I like CVS. The one near my new apartment even has an Rx counter with a drive-thru window. Like most any Angeleno, I feel instant affection for any merchant that allows me to patronize their store without exiting my car. Plus, you gotta admire their self-sustaining marketing strategy. Supply and demand is for amateurs—these guys are rockin’ some cause and effect. Check it out:

Darn it. If I’d been paying attention I could have saved $5 when I bought¹ $20 or more of Halloween candy.

____
¹ Yes, that’s right: $5, and one pronoun. Look at the flyer again.

This little Facebook meme has found its way to me. OK, what am I supposed to do?

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I’ll do it, and I’ll send it to the friends who tagged me in theirs, but no way am I going to require 25 of my Facebook friends to write lists too. My friends have more important things to do… well, most of them, anyway.

25 Random Things About Me

1. I am a compulsive copy editor and a remorseless grammar nazi (in case you hadn’t noticed).
2. I am geeky enough to use HTML markup when posting things on community web sites. In case you still hadn’t noticed.
3. I’m seriously considering getting a bicycle to use for getting around town, in order to both save money on gas and get more exercise. The only drawback I foresee is the increased chance of severe injury due to LA’s shortage of bike lanes and surplus of reckless drivers.
4. I’m discouraged at having already written this much and only being on #4.
5. Guiltiest dietary pleasure: ice cream.
6. I just decided that if I’m going to write this much, I’m damn well going to make it a blog post — come to think of it, then it’ll automatically become a Facebook note anyway. Screw it, I am now composing this on WordPress.
7. I first used a computer in about 1981 when my elementary school obtained three or four machines and stationed them in the library. They taught us to program a little bit of BASIC, which never really came in handy. Within a couple of years I was writing school essays on my family’s IBM PC and telling people how totally choice WordStar for DOS was.



8. I am not a grammar martinet with regard to casual conversation. The standard for spoken English is necessarily much broader than the one for written English. How dull and colorless would conversation be without the wild cards of things like dialect and slang?
9. I inadvertently stayed up working on something until 2:30 A.M. last night, and it’s altogether possible that I’ll fall asleep before I finish this.


She’s worth every penny

10. Pretty soon I’ll need to go pick up my dog Bella from her bi-monthly cardiac ultrasound re-check appointment at the vet. I’ll feel lucky if we get out of there for less than $350.
11. I can’t believe I already need to do laundry again.
12. Every so often I hear the Italian woman in the building next door having sex. Usually it’s when I need to concentrate on something else, but can’t, because she apparently likes her nookie with a generous supply of fresh air via her open window. C’est la vie, she’s clearly faking it most of the time anyway.
13. In my opinion The Office has fallen off a little bit lately, especially compared to 30 Rock, which still consistently cracks my shit up.
WARNING: items 14, 15 and 16 contain a high level of geekery. Viewer discretion is advised.
14. I’d love to be able to uninstall iTunes (and the irritating Apple Software Update app piggybacked onto it, which pesters me daily to install something called Bonjour for Windows) and use Songbird for everything. The problem is my iPod, which I like to use for listening to podcasts. With Songbird’s graduation from Beta into its full 1.0 release, its functions for podcast reading, metadata editing, and iPod device support went from “useless or nonexistent” to “kind of a pain in the ass, but it works.” It just ain’t there yet.
15. Which reminds me, I have a couple of web-related crusades of principle going, so I think I’ll give them each a number on Ye Olde List here. First in line: the iTunes Store. Think we’re supposed to stop hating them because they’re finally selling songs without DRM now? Think again. The new “DRM-free” media files they’re selling still have the customer’s registered e-mail address embedded in them, making any future copies thereof potentially traceable to that customer. Also, if you want DRM-free versions of music you already bought from the iTunes Store, they’ll give them to you… for 30 cents per song. That’s right, they want to charge you again for music you already paid them for. Say it with me: the iTunes Store sucks. Buy your MP3 music downloads from Amazon, where they’ve always come without DRM and at the higher-quality 256-kbps bitrate that iTunes just now started providing.



16. Next, a Colbertian wag of my finger at Internet Explorer. I would say “people who use Internet Explorer,” but Google Analytics tells me that would implicate 40% of the visitors to this blog over the last month, and I dearly love each and every visitor I get. Even the ones who use a shitty browser. Never mind that IE is the bane of any web designer’s existence (unless you’re a web designer, in which case I don’t need to tell you). There is simply no humane reason for anyone to deny him or herself the improved ease of use, configurability, speed, and stability of the superior alternatives: either my favorite, Firefox, or any of Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, Flock, and the Mac-only Camino, among others will do (but for God’s sake, not AOL Desktop). Seriously, do yourself a favor.
17. Now that I’ve heard Terry Gross interview Darren Aronofsky on Fresh Air, I really want to see The Wrestler.
18. All due credit to the Cardinals for peaking at the right time, but I’m rooting for the Steelers.
19. Every move Rod Blagojevich makes still leaves me saying, “Can you fucking believe this guy?” Wow. Not even a decade in, and he’s already making a credible run at Douchebag of the Century.
20. I believe that my biggest liability as a blogger is my constitutional inability to write something brief. However, in this instance it was not I who decided the list had to be 25 items long.
21. It is downright nippy in my apartment right now, but after last month’s bill I don’t want to keep cranking up the thermostat.
22. I haven’t used most of the Amazon gift certificate my brother gave me for my birthday yet. Possible items include Season 2 of The Shield on DVD (God, I already miss that show). Earlier today I also thought of two more glaring holes to fill in my music library, namely, Sam Cooke and Junior Walker & the All-Stars.
23. I’m having trouble restraining myself from putting up little cop-out entries for these few remaining list items… whoops — see, that one got by me.
24. Our refrigerator in this apartment is at least 25 years old. When it first cycles on it makes a sound like a garbage disposal that a piece of silverware fell into, which lasts for about ten seconds before trailing off. I barely notice it anymore, but it tends to startle guests.
25. I’m far from perfect, but one thing I’m very good about is always putting the toilet seat down.

Since I ended up not doing this on Facebook, the tagging people thing doesn’t really apply. I’ll forward a link to this post to some friends and hope some of them leave comments here. Even if their comments are just to ask why I wasted their time with this frivolous crap. Don’t be shy, mock me!  I’ve teed it right up for you with this list, so bring it, bitchez!

more graph humor and song chart memes at graphjam.com