Better Book Titles
Okay, I have spent entirely too much time on Better Book Titles. The formula is simple: re-title a book with something a little more descriptive or appropriate, and photoshop the new title onto the cover of the book.
The best ones are when they take a title from one book or movie and put it on the book it should have titled in the first place. I have literally spent hours looking at these, but for some reason Sara does not enjoy them. I don’t know how many I called her over to see. “Check out this one!” I would say, pointing and chuckling, only to have her shrug uninterestedly and say, “I don’t know, it’s just not for me I guess.”
Don’t be like her, go enjoy these. Here are some of my favorites:
What kind of hat can I wear?
One day, as we were descending into the subway in New York City, we saw an older gentleman coming up the stairs. With our view from above, we could see an absolutely horrifying splotch of skin cancer right in the middle of his big bald head. It was quite memorable, and somewhat terrifying. Since that time, Sara has insisted that I keep my own big bald head covered whenever I go anywhere near the sun.
It certainly beats rubbing sunscreen into your hair. However, sometimes I feel kind of dumb wearing a ball cap.
When I was in college, I wore a ball cap practically every day. Maybe that’s why I feel like maybe I’m a little old to be wearing a ball cap. Or sometimes I feel like I’m dressed up a little fancy to be wearing a ball cap (and by fancy, I mean a button down shirt or something, I’m not exactly walking around in a tuxedo here). I don’t know, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but in any case what are my other options? I’ve tried on a few other kinds of hats here and there, but none of them seem quite right. Is there an accepted “adult” style of hat? What kind of hat fits my personality?
I could go with the hiking hat, but that’s pretty much as casual as a ball cap, and I don’t want to imply I’m an outdoorsman.
What about a bahama hat? Still pretty informal, but more suitable for relaxing in a cafe in Havana, which is more my speed.
Or perhaps a panama hat? A little more formal, and it sort of looks like the kind of hat I could grow into, like a gangster, or Wilford Brimley.
I don’t know. They’re all a little casual without being too casual, which I like, but maybe we need to expand our search a little bit. Consider some alternatives.
I don’t think I could do a cowboy hat. I’m not exactly country, and I’m not sure it would really fit in in my neighborhood.
On the other hand, maybe a newsboy hat. Oliver looks pretty damn good in his, why not me?
Not too bad, but maybe we need to think outside the box a little bit…
Barbershop hat?
Okay, but if I’m going to go barbershop, why not do it right and go porkpie?
I think the best looking one has to be the fedora. Great color, feather in the brim, jaunty angle? Check, check and check.
As long as we’re going old school, maybe I should go bowler hat. A little old fashioned perhaps, but also a little cool, steampunk style.
Now we’re talking! Or maybe something like:
Hey, if it’s good enough for Indiana Jones, it’s good enough for me!
Or, of course, there’s always the ever popular…
So, gentle reader, what say you?
Wanted for Skullduggery
One morning I woke up and my victory mustache was gone. Its work was done, and it rode off into the sunset, like the Lone Ranger.
My brother’s ‘stache, on the other hand, decided to hang around. It has since morphed into something a little different:
So, if you see Snidely Whiplash skulking around tying women to train tracks, it’s probably just my brother. Please return him to me. In the meantime, don’t try to transport any money by train, and beware old-timey piano music. That is all.
V is for Victory ‘Stache
My brother showed up to my mom’s wedding with a ridiculous mustache. He is currently running an election campaign, and he explained that a few people had made a pact that they would not shave their mustaches until they achieved victory.
That’s when I realized that I had this amazing natural resource that I wasn’t using in any way. And why not put my upper lip towards a good cause, and help my brother win his election? Thus, another victory ‘stash was born.
(though of course, we should give props to the original victory ‘stash)
I have always been a big fan of ever-changing, ever-more-ridiculous facial hair. Sara, however, is definitely not a fan of facial hair. I tried to explain to her about a man’s right to choose what he wants to do with his body, but she’s not buying it. Ugh, women! So insensitive. They give you a wedding ring, and then they think they own you. Well, this man is more than just a piece of meat! I’m a piece of meat with a mustache!
And quite honestly, I’m just so tired of being the most handsome man in the room. It’s such as hassle; it’s practically a disability. So I just need to handicap myself a little bit, to bring it down to everyone else’s level.
So far, the best part of having the mustache is watching people flounder around with what to say. Sometimes they say something like, “Uh…wow!”, or sometimes they say nothing at all. In either case, I can just see this process going on behind the eyes like, “I know him to be a reasonable man, and yet…” It’s like they just can’t process it. I just get to imagine these little conversations in their head, like, “Should I laugh about it, or does he honestly think that looks good?” It’s so fantastic.
I guess I can spot the people who think that I think it looks good, because they say something like, “Hey, I like the mustache! It looks good!” Okay, now how am I supposed to take someone seriously after that? Either they really think it looks good, which is kind of silly, or they don’t, in which case they are just lying to me.
I think the problem is that my mustache is not yet ridiculous enough. When it reaches epic proportions, then people will be less inclined to think I’m just an idiot. Then it will be patently obvious that it looks awesome, and nobody will feel the need to mention it, or give me fake compliments. Because then all the compliments will only be real.
Anybody have a good mustache wax vendor?
I HAVE THE POWER
By the power of Greyskull...
In other look-alike news, my brother-in-law pointed out another eerie similarity…
Good Weekend / Bad Weekend
We had a really good weekend. And yet, we also had a really bad weekend. It’s funny though, because this bad stuff kept happening, but somehow it didn’t really ruin anything.
On Friday, I went outside to take the kids to the library, and I found out I had a really low tire. I have a compressor, so I put air in and went to the library, no problems. However, when I got home, as soon as I opened the car door, I could hear the air coming out. It was pretty loud, in fact, you could hear it all the way up to our back door. The tire had gotten wet from melting snow, so you could pinpoint the source of the leak pretty easily. However, we didn’t really need the car anymore on Friday, and on Saturday I got it repaired for $15. No real life disruption whatsoever!
Unfortunately, that was just the beginning of our trouble.
Saturday morning, Sara was using the microwave, and it was acting funny. As she demonstrated it for me and we played with it, starting and stopping it, the power to the microwave suddenly went out. This was followed shortly by the stove, and then later by the refrigerator.
What I know now is that something in the wall came loose, causing a small electrical fire (which I smelled at the time, but assumed was the microwave). Since the microwave was on, it fed back power to the stove, frying the control module and all the outlets on that circuit. The refrigerator is on a separate circuit, but they share a common ground (which is apparently common, and correct), which blew out the outlets on that circuit, but did not fry the refrigerator.
The whole thing is very frightening! From what the electrician said, it was just a random thing that could have happened anytime, anywhere. Luckily, there wasn’t too much damage. We have to pay for the electrical repair, a new microwave, and a repair for the stove. But it’s not as pricey or disruptive as a house fire, that’s for sure!
In fact, it didn’t even disrupt our plans for the day! We went ice skating.
Neither Sara and I are ice skaters. I think I’ve gone 2 or 3 times in my life, and I mostly remember them as being full of pain and humiliation. I was going for Evie’s sake, but I didn’t expect to enjoy it. As it turned out, I was something of a natural! I never fell a single time, and after the first time around the rink I was passing people, skating around people, doing triple lutzes, etc.
Nobody was more surprised about that than I was. I don’t know if it was just because I was trying it for the first time as an adult, or if it is because one time I had this awesome dream about ice skating and when I woke up I knew I could totally ice skate.
Even Sara ended up skating. She wasn’t even going to come, originally. After Oliver woke up from his nap, she ended up coming over to take some pictures. Finally, she ended up borrowing Ron’s skates, and we took a turn around the ice! I was really glad about that, it was a lot of fun. A mom even commented how nice it was to go skating with your sweetheart. Awww! And even despite that comment, I think Sara had a good time.
Now I’m kind of jazzed to go again. We live close to a skating rink that only costs $6 for skate rental (no charge for skating), so we’ve kind of been wasting the opportunity. Evie didn’t like it at first, but she went around a few times anyway and was disappointed when it was time to go home. Her two favorite parts were 1) the hot chocolate, and 2) in an attempt to make her laugh to keep her from getting frustrated, I called her “scissor legs” which she found endlessly hilarious.
The other big highlights of the weekend were teaching Evie how to play and then actually playing a rousing game of sardines around the house, and the most elaborate game of Wizard of Oz I could imagine. There were costumes and scene changes. Since my mom more or less knows the movie line by line, it was very specific. I have a bad feeling we will be reproducing this one for a long time to come (and with Evie, that means doing everything EXACTLY THE SAME as the first time).
So it was the worst weekend in a long time, in terms of bad things happening. But when I look back on the weekend, I only remember it being a good weekend! Not too shabby!
Can I pull off hipster glasses?
I need new glasses, and I’m thinking of getting something radically different. On the other hand, I’ve had similar glasses for so long, that I’m not sure if I can really wrap my head around something new. I usually go for very small glasses that sort of disappear into my face. So I ask you, Internet, can I pull off big, thick glasses?
More or less creepy?
As Sara pointed out, glasses like that typically go better with nicer clothes than hooded sweatshirts
So, what sayest thou?
The Children of the Night
The other day we got a picture of Oliver eating a puff…
OR DID WE?
Who will be his next victim?? I did say I suspected him of being a vampire…
Image Editing
My post the other day on Fences got me thinking of what downloaded software I have that I use a lot. As I said, there really aren’t a lot of things that I use a lot, but there is one program that I use quite a bit that I’ve never mentioned on here. And that is a disservice to you, my readers.
The program is Paint.NET, and it is an image editing software. Don’t let the “Paint” in the name fool you, it is more similar to Photoshop than to the Paint program that comes with Windows. Except that Paint.NET is free, and Photoshop costs about $700.
It takes a while to get used to, just like it would if you were new to Photoshop. There are a lot of crazy complicated features. But once you get your bearings, it is pretty easy to do some pretty advanced stuff. And I’ve always been able to find tutorials specific to Paint.NET about anything that I couldn’t figure out. There is a pretty active community, including people making many plugins, which you can install to get extra functionality.
So, before you go drop $700 on Photoshop, give Paint.NET a try. And if you’re happy with whatever image editing software you have, ignore this post.
Airbrushed Beauty
We’ve all seen a million pictures of celebrities without their makeup, etc. But even still, I think we are all a little fooled by the magic of modeling. Sure, anybody would look good with better wardrobe / hair / makeup, but they have to have a good base to work with, right? Well, kind of.
Check out some of these images to see how much they really change via “airbrushing” or photoshop. It is absolutely amazing. I’m not surprised that they do this stuff, but I figured it would just be a little touch up here or there. They practically draw a new picture.
Follow the link and then, once the image is loaded, mouse over it to see the original picture before touch ups. Also, there are a few little images on the right hand side that you can click on which will bring you a close-up of a particular area that was heavily modified.
Another good one is this bikini chick. Also (so as not to be called sexist)(again) here is a male model. There are a few more on the right of the page.
Link via PlanetDan
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