monkey nonsense

so i played kemps last night for the first time in a long time.  i love kemps!!  it’s one of my all time favorite games.  it’s really simple and easy to learn.

everyone starts out with 4 cards.  the object of the game is to get 4 of a kind and then somehow signal to your partner that you have 4 of a kind without tipping your hand to anyone else.  your team wins if one of you has 4 of a kind and the other partner successfully acknowledges it first by yelling “kemps!”  another team can win if they notice your team signalling and yells “cut!” (actually, the way we played as kids was to yell “schemps” but that’s ’cause we forgot what it was we were supposed to yell) the game starts when everyone turns over the “pot card” (cards in the middle that everyone is going for to complete their 4 of a kind).  with the scramble to get cards, things start to get hectic.  so it’s easy to toss in a signal somewhere in there.

the way my high school friends and chinese school friends play, even MORE confusion occurs because everyone is trying to give fake signals to get fake calls of “cut!”  some of my all-time favorite kemps moments involve ridiculous signals (both fake and real) like knocking the card out of the person to the right, abruptly standing up and looking around, belching outloud a certain number of times, running to the bathroom in the middle of the game, and slapping the person next to you on the back.

last night, people seemed to be more subdued than my high school/chinese school friends so signals were a lot more discrete.  it was a different way to play that i was not used to (i think i confused the crap out of the people sitting next to me by rubbing their heads randomly in the middle of the game… hey!  at least it threw them off from picking cards).  because everything was less outrageous, it was pretty interesting and hard to guess when people had kemps.  still a lot of fun.  and that’s the best part of kemps.  the game changes depending on the people playing.

who wants to play?!!

NY Times had an article (about a year ago, i just stumbled upon it) about my next door neighbor!! she is a student at yale and they interviewed her about what she wants to do. i think some people may view it as kind of anti-feminist because she wants to go to law school but afterwards, focus more on her family. i actually don’t see that as anti-feminist because she isn’t limiting herself. she isn’t majoring in home economics and wanting to marry and have kids right out of college. it’s clear she’s a highly motivated and intelligent woman who has ambitions and goals she wants to accomplish. just because she includes family in her plans doesn’t mean she’s selling herself short. in fact, i think the fact that she wants to go to law school, become a lawyer AND have a family makes her all the more ambitious. she wants to accomplish all that in less than 10 years (say she wants to have kids around 30). it’ll be all the more impressive when she accomplishes that.

most importantly, the NY times article had a picture of her and her mom (her mom’s nice too! my parents really like their entire family. my dad usually races to mow the lawn between our two houses before mr. lechner because mr. lechner, very generously, always mows all the lawn, including the portion that is ours.) sitting on their front porch. and in the background is my good ole house! yay brick front!! and green shutters! i love my house

hahahha, jean claude van damme when he was a kid looked like the kid from that old christmas movie?  i’ve never watched that movie from start to end, but it’s always on during the holiday season so i’ve seen bits and parts.  anyhoo, he looks kind of dorky yet strangely, he bears a striking resemblance to his future self…
more celebrity kid pictures here

i took french for three years in middle/high school. i was terrible at it. my teacher actually told me that i had one of the worst french accents she had ever taught. i remember reading all the french basically as english, pronouncing every S i saw (apparently, a lot of them should’ve been silent… who knew??) i think the only things i can still remember saying in french is where is the bathroom (ou est la w.c.? where w.c. is pronounced “do-blah-vay-say”) and shoot, i forgot how to say may i sharpen my pencil…. but i know mon crayon is somewhere in there.

so when tim (my source for amusing online videos… for example – the fun of having a younger brother) sent me this video, i was thoroughly confused! i knew my french was really bad… but i thought it was a good enough to understand the video. i watched over and over again and the only thing i understood in the video was la salle de bain (another way to say bathroom!) and bibliotheque (library) which wasn’t exactly what they were captioning…

baaaaaaaaah in any case, this commercial is awesome! and bill… great french! i especially like “gem apple bill”… spoken like a true frenchman!

so this weekend was the “annual” (not really ’cause we missed 2006 and made up for it by going in january 2007) trip to NC!

roundtrip ticket to NC – $128.60
parking fee at airport – $30
roundtrip driving (in the ice/snow on the way back) to BWI so i could fly Southwest – 2+ hours
(alternatively, a 4 hour drive down after being delayed at the dealership for several hours, but 6+ hour drive in the snow back by Larry and Angela)
listening to mariam sing while driving – priceless

so apparently the only two songs on the radio in NC is fergilicious by fergie and what goes around by justin timberlake. really. only those two songs. every time we got in the car and turned on the radio, it would be one of those two songs. after attempting to decipher the lyrics to the songs over mariam loudly singing her made up lyrics… i finally looked up the tricky lyrics to fergilious and what goes around…

fergie is, in fact, trying to spell tasty and delicious as we suspected in the car. (we’re not very good verbal spellers and it doesn’t help when mariam just starts to recite the alphabet after D…)

T to the A to the S T E Y girl you tasty, T to the A to the S T E Y girl you tasty
D to the E to the L I C I O U S, to the D to the E to the, to the, to the, hit it Fergie

apparently fergie isn’t very good at verbally spelling either…. tastey? we figured she was just elongating the T so that it would fit the rhythm of the song. fergie also counts similarly to mariam – “And they be lining down the block just to watch what I got (four, tres, two, uno)”… except mariam is more “A… B… C… 4″

and in what goes around, justin timberlake is actually saying:

What goes around, goes around, goes around
Comes all the way back around
What goes around, goes around, goes around
Comes all the way back around
What goes around, goes around, goes around
Comes all the way back around
What goes around, goes around, goes around
Comes all the way back around

very different than what angela or mariam were saying…

lots of fun this weekend i almost got over my fear of dogs. almost.  however, mariam still scares me.

so derek jeter and jessica biel have been in the news lately, one of the latest celebrity/sports couples. i was reading talida’s star magazine (quality, i know) when i saw an article about derek and jessica. unfortunately, i haven’t been able to find an online version of the article so i’ll just quote some key parts here:

Is the two-month-long romance between Jessica Biel, 24, and Yankees captain Derek Jeter, 32, already going to the dogs? Yes, if… Tina… has anything to do with it! … Despite the shortstop’s efforts to woo Tina…, … It’s gotten so bad that Jessica’s afraid to leave the two alone together!

hahaha i’ve basically removed any references to tina as jessica’s pit bull dog! the real article is about how jessica’s pit bull (named tina), despite being well trained and despite derek jeter’s attempt at bringing doggie biscuits, still seems to dislike something about him to the point that jessica doesn’t know what to do… i guess the article is not 100% accurate…

note: this post only makes sense if you know one of my roommates (also named tina, but not a pit bull) is obsessed with derek jeter.

cnn had an article about radical vs. moderate muslims. they entitled it Radical Muslim: We drink our enemies’ blood. all i could think of was…. WARNING: 24 SPOILER!!!! well, jack bauer eats our enemies!

in any case, i was wondering whether middle eastern people get tired of playing the bad guys every season (i’ve watched) of 24. doesn’t it feel like we’re constantly picking on them since they’re always the villians. would the show be less interesting if the bad person was american or canadian or british? has there been a season where there’s been a non-middle eastern villian? (i haven’t watched all seasons of 24)

i would find a season of 24 where the villian is canadian to be amusing tho i may be in the minority here…

edit: oops, i have a short term memory.  i guess last season’s villians weren’t middle eastern, but 2 of the 3 seasons i’ve watched have been!

previously, i posted about my parents and technology. today, i received an email from my dad:

							Reply to all Forward Print Add victor to Contacts list Delete this message Report phishing Show original Message text garbled?
	to			*******@yblcpa.com, *******@hotmail.com, *******@gmail.com
	date			Jan 18, 2007 2:49 PM
	subject			Macy’s
	mailed-by			hotmail.com

Macy’s has a big sale now thru Sunday…

Daddy

warning: subjects discussed in this post may disgust you.

one of my biggest fears in the world was discolored feces. i think it started when i was in 3rd grade and I first started taking medicine. The pills contained a warning sticker saying “May cause discoloration of the feces.” That freaked me out… like I’m going to have neon poopies?? So I was pretty afraid to eat too many of the pills. Later on, as the doctor checked up less frequently, I began to worry that I would OD and have neon poopies.

It was freshmen year in college when I think the topic of fears came up… I finally told some people of my fear of discolored feces. One of the people I told, in an attempt to reassure me that discolored feces was not that big of a deal, told me about this story of her friend and her. They were Pitt students who went to a Pitt pep rally/festivity of some sort. At the festivity, they decided to eat some “Pitt ice cream” – basically some ice cream that was dark, navy blue and yellow (Pitt’s color). It was a couple of days later, when she digested the ice cream and went uh… #2, she saw her poopies were blue-ish green. At first she wasn’t sure where it was from but a couple of days later, her friend worked up the nerve to ask her if she had experienced something weird with her poopies that she realized it was some side effect from the navy blue ice cream. BAH!

I think after hearing her story of blue poopies, I kind of figured it was ok to have discolored feces. I guess I always thought “discoloration” was something freaky like neon yellow or pink (though admittedly, bright blue poopies are kind of freaky too). And I also learned that it’s just because your body is flushing out the excess that causes the color changes (? right??)

So I got over my fear of discolored feces! And the best part of getting over it is now I pretty much ALWAYS get blue italian ice/candy which results in a lot of excess blue dye in my system without being afraid!

Like this past weekend, I got a blue raspberry italian ice two days in a row!

my halogen has 2 settings- low and high. you have to turn once (from off) to get low, then again to get to high. i usually set it to high ’cause i like brightness. it’s a pretty bright halogen…. it lit up my entire basement room at harleyford.

it’s approaching 3 years old now. i don’t know the life expectancy of halogens, but it’s starting to get flaky on me. the knob is cheaply made so often times, it’ll just pop off. i think perhaps because the knob no longer stays on all the time, the contact (or whatever it is it needs to switch on… i don’t know much of the anatomy of a halogen either) is hit or miss now. i know i replaced the lightbulb once… i’m not sure if it’s the lightbulb’s problem then.

but basically, if i turn the switch on to high, it still won’t turn on. no flicker, no nothing. so i usually turn the knob a few more times, unsure of the state of the light. (did i inadvertantly turn it off with one too many turns of the knob? is it only on low?) inevitably, the light will start to make static noise and eventually flicker on. but not for a few minutes… 5-10 minutes. so now i just sit in the dark, waiting for it to flicker on. some times it’s quicker than others…. some times, i have to turn on my bathroom light for a bit of light while i wait.

today, i waited a good 10 minutes. i even went to shower. it still did not come on. especially after it did not come on during my shower, i thought perhaps i had not turned it to the right setting, so i gave it a few more turns and waited in the dark. nothing. i was sad my ole faithful halogen was finally broken.

bah! then i noticed the wall switch was off. no power to the halogen! i’m smrt like that.

… or maybe it’s ’cause i woke up early today!  ’cause i clearly wasn’t awake enough to notice i put body wash in my hair instead of shampoo