23 Returns

So since about 1% of you know what this blog is going to be about from the title, I'll give a little explanation. And since I feel like it, it will be in biblical form.

1 And it came to pass that in the days of the king Hill there came a boy unto the Student Council.
2 And lo, this boy was a nerd, therefore he was the tech support officer.
3 And it came to pass that Schmidtty did speak for all the people of the land when he did say that video announcements sucked and were boring, for behold, nobody watched them.
4 And thus it was that Schmidtty told the boy (his name being Andrew of Broekhuijsen) to make video announcements interesting to watch.
5 And Andrew and his friends labored much in the land, and behold, 23 was born. And there was much rejoicing, for everybody throughout the land thought it owned all.
6 But alas, during the filming of the finale, the retarded camera battery waxed weak, as a 7th grader. And thus it was that the film captured really crappily and became un-editable.
7 And because of this, the finale did fail to become aired. And there was weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth, for behold, there was much sorrow and lamentation throughout the land.
8 And it came to pass that Andrew couldn't get his friends schedules to work out well enough to go back and film it. And thus did the 2006th and 2007th year pass away.

So finally, two years after it was supposed to come out, people have time to film. The finale is in production and I'll post a promo up here as soon as I get one done.

And since I'm so nice, I'll embed the ones we did finish and air back in 9th grade here. #1 got deleted somehow but it was pretty insignificant anyway, so yeah.

Episodes 2-6 (in order) follow. Notice the ridiculously long disclaimer at the beginning of episode 4. This was because the librarian got all PO'd at us after episode 3. Also notice the evolution of the titles as I got less and less lazy with my movie making:














And the special 23/Pokémon music video! Yeah, I'm that cool.



So now that you've all had that profound cinema experience, you can be excited for the finale. I'll keep everyone posted.

These Shoes RULE!

So as all of you know, due to your feverish stalking of me after reading my first few blog posts, I've been wanting a pair of bowling shoes for quite some time now. Not because I'm the next Danny Wiseman,




I didn't know who he was prior to this post either.


but because I wanted to wear them as a fashion statement. Unfortunately, I didn't know how intensely hard it was to get ahold of such a pair of shoes. Initially, I thought a quick phone call to the bowling alley would solve it. Here's the actual transcript of the phone call, because I take transcripts of all my phone calls:

Me: Hello, do you guys sell your rental shoes?
Jack & Jill's: No, kid, you'll shoot your eye out!
Me: For shame.

Apparently it's illegal to sell bowling rental shoes to a minor to regular civilians because if you enter an alley, people could think they were stolen. I understand the rationale behind that, because I can't think of anything I would rather steal from a bowling alley than shoes that have been worn by 150 people other than myself. Except maybe some used kleenexes out of the trash can.

So after this minor setback, I stumbled upon the bowling black market.




The bowling black market is a little-known,
yet extremely lucrative business. Note the
expensive suits worn by these crime lords.


Long story short, I got my shoes any way I had to. There's a little site out there for those who are willing to look to find it called illegalbowlingshoes.com. They charged only $30 for the shoes, shipped it free (albeit from an unknown location), and didn't mess up my order. Little did I know that they had a trick up their sleeves. The first thing I noticed when I opened my shoes was this:




That's English for "illegal."

Yes, they say "rental" on them in big, obvious letters. I guess that's the price I pay for style.

Now there are benefits to having these shoes. Contrary to what you might think, I was not immediately tased on the streets and arrested by the fuzz the minute I walked outdoors. In fact, I wore these shoes bowling on Saturday, and didn't have to rent any. They're already paying for themselves! Another bonus is they really seem to focus my bowling skills. I bowled a 264 that night* thanks to these shoes.

*May or may not be a shameless lie

Finally, last but not least, these shoes are perfect for moonwalking on almost any surface. Those of you who have been bowling have probably noticed the lack of traction on the bottom of these shoes. This is on purpose, presumably to both promote hilarious slips and falls on the lanes, and probably to help you bowl better or something, too. But Michael Jackson would be proud of the use I've put these beauties to.





Disclaimer: these shoes do not grant
the wearer the ability to moonwalk.

Essentials of EFY

Before I begin, I'll just inform you all that due to the large nature of these pictures, and the unable-to-handle-large-pictures nature of this blog, I've linked all of the pics to their larger counterparts. To blow a pic up, just click on it.

So I actually went to EFY in the third week of June, but I figured I might as well write a post about it. After all, I didn't even have a blog when I went so it's not like I had my chance and blew it. The following things are the neccesary ingredients in any successful EFY. Trust me, I'm an expert. I've been one whole time.

1. Counselors

Your counselors have to be awesome and zany. Yes, I just used the word "zany." If they are boring like some of the other companies' counselors, then your EFY experience is doomed to fail. Bad counselors at EFY are like snakes on a plane: neither of them make any sense.

Prime example: My counselor, Tyrell. When we guys first saw the note on our dorm door introducing our counselor as Tyrell, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who pictured a huge black dude.





Not Tyrell

When he actually entered the room, the impression I got was... not quite what I expected.





Bears, Beets, Battlestar Galactica!


Yeah. Seriously. Coolest counselor since sliced bread.

2. Hot Babes

No EFY is complete without them. Don't really need to put a lot more text in the section because the following picture pretty much speaks for itself.





Pictured: Virtue

3. Sizzling Man-Hunks of Future Missionaries

Again, the picture basically speaks for itself.




"Hey baby, wanna hold the Priesthood?"

4. Foreigners

No, I'm not talking about the band (although that would make a pretty sick EFY too, I'm sure). But we had a kid from London, who we referred to as "London," and two kids from Australia, who we referred to as "the Aussies." Funny stuff that we as Americans can laugh at: they called napkins "serviettes," they had never had chocolate milk or corn dogs, and the Aussies liked something they called Vegemite.* Haha!




*May or may not cause violent hemorrhaging

5. Food

Ok so we ate like pigs at EFY. Wednesday night was pizza night and we ordered two 23" pizzas. And ate almost all of it. Nine guys.




That guy is 6'6"

But it seems like a shame not to mention how much soda we drank on Wednesday.




*burp*

So that pretty much sums up everything you need to make your EFY rock beyond belief. Until next time, keep pretending your EFY was anywhere near as cool as mine.

Things that REALLY Bother Me

Some call them pet peeves. But mine are just too numerous to refer to them as that, so I just call them things that REALLY bother me. Here we go:

5. Ridiculously melodramatic MySpace girls




"OMG he doesnt even kno i exist!!!11!1shift+111!!eleven"


Ok, so who do they think they're kidding? Sometimes I wonder if they know that they're being annoying and immature or if they honestly believe what they're saying. They say 94% of all emos are just posing for attention, and that most of them aren't really all depressed or anything.* If I could give one message to all of these type of girls it would be: You're annoying. Stop being so annoying. And nobody likes your black and white pic.

*Fact may or may not be made up.

4. When my little brother thinks he won the argument and outwit me, but really he didn't and he's just being an idiot, and I'm just gearing up to kick his trash, but then my parents get home, and I can't do anything to him or he'll start crying to get me busted

Yeah this one doesn't need a lot of explanation. I think the title pretty much captures it there.

3. People mispronouncing words

Don't get me wrong here. It wouldn't bother me so much if after I corrected them they would just accept it and move on with their day. But when they insist that their incorrect pronunciation is, in fact, the right way to say it, THAT'S what kills me. Specific examples of words that are terrible:

Caramel. Pronounced CAR-mull, NOT CARE-uh-MELL
SoBe. Pronounced SOH-bee or SOH-bay, but NOT SOBE
Pillow. Pronounced PILL-oh, NOT PELL-oh
Drown. Not "Drownd." What are you, 4 years old?

Also related to this is when people correct me when I'm the one that's correct.

2. Losers (primarily online) who argue about the most homosexual things to argue about

I don't know how many times I've seen these huge flame wars under YouTube videos about the gayest things imagineable. A person gets one little fact wrong in a comment, or maybe they don't, but some obnoxious tool is certain that they must save all the YouTubers from these heinous lies, nay, this heresy. The two argue about it in a series of comments that goes down to the bottom of the page and beyond, usually starting as a legitimate (however pointless) argument, but degrading into each person making ridiculous assumptions about the other's character, age, and mother. Shortly thereafter, the entire infrastructure of the conversation collapses into a fit of calling each other "fag."

Related to these arguments is people bragging online. Somebody could put up this freakin' awesome guitar solo (for example) on YouTube, but it won't be up for 10 minutes before some deck comes along and leaves a comment about how much better he is at guitar than the person featured in the video, or pointing out all the video's miniscule technical mistakes.

1. Picky people at the restaurant where I work

Yeah, so apparently some people think they deserve special treatment when it comes to fast food. When I'm working the grill at Iceberg and I get a burger on screen that has some special orders, (no cheese, etc.) that's fine, if slightly annoying. Some poeple don't like cheese. But when I put the order out, and it gets SENT BACK without me having made any mistakes, that really makes me want to spit in their food (not that I would ever do that - employees are on camera 100% of the time). Here's an example of something that actually happened to me recently:

Some lady orders a combo with fries. I make her burger, put some fries in the little cardboard things that hold them, send it out and someone in front calls her number for her to pick it up. These were perfectly good fries. They had been out of the deep fryer and under the heat lamp for maybe five minutes max. But 10 minutes later, the twit comes back up complaining that her fries "aren't fresh enough." Now I'm no fry connoisseur, but I'm pretty sure you can't tell the difference between 1-minute-old fries and 5-minute-old fries.







If you can see a difference, please never come to Iceberg

That wraps it up for today. If any of you have similar things that really bother you, feel free to post a comment.

Man vs Wild

Ok - so for those of you who haven't seen Man vs Wild, it's a survival show on the Discovery Channel starring this British guy called Bear Grylls.




Not quite


Each episode, Bear is dropped (usually by means of him jumping out of a helicopter after pretending to be scared to do so) into the middle of nowhere, and has a week to find his way back to civilization. He must follow certain rules:

Rule 1: Bear is only allowed a knife, a flint, and the clothes on his back, plus some equipment depending on the area he's in (skis when he was in Alaska, etc.).

Rule 2: Bear can't just stay in one spot and wait to be rescued - he has to be moving throughout the show and demonstrating survival techniques along the way.

Rule 3: Bear must ruin his knife each episode by using it to do such things as hitting it with a rock to cut down a tree. Yes, I said Bear Grylls cuts down trees with pocketknives.





Good work, Bear

Rule 4: Bear must eat something completely disgusting during the course of each episode. Bonus points are awarded for cooking it in an equally disgusting way, or eating food raw that really needs to be cooked.




"I could really use some mayonnaise."


Rule 5: Bear's shirt comes off every episode. This is non-negotiable.

Bear in Alaska. Seriously.

Rule 6: Bear must do several things that look completely unnecessary, but then explain why they are, in fact, necessary by telling an extremely vague story. Example: "What I can't stress enough is the importance of insulation underneath you to sleep on. Just last year, a mother and her daughter were camping out in this rainforest. When they arrived at their campsite, they put down tents without insulation underneath. Twelve minutes later, both were dead."

Hopefully, at the end of the episode, we get a deep, thoughtful monologue about how his travels in the area have changed his life. And with that, I'll leave you with a spoof I produced with my cousins and uncle this summer.

Birthdays

Wow - this whole blogging thing is more addicting than I thought. I made it about 9 hours before feeling the need to make another post.

So today is my little brother's birthday, making him 14. For those of you who don't know how birthdays work around our house, here's a general formula:

6 months before birthday: Make a list of things you want on your birthday. If you are under the age of about 15, this list should include sections with actual items you think you might get, items that you hope maybe your parents will get you one of, and several items that you have an ice cube's chance in hell of actually getting. The items in the last section will be added only for sardonic value, and to remind your parents they're not from Alpine.

1 week before birthday - 1 day before birthday: Obsess endlessly about your birthday, by doing such things as reminding people it's in x days several times hourly, posting a countdown on FaceBook (re wording it every few minutes so it stays on the top of people's lists of friends' status updates), and printing trees worth of copies of your birthday list to post on people's doors, bulletin boards, and telephone poles throughout the city.




Sampling of a typical day
during this stage


The night before birthday: Try to contain your excitement at being sent to bed. We know you're getting presents in the morning. We know.

The morning of birthday: Theatrically pretend to jerk awake when the family comes into your room singing happy birthday at some ungodly hour of the morning. You're sure to fool everyone into believing that you haven't been lying awake in your bed for the past 7 hours, checking the clock frequently to see if it was 6:00 am yet.

So that's the general process around here. Feel free to share how your birthdays go down in the comments, as long as it's not horrendously boring.

Jumping on the Bandwagon

So here's my first post on my blog. For all of you that found my blog because Melissa linked to it or something, I should dispel any preconceived notions you may have about my blog because of hers:

1. I'm not as hilariously quirky as Melissa, though I do my best. And getting a hamburger phone is on my to do list.

2. Melissa's music tastes and mine are fairly similar, but while she likes things like Mika, Billy Joel, Josh Groban, etc., I prefer what I consider to be rather more refined music, such as Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and basically anything by a black person after the year 2000.

Pictured: Ideal band

3. I'm really pretty cynical which I try to translate into humor. Case in point: #2 of this list.

4. Melissa updates her blog like every freakin' day. I'll be lucky if I update this more than once a week once the initial novelty has worn off.

So now that everyone knows how this blog is going to roll, hopefully nobody is in for any unpleasant surprises, and/or can just quit while they're ahead and stop reading this blog after the first post.

Well, that pretty much concludes my opening post. I'll make sure to keep everyone posted (no pun intended*) on the status of my hamburger phone endeavors and if Soulja Boy ever writes a song that was as good as Crank Dat.

*Yes, that pun was definitely intended.