On the frozen Smurf Turf...

Have to start off the day my mentioning the passing of that legendary pop culture figure, the “Time to Make the Donuts” guy. First of all, as someone who misses Dunkin Donuts (which are apparently unheard of in this part of the globe) every day, this is actually meaningful. Add up all the commercials I watched and I’ve probably spent days of my life listening to that catch phrase. However, I have to point out that this guy got full coverage on Yahoo and CNN as well as mentions on my local news, which is more than Jack Kilby got earlier this year. I mean, all Jack did was invent the integrated circuit and make the modern world possible. But I guess that just doesn’t cut it anymore. Sigh.

(Yes, I know the irony in that this is a pop culture blog above all else and I tend to rant about how horrible pop culture is. But the fact that no one teaches who invented the transistor or the microchip or the computer bugs me. If they teach that Fulton invented the steam engine and that Cyrus McCormick had something to do with a plow then why can’t we teach the modern inventions?)

My office is still empty. Maybe the company went out of business and no one told me. Or maybe this is the greatest episode of Punk’d ever. “We’ve hid the rest of the employees so now watch as he tries to do all the work of a major multinational corporation by himself.” Ok, maybe not the greatest episode of Punk’d but we’re talking about Ashton Kutcher here, it’s not like we’re starting from a high level of quality to begin with. Still, nice to have a few days where I can have my headphones on for no reason other than I like listening to music while I work. As opposed to the rest of the time, when they are mainly to keep me from overhearing every phone conversation for a three hundred foot radius.

Oh, and I can’t believe that my being at work made me miss the MPC Computers Bowl, or as it will always be in my mind, the Humanitarian Bowl. Yes, my favorite bowl game of all time (and not just because it played an epic role in my “every relationship can be turned into a football analogy” theory) was played this afternoon. When you think of college bowl games, you have to think of playing on a Wednesday afternoon on blue turf in Boise, Idaho in a bowl named after a general concept. I was never quite sure what the mascot of the Humanitarian Bowl was, probably Bono. I still can’t believe that they changed the name. It was the biggest travesty since we lost the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl. But we will always have the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl to look forward to…

(There are like two people on the planet who will actually get that last reference. The only way to get it is to have spent an insane amount of time in a bar in South Bend in the spring of 2003. And actually, if you did spend that much time in the bar you probably killed so many brain cells that you no longer have any long term memory. But will, on the other hand, have an urge at about 10:30 on a Wednesday night to search for a popcorn machine next to the Golden Tee game.)

Hey, one other note to close off the post. Battling the Current just went over 300 posts, which is unreal. For those of you who wonder about these sort of things, I’ve written pretty much all of the entries in my writer’s journal (discounting the stuff I stole from other sources, repeated from my old journals, or simply wrote from somewhere other than my laptop) and that has resulted in over 300 pages of material and about 160,000 words in the past year. That is nearly three novels worth of material. Admittedly, three novels with a theme of “Dude, weren’t Transformers cool?” but three novels nonetheless. Like I (and Stephen King) have always said, if you can’t produce quality always stun them with quantity.