I Can’t Type Correctly ‘Cuz I’ve Got Blisters on My Fingers

Was listening to Metroid Prime’s soundtrack earlier today, and noticed something interesting…

This just took “bigger than Jesus” to a whole new level.

Now, it’s not listed this way on the actual tracklist for the soundtrack. Which is probably a good thing.
But apparently on my copy, somebody messed something up…

What happens when I get up before noon on Saturdays...

     It's not very often that I have to wake up before noon on Saturdays, but when I woke up this morning I decided to check my email. I saw an email from Zen Magnets as I ordered some magnets from them yesterday, and I wanted to know about how long it would be before they arrived. It turns out they should be here next week (yay!) however, I also found this included in the email, and for this Zen Magnets will have my eternal respect (not that they didn't already)...

     "After a rigorous 4 step process of verifying the quality and consistency of each and every magnet, we donned silk gloves and placed it into a sacred padded envelope made of magic and lined with Unicorn fur, sealed the envelope with an adhesive made from strands of Gypsy hair, and wrapped the whole thing in a snazzy looking faux gold leaf paper, with elm leaf inlay from Costco. Unfortunately, by the time it gets to you, all of that fancy stuff will likely have been picked clean by the greedy postal service employees. Please don't be surprised to see just a plain padded envelope."


     After laughing at that for a few minutes, I went upstairs to eat some breakfast. I poured myself a bowl of Raisin Bran because I am a boring person who likes Raisin Bran. However on the back of this particular cereal box, they were advertising for the new version of Raisin Bran; they decided to add cinnamon and almonds to it. But their advertising just made me laugh, it said, "We've got cinnamon by the spoonful". Now I don't know what the advertising people at Kellogg were thinking, but a spoonful of cinnamon is not exactly what I'd call tasty. As a matter of fact, it's pretty much impossible to eat a spoonful of cinnamon. However, I still got a few laughs out of this one, and thankfully no milk or cereal exited my body through my nose. Sadly, this happens to me quite a bit, especially if Brandon is around...

    Thank you Zen Magnets and Raisin Bran for making my morning enjoyable.

My Grandpa Survived the Hunger Games

Yeah. So. The other day, I was talking to my grandpa. He was telling me about his years in school. Mostly his Junior and Senior years. Apparently, his school had the Hunger Games. Just kidding. But it sounds pretty brutal to me. Some schools do special end of the year things. His did the Junior vs Senior Games (I don’t know the actual title, but it sounds good to me). The whole school is let out early for these events that pit the Juniors against the Seniors. To get an idea of the circumstances, he told me that when a Junior went to the movies, he had to take half of the Junior class for protection. Otherwise the seniors would beat them up. Harsh. No wonder we are weak today! Now we take our cell phones and iPods while our elders took their knives!

You head for the hills when they come out with their Nokias.
Anyway, he gave me a few examples of games they played. First off: Tug o’ War. Nothing sounds off about that, right? Just rival classes having some good ol’ fashioned fun? Wrong. This wasn’t any old kind of tug o’ war. Instead of just having a middle line to cross, they had the fire department there spraying water from a hose at high pressure. Being pulled to the middle was essentially torture. He told me of the time when he was a senior, they pulled a junior into the sights of the hose and just held him there. Eventually, that Junior switched sides to pull another junior in: Traitor!
Another wonderful SCHOOL SANCTIONED game was Bridge Crossing. Take a look at the wonderful picture.

The goal was to climb up one pole, shimmy across the middle, then go down the other pole to get to the other side. Oh. And there was a senior starting from one side, and a junior starting from the other side. Yup. That means only one can be the winner. They each got a small burlap sack filled with saw-dust to knock the other person off of the pole. I’d like to think that there was just dirt, grass, maybe even a pad under the pole, but knowing how things went back then, it was probably spikes.
Finally, they had something that more closely resembled the Hunger Games. There was just a ring drawn out with saw-dust filled sacks, and the contestants were in the ring, and the last one standing wins! He said there was 10-15 people in the ring. They could wrestle them out, no punching (though my grandpa said that most people just wanted to duke it out), and they had (you guessed it) sacks with sawdust to beat each other with.
He gave a great tale of how he lasted as long as he could in there (as a junior) but to no avail.
From this I learned that my grandpa was a victor, that schools back then were pretty cool, and that there must have been a surplus of sawdust. Ask your grandparents about any of their school stories!

How to Build a Picnic Table

(In a discussion where The Zelda Email Blog was mentioned)

A dramatic one, that is.
And thus, it begins!