Shyzer.com

There’s nothing quite like having the house all to yourself, even if just for a day or two. I’d write more, but I’m too busy doing nothing.

I just realized I never posted about my free laptop that I got recently. I could rehash over what’s already been said, but I’ll just link to the post I made on HIF about it instead (yet another reason for you people to read HIF daily!) and leave it at this: I freaking love it. I can sit outside and surf the web, I can hold 10 trilion gigs worth of files (okay, maybe not that much, but it seems like it), and I can unplug myself from the wall outlet and not be afraid that the battery will die within 18 seconds. All in all, I can’t complain and getting it in the mail might possible be the highlight of my summer so far.

Right around the time where started losing all inspiration to update Shyzer, I remember seeing a short video of a mystery man catching Heather from Dooce and in a hotel lobby and staging an impromptu interview. Apparently I saved said video, which should come as no shock to anybody since I am Lord Packrat, King of Saving Random Videos, Funny Pictures, and Other Useless Shit. As I went through My Video folder the other day, I stumbled across the clip and watched it yet again. In it, Heather shares the following two tips:

My secret is trying to find a story in the most mundane of events and it’s a challenge but it’s also an extremely fulfilling type of artistry, I think.

Truer words have never been spoken.

I think that’s why I’ve enjoyed working on Hey, It’s Free so much since I opened it in March. Initially, I had planned on making the site a farm from which I could get referrals to my accounts such as FreeIpods.com and the such. But once I realized that was going to be un-Godly boring and bland, I just started posting links to free items every few hours.

Before I knew it, I started trying to find something funny in each item, either in making fun of myself for wanting the freebie, making fun of others for wanting it, or making fun of the freebie itself. It grew to be a challenge; trying to come up with two or three liners multiple times a day on random items. I personally still think I suck at it, but not only has the traffic grown almost each week, but the response has been amazing. I get almost daily comments and e-mails from people who think I’m hilarious and it both baffles and humbles me.

Every time I get one, I want to say, “Me? Funny? Na, I’m not funny, you’re got it all wrong. These people are funny, check out this or this or this blog…I’m just a guy trying to show you where you can get free dog pooper scoopers and coupons for small diet cokes.”

Shyzer never was the pinnacle of blogs. It was a blast for a while, but somewhere along the way it became a chore. I started to loath the thought of trying to pluck a story out of my daily events and it showed, both in terms of the quality and frequency of my updating here. This is nothing new, as it’s happened before to me with Shyzer. But what Hey, It’s Free has done is remind me how enjoyable running a website can be.

Just as I’ve discovered I enjoy trying to find the funny in promotional crap companies give away, finding a story in my everyday life has become fun again. And that, my friends, feels wonderful.

I think what’s scariest about the situation in the Middle East is that I agree with President Bush. By now, everybody’s heard President Bush speak candidly about his thoughts on the whole situation and while most of the media attention has been focused upon his usage of the word “shit,” little has been said about the message President Bush was trying to convey. Which I completely don’t understand. Here is a grown man, talking in what he thought was a private conversation to a trusted friend and ally, and we’re shocked he used an expletive in regard to a situation that, in reality, is shitty? There are times I feel this country is far too prude and childish - watching people gasp and scream bloody murder over a four letter word is such a time. But I digress.

You can count the number of times I’ve agreed with President Bush on your right hand. In fact, my grandfather, who lost a few fingers in an old mill accident, can still count the times on his hand. And yet, for all those out there keeping count, it’s time to extend a finger. It’s no secret that President Bush’s approach to foreign policy is “kick ass and take names later.” And while that doesn’t work in most cases, it’s certainly a better approach than “kick ass against the wrong people and take names later,” which is exactly what Israel is doing. They’re causing a scene for no reason (I’m looking at the bigger picture here, not at the 2 kidnapped Israeli soldiers) and which in turn will only hurt their cause.

Lebanon is a pawn. It has been for decades now and any low-level State Department diplomat can tell you that. This is no secret. And yet the entire world seems to turn a blind eye and accept Israel turning Lebanon into a scapegoat and in exchange the world gets to sleep easier at night while Israel ignores Syria. Sure, it’s true that Hezbollah was formed and currently resides in Lebanon, but its true backing comes from Syria. Weapons, money, soldiers, you name it, Syria hooks them up with it. One could even argue the Lebanese government has little power over Hezbollah due to Hezbollah’s increasing political force, as well as their high level of local support since it was Hezbollah and not the government who was building schools, hospitals, and roads. All thanks to Syrian support and money. Although, it might be safe to bet that some of that support will erode in the near future since all those schools, hospitals, and roads are in flames now, but that’s beside the point.

The point is, as Israel bombs the hell out of Lebanon, they are only hurting themselves and the Lebanese people. Sure, they might slam a few Hezbollah buildings and headquarters, but this is just like fighting the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. You can’t eradicate them with long range missiles. Hell, we’ve been in Afghanistan for almost five years now and we still don’t have anywhere near complete control over the country.

You can’t wipe out a terror cell with bombs and missiles. You can’t even do it through unilateral occupation (hi there, Iraq!) You attack the center of the problem, Syria, and to make sure it doesn’t succumb to the same fate as Iraq, you get the rest of the world behind you and show the Syrian government that they are so outnumbered, they haven’t a chance.

If we take diplomacy off the table (which with President Bush is almost a given, at least with the old and true President Bush, the one we heard on the microphone talking to Blair), then the only way to do it is to get a global backing and wipe out the source.

And that’s what President Bush and Tony Blair suggested here. Blair takes the diplomatic route in saying that if the entire world united, they could pressure Israel to stop in a matter of minutes. And President Bush takes this conclusion a step further in the form of, if Israel truly meant to rid themselves of Hezbollah, they then use this global pressure and flip it into support for attacking the true root of the problem and hit Syria. Israel wins in destroying an enemy, Lebanon wins in no longer being bombed, and the world wins by removing one of the most dangerous nations from the oh-so-fun equation of “Oh God, Oh God, what crazy nation might kill us all?”

Israel has done a fantastic job of playing the Holier-than-thou maiden in distress role over the past 40 years, but that’s for another post. What’s clear now, though, is that A) Israel is helping nothing in the current situation and has other alternatives that if taken would produce a much better result, B) Syria is playing a wonderful game of poker, C) The rest of the world seems okay with the fact that Israel is beating Lebanon senselessly, and D) President Bush and I are in the same frame of mind.

I think I need a drink.

I’ll be honest; this laptop I got for free has been a Godsend. The built-in wireless Internet in addition to the neighbor’s unsecured channel (and now, our own channel, cleverly titled Shyzer) has equaled me being able to sit outside in the sun and type/chat/surf until my little heart’s content.

Of course, that was before the record breaking 429 F heat wave swept through the area, causing pavements to sizzle, plant life to shrivel, and my own body to boil and burst after a mere 12 seconds of direct sunlight. I like to say I’m in the wrong era and should have been born 400 years in either direction, but damn if my ancestors didn’t get screwed over by not having AC.

As for my predecessors in the future…well, I’m sure that by 2406, we’ll have invented some sort of ray gun that zaps those cute little umbrellas in tropical drinks and enlarges them into global heat shields. I figure the inspiration for such a device will come from either American’s lazy desire not to have to put on sunscreen anymore because it’s too much of a hassle or because the o-zone will have become only a brief paragraph in their history books, like the dodo bird, Democrats, or Lebanon.

Whichever comes first.

I’m playing around with a few new ideas for websites (I know, shocker, me starting yet another project I’ll only half ass complete!) and also trying to figure out how well this YouTube integration actually works. When I went to upload a random video, I remembered I had promised Fellner that I’d send him this clip from the Colbert Report where Stephen interviewed the Congresswoman from Colorado’s first district. If that wasn’t already enough reason to watch it, the fact that he tries to get her to join the Mile High club should push you over the edge. Anyways, here it is.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of extraordinary commercials. That’s right, those little 30 and 60 second blurbs that most people hate and skip straight through are at times small drops of Heaven for me. I say “at times” because truly it often feels as if I’m searching for the proverbial diamond in the rough. I can’t count how many local car dealership ads and childish soft drink commercials I’ve sat through with the hopes that maybe, just maybe, the next commercial to air will be one that I’ll fall in love with and race to the computer to download. It’s not often enough that I find a great commercial, mainly due to the fact that I don’t really watch that much television in the first place. But trust me, when I do, it brings immense joy into my life.

If a company spends money on an ad campaign, one would assume that their main goal is for as many people to see the ad, correct? We can take that assumption a step further and find that there are certain advertising agencies that are known for producing better commercials than your garden variety, run of the mill ads. These advertising agencies might have a vast portfolio of memorable ad campaigns that were not only wildly successful, but in turn massively profitable. Therefore, I’m guessing that these advertising agencies would charge a higher fee for developing and producing a series of ads and such, if a company hired them, they would expect a high quality ad in exchange for the high price tag.

Which leads me to a question that I’ve yet to find a reasonable, or even competent, answer to. Why is it that almost every company out there fails to make their ads readily available and easily accessible for their consumers on the Internet?

How much more dense can these companies get? They’ve shelled out high dollar for an ad campaign, they’ve managed to land a series of ads that don’t make people want to immediately flip to the next channel, and they now have a base of consumers who are actively seeking out these ads just so they can watch them repeatedly and share them with others. So why is it that whenever I see one of these types of commercials, I’m forced to search countless forums and Google result pages in an effort to find a video copy?

Whether it’s by myself or someone else, the ad will inevitably be found either buried on the companies website on some remote server or directly ripped from a TiVO feed and posted to the web. To make matters worse, half of the time when the commercial is actually found, it’s usually encoded in such a manner that it can’t readily spread. Most of the time this means that the video is encoded in flash format and embedded in the webpage, which means a nerd like myself is going to have to figure out a why to rip it off the page and encode it into something more easily transferred. Hell, half of the time I give up and shell out a few bucks for a month subscription to Ad-Rag and then rip it straight from their server…

And don’t even get me started if all I wanted in the first place was the musical score!

What is the point of this? Why spend time and money on an ad campaign and then execute it so poorly that your consumers who enjoyed it are prevented from viewing it again! I’ll admit there are some companies, such as Apple, who at least make it easy to find and view their latest commercials. But even then, you can’t download the commercial or soundtrack unless you view the source, find the code, load only it, and then save page as. And frankly, I think it’d be a lot easier to simply hit a “download” button instead.

So listen here all you Fortune 500 companies out there. First, stop making shitty commercials. Make them funny. Make them memorable. And then make them available for download.

Is it really that hard of a concept to grasp in this day and age?

I hate basketball. I usually can’t stomach watching or playing basketball for more than 20 seconds at a time. Although, to be fair, I’m a huge fan of Mark Cuban and if there’s anything that will get me to watch a game, it’s him. Pro sports in general need more owners like him. You can argue whether his heart on the sleeve type attitude is good or bad for the sport or whether he’s vastly annoying or not, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Dallas Mavericks fan (or simply any basketball fan for that matter) who didn’t like him. Why? Because he actually cares about his team and of all things, wants to win and make the league better while he’s at it. You don’t think fans of the Minnesota Twins or Oakland A’s would kill to have an owner who actually wanted to win and was willing to spend in order to do so? Exactly.

Hockey is alright. I love watching Olympic hockey, where the rinks are wider and the play is much more fluid, but for the most part I haven’t been a fan of American hockey for the better part of the past eight years. Soccer? Ok, I’ll admit, I’m a big fan. Maybe it was all the years of playing soccer as a kid or maybe it was watching Brandy Chastain strip on the field after making her shot against the Chinese, but somewhere along the line I fell in love with watching a good game of soccer. And I think we all know my thoughts and feelings on baseball.

So with that said, how in the hell did June 2006 morph into one of the best all around months for sports?

Seriously, I can’t think of another month where five major sporting events took place that I was fully invested in. If I liked golf, that number could have been six, but who in their right mind can watch a bunch of guys play golf?

Six games of the basketball finals? I watched each one. Seven Stanly Cup finals games? Ditto. World Cup? College World Series? Mariners baseball? I haven’t missed a beat.

The basketball finals were great to watch simply because I didn’t know Gary Payton was still in the league on Miami’s roster. I remember back in 1996 when Payton led the SuperSonics to the finals against Jordan and trust me, that feat alone almost sucked me into the basketball world. Needless to say, I was damn happy to finally see him win a ring this year. As for hockey, man oh man was that a good series. I found it oddly pleasing that the Carolina’s first pro championship came in hockey. That’s right, in a place where football, baseball, and basketball rule the land and where a grand total of 19 people have ever played ice hockey, the freaking Carolina Hurricanes are the first to bring home a championship. Suck on that, Panthers.

Despite America’s performance, the World Cup’s been a beauty to watch. Sure, the usual suspects are the only teams remaining and it isn’t over yet, but up to now anybody who’s watched a game can’t admit it hasn’t been entertaining. Okay, I take that back, there are plenty of Americans who will whine it’s been boring, but they just don’t get the sport. The College World Series was also great, even if the Gamecocks were eliminated far too early. I started cheering for Oregon State when I saw the stat flash across the screen that the school’s only other championship came back in the 1970s in the oh-so riveting sport of Cross Country. Hell, I ran CC for a few years and even I would be disappointed if that was my school’s only championship. Luckily for those Beavers, however, they beat UNC in resounding fashion to claim the title.

But to be completely honest, the best event of all has been the entire past month of Seattle Mariners’ baseball. On May 30th they were 22-32. Now? 40-39, an improvement of eleven games. I’ll be the first to admit it might not last and that on July 29th, I might be lamenting of what could have been. But the pure fact that they are currently only two games out of first place and that I haven’t seen the Mariners win like this in over three years translates into me watching and enjoying every damn game recently. MLB.tv is a great asset in moments like these and I would like to take this time to personally thank the NL West for all the hospitality they’ve shown the Mariners over the course of this season. It’s not every year an entire division rolls over and plays dead just so Seattle can get some much needed wins. God, if you’re listening, I’ll order a few more 17-7 months for the Mariners, if you don’t mind.

And with that, tonight’s first pitch was four minutes ago and I’ll be damned if I’m missing more Mariners baseball. Adios folks.

As if I wasn’t already feeling like the loser who got left behind at the station by the Life Train, news like this starts to trickle in. First there was Stan’s announcement of engagement a month or so ago, which was pretty big news and exciting for all to hear. But just like the old days of Stoobela, Angela one upped him yet again with her announcement of becoming a baby oven. All of this is fantastic news, especially if it helps people forget I’m a 23 year old college graduate living with his family. In fact, if I want any thunder for myself, it looks like I’ll need to find a chick, knock her up, and then march her down the isle before the little devil pops out.

Seriously though, congrats you two. Y’all deserve it and I couldn’t be happier for either of y’all.

Nothing pleases me more than those random moments in life where you unexpectedly discover something grand and amazing. Whether it be picking the one random bathroom stall where a $10 bill is lying, or having a friend call you up and say he’s got an extra ticket to the ball game tonight, or looking out your window on a random Tuesday and noticing that the hottest chick in the world is in the process of moving into the house across the street. About a week ago, such an event occurred to me. Julianne asked if I wanted to watch The Chronicles of Narnia with her and since I can rarely say no to her, we plopped in front of the TV with a big bowl of popcorn and stuck the DVD in. As the credits began to roll 9 hours later, Juls and I began to talk about what we thought of the movie, but just as we got going we both stopped and turned back to the screen, mesmerized. We sat silent for a minute listening to the song that was playing before it finally gave way to some crappy Alanis Morissette tune. Within 10 minutes I’d Google’d the song, found the artist, and “obtained” it.

I must have listened to that song 100 times within the next 48 hours. Ok, according to my iPod, it was actually only 54. Still, you get my point. But the story doesn’t end there, folks. As I listened to the song, I knew there was something eerily familiar about it. The song was by an artist named Imogen Heap, but the more I listened to it, the more it sounded like Frou Frou. Many of you probably have no idea who Frou Frou is, but back in 2004 one of their songs was not only in the movie Garden State, but was also the song used in all the previews and commercials. In fact, one their songs, Hear Me Out*, is prominently featured in the new I-swear-it’s-coming-one-of-these-days-even-though-I’ve-worked-on-it-for-over-three-years-now section on Shyzer known as Shlyircs. The only reason I tell you any of this is because finally it dawned on me that “Imogen Heap was simply the chick from Frou Frou,” which clearly meant she was now flying solo and hence there was a whole new CD out there just waiting for me to devour.

It was as if I’d picked up that $10 bill only to notice there was an extra zero on the end of all the tens, or the spare ticket my buddy had for the game was a box seat, or as I watched the hot chick move in, I spotted no wedding ring. And yet the story doesn’t even end there.

About a year ago, Blink 182 announced they were going on hiatus, which we all know is the secret word for “breaking up never to return and make new music.” Now, while this may have pleased some people, it was semi-tragic to those of us who loved Blink. Their music wasn’t just soothing; it was a staple in my development and upbringing. In fact, if I were forced to pick my favorite band, Blink would give Collective Soul a run for their money. But to be honest, I wasn’t that worried. Back in 2003, two of the members of Blink branched off on a little side project called Box Car Racer, which was brilliant (and again, even more prominently featured on Shlyrics than Frou Frou.) I held out hope that with Blink on hiatus, they both might return to Box Car and simply take that up full time. But sadly, I read last July that each and every member of Box Car had no desire to return, stating it had simply been a fun little band they had no desire of growing. And with that, I gave up all hope of hearing any new Blink music.

And then three nights ago Clay fell asleep with the TV still on and I randomly turned off my iPod exactly at the right moment. Suddenly, that $100 bill had become $1000. Those box seats were for game 7 of the World Series. The hot chick was not only single, but heavily attracted to me.

As soon as I switched my iPod off and got up to do the same to the TV, I froze. We all know the only time MTV plays music videos is between 1 and 4 AM and seeing as how I was the only person still awake in the house, it’s safe the say it was right around that time frame. It didn’t even take me 10 seconds to identify the voice coming from the TV. It was Tom DeLonge, the singer from Box Car, the singer from Blink. It turns out the reason he had no desire to grow Box Car was simply because he wanted to start yet another bad, one that was bigger and better. And yet as I listened to their music, in my mind, I was listening to a new Blink CD yet again, albeit one that was a little more advanced and mature, both in lyrics and sound. Thankfully the torrents were running well that night and within minutes, I had 12 songs on my desktop by Angels & Airwaves and I must say, I don’t think I’ll be deleting a single one of them.*

It’s not every day that you find $1000 on the floor. Or get free box seats to the World Series. Or get to take a smoking hot neighbor out for dinner. Or in this case, discover some of the best songs since Coldplay’s X & Y album. But in each and every case, you learn to appreciate the random event and thank your deity of choice for delivering such a special treat.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to jam.

* - AVA and Hear Me Out can now be heard on Shyzer Radio