I’m off to Albany, New York for the first wedding of one of my high school friends, which is really, really weird. Actually, I’ve known Joanna since we were in 5th grade, which makes this whole endeavor even fucking weirder.

Her brother, who I still picture as the eleven year old he was when we graduated from high school, will be picking me up from the airport. This weekend is going to be hilarious.

Well, except for the five hour layover I have tomorrow between 5-10am in Detroit. That’s just going to be brutal. Thanks for changing the schedule on me like 8 times, Northwest!

* - Where the title comes from.

Some days I feel like the guy in this Onion Radio News bit (Achtung: loud, autoplaying audio).

Gee, it would be nice to be employed.

So Flickr has a feature wherein you can compare the statistics of all your pictures, and see which ones are the most popular, see where your hits are coming from, and things of that nature. It’s pretty interesting and a fantastic way to kill time if you’re really bored.

I have one photo that is far and away the most popular one (almost 2500 views vs. the 2nd place photo’s 1900, and 10th place’s 390). Is it well-composed? Is it of something particularly unusual? Or is it this:

That’s right, a picture I took of a grow room in the Amsterdam Hemp and Marijuana Museum is the most popular picture I’ve ever taken. It’s managed to make its way onto the first page of search results for both “hemp” and “marijuana” on Flickr, so I suppose that helps.

I’m inordinately amused by how very, very many people seem to enjoy this picture, despite how utterly craptacular it is. Piss-poorly framed, shot with a terrible resolution camera, and really kind of indistinct. But it’s weed, man, so it’s popular.

Clearly, I should start aiming more of my efforts in everything artistic at the stoner crowd, because they’re easy to please.

Sorry to stick y’all with another bullet-pointed post, but these things happen when you’re broke and unemployed and not doing much:

• Went sea kayaking with my friend Lisa this morning, which was great fun. We paddled at least 2-3 miles up the coast from the Malibu pier, and it was a really gorgeous day for it, too. However, I forgot how much seawater fucking stings when you get it in your eyes, and I also didn’t realize how much kelp that’s about three feet underwater could look like a shark. It did not help that I recently re-watched Jaws.

• Between the opening and closing ceremonies, are there any fireworks left in China? I know it’s the country that invented them, but man, that was an awful fucking lot of fireworks.

• Man, the Chinese do know how to put on a show. Between the fantastic opening ceremonies and the very nice closing ceremonies, the organizers of London 2012 must have been watching that and going, “…oh, bloody hell.” Particularly since the Jimmy Page and Leona Lewis portion of events was (with the arguable exception of Jackie Chan singing) the most flagrantly goofy part of the closing ceremony that often came across as a cross between Cirque de Soleil and Starlight Express.

• I’m sort of sad to see the Olympics go, since they were a wonderful, wonderful diversion from the fact that there is nothing good on television right now except Mad Men. However, I’m glad they’re going now, since I just did my annual “How the hell am I going to TiVo everything I want to watch?” spreadsheet and have determined that, at least before I start deleting things that suck, I have 26 hours of TV a week on my prime-time schedule. I think the “cancel season pass” key is going to have to be merciless this year, because I am not going to have time to actually watch all that.

• So speaking of television, does anybody have any desire for me to do a few TV reviews like I did last year? I basically talked about new shows as I watched them (making sure to divulge the ever-increasing number of shows I have friends working on), some briefly, some at greater length. Did you guys actually find that shit interesting, or was it like, “Dude…you watch too much TV”?

Finally, I have a job interview tomorrow, so hopefully these bullet pointed posts whining about how I’m bored stiff will soon be replaced with ones whining about how exhausted and overworked I am. Fingers crossed!

A few of the more entertaining subject lines from my spam box, all of which feature Paris Hilton since I think people will believe she has done any or all of the following:

• Paris Hilton denies screwing Ron Paul
• Paris Hilton Wins Pulitzer Prize [okay, this one may stretch the bounds of believability]
• Paris Hilton Had Sex With Aliens

and my personal favorite:

• Paris Hilton’s vagina bites mailman!

I see your giggling at inappropriate Olympic medalist names and raise you my hysterical laughter at Barack Obama’s Inconvenient Snorkel.

Hat tip to TWoP co-founder Tara Ariano’s blog.

Mf mmf mf mmfmf mff:

Mmmf, mf?

Edited to add: Mmf mmf:

And of course, right after this was taken, he decided my left arm (which he’s laying on since these photos are reversed by Photo Booth) was dessert.

I went for a looooooong bike ride today. I wanted to do the entire Marvin Braude trail, but I came up a little short.

The entire trail is 22 miles each way, and I have to bike 2 miles each way to get to the trail. If I’d done the whole thing, I would have gone 48 miles.

Instead, I went all the way to the South end, about two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier. This was about 5 miles South of where I stopped the last time I rode the trail, which was a significantly larger gap than I had realized, so I was a lot more tired by the time I reached the South end when I thought.

The wind was whipping pretty good coming back North, so I think that’s part of what tired me out so much. I think I also need to bring more than a granola bar along to refuel.

I wasn’t really hungry per se, but I noticed I got a lot more tired than I did during my last ride that far South, during which my friends and I stopped for brunch. Pancakes and Guinness are apparently a far more efficient fuel than one wee granola bar.

But I managed to get all the way back to the Santa Monica pier, which is just over 18 miles north of Redondo (and about 3/4 of a mile north of where I got on) before my the combination of the setting sun and my body saying “GET OFF THE BIKE!” determined that I should probably head home.

I wound up breaking down and buying a comically overpriced 20oz Gatorade at the S.M. pier, and I felt WAY better after that, so perhaps I shall invest in some for my next ride.

However, I did 39 miles total, which is nothing to sneeze at, and about 80% of the entire way. We’ll see how many of my limbs I can actually move tomorrow, but for right now, I’m pretty happy I managed to go as far as I did.

Nothing major, so it’s time for some bullet points!

• Tropic Thunder is fucking hilarious. I’m glad I went and saw it, although I’m not glad that my current financial situation dictates that I get one night out approximately every two weeks.

• The Olympics being on a tape delay to the West Coast is fuckin’ weak. Kills the suspense in all the swim stuff I like watching when every newspaper I read online has the results up before the races are even shown here.

• I really need a job. Like, now. It is extremely difficult not to wallow for a bit when you realize that you’ve been unemployed for a quarter of the year and are damn close to being unemployed for a third of it.

• I would really appreciate it if my apartment would cool down enough for me to be able to cook without almost passing out. That would be helpful.

• You will be genuinely shocked to learn that I am so bored that I’m actually reading books. You will not be shocked to learn that most of these books are ones that have been made into movies, and that one of the others was the new David Sedaris, which is awesome.

Anyway, it’s about time for some more tape-delayed Olympics, but hopefully some interesting (or at least amusing) shit will happen this week.

Well, it only took a month, but I’ve now corrected the times on all 1890 posts that came over from Blogger.

I need a hobby.