picture of an 8 person beer funnel.

Cheese Doodles Memoirs

Despite my somewhat cynical exterior, at heart I have always been an optimist (tempered by a liberal dosage of pragmatism). Furthermore, I have always considered myself a quick study and taken great pride in my ability to quickly size up a situation. These traits have been evident in my behavior since I was a young boy, a young husky boy, a young husky boy with a lusty addiction to cheese doodles.

I’ve always had a penchant for hanging out with society described “trouble-making hooligans” with too much time on their hands. Call me old fashion, but it was just plain fun. One such hooligan was named Eric. We had adjacent backyards which made for a perfect arena for mud pie wars, digging holes to china, setting the Gobots we received from santa instead of transformers ablaze and typical youthful deviance…

One day in 1982, Eric and I were hanging out on our porch listening to Thriller on my boombox discussing how to score some bottle rockets, you know, typical kid stuff. So anyways, my mom pulls up with groceries in tow. Being the good mom that she is, she kicks over a bag of Jax Cheese Curls. Unfortunately, they were intercepted mid-flight by Eric who insisted on playing a game of cat and mouse.

Now if we were only taking into account individual speed factor alone, the smart money would have been on Eric. However, separating a fat kid from his cheetos is not unlike parting momma bear from her favorite cub. I quickly grabbed my mothers hand held gardening spade and ensued pursuit on foot. Eventually the chase led to a very cartoon-esque, route around the large (but low) bush in my parent’s front yard. Eric kept perfect pace keeping and exact 180 degree equidistance between us for several laps. Once I got a bead on him, I let that shovel fly with everyone ounce of rage I could muster, clocking him square in the back of the cabeza and flooring him in the process. I nonchalantly walked over, picked up my cheese curls and went back to the porch just in time to catch the end of PYT.

The Moral of the Story? Life is nothing more than an educational experience, nay, an educational journey through which each individual is charged with learning their strengths and how to leverage them to overcome challenges. When in doubt, use a shovel.

Exercise your democratic right!

And vote for the subject matter for my next blog post!

Here are the current choices....

1. Racism in 2005
2. Freak-o-nomics vs. The Tipping Point -- a psuedointellectual book review
3. Never take a fat kid's cheese doodles--stories from Ben's childhood
4. Fundamental Differences in Chick vs. Dude Logic
5. What really happened to Michael Jackson
6. Another installment of topic15's world weekly sun enquirer news
7. Your mamma jokes...Ah snap! Don't make me go there!
8. Where are they now?-- Cool stuff and people from days gone by
9. Hollywood Squares bound--Stars on the fasttrack to nowhere
10. The energetic capacity of the human body

The polls are open!

One more thing...

I just saw an episode of the Family Guy and they totally referrenced "Breakin 2."

Brilliant!

The countdown

1. Only one more day to find out what's in that damn hatch! I thinking the hatch will contain Richard Hatch and hatchet.
2. Less than one month till the warriors come out to play on the PS2 courtesey of those devilish developers at Rockstar Games. I may very well call in sick for that entire week. Can you dig it suckaz!
3. Two months till Walk the line hits the big screen. Even cooler, is the fact that Shepard Fairey of Obey the Giant fame designed the movie's poster.

Topic15 NEWSFLASH!

This just in...

A line of cocaine was spotted snorting Kate Moss in London Underground's Waterloo Station. The drug's rep was unavailable for comment at the time of press.

Until recently illegal substance abuse of Kate Moss (or special K as it is referred to on the street) was seeing a decline, sparked by the availability of more potent addictive substances such as the Family Guy. Experts attribute the recent resurgence as an anomaly resulting from a summer peppered with reruns and global climate shifts.

25 Useless facts...

C'mon, you know you love them! (side comments in red)--Sorry for the B-league posts, I actually have to do some work from time to time.

1. Butterflies taste with their feet.
2. A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why. (According to mythbusters, this is a lie, the acoustic signature of the quack mirrors and masks the echo)
3. In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.
4. On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
5. On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
6. Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.(100% of NY cabbies are d!ckheads)
7. Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
8. Elephants (and Star Jones) are the only animals that can't jump.
9. Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older (only one person in four billion will give a crap).
10. It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
11. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
12. The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
13. A snail can sleep for three years (rookie, I slept all four years through high school).
14. No word in the English language rhymes with "MONTH" (or purple, unless you count nurple).
15. Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.
16. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and earsnever stop growing.
17. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
18. All polar bears are left handed.
19. In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies,including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
20. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
21. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using theletters only on one row of the keyboard.
22. A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
23. "Go." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
24. If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.
25. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

Das Hip Hop Natione

Would you believe it if I told you that behind the United States, (and for some crazy reason, France) that Germany is the world's third largest hip hop nation?

Oh yes, it's true. One hour of german MTV and a trip on the subway is all the evidence you will need. Man, the graffiti stylings are everywhere and straight out of beat streat or wild style. I was pretty much expecting the german version of Ozone, Turbo, and Special K to jump on the train and start breakin their way down the aisle. No such luck.

As for groups, well a trio know as Fettes Brot was getting heavy rotation on MTV. Literally translated, their name means "Fat Bread." I wonder if something was lost in translation. Who knows. MTV was also peppered with domestic hip hop essentials such as Eminem and Wu-tang clan.

No good examples of fashion to speak, well unless of course you consider some fantastic Kobe Bryant pants.

Did I buy them? Hmmm, well you'll just have to wait and see. (note1 there is a real earing in the jeans in Kobe's ear)

So thus far, I have briefly painted a picture of the general adoption of the hip hop lifestyle among the german youth. What's missing? Well how about violent crime? Virtually non-existant.

An interesting observation in light of the criticism this form of music often receives. If listening to hip-hop has the ability to corrupt the moral fiber of the youth and produce criminals (or at a minimum, encourage criminal exploits), why then is this result not replicated in Germany?

Is it the disparate population density as compared to the US?

How about the general better standard of living?

Could it be the gummi bears?

Probably because of the McBeir.