Stupid Games

The other day a bag of knock-off (Sam's brand) Jelly Belly beans appeared at my house (dunno who bought them) but a cardinal sin was committed! The bag, which contained the list of what each bean was flavorwise, was tossed. Being bored, I tried to figure out what each bean was.


Da beans!

Starting from the upper left and going to the end of each row, here goes:

1. Cherry. Though to be fair, this should be called "Robitussin". Ugh. The worst part was the fact that these were by far and away the most plentiful in the bag. Mediocre at best, unless you're a big fan of the Tussin.

2. Strawberry. A little fruity, but not too bad. This was an easy one.

3. Wow, I dunno. It's a little fruity, but not really. Bubble gum? Maybe?

4. Grape. Though it honestly tastes more like grape jelly. Now all I need is a peanut butter bean and a couple bread-flavored beans and I'd be set.

5. Now this tastes like cherry again. Not like Robitussin Cherry, but like cherry. Why do we need two flavors of cherry? Or maybe it's Raspberry? I think they all taste the same to me. Whatever.

6. Tangerine. Remember Orange Julius? Damn, I love the hell out of those things, but we haven't had them in Tallahassee for over a decade. These beans taste exactly like an Orange Julius. And all this damned talk of an Orange Julius makes me really want an Orange Julius. A really big one. Shit.

7. Blueberry. This was probably the easiest call of the bunch so far. Very good, a tasty bean.

8. Butterscotch. Riiiight. Why a butterscotch bean? Pretty mediocre in flavor, if you ask me. I'll stick to the butterscotch Life Savers. Or Butter Rum or whatever they call them. So if they have Butterscotch and Butter Rum, do they make Butter Whiskey or Butter Tequila? Ugh, that sounds terrible, to tell the truth.

9. Apple. Tastes just like a candy apple, very appropriate for October.

10. No freaking clue. It tastes like fruit, and not at all like blue. So I'm stumped.

11. Orange. To tell the truth, this tastes more like orange juice than the fruit proper. Not bad, but nowhere near as good as the tangerine beans.

12. Cinnamon. To easy to tell. This bean's spicy and definitely has the strongest flavor of a bean so far.

13. Coconut. I personally love coconut, and these are delicious. Can't get enough of these, you know.

14. The dreaded black bean. We'll skip this for now and come back to this later.

15. Root beer! Didn't see this coming. I figured a chocolate bean or something. Good flavor though.

16. Huh? This tastes exactly like the grape jelly bean. Maybe my tongue is broken.

17. Watermelon. A familiar, distinct flavor. Easy to pick out, good bean.

18. Buttered popcorn. Now, I never understood the buttered popcorn jelly bean. The whole concept of it is just never quite made sense to me. A traditionally sweet foodstuff that tries to taste like a salty foodstuff? Why?

19. Pear. Pear's my favorite fruit, so this is a welcomed taste. Pretty tasty bean, good stuff.

20. Pear again? Sure, why not! Though this tastes more like the Life Saver variety of pear.

21. This tastes like a mediocre lemon-lime flavor. Never been huge on lemon-lime to tell the truth. Maybe in Mountain Dew, that's about it.

22. Tutti Frutti? It's pretty sweet, with a light fruity taste. I dunno.

23. This tastes like a pear (again) but this time a lot more flavorful. "Juicy" pear. I'd call this one my personal favorite, the ol' green with brown specs. I picked these all out first and ate them.

24. Cotton candy? All I taste is sugar, kinda like that cotton candy gum that BubbleYum makes. That stuff is incredible, by the way.

25. Yeah, I've got no freaking clue. I'm gonna go with "Glucose" as the flavor here.

26. Banana. This tastes exactly like the banana flavor you get in Runts. Decent stuff.

27. Peach? This tastes like those gummi peach rings, but not as good.

28. I'm gonna guess Capuccino, only because of the coffee-like aftertaste. Very sweet.

29. Marshmallow. I know real Jelly Bellies have a flavor called "Toasted Marshmallow", but these honestly taste more like cereal marshmallows. Like they're straight out of a box of Lucky Charms.

So with all the other flavors out of the way, we revisit that dreaded black bean, #14.

14. Licorice. Ugh. The thing I hate the most about licorace is that it just absolutely dominates over the taste of any combination of beans. If you grab 5 beans to eat, and one's a licorice, all you freaking taste is licorice. So I decide to take one for the team and I pick out every single one of these...and eat them all at once. 17 of them. My tongue honestly went numb and I cried on the inside. To soothe the pain my tongue and tastebuds were in, I pulled out all the Juicy Pears and Tangerines and ate them too.

Good waste of an hour or so, I suppose.

It Begins with one Simple Punch to my Head

So Deuce's Halloween party last night was fun [Click here for pictures]. Spent some time there, some time at another party, then back to Deuce's to finish off the night. At the end of the night, there was a scuffle next door - one of Steven's neighbors had some fight trying to errupt. Some of my friends intervened, but I just stood back and got the hell out of the way. Why? Not my battle. I don't know why they're fighting, I don't care. They have a right to fight if they want to. One of my friends said he went to help because "it's the same reason I'm going to be a nurse, I want to help people" - something that I don't quite buy. Nobody was hurt, nobody was injured. Had that been the case, somebody hurt, then I'd get involved. It seemed to me like all that "helping" people who don't want to be helped just pisses them off more. Out in the open, I'll leave them alone. In a hospital or a setting where they're a danger to themselves, I'll step in.

I should be in Atlanta for GT homecoming this weekend, but circumstances dictated otherwise. Maybe some other time.


This is why I love Saturday, two TVs and a computer with a TV capture card. Games I'm watching [from far left]: Clemson at Georgia Tech, Florida vs. Georgia, and Maryland at Florida State. I need six eyes!

Oh, if you haven't seen the commercial for the new Sony Brevia TV, you really should go watch it. 250,000 super bouncy balls let loose in San Francisco - it just has to be seen. If you've got Quicktime 7 (which you should, H.264 is incredible) then you should get the high bandwith version.

Tim Finnegan lived on Watling Street, A Gentle Lad

So last night, to avoid the mass of FAMU's homecoming we went to a new Irish Pub off Thomasville called (oh-so-originally) Finnegan's Wake. Beer selection was decent (typical Harp/Bass/Guinness and some other domestics, including humorously Killian's) and the ambience of the place was pretty nice. It was crowded as hell, but I should expect that on a Saturday night. Music was a little out-of-place for an Irish pub though. Sure, you'd hear an occasional Pogues song (nice touch) but the majority of it was jam band crap like Dave Matthews and Phish. They should let me handle the music. Nothing but Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys, The Pogues, Black 47...I could spruce it up. Will I go back to that place? More than likely. Prices were a bit steep though. In fairness, they did have the best Guinness I've had anywhere in Tallahassee. Very fresh, very sweet. I think the place is a chain.

So on the way to the pub I popped in Flogging Molly's 2002 album "Drunken Lullabies" and rocked out, Irish style. I was trying to get into the mood of things afterall. [Though to keep up my rep as an asshole I wore an English national team soccer jersey. Nobody's perfect. Go Lions!] But after listening to the album after a few pints of stout in my system, I discovered that it probably is the absolute best album to listen to in such an occasion. The album is extremely lively to begin with, but after a few spirits, it just comes to life even more.

Go listen to "Kings of the Kilburn High" or "May the Living be Dead in Our Wake" and you'll agree. Or maybe not...if you suck.

Technorati Tags: Irish pub, Flogging Molly, Drunken Lullabies

Say What Now?

I just saw a commercial for Aaron's Rent-To-Own. Their tagline? "Do the Math. Aarons." Are you kidding me? Do the math? For rent-to-own? Where you overpay for everything? People really are morons, I swear.

You'll notice Technorati tags now appearing in the bottom of my posts. If you've never looked at Technorati, check it out. Interesting stuff, more social bookmarking (much like Digg and del.icio.us).

So I'm going through my usual Saturday routine of watching three college football games at once (one of the joys of having 3 old televisions is putting them all next to each other and going back and forth watching all the early games) and the one on the big TV is UNC-UVA. The Wahoos just kicked a field goal to bring the score Heels 7, Cavs 5. What the hell kind of score is that? That's a baseball score, not football. Even more depressing is seeing a score of 7-2 late in the 3rd quater. Both QBs have about 65 passing yards, so this one is pretty pathetic so far. Why am I watching this game? Because it's ACC football, and I love ACC football. I would rather watch two ACC teams duke it out than the majority of other teams in football. There's a bunch of Big Ten (Eleven?) games on right now, and the only one I'd want to watch would be Northwestern absolutely thrashing Michigan State, only because I would love for NU to win that terribly overrated conference. Go Cats! (But really, I should make an ACC football blog or something).

I did something fairly crazy last night. I took my new (and pretty expensive) Organic Chem book and did the unthinkable - I took the binding off and separated the pages? Why? Because I then scanned the book in as a PDF file. That may sound idiotic, but now I can take the entire 1200 page book with me either on CD or on my laptop. I can instantly jump to pages. I can type in a phrase and search through the book (I pumped the pdf through Acrobat's OCR scanner) and find it quickly. I can copy sections out of the book and email them to other people. When the data becomes digitized, there's so much more I can do with it. Plus, I can keep that PDF file on me as long as I want, and don't have to deal with the size and weight (about 8 pounds) of the book. I can sit in a class in med school with my laptop and instantly pull up something in my old O-Chem book. I would love to have all my old textbooks digitized eventually.

Flock's been good to me so far. I don't like how every Firefox extension isn't immediately supported (Adblock, Greasemonkey, and a few others are) but that'll just take time. The blogging features are great though. One click of a button and a window pops up, I type my post, and it submits. No need to log in to Blogger, click on which blog, click new post, wait for the load, wait for the republish. I'm impressed so far. I just wish there was a way to tie in my digg and del.icio.us accounts so if I digg something, it gets added to del.icio.us.

Technorati Tags: rent-to-own, OMFJ, pdf, textbook, flock

Can You Dig It?!

Today I bit into the hype machine. While walking around at Wal-Mart today, I saw a copy of "The Warriors" on DVD laying around on a shelf. So I bought it. Now I knew nothing about the movie, other than that the guys at Rockstar liked the movie (circa 1979) enough to make a game out of it now, 26 years later. Normally I don't buy DVDs unless I've seen the movie, so this was a rare exception. Final verdict? This is a flick you should see. It's a cult classic for a reason. CAN YOU DIG IT?

I also saw "A History of Violence" earlier today, and I was impressed. I won't give anything away, but I will say that some of the uproar about the movie being too gory or graphic or excessively violent - well those people are simply morons. Too gory? See "House of 1000 Corpses" and then we'll talk. (But seriously, don't see that movie. It really really sucked.)

And while the game itself is just middle-of-the-line, the beginning fight sequence (CGI) of Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks is insanely hot. All your old MK2/MK3 favorites dualing it out in front of Shang Tsung's throne. Pretty hot. Though the opening sequence of Far Cry: Instincts is just as hot. That game is the best looking video game I have ever seen with mine two eyes.

Oh, and this post is my first using the new browser Flock. Flock is a web browser built on top of Mozilla Firefox with added features, predominantly blog and social bookmarking based. Flock assumes every user has a blog, and uses del.icio.us to manage your bookmarks online (you have the option of sharing them with the world if you so desire). Now once they get digg support in, I'll be right as rain. I'll use this for a week and let you know what I think.

Technorati Tags: The Warriors, A History of Violence, Mortal Kombat, Flock, del.icio.us

We Quit The Room

I saw possibly the worst car I've ever seen in my life today. I nearly cried because I was laughing so hard as I was driving down the road. First off, the car was a mid 90s Honda Civic DX, the kind with a hatchback. First thing I noticed was two gigantic exhaust pipes, one on either side of the back of the car. What's wrong with this? The Civic is not a dual exhaust system, last time I checked. So either he added a dummy exhaust (which is possible as I never saw it move) or piped in a second, useless exhaust. Stupid either way. The car had various performance stickers, including a Flowmaster. The car probably had a cold-air intake, as it sounded like a really pissed off weedwhacker. So aside from sounding like a garden tool and having a fake tailpipe, the car had no back window and the front left and back right wheels were spares. The paint job was terribly faded and scratched off, and clearly ordinary household spray paint had been used to try to mask one large area on the front hood. So this car was just incredible.

I got bored the other night while procrastinating doing my spanish homework, and did something I haven't done in a while: I put together a mix. I thought one song, Death Cab for Cutie's "I'll Follow You Into the Dark" was so good when I heard it that I wanted a mix of similar, laid back songs. So it's a sort of "chill" mix, but with an indie feel. Some tracks are old, some new. I wanted to share it with others, so I looked into RapidShare, a site which lets you post big files to share with others. The mix clocks in around 73mb, but RapidShare only allows for 50mb max file size. So I broke it up into two zip files.

Download Part 1 and Part 2 of my new mix.
[At RapidShare, click the "Free" Button, and wait for the timer on the 2nd page]

Here's a tracklist for those who would rather look before they leap:
1. Blur "Coffee and TV"
2. The Shins "New Slang"
3. Architecture in Helsinki "Maybe You Can Owe Me"
4. Beulah "Don't Forget To Breathe"
5. The New Pornographers "The Bleeding Heart Show"
6. Death Cab for Cutie "I'll Follow You Into The Dark"
7. The Decemberists "Eli, The Barrow Boy"
8. Iron & Wine "Jezebel"
9. Antony and the Johnsons "You Are My Sister"
10. The Magic Numbers "This Love"
11. Elliott Smith "Waltz #2 (XO)"
12. Sufjan Stevens "For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti"

Now, I know a lot of you have probably never heard of 11 of those 12, but download the files and give it a shot. You might like it, you might now. Personally, I always love the chance to listen to other people's mixes. Sometimes I hear something new I like and can add a new band to my growing list of good bands. It's always interesting to know what my friends are listening to anyway.

I Got 50 Bentleys in the West Indies

First off, with GT trailing 10-7 to Duke at halftime today, memories of that terrible game 2 years ago where I saw my Yellow Jackets lose to Duke in Durham resurfaced. Thankfully, Tech turned on the jets in the 3rd and put up 28 points.

School's going well, new job's going well too.

You need to watch this flash video that my friend Staney made. It's an animation for the Wyclef Jean song "It Doesn't Matter" and needs to be seen by all. Hilarious stuff.

The new Death Cab for Cutie album is good, don't know why it took me so long to pick it up. The New Pornographers put out a good disc too. Just got the new Bloodhound Gang, I'll give that a few spins then decide if I like it or not.

Damn, there was something else I wanted to say, but I forget now.

If you haven't seen the website Hetemeel.com, go check it out. You have some stock images, and can create custom images by adding dynamic text to them. For example, here's a few sophomoric images I whipped up:

Cup Check!

While watching the UF-UT game a couple weeks back, I saw something that I had to show to the world. So I TiVo'd part of the game, copied it to the laptop and snagged a screen capture:




Hilarious. I bet his mama is so proud, holding his package on national TV.

Oh, and check out the new "Features" section in the sidebar. I started putting up my old Favorite Albums lists, as well as a link to the 999. Other features will go up there as I think of them.

Oh, and why didn't anybody tell me about the new Mindless Self Indulgence album?! I just picked it up and it's been playing non-stop in the stereo. I missed out on some months of quality MSI!

That's all. As you were, people.

The Best Email Ever.

Via email:

If I had a blog, this week's entry would go somthing like this:

Sunday, October 1, 2005

BLAH

This was my first weekend working without my most favorite workfellow in all of Florida, seeing as I have never worked outside of the sunshine state. I enjoy working in unit three with MJ, mostly because he's almost always the smartest person in the unit (MD's included). I miss him a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot.
Weekends without MJ are going to be BLAH.

Kelli

Aww! That makes me feel important. A bit of an overexaggeration, sure. But still makes me feel missed. [And you have no idea how much I'll miss working with you, Kelli. One of the worst parts of leaving TMH is not having you around to crack me up. Oh, and the whole eye-candy factor too. Hah!]

You're Always Wearing Dodger Blue

This has been a pretty eventful week, so here's a wrap. We'll start first with Friday Night:



As mentioned first here back in February, Zack and I finally tried to pull a 999 last night. Click the picture above to get the full story.

I quit my job at the hospital on Tuesday, and was hired later that same day to work in the Athletic Department at school as a tutor for math and science. The pay is better and though the hours are less in number (but more humane), but they should conform to my school schedule just fine.

I'm working on getting financial aid, but it's an uphill battle for a non degree-seeking student. Should be possible though it might take a fight.

College football has been interesting this season, but I'm ready to make my first bold prediction of the year: Virginia Tech beats Southern Cal for the national championship in January. VT absolutely demolished my Yellow Jackets last weekend in Blacksburg and if they play as well as they did last weekend for the rest of the year, they won't be beat. Incredible offense with Marcus Vick, great defense, and the usual stellar special teams play and you can't doubt the Hokies this year. Just wait and see.

My Sox are getting pounded by the Yankees at the moment, here's to hoping they pull something off and make the playoffs.