How Well Do You Understand Stupid Girl Quizzes?

Dear women,

All magazine quizzes about relationships and guys are total crap.

#1 – Guys don’t create those. No man is going to actually spend the time to make a quiz on that topic. Sporce sports trivia? Maybe.
It’s possible they have some input on the quizzes, but I’d imagine female editors would reject their contributions by saying “We can’t tell them that! All the fat girls will kill themselves!”

#2 – clicking StumbleUpon brought me to a page of quizzes with a “How well you understand guys” and “how well do understand girls” quizzes.

I took both.

Now, I understand guys quite a bit. BECAUSE I AM ONE. I’m also very straight and very single. I know nothing about women, even though I’d like to be in a great relationship with an attractive one.

And I scored 74%. On each quiz. Answering honestly.

These results show that these kinds of quizzes are complete crap; you girls are very stupid for allowing me to be single, or both.

I Have Never Wanted Anything More In My Entire Life

Nobody likes the bully. The type of person who doesn’t just enjoy winning, but can’t be happy unless they are making everyone else feel like crap while they win? Those are the types of people no one likes. And they’re the types of sports teams I hate.

I’ve always rooted for the underdog. Nothing is more compelling than a David vs Goliath match-up. That’s what made my senior year of college so awesome. NCAA Tournament: tiny St. Bonaventure vs basketball powerhouse Kentucky.

David had Goliath on the ropes, but Goliath forced overtime. Goliath had David on the ropes in overtime, but our underdog incredibly forced double overtime. In double overtime, David’s last rock was just off the mark and Goliath limped into the next round.

It was drama. A roller coaster of emotion for four hours. It was legendary on our tiny campus. And that’s why I didn’t want to go to some big huge school like Kentucky or North Carolina, Texas, LSU or Ohio State. A win by St. Bonaventure would have been incredibly special. And it was just another game for Kentucky.

Every where I’ve gone, Goliath has been around the corner.

At St. Bonaventure, there was Syracuse a few hours away: A basketball power that refused to play us in our arena.

At Dayton, there was Ohio State an hour away: Big, Rich and pompous, demanding to be called THE Ohio State University? (There’s like 25 state universities in Ohio)

Also at Dayton, Cincinnati was an hour south: With a thug reputation, and a ringleader when Dayton’s entire conference left UD behind to join a new league. At Dayton, we hosted the NCAA Tournament, and I’ll never forget what a jerk Roy Williams was and how glad I was George Mason beat North Carolina.

When I was working outside of Austin, there was Texas looming over everyone.

At Tulane, an hour up the river was LSU. Being around LSU fans sums up what I’m talking about nicely.
There’s 12 Division I schools in Louisiana, and two fan bases: Tulane’s and LSU’s. No one roots for Tulane who didn’t go there or work there. I’ve met one guy who roots for LSU and actually went to LSU (Hi, Eric).

I don’t understand people like the non-Eric LSU fans. Think about rooting for one of those big schools. They win most the time, there’s nothing special about it. They’re bigger and richer than everyone else. They’re rooting for Goliath.

I HATE those schools because they have no souls.

**If you think that’s harsh, think of Al Michael’s voice for a second saying: “…3…2…1…Do you believe in Miracles? NO! USSR Crushes the United States Olympic Hockey Team 14-1!” **

St. Bonaventure played Xavier in the A-10 finals today. For the Bonnies, it was win and get into the NCAA Tournament. Lose and you’re watching on TV. Xavier sure isn’t Goliath. They’ve just made it out of our conference to tangle with Goliath a lot more than we have. But still, it’s the type of game we never win. Literally, we’d never won an Atlantic 10 Tournament.

I found myself praying for a mini miracle.

So here we are. 12 years after my alma mater’s David vs Goliath battle with Kentucky. St. Bonaventure pulls of a mini-Cinderella run just to GET to this year’s NCAA Tournament.

The NCAA Bracket comes out and at first I am mad, because the NCAA thinks the Bonnies are an extremely weak David. But if we can beat Xavier in a game we never win, maybe with one good rock we can take down a Goliath.

I pull out my pencil to make my picks, and scan the progression from the line that says 14 St. Bonaventure to the end of the bracket:

Round of 64: 3 seed Florida State
Round of 32: 6 seed Cincinnati or 11 seed Texas
Sweet 16: 2 seed Ohio State
Regional Final: 1 seed North Carolina
National Semifinal: 1 seed Syracuse
National Championship: 1 seed Kentucky

Eight things in life is a lot to ask for. So I’ll only ask for seven:

LSU can wait, if we can just have six huge rocks and perfect aim.

Feel It, Feel It!

When I’m at basketball practice, and the coaches and players are encouraging each other, I feel compelled to chime in, to show my support. But I don’t really know exactly what to say without being repetitive.

So I solved this by simply using all the phrases I could think of from Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s hit single: Feel The Vibrations.

Come on, Come on!
Feel it, Feel it!
Get up, Get up!
In it to win it!
I wanna see motivation!
Get yours!
I wanna see sweat comin’ out your pores!

Hey Hollywood, Instead of a Remake, How About a Nice Game Of Chess?

They are re-making WarGames. They being some Hollywood movie company.

This is incredibly stupid.

Some hacker kid can’t turn a cold war into a nuclear war through computers in today’s era.

#1 – Remote access of the government’s war computers in 2012-14? Are you kidding me?

That premise doesn’t work now. Sure, the kid hacked the Sony Network, which is designed to be online. The US Military system is NOT designed to be online. They’ve closed that door in the movie industry 15 years ago. In Mission Impossible, they had to break into CIA headquarters to use the computer. Even the biggest technology plot holes in 24 were not this big.

#2 – Hypothetically, if the government’s computers could be entered by some hot shot hacker (and, PS, we already saw the awful Die Hard 4 movie), the hacker is not ACCIDENTALLY starting WWIII because he thinks he’s playing a game:

 “I’m going to steal some video games by hacking into this computer software company’s server at WarGames.com. Ooops, I accidentally hacked WarGames.GOV” ?!??

#3 – Oh, the “there’s a back door the programmer put in himself and never closed” concept (hey, worked in Jurassic Park… in 1993!) doesn’t work. You think the US military has ONE GUY doing their system? It’s a massive team who’d close each other’s backdoor systems.

#4 – The whole plot worked in the 80s because computers were so new, and there was the fear of an older generation within the military, and civilian areas, of things like that happening. McKittrick and Beringer, the two guys at odds over the “new tech war” vs “old school defense systems,” would both be about 10 years younger than my Dad is now. My dad was showing me tic-tac-toe on his work computer 28 years ago (right before the movie came out, probably why I loved it so much).

Anyone in the US military is fully indoctrinated to the role of computers and technology. There’s no possible antagonist. Who believes we can’t trust a computer to handle things in 2013? Do you know anyone who doesn’t have a computer? Ten years ago, my GRANDMOTHER was selling things on sells things on E-Bay!

Don’t believe me? This is the info from my grandmother’s Facebook page.

#5 – WWIII? How are we going to have a full scale, Global Thermonuclear War without Russia? The whole concept of mutual assured destruction was predicated on the fact that we knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the Soviet Union (through our inept CIA), so we thought they were a threat, they thought we were a threat, and we thought we were two massive super powers staring each other down. (In reality, the “intel” we had on the Soviets was so much guesswork by CIA operatives trying not to get fired for finding out nothing so they made it up).

There’s only ONE country that could POSSIBLY fit that bill in 2013: North Korea. And no one is talking down Kim Jong Il, cause that bastard’s crazy.

The only way to advance the plot of “hacker almost starts a nuclear war” in 2013 is if the hacker is trying to get access to what the heck is going on in North Korea, discovering their military systems are online because they’d 30 years behind the times, and inadvertently puts us on the brink of WW3. But that has a major plot hole of… “How the hell would the US government find out, hunt him down, and have him race against the clock to stop it” when the real US response would be “screw it, just annihilate their backward-ass country.”

How about re-making bad movies into good ones, instead of good movies into bad ones?

How The States Got Their Shapes / Why Does Anyone Live There? Part IV

There’s a series on The History Channel called “How The States Got Their Shapes,” which tells you… you get it. It talks about imperialism, border wars, territorial fights, political maneuvers, religion, bigotry, slavery, booms in industry and commerce, weather, etc, shaped the borders of, and inside, our country.

One thing they discussed the other day was the economic boom going on now in North Dakota. Which has like three percent unemployment, and plentiful jobs in tech, green initiatives, and dozens of other fields. The cost of living is ridiculously cheap. My employer just hired a guy from North Dakota, he got his law degree, and paid, for SEVEN YEARS (four years of undergrad and three years of law school) about what tuition costs for my friend’s final year of undergrad at Tulane.

Of course, the show makes it sound like everyone should move there immediately with their packaged footage of industry booming, people talking positive at their workplaces, and talking about how great North Dakota is. Which made my broke behind consider looking for a job there.

Then they go to the standup part of the show, where the host interviews people on the street (usually to ask them state trivia questions and have them draw states on a clear marker board). And of course, it’s minus-three degrees outside. They said they found ONE person to interview on the street cause everyone else was inside or not going to stand outside to talk. That leads to the weather discussion, and how it’s so freaking cold there, you need survival gear in your car at all times.

Which my new co-worked completely backed up. I realized, “I pay more for things so I can live in nice weather locations, like smoking a cigar on my porch in New Orleans in December. Since leaving Ohio, it’s snowed in the town of my residence exactly ONCE, and that was wiped away by my windshield wipers. Screw cold!”

I’ll even accept an influx of crime to avoid that cold. While discussing the status of our fair city as “Most Miserable” and having a high crime rate.

Would you actually want to live in any of the “Safest Cities”? There’s no crime because the 48 people – who are too stupid to have moved somewhere better – all know each other.

My new friend from North Dakota summed it up: “You can’t mug someone at gunpoint in North Dakota half the year. If there actually was someone outside to rob, you’d have to go inside because your snot would freeze before they could pull out their wallet from underneath all the layers of clothing. Actually, they’d know your fingers would be too cold to pull the trigger and just punch you in the nose. Getting punched in the face with frozen sinuses would definitely incapacitate you, possibly kill you.”

Yeah, that’s less miserable than my city: where I did a double-take on the first overcast day after 150 straight days of sunshine and temperatures between 72 and 92. I opened a window in April and closed it on October 23rd. Those city rankings need to fix their methodology.

Mysteries of the World

There’s lots about the laws of physics and how the universe works that I will never understand. The most mind blowing are among the most obvious. But the three that are insanely simple, yet mind-blowing really bother me. They are:

 #3 – If I use my AC to lower the temperature of my apartment to a lower temperature than it is outside, and then I turn off the AC and open my windows, how can my apartment become swelter and 15 degrees above the outside temperature in minutes – with nothing in use like hot lights, just my energy saving TV?

#2 – When you’re sick, how is there that much phlegm in a human body?

#1 – If I use Q-tips in my ears every day (yes, in the ear canal, violating the directions, like everyone else), how come for four days in a row there’s nothing on the Q-tips, and the fifth day, it’s the motherlode of earwax?

A Long Flight To Hawai’i

Written Sept. 7. On a plane over the Pacific Ocean

My day started with a phone call from Julie at 5:30 am.  Julie’s awesome. Not only did we have a late night convo about things we really can’t talk about with other people (tamer topics included: “Am I gay if I think I should have gotten a pedicure before going to Hawai’i? I always wear socks and my feet… they need some work”) But the moral of the story is: I finally found a way to make time zones work for me: Have my east coast friends call me when I have to be awake three hours after bed time.

Once sleeping was not an option on the van trip to the Sacramento airport (hour drive), I surfed twitter on my phone for news. First item I see: the team plane for Lokomotiv Yaroslavl (a hockey team from the KHL, the top league in Russia. They steal NHL players all the time) crash this morning outside Moscow and killed at least 34 of 37 people on board.

That would be a horrible thing to read even if I wasn’t about to get on a plane with a team and fly 3200 miles over nothing but the Pacific Ocean. My sick brain immediately pictures a stewardess saying “Today’s inflight movie: Castaway!”)

I assure you, these next to statements are not related:

1. Anyone who complains about a free trip to Hawaii should be punched in the genitals.

2. Five hours and 24 minutes is a long time to be on an airplane

It amazes me how my shoulders can sag and be sore, along with my neck at 11 am after two hours on a plane. I sit at my desk looking at my computer from 9 am until about 7 pm six out of every seven days. Why should there be a difference between desk and airplane? I guess my office chair is 5 times more ergonomically correct than an airline seat.

 I’m pretty sure someone on this plane brought an entire block of the strongest smelling boldest sharp cheese that exists.

 I really miss the internet. Or things that transmit news but also require the internet, or phone access, such as twitter or facebook. Or texting people. I can’t even ask.

As many of you know, I have an abnormally large interest in the subject of college athletic conference realignment. And the night before my flight, the SEC held a secret vote on whether or not to admit Texas A&M from the Big 12 as their 13^th team. The twitter rumors last night were they accepted A&M  and would announce it Wednesday. Which means, the SEC would need a 14^th team (West Virginia of the Big East, or Missouri of the Big 12), the other Big 12 schools might scramble for better conferences, the Pac-12 might add four teams from the Big 12. The Big East might need to replace West Virginia, maybe take those left in the Big 12 and expand to an unprecedented 20 teams. Or the Big East might break along football lines (seven schools don’t have basketball) with the football group adding Big 12 leftovers or Conference USA schools (my former employer was in C-USA), the basketball side might add Xavier and Dayton (my other former employer) and my alma mater might lose status with Xavier and UD leaving.  In otherwords, it’s basically an Armageddon day on internet/twitter for one of my main random interests. While I’m internet-less on a plane. But again, it’s a small price to pay for a free trip to Hawaii. And I’m not complaining.

It’s amazing how quickly I can accomplish computer tasks that don’t require the internet when I don’t have internet access. For example, a work task, or writing a page and a half about nothing.

If this were the SATs: Internet is to KevFu trying to work as

1. Productivity decreasing
2. Tools are to cavemen
3. Ooh! Shiny Things!
4. All of the Above

If I meet the person who programmed the auto-format features on Word, I will punch them in the throat and say “Sorry, we have auto-punch to the throat enabled for your convenience. You needed to tell me to adjust my auto-punch to the throat settings BEFORE I automatically punched you in the throat.”

In a somewhat related story, I can’t text my friend from West Virginia about WVU possibly going to the SEC, because there’s no way to phrase it without my phone changing it to SECOND.

You’ve probably stopped reading because you’re bored or the shiny internet distracted you (I’m so jealous). But we haven’t reached the halfway point of the flight yet.

One of the things I discussed with Julie was how boring my life was. She disagreed with my assessment and probably won the argument with: “You’re getting a free trip to Hawai’i to hang out with barely dressed, spandex-clad college girls!” I scored minor points with “You hang out all day with first-class business jet setters enjoying cocktails!” It’s all in the presentation.

I rail on Macs for not being as good as PCs, but the Mac version of Freecell keeps your stats in a much better way. It lists every game you’ve played with the date. I’m at 51 games and counting on this flight.

This would have been an ideal time to do some things I’ve always meant to do but never had the time to dedicate. Like, had I looked them up on the internet and saved them/printed them before I left, I could have learned all the words to the German version of 99 Luft Balloons.

I did download an entire season of Dexter since I’m only through Season 4 and Season 7 starts soon. But I downloaded them to my Mac, and they only play on Windows. And I can’t transfer them from the Mac side of my computer to the Windows partition for some reason.

I briefly wondered: “Is it a bad thing that Michael Jackson’s death made it cool to listen to MJ again?” If you think “you know, that’s a valid point. You never want to see someone die – child molestation charges not withstanding – but…” you are TOTALLY WRONG on this issue. It was NEVER UNCOOL to listen to Michael! (Classic KevFu misdirection).

If it takes five and a half hours to get to Hawai’i, which is pretty much the most gorgeous place on earth. I have to believe that Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia are totally not worth going to see.

I always wished I was a gifted enough to be a professional athlete who made lots of money playing sports. However, I think a 6-2 baseball player would be ideal, because I couldn’t imagine being a 6-10 basketball player on a plane for this long. In related news, I can’t feel my right leg anymore.

Must conserve phone battery for landing news-seeking bonanza.

Just because it’s been a while since I’ve said it: “Who Dat? Who Dat? Who Dat say they gonna beat them Saints?”

I should write something worthwhile during this time, instead of a bunch of rambling crap.

Hey, if you look out the window, you can see the Pacific Ocean!