You think I got kicked out because of just the aquarium?

Here's a fun little game that April and I like to play: Pretend Tom Cruise is Jason Schwartzman.

Try it.

They're both four and half feet tall, have large toucan-like noses, one eyebrow apiece, and deliver lines in a very similar manner. It's hysterical.

I defy you to watch Top Gun while pretending Tom Cruise is Jason Schwartzman without laughing every thirty seconds.

I remember back when this was all farmland.

That old man Peabody. And his crazy ideas about breeding pine trees.

The company that I work for owns 52% of Puente Hills Mall, in the City of Industry, CA.

Today, I found out that Puente Hills Mall served as both Twin Pines Mall, and Lone Pine Mall, post-Marty McFly getting hit on by his hot mom in the hit 1985 film "Back to the Future."

Needless to say, I am so completely stoked by this tiny bit of radness.

I didn't believe the news at first, so I found a couple of aerial photos that were taken just before we bought the property in December.

Holy crap! Plain as day is the parking field in between Robinson-May and JC Penney where Marty found out if those bastards could do 90, where Doc Brown was shot by Libyan terrorists upset about getting a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts, and where Einstein became the world's first time-traveler.

Gone is the JC Penney (replaced by a 24 Hour Fitness), but all the architectural details are still there. I have got to find a way to get out there for some sort of property visit.

Oh Puente Hills Mall, my density has popped me to you.

Yeesh.

I love loose change. At the end of every day, I take it out of my pocket and put it all in a pile. A couple of times a year, I cash it all in and do something stupid with it. I consider this free bonus money to be spent on items I want, but can't really justify purchasing. No matter the cost, I consider the items purchased with it to be free.

This is made all the easier with those Coinstar machines you'll find at the grocery store. Usually they charge some stupidly high rate for you to change your coins into cash. But, if you opt to use the money at Amazon.com, or iTunes, or some other approved vendors, they'll give you a gift certificate instead, and you can use the full amount of your coins.

Being the cheapskate that I am, I requested an amazon.com gift certificate.

Seeing as how I have loose change at the end of every transaction I make (never do I use the change from a transaction I made just FIVE MINUTES AGO in a new transaction...even if the $.93 I got back would greatly help in my new $2.91 transaction) this act of sheer laziness usually nets me some nice money. Case in point: I was able to buy the Sin City Library, which consists of all seven yarns and an "Art of Sin City" book, all in giant coffee table sizes in two volumes, at amazon.com (which listed for somewhere in the vicinity of $190) for almost no actual money out of my pocket.

Today was the day that they arrived.

When I returned home from work, I gleefully opened the boxes, hoping to peruse their giant, hard-bound splendor. Unfortunately, my Volume II set contained not one, but two copies of Volume Six and, sadly, zero copies of Volume Five.



Heartbroken, I emailed Amazon.com about my sadness. I kid you not, ten minutes later, I've gotten an email that they've already scheduled to send me another set in the mail tomorrow, and they've given me the pre-paid postage to send them my defective copy back after I've had the chance to examine the new set.

Padmavathy and the rest of the crew in New Delhi do a hell of a job.

I should have done this in 1989.

I've finally taken the plunge into the world of handheld gaming. I never owned a Game Boy, Lynx, Game Gear, TurboExpress, Neo-Geo Pocket, Wonderswan, GamePark, N-Gage, TapWave, PSP, Gizmondo or GP2X. I even passed on the original DS when it came out. But today I entered the world of tiny fun with the release of the Nintendo DS Lite.

The only reason I'm even typing this now is because my wife is playing it at this exact moment. If she wasn't, I'd be on it, doing my best not to blink, probably pissing and shitting in place so that I wouldn't have to stop playing.

I read some previews a few weeks ago, and was planning to pick one up. I was originally planning on purchasing a PSP, but the reviews weren't as favorable. The DS Lite wasn't available until this morning, but it's smaller, brighter, lighter, and better than the original, so I decided to wait.

I won some money at my company picnic last weekend, so that allowed me to stock up on games as well.

Today I bought:

The DS Lite Console
Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes A Day
Big Brain Academy
Trauma Center: Under the Knife
Sonic Rush
New Super Mario Brothers
Mario Kart DS
Tetris DS

I've played all the games for a bit, and I'm really excited about them all. But my wife and I have immediately become obsessed with Brain Age and Big Brain Academy. I can easily see us foregoing sleep and hygiene over the coming weeks as a result of these games.

I'm still looking for the new Castlevania game, as well as Meteos and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney .... a game that sounds so stupid that it simply has to be fabulous (in much the same way that Trauma Center is ..... a videogame about performing surgery? Whatever.)

She has to leave for derby practice in a few minutes, and while I'm sad to see her go, it opens up the console for my exclusive use, so I probably won't even notice. She's going to kill me when she reads that.

In any event, I can already tell we're going to have to buy another one.

Damn you, Kroger!

I had my heart set on the reincarnation of the reincarnation of Ecto Cooler: Crazy Citrus Cooler, which replaced Shoutin' Orange Tangergreen, which replaced the omnipresent Ecto Cooler, whose disappearance from store shelves coincides with my last purchase of a Hi-C product.

Obviously, you've let me down.