Tonight I threw together a trite "About Me" page. I hooked it into my MySpace.com profile, so hopefully it'll suck some of my MySpace audience into this crazy Blogosphere.

Check it out!

Also, I altered my site's layout a bit. Nothing major.

 

There's really no other way to say it: Dane Cook is a hilarious man. I just saw his latest routine is on HBO - a special called "Vicious Circle," and it's damned funny. I highly recommend you attain it - either by legal or illegal means. Another one of his albums that came out last year that's really good is "Retaliation."

One of my favorite little rifts Dane has that comes to mind is about when people pull into your driveway just to turn around.  I can really relate to this occurrence because it happens to me every other day. Some random stranger pulls into my driveway, beams their blinding headlights into my windows, and then promptly backs out and drives off.

The interaction totally sucks because there is no closure. I just end up feeling entirely used.

I had an angry, mean 60-year-old neighbor back when I was young who would stand by his front window all day. When someone pulled into his driveway to do a turnaround, he'd write their license plate number down and call the police. You have to respect that amount of dedication. I'm not quite to that point.... not yet anyway.

My roommate, Tdogg, decided to make my sister and myself a delicious taco dinner, tonight. He's a pretty standup guy. He even went and bought the supplies to make everything. The evening was shaping up to be quite the gala event.

Unfortunately...

Our ceremony of taco-eating merriment turned sour when we discovered that Tdogg had bought a head of fucking cabbage instead of lettuce. He was like, "yea you can probably use that instead of lettuce." No way - no god damn way - you cannot use cabbage in lettuce's stead. To do so would practically be a crime against humanity... and all other things sacred.

Not a substitute for lettuce.

Anyway, needless to say, things were looking grim for taco dinner night. So, my brave sister set out for the Hyvee most local to us to retrieve a head of lettuce. Upon arrival, she was forced to battle an onslaught of incompetent Hyvee staff members. Travis and I waited... 5 minutes go by... 7 minutes... at 10 minutes, I gave up hope and went to play Guitar Hero; as far as I was concerned, darkness had encompassed taco dinner night. Then, suddenly, my sister returned. She was physically battered and mentally strained, but she had in tow a beautiful, glimmering head of lettuce. Her courageous act averted the great taco crises that evening!

We went on to have one of the best taco dinners... of all time.

The End

I've been debating whether I should let loose the wrath of my cursing vocabulary on this blog. Thus far, I've been really good - too good for my own good I would say.

The problem is cursing is an integral part of my day-to-day speech. I mean, I don't curse all the time, but if I'm speaking openly, it's just a matter of time before I drop an f'bomb. Honestly, I just don't feel human unless I spew out a few invectives here and there.

I read a lot of blogs - across a multitude of subject matter - and even some of the most respectable bloggers tend to use at least some bad language^[1]. Perhaps more importantly, some of the funniest writers, to me, swear without hesitation^[2].

"Cursing adds Humor, Meaning, Emotion, Boldness, Depth, Feeling, Etc. to dialogue..." -Me

Personally, I like cursing because it makes me sound like a fucking bad ass. Ah yeah, I'm feeling more bad ass already. Also, it makes whatever you're saying sound 10x more important since cursing is involved. It's god damn science, people.

This article is pretty awesome - top ten reasons why I swear. It works, even though the article is actually against cursing... whatever.

The downside to having an expletive-riddled blog is that it could make me look less credible if I were to, say, reference this blog on my Resume or something. I can just see some high-faluting HR staff member at mega corporation xyz loading up my blog (assuming the company firewall lets them access Zinknation.net, which is doubtful). Two minutes later, they tear up my Resume, with a face full of scorn, and write me off as an unsavvory, racist, child-molesting rapist who steals from the blind and punches babies - all because I had a few curse words on my blog.

Ah... I don't know. That's pretty unlikely. I don't think I want to work for mega corporation xyz, anyway.

[1]

• Joel on Software
• Coding Horror
• Creating Passionate Users

[2]

• Rory Blyth
• The Show with Zefrank
• Outlaw Heart

What happened?

I had just purchased my house and I was exploring the attic space^[1]. I wasn't even doing anything important. I was just digging around in the insulation, doing some initial planning for some projects. Then, suddenly, after a cracking noise and some frantic movement, I'm hanging by a crossbeam from my living room ceiling.

The box cover from the movie Cliffhanger depicts the scene almost perfectly.

So, there I was... just dangling there with only my bulbous muscles preventing me from falling to certain death. This image isn't entirely accurate: there wasn't a helicopter flying around behind me, but it was "an avalanche of thrills," as indicated by Jami Bernard from the New York Post.

Why, Kevin, why did you fall through?

Here's a question that gripped and shook the Nation for days afterward. A couple of theories were conjured:

• I lost my balance.
• I made the hole purposely in order to install a fire pole (how awesome would that be, for real).
• I enjoy laughing in the face of danger.

While there's some validity in all of these theories, the real reason is that I thought the ceiling drywall could support my weight. My assumption was, what experts would later call, a poor, stupid, but funny in a no-one-got-hurt sort of way assumption.

The Aftermath:

Initially, I was a little shocked, I think. There was insulation all friggin' over my living room. So, I started vacuuming it up as quickly as I could. During this time, my roommate Travis (otherwise known as Tdogg) wanders out of his room. After bearing witness to the scene, he nearly falls over from laughing so hard. You son of a bitch, Travis. 

Later, I called up my parents and rattled off the embarrassing details of what had transpired... in a completely downtrodden tonality. (You would be downtrodden, too!) Perhaps the worst part is that my parents actually laughed at me, but at least they agreed to help me fix the gigantic, gaping hole in my ceiling.

A few days later, the parents showed up to help fix my booboo. The quality of these images isn't so great - so sorry. Actually, they kind of look deshaveled like amatuer natural disaster photos or something, which is pretty damn fitting.

[1]This occurred a while ago - Circa January, 2006; long before I had this blog. But, it's been such a pivotal point in my life that I had to make a post about it so you can understand why I am the way I am!

For those of you who didn't have the opportunity to listen to me bitch about how terrible I was feeling over the past 2-3 weeks, now's your chance. I came down with a flu/cold thing a few weeks ago, which progressed into a pretty bad case of tonsillitis. It was painful and awful made me not want to be alive, but after many Nyquil-induced sleeping nights, I got better.

Anyway, I've been healthy for a few days, and now everyone around me is getting flu/cold like symptoms. I'll admit, this is probably my fault – everyone becoming ill and what-not. My bad, people – I feel bad about that... really I do. But you know why this is awesome for me? I'll tell you why: amongst you invalids, I'm a titan; a titan with an epic amount of cold and flu immunity.

Actually, you all should be thanking me. Once you all are done suffering, you can hop onto your blog, Myspace, messageboard,  or whatever it is you have and proclaim your status as an immunity titan, too.

I recently installed a new ceiling fan in my kitchen after impulse-buying it from Lowes. Ceiling fan installation is pretty much a huge pain in the ass: you have to cut a whole in the ceiling and dig around in insulation to mount and wire the thing up. But, hey, at least I didn't fall through my ceiling... again!

I had a realization. When the fan speed is on the lowest setting - slow enough that you can see the blades turning without blurring, it gives the room a totally laidback, pimp-like aura.

On the other hand, if you jack the fan all the way up to its highest setting, the room's atmosphere becomes chaotic, stressful, and frantic. People will, no doubt, be affected by the fan running on freak-speed. I predict they'd start fighting, breaking windows, and vandalizing and/or stealing my stuff. None of which are ideal scenarios, so I'm going to have to be careful.

One thing is for certain: next time I have the ladies over, I'll have the fan on pimp-speed. I don't even care if it's -10 degrees outside. This fan will be on, seducing the room and its inhabitants with its awesomeness!

I went up to Minnesota/Wisconsin over Labor Day weekend to spend some quality time with my cult of closest friends. We all stayed in my friend Andrew's parent's luxurious lakeside cabin.

The digs were swanky, the food was tasty, but the showering accomodations... weren't so great; us guys were forced to bathe ourselves in the friggin' lake like cavemen, or something, from the days of old. It was really dehumanizing.



All in all, good times were had by all, as indicated by the happiness of this picture.



In other news, while I was up there, I picked up a Motorcycle I got for cheap on Ebay. It's a 1993 Suzuki Katana, so it's pretty old and it needs some work done on it--not too much hopefully.  The young chap I bought it from had painted it, himself, with spray paint from Wal-Mart. His color choice... wasn't so great. I'll post some pictures of it after I get it fancied up.



You can check out the whole photo album of the Wisconsin trip on my sweet picasa account: