...and found

We are now more than half way through the current season of LOST. That being the case, I have decided to make a few predictions about where I believe certain characters are heading. Keep in mind that I am a huge fan of the show and have seen all the episodes multiple times which should give some credence to the predictions I am about to make. Enjoy.

- Kate is the Smoke Monster
Kate has always been very mysterious. Popping in and out of peoples lives and constantly changing her mind about who she wants to hang out with, very similarly to Smokey.

- Hurley is Ben in the future
When Ben was exiled from the Island, he felt like a huge part of his life had been ripped from him. Now that he is back, the Island will still want nothing to do with him causing him to sit in pajamas all day and eat ice cream causing him to get fat, move to Los Angeles, work at a chicken stand and then win the lottery.

- Locke is Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart was LOST while trying to circumnavigate the world in a plane. Locke was LOST while attempting to fly home after being unable to go on a walkabout. Think about it..

- Rose is one of the Dharma Vans
Rose makes things happen. Similar to the way a van enables a person to get from one place to another.

- Old Walt is Young Walt.
I dont think I really like older Walt. Also, WAAAALLLLLLTTTTTTT!!!!!!

- Sawyer is the Frozen Donkey Wheel
Much the same way the Frozen Donkey Wheel changes the timeline people are in, Sawyer helps fill in the slow gaps when the show is beating us over the head that Richard Alpert still isnt aging.

- Jack is Jacob
Duh.

- Richard Alpert is the orange that John Locke was chewing on in the pilot
This one is more of a hunch than anything else. I think it has something to do with his eyeliner.

- Vincent is the Island
Vincent is always appearing in places that hold crazy important significance to the show. Anytime we hear the Smoke Monster, aka. Kate, theres Vincent. Anytime people wander off into the jungle, never to be seen again, theres Vincent.

- Aaron is Claire
Try to wrap your head around that one!

- Juliet is Juliet and always will be Juliet
Im not even sure she is supposed to be on the island at this point.

- Bernard is the jar of ranch dressing Hurley was eating
Another one of those self explanatory ones. Hurley likes giant jars of ranch dressing. He also like Bernard.

- Libby is the Hurley Bird
Who else would be hanging out in the Jungle yelling Hurleys name other than the crazy lady who was in love with him who was killed who also happened to be at the same mental institution as him.

- Desmond is Michael Keaton
Michael Keaton was originally scheduled to appear as the role of Jack in the pilot. He was scripted to die in that first episode. Plus, Desmond would make a great Batman.

- Jin is Sun and Sun is the 4 toed statue
I wont spoil how I came up with this one just yet, mainly because I have no idea how it would actually work.

- Charlie is the sky turning purple
Charlie was in a rock band. Prince, who also was a rock star, had a song called purple rain. Coincidence? Not on LOST, my friend.

I am, of course, not entirely sure how accurate these predictions will turn out to be. Somewhere in the 80-90% range is what I am assuming. Feel free to let me know your own predictions of where some of these characters are going. Although, after last nights episode, who knows where ANY of the characters will eventually end up.

Resident Evil 5

I have been told by quite a few people that Resident Evil 5 is pretty epic. I am generally pretty skeptical when I hear thing like that but enough clamor has been raised that I decided to get the game and give it a try. I really enjoyed playing Fable II, the last game I played that everyone was going ape shit for, at least until I encountered a game ending bug that prevented me from playing it any more. So, bugs aside, hopefully I will enjoy this one as well.

Now, if you know me at all, you know that Zombies, in general, scare the ever living piss out of me. I am certain that playing Left 4 Dead has taken several years off my life. Luckily for me, if this game is on par with the level of scaryness in the movie, I think I will be alright. And since I am a pretty big fan of the movies, it is a bit baffling as to why I have never played any of the games in this series seeing how the movie was based on the game.

In more sort-of-related news, I tried and failed to fix the Xbox 360 red ring of death issue for one of my friends. Im not going to get into the details, but it did involve drilling several holes into the metal inner case. The warranty was already void so I suppose there was no harm in giving it a shot. I really wanted to try the alleged Towel Trick, which involves wrapping the 360 up in towels and letting it run for 10 minutes until it gets so hot that the solder melts itself back into position, but my friend wanted none of that. The thing is now so FUBAR that the fans no longer spin and the DVD drive will not even open. I wonder if would still be possible to send it in to Microsoft and hope they neglect to check if the warranty sticker has been broken and just hope they send a brand new one..

Either way, not my problem, but it was fun taking the whole thing apart.

Ruck of the Irish

Today is apparently St. Patricks Day. A holiday that is celebrated by drinking obscene amounts of alcohol. A holiday so great that you don't even have to buy cards or gifts. The only rule you have to abide by is wearing an arbitrary color and everyone will be cool with you. Failure to do so will result in one of your more bubbly co-workers pinching you while ridiculing you at the same time.

And just like any holiday, you will have a few Nattering Naysayer McFunlesses who will go out of their way to let you know they dont give a damn about it. You will hear phrases such as Why celebrate St. Patricks day when I dont even drink?. Unfortunately, it makes you come across as an stereotyping hack along the lines of Why celebrate St. Patricks day when I dont even beat my wife?. How about you just stay the hell out of the conversation then, dick!

No doubt several newspapers will conjure up stock information and shove the same stupid "47 things you didn't know about St. Patrick's Day" and "Police on high alert for drunk drivers this St. Patrick's Day" stories they regurgitate year after year.

I personally will be going to the place we Play Trivia at. No doubt green colored drinks will be consumed as well as some sort of rumored stew. In case you have been wondering why I havent written much about trivia lately, the reason is simply that we have sucked it up so badly that is not even worth mentioning. Oh well, stay safe tonight you guys. And remember to punch those anti-holiday people right in the baby maker if they give you any crap.

It is better to spend money like there's no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there's no money!
-Irish Toast

NASA we've got a problem

NASA has been having quite a few problems recently. And Im not even talking about the multi-million dollar Global Warming Fear Monger satellite that failed to achieve orbit a couple weeks ago. No this post will be dedicated to the Space Shuttle, more specifically, things that can be done to ensure that missions get launched on time and in a safe manner.

Now if you follow any of NASA related stuff at all, you will know that they have been trying to get the Space Shuttle Discovery off the ground since early February. Plagued by fuel control valve problems, the mission had been delayed infinitely. Once all of that had been settled, everything was good to go for a night time launch that was scheduled to occur last night around 8 CST. But, of course, another problem involving the main hydrogen gas line was discovered and the mission was scrubbed again.

Now I want to make it perfectly clear that I am no rocket scientist (although I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night), but it just sort of seems that most if not all of the issues that end up delaying missions are rather silly. In my humble and sarcastic opinion, I believe that many of these issues could be fixed with stuff that you find on late night infomercials. Ill give you a couple of examples to prove my point:

Real Life Examples

1) The leaky hydrogen gas pipe could be easily repaired by Mighty Putty . According to the commercial: Fill surfaces holes and cracks, instantly seal leaks in pipes and faucets, repair ceramics, furniture, tools and more. Im fairly certain that by and more they are talking about multi-billion dollar space equipment.

2) A while back, a shuttle launch had to be delayed because of dents in the main fuel tank caused by hail. They spent weeks and who knows how many millions of dollars carefully filling in the holes and sending it down when all they needed was Fix It!. Just apply to damaged area, rub in with the power buffer and wipe away. Safe to use on any color. Not to mention the FREE BONUS: FREE FIX IT PRO SCRATCH REPAIR APPLICATOR. See what I am talking about here?


More Hypothetical Examples

1) Lets say an astronauts spacesuit gets ripped while in the void of space. Due to his hefty schedule, he has no time to sew it back up. Not to fear, he has a canister of Mighty Mendit! Whether it's a denim, leather or lace you can use Mighty Mendit any time, any place. Surely we could add Even Space! to that lovely tagline.

2) Hypothetical number two dives down into something we can all appreciate: food. Lets pretend that NASA is going to delay a launch because there is no time to make a good meal. Not a problem anymore, not unless you have the Big City Slider Station! Big City Slider Station is the mini burger sensation that's sweeping the nation. You just scoop, press, and cook on ANY stove...and in just minutes you'll have 5 mouth-watering sliders! With a couple of these, you could easily feed and entire fleet of astronauts and get them on their merry way on up to outer space.


I am guessing by now that you see my point. These products could easily save NASA not only time by getting missions of as scheduled but also millions of dollars in savings since these products generally only cost maybe like 20 bucks each. Not only that, they will usually throw in a bunch of free stuff just for calling in the next 10 minutes!

I really might be onto something here. Perhaps they should have made me the new head of NASA..

Lotta bout living and a little bout love

So last night, I went to the Rodeo. Now, for all you non-southerners, the Rodeo is an event where everyone in the city forgets that they are lving in the 21st century, dresses up like they are in the old west and watches a bunch of folks who really are living in the past wrestle with a bunch of wild animals. Truly a unique event that everyone should eventually make time to attend once in their lives.

The events are pretty much what you might expect: Bull riding, Barrel Racing, Calf Wrestling and Wagon Racing. One of my favorite events has always been the Calf Scramble where a bunch of middle school aged kids run around after calves in the hopes of tieing one up so that it may raise it and eventually make some serious cash off it.

This year had a new event, however, that instantly becamse my new favorite: Sheep Riding. This event features kids, who were almost certainly promised candy, who are placed on top of a sheep and then let go of. The goal is to stay on the sheep as long as possible, a la bull riding. And when I say kids, I am talking about 4 year olds here. These poor kids had the look of sheer terror in their eyes prior to being let go of and watching them fall straight on their asses was nothing short of the most brilliant entertainment I had ever seen. For all of you saying "that's so horrible!!", pipe down, all the kids got trophys, ok?

The festivites were capped off by a performance by Alan Jackson and then we went outside to go check out the carnival. While pretty standard by carnival standards, it did feature what appeared to be a ski lift type ride. I wanted to ride the thing that trows you up against a wall while spinning violently but no one else felt like throwing up. So we ate our fried oreos and went home.

And if you think I am making up the stuff about the Sheep Riding, be my guest to look it up on YouTube for some pretty epic lolz.

New Orleans 3: Tokyo Drift

So this past weekend, I took yet another trip down to New Orleans in the hope that there would be no hurricanes to evacuate from nor any catastrophic car crashes that lead to concussions. For the purposes of history, I will henceforth refer to this trip as "New Orleans 3: Toyko Drift".

Instead of working all day Friday like suckers and leaving late at night, we decided to take the entire day off and get out to an early start. We left houston around 10:00am and made a straight shot to Lafayette, LA. No stopping in the death trap that is Orange, TX this time around. The main reason for stopping in Lafayette was to hit up the Krystal Burger. In fact, it would be safe to say that the main reason for this entire trip was food related as we had free buffet coupons for the casino in New Orleans.

After leaving Lafayette, we headed straight for New Orleans and made it there around 5:00 in the afternoon. The smell of vomit and urine from the weekend before (Mardi Gras) was still quite pungent in the night air. We hotel'd everyone (even the mayor) and then proceeded to what would turn out to be the main attraction for the trip: the casino. Most all of us had either free slot play or table match play coupons to burn through. Being a Friday, the table stakes were already at a $10 minimum with most being $15. Undeterred, we pretended to be high rollers by getting a hundie stack of nickels and playing at the $15 craps table.

Now if you know anything about craps, you will know that most people play the pass line and take odds respectively. Realizing that strategy had never worked out for me before, I proceeded to play the "wrong way" by playing the Don't Pass line. Needless to say, all of us that played ended up substantially ahead by the end of the session. Christine did exceptionally well, yet again, despite the fact that she continually said she had no idea what she was betting or even how she was winning monies.

After cleaning up at the craps table, we went out to Mother's for some Po'Boys. Quite frankly, they were delicious. In fact, since we actually did some planning ahead this time around, all the food we had was super good and super filling. Ironically, the only place that seemed a bit sub par was the casino buffet that we got for free.

I could talk a lot more about what all we did in the casino since we spent a disporportional amount of time there. But in the interest of you, the reader, I will move on to our Bourbon street experience. We started out early Saturday morning by missing the Cemetart Tour we were going to go on by 10 minutes due to extreme lolligagging. In light of that, we decided to go to Pat O'Briens to get one of their Hurricane drinks and be entertained by their piano bar. Since I had been there before, I advised everyone to nurse the drink as drinking it too quickly can really mess you up in a hurry. We had a good time there and then went back to the hotel to take a little nap before once again hitting the casino before finally making it back to Bourbon Street later that night.

It should also be mentioned that on the way back to the hotel, prior to our nap, we went to one of the Tropical Isle bars to try some of their ofther drinks (besides a hand grenade). The one I got was called the "Shark Attak" and the picture above is what it looks like. It is not so much what was in the drink that made it good but rather the way it was served to me. I don't want to ruin the surprise for you on that one, you will just have to try it for yourself.

Anyway, so late Saturday night we went back to bourbon street. We saw a sign on one of the bars that said "2 for 1 drinks". So we went in there and naturally ordered doubles of our favorite beverages not knowing that we were really getting double doubles since the drinks were already doubles. That really started the night off on the right track. We then went back to the Tropical Isle from earlier and got a couple Hand Grenades each before being completely done.

We got back at the hotel around 4 in the morning, ate some more Krystal Burgers, and went to sleep with checkout being just 6 hours away. Needless to say, we missed checkout and finally left the hotel around 12:30 for an uneventful ride home. I was so thankful that I finally got a trip to New Orleans with out any kind of catastrophy. Taking back more money than I took there didn't hurt too much either.

Sorry for the long post, but this trip was deserving of it.