What is this, 1983?

Subject line of a spam I just got: "Dig Dug, Joust, Galaga, and 81 more games on your TV."

Yes, I had an Atari 800, which I often used to play video games, including the ones listed above, on a TV. Heck, I remember having Atari's Joust cartridge, complete with Atari's latter-day silver-with-black-stripes label design.

Bait, and I switched

Dairy Queen was giving away free small ice cream cones today to celebrate my birthday...which happens to fall on the anniversary of the invention of the ice cream cone. But once I got there, I decided that I was too hungry for a small ice cream cone, and I got a Blizzard instead. So their "free" ice cream cone ended up costing me $3.45!

Schadenfreude

I'm really enjoying this "Detroit Tigers countdown" that's in the sports headlines these days. Actually, I guess it's more of a count-up. 110th, 111th, 112th, 113th...tonight's headline was "Toronto Delivers 114th Loss to Tigers."

The comic strip "Tank McNamara" is doing a week of strips about this in which part of the strip is upside-down, based on the theory that Detroit fans should be looking at this the other way, or something like that. Unfortunately, I read it online, so I'm having to use my reading-things-upside-down skills; I'm sure it's much easier to deal with in a newspaper. Yes, I know I could open the JPEG in a graphics editor program and use the "rotate" command, but that's more effort than I'm willing to expend for one comic strip.

True enough, I guess

An actual listing in next week's TV Guide:

10:00 [2] [11] NFL Football
[May be preempted for NFL Football.]

Apparently, now it's bad news week

I've only been to 17.5% of the counties in the United States.

That figure, and the current statistics, actually doesn't include counties through which I've only traveled on a train (but it does include a few counties where I got off a train and stood around on the platform for a while, then got back on the train), because it was going to be a little too challenging to figure them out from a road atlas. But I will go back and put them in soon, to not only boost my total number of counties, but boost my total number of states...Kansas, Idaho, and Mississippi are the three states which I've only seen from a train window.

8 simple rules for booking talk show guests

According to my TiVo, John Ritter is scheduled to appear on "The Ellen Degeneres Show" on September 22nd. It'll be a neat trick if they can pull that off.

Good news week comes to a screeching halt

Friday: Johnny Cash and John Ritter within hours of each other? Wow.

Good grief, more good news

Thursday: Tower Records had Frank Black and the Catholics' new album on sale, and it's great!

(Actually, I heard Frank Black perform some of the songs acoustic on August 30th, and I'm a little disappointed they don't sound like that on the album, but then again, this is supposed to be an all-good news week, so ignore this parenthetical note.)

Still good news week

Wednesday: My subscription copy arrived, and the redesign of TV Guide doesn't totally suck!

It's good news week

Monday: They have Boo Berry cereal, which I haven't seen since I moved out of Pittsburgh, on sale at Target! And I bought the last box on the shelf! And the Bucs won!

Tuesday: Next year, they're coming out with the first of 25 volumes in a full series of complete "Peanuts" comic strips!

I can't wait for Wednesday!

Auto-graph

I had today off work, so I decided to go on a little sightseeing drive, which actually turned out to be a little bigger than I was intending in the first place (because I missed the exit where I had been planning to get off Interstate 5, so I decided to keep going north to take a different east-west road for the second leg of my planned loop).

Anyway, in the future, I have to remember not to consume a 20-ounce Cherry Coke and a bag of chili cheese-flavored Fritos shortly before traveling on any roads that are intensely curvy and hilly, such as California state highway 33 through Los Padres National Forest. Turns out the combination doesn't make my stomach happy.

What more than made up for that part of the trip, though, was the fact that, at odds of about 1 in 4,000, my iPod randomly decided to play the great Frank Black and the Catholics song "St. Francis Dam Disaster" as I was driving between the towns of Santa Paula and Piru. The lyrics, in part:

A few got lucky in Piru
Because that water seeks her own
But four more hours she would flow
She had 29 miles more to go

She carried in her every kind of thing
House, tree, telegraph pole
Some say a thousand souls
At 3:00 A.M. she gave Santa Paula a ring
She was still 25 feet high
Under a peaceful sky