ThinkGeek, my love for you knows no bounds

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Most catalogs or emails from companies are an annoyance. Maybe you bought one item one time, and now you are forever cursed to receive correspondence from this company. Page after page of crap you don’t want. But every once in awhile, you have a company that is just totally on your wavelength. Every single item is awesome, and receiving a catalog or email from them puts a smile on your face. For me, ThinkGeek is that company (Probably less useful than Sara’s company, which is Boden, and actually sells useful clothes and stuff). Just when I think they’ve exhausted the total list of possible cool items, here’s two totally new items that are totally awesome.

Item 1 – The Panic Button Light Switch

Basically, it’s just a kit to replace a standard light switch with a mad-scientist-laboratory-emergency-cutoff-style giant red button.

It seems so obvious when you see it, doesn’t it? How much more dramatic would turning lights on and off become if you could slap a big red emergency button to perform the task? And you can even turn the button like a dial for a dimmer switch. A little too expensive to actually replace all the switches in your house maybe, but still a great idea.

Item 2 – Scizza Pizza Cutter

Okay, you can’t improve on something as simple and straightforward as the pizza cutter, right? Wrong.

Okay, at first it seems crazy, but bear with me on this one. If you think about a regular pizza cutter, it’s not exactly perfect. First off, we often bake our pizza in a cookie sheet, so I can never cut through the very edge of the crust because the wheel hits the lip of the pan. Then, I have to run the cutter back and forth to get all the way through, but I never quite hit the same line, so I just end up making multiple shallow cuts. So there is some room for improvement, and this design would probably handle those issues. Also, once the pizza finally is cut, I usually turn the pizza cutter sideways and use that as a spatula. So it was particularly brilliant to include a built in spatula on the bottom. Besides, with a regular cutting wheel, cutting on the pan must wear out the blade, right? Another problem solved. Brilliant, top to bottom.

(Side note, literally as I was writing this post, ThinkGeek just emailed me to tell me they had deposited bonus Geek Points into my account. Coincidence? Maybe. Creepy? For sure. I told you they were in my head, they even know what I’m typing!)

Dancin’ Kim

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Oooh, my friends. Have I got something for you. Allow me to introduce you to Totally Rad Dances with Dancin’ Kim. Prepare to learn the Thriller dance:

“So how completely awesome is the Thriller video? My friends and I are like totally obsessed. We’re all, ‘he totally topped the moonwalk’! It’s super cool.”

Oh. Em. Gee.

I was introduced to Dancin’ Kim through some unorthodox methods. It was actually linked to from a friend of mine’s website for his upcoming wedding. It was love at first sight, and I immediately went out and watched every Dancin’ Kim video I could find.

“Everybody at Danceteria is doing it. And you know who hangs out there. Madonna. So you know it’s super cool!”

I’m not really sure that Dancin’ Kim is really the right person to teach you how to pop and lock. Never more so than when she says the phrase, “This is the beat of the street with the freshest moves going down!” Yeeeah.

Oh, don’t stop there. By all means, learn how to dance like the Go Gos, how to do the Robot, and how to do the running man. You know you want to.

I think what my life is missing are Rad Friends. I mean, I have friends, but are they Rad Friends? Would I be able to call on them at a moment’s notice and have them submit to video taping some of the worst, most listless dancing the world has ever seen?

Okay, I know everybody in every decade always thinks this, but when we look back on today 30 years from now, it can’t look this ridiculous, right?

Standard India Restaurant

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Over the weekend, we checked out Standard India Restaurant.

We discovered this place by seeing it on Check Please, followed by seeing it come by on Groupon. We didn’t buy the Groupon, but I guess we should have, since we ended up here anyway.

Standard India specializes in something called thali, which involves stainless steel plates that are big enough to hold your plate as well as a huge series of small stainless steel bowls or cups. Even the naan comes in something that looks like a stainless steel bowling ball. In other words, there is a lot of stainless steel. You may recall the awesome Indian-style tiffin lunch boxes our kids got for Christmas:

Yeah, like that. As a side bonus, you can spin your plate like a Lazy Susan!

We got the Grand Buffet, and it was awesome. In addition to all the items on the buffet, this is still thali, so you get like 5 or 6 little bowls of things to try brought out to the table, as well as the regular stuff, like naan and samosas. In fact, I think I could have filled up on just the extra stuff they brought out, and not hit the buffet at all. But I didn’t, I hit the buffet. Twice. Everything was so good, with just the right amount of spice. Even the desert was perfect. We also ordered a mango lassi for the kids to share, and we could hardly get Oliver to set it down long enough to eat anything. The food was absolutely the star of the show.

We had heard that the place was kid-friendly, and I found that to be true, despite the fact that there were no other kids in the restaurant. The owners are SUPER friendly, and they really interacted with the kids. In fact, I’m pretty sure they gave us a table that was reserved, even though we didn’t have a reservation, because of the kids. They also only charged us $4 for Evie’s buffet and nothing for Oliver’s, which is a pretty good discount, considering the adult buffet was like $19.

$4 would be an absolute steal for the amount of food you get, and Evie paid back their kindness by refusing to try anything. Luckily we had Oliver, who more than made up for her. It all works out in the end; I like to think that Oliver had the $4 buffet and Evie was free. There really is no joy in taking Evie to a restaurant. She begs to go, but then she won’t try anything. And even if she did, she wouldn’t like it, because she is dead set against it from the outset. Since this happens every time, I’m not really sure what she is expecting to be different. Oh well, at least she ate her weight in naan.

If you are going, I would definitely get reservations. We didn’t have any and we got right in, however, that appeared to be the exception, not the rule. The place was packed, and even with reservations, most people had to wait. So I would go better safe than sorry on that front. Also, many or even most people were taking advantage of the BYOB, so feel free to do that as well.

I would be remiss to mention mention that it wasn’t all roses and kittens though. At the end we had to wait almost 20 minutes for our check. I’m inclined not to hold that against them, since they were pretty busy and for all I know it was a one time thing. But I felt pretty bad because there was a very large number of people waiting for tables, and here we were, sitting at the front table right in front of everybody, clearly done and clearly not leaving. The kids were restless as well, since we were done eating and it was past their bedtime. Eventually Sara had to take the kids and leave while I sat and waited. I never did figure out what the problem was, but it definitely left me with a bad taste in my mouth (not literally, believe me). However, like I said, these things happen sometimes, so who knows.

All in all, I would definitely recommend the place.

Shortlisted!

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Woo hoo! Got a notification that I was shortlisted from a great magazine today. First time, feels great! Hopefully my next post will be an acceptance!

::swoon::

Battlestar Galactica, Part II

/ Shane / 8 Comments

Well, we finally finished up watching Battlestar Galactica (you can see the first half review, here). Major spoilers to follow, so if you haven’t seen it and you think you might want to some day, I wouldn’t read any farther.

What a great show. I’m not saying every episode set the world on fire, but, top to bottom, one of the most consistently interesting and exciting shows I’ve ever had the privilege of watching.

The gimmick of not revealing the “final five” Cylons (the bad guys – robots who want to destroy the human race, but can be indistinguishable from people) until the end was great. Not only did it really keep us guessing, it also gave us endless hours of conversation ala LOST.

I thought they did a really good job with the Cylons. They seemed realistic to me. It was like they didn’t quite get it or understand what it was to be human. Close, but not quite, the way you you could mimic something and have all the appearance of getting it, but not actually getting it. I liked how they didn’t quite understand what love was, or the way they’d be so cruel but then if a human did one bad thing the’d be like, “You see! You see how awful and brutal you are!” I don’t know, it just seemed believable to me, like that’s the way super intelligent killer robots would act.

There were so many great characters. Boomer/Athena was (were) a great character(s). (Side note, as an actor you totally want to be a Cylon. You can’t die (a new copy of the robot comes online with all of your memories) and you can be in multiple places at the same time (more than one copy of the robot can be active at once). Never ending paycheck!) The “Eights” were sort of the most human, and were therefore the most caught between the two worlds and thus had the most interesting storylines. The three gentlemen I talked about last time (Admiral Adama, Colonel Tigh, and Brother Cavil) were all fantastic characters who were fantastically acted, right up until the end. Even some of the side characters got to have a story line or two.

You know who didn’t get to have a story line or two? The black Cylon! Seriously! Early on in the show, they introduced one non-Caucasian Cylon, and the he just disappeared. Every single other Cylon model had a major role to play in the series, but not the black one. No sir. He never even appeared in the background of the ship. I guess it was the back of the starship for that one.

I thought the end was pretty decent. It is comforting to know that, no matter how many times the cycle of humanity repeats itself, our crowning achievement is always “All Along the Watchtower”. I thought Roslin’s death was handled pretty well, which was probably tough, given that it had been building up basically since season 1.

However, I was deeply disappointed that Starbuck 2.0, as well as Baltar and Caprica 6’s hallucinations, turned out to be angels. I don’t know why this upset me so much, but I thought that part was really stupid. I also never really liked the character of Gaius Baltar. I felt like he could have been cool, a genius who unwittingly nearly destroyed the human race, but he never really made it for me. At the beginning he was too goofy to seem like a genius, and at the end, the whole sex-cult leader thing didn’t do it for me. We never once saw any evidence of the fact that he was a genius; whenever he did something smart it was completely by accident. He was also apparently irresistible to women, though I couldn’t give you a single reason why.

Anyway, as good as everybody predicted, and now we have to find something else to do with our time. Any suggestions?