Tuesday, April 22, 2008

I'm so sick of this, I could literally kill someone

Yesterday's Dinosaur Comics addressed our society's widespread inability to use the word "literally" correctly.  Today, in an interview on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Hillary Clinton described America as being "literally over the oil barrel" with regard to our energy policy. Et tu, Hillary?

One easy way to make the world a better place is never to misuse the word "literally" again.  If that proves too difficult, you can always play video games for charity.  What?  Huh??  Yeah!

FreeRice is a vocab-building game that will donate 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program every time you can pick the correct definition for a word.  The difficulty level moves up and down based on your answers, and there's no limit to how much rice you can donate.  Philanthropic logophiles rejoice!

What's that you say?  Big words are for bookworms and college professors and Noah Webster?  Perhaps you should try FreePoverty instead.  The game lists off cities and landmarks from around the world and you have to mark their locations on a world map.  The more accurate you are, the more clean water is donated to people living in extreme poverty.  Do you know where the country of Moldova is?  What about Namibia?  Learn how bad your geography is with FreePoverty!

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For all interested parties: about 15 pictures from our last party can be viewed in the below slideshow.  Everything labeled "vs. pinata" is a video; click on the thumbnails to see them.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Stories of the Road, issue 30: Invading Mennonite territory

Thanks to everyone who made our party a rousing success!  Pam's piñata was a smash hit (ha!) and we damn near drank the place dry.  Also, we raised $55 in donations for my autism walk this May!

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The party kicked off an insane 48 hours for me.  After going to bed around 5 AM on Sunday morning, I woke up at 9 to start working - as in work working.  I left the house at 2:30 Sunday afternoon to fly to Morris, MN, which is about a 3-hour drive west of Minneapolis.  After arriving at the hotel at midnight, I proceeded to pull my second-ever work-related all-nighter - the day after our party, mind you - and showed up at the customer's office at 6:30 Monday morning for a sales presentation.  Which, miraculously, I nailed.

After that I flew straight to Atlanta, where it was 70 degrees and sunny all week long.  One coworker was upgraded to convertible for free.  None of us know why.

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Somehow, Lucy's ukelele love song to me (which I also linked to in a previous blog) was one of the featured videos on YouTube's home page last week.  In a two-day stretch, the video pulled in 700,000 views, 5,000 comments, and was favorited about 4,000 times.  How do you follow that up?  With another awesome ukelele love song video, of course!  I am crushed with adorableness.

 

To try and prove that all of the talent in this relationship didn't end up on one side, I put a new song up on the Tiger Stance MySpace page.  You can download it there or listen to it here:


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