The Johnson Smith company used to be THE place to go when you needed whoopie cushions, fart spray, trick gum, and all that good stuff. In recent years they’ve slowly gotten rid of anything worth buying and have since become just another Lilian Vernon clone. It’s sad.

Luckily, another company has risen to fill the gap left by Johnson Smith, the former gag-industry heavyweight. Enter Archie McPhee. Their catalog is seriously impressive. They even have a store that you can visit up in Seattle – complete with frightening looking employees!

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Photos from the red carpet premiere yesterday of Pirates of the Caribbean are now online. I wish I could have gone, but we were busy doing house and wedding stuff.

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Today’s the day. The National Do Not Call Registry is now accepting signups! The site is swamped right now, so you might have trouble signing up online.

You can also register by calling 1-888-382-1222, but you’ll need to call it from the phone number you’d like to have blocked.

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Holy moley. Strom Thurmond has finally kicked the bucket. 100 years is a good long run, that’s for sure.

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The year is 1986 and your favorite Disneyland attraction has closed to make way for George Lucas’ Star Tours. What do you do? Well you sit around moping for the good ol’ days for about thirteen years, then you rebuild the whole damn thing in a 3D modeling program. In this case, it’s Monsanto’s long-gone Adventures Through Inner Space!

This guy’s obsessed, but what an effort! I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.

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I was out of the office sick the past two days, but the good news is that I was home to accept delivery of our new grill.

We got the propane version of the Weber Genesis Gold B and it rocks. We made burgers, dogs, and zukes last night and they were all pretty good. I’m used to cooking with propane, but I’ve never actually gotten a propane tank refilled or connected, so I tried my best not to blow myself up during the process, and it worked! Propane is cheap too! It only cost me $15 at U-Haul to refill the tank which is good for 16-20 hours of cooking at full-blast.

The grill is grrreat. We would never be able to afford it on our own, but Tammy had a bunch of American Express Rewards points stocked up from her various purchases at work for the past year or so, so we cashed them in for some backyard grillin’ action.

Also, we had a mouse or a rat climb into our dryer vent and it pooped in the exhaust hose. (That’s that big silver tube that snakes out the back of your dryer and eventually shoots outside of your building.) I cleaned it out, but our laundry still smells like pee. The guy from Sears said we’ll just have to wait it out and the smell will go away eventually. That’s lovely. In the meantime, I got some metal screen at Home Depot, cut it to fit, and wedged it in that outside vent.

I also bought some rat poison, but I wound up throwing it away. I was afraid that just having it in our garage would attract rodents inside to get to it! Our neighbors have dogs also, so the mice could have vectored it over there, and that would not have been good. So now it’s not a problem and a garbage dump somewhere will have a few less rats.

Owning a home can be a challenge sometimes!

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Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room opened to the public 40 years ago today. The Tiki Room was the first Disney attraction to ever use audio-animatronic figures, and over 200 of them at that!

It’s not kept up very well nowadays, and the content may be a little dated, it still makes me happy. There’s something about hearing that Hawaiian War Chant building up faster and faster before it ends in a crash of thunder and lightning.

Tiki Room trivia.

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Yesterday I replaced some more landscape lights, and we went to two garden centers scouting out possible replacements for a sweetgum tree with wandering roots in our front yard. I’m leaning towards a king palm, but Tammy’s got her eyes set on a european white birch. We’re still researching though!

Since we moved in, we were using an old end table to hold the TV, and all of our DVDs and video games were just stacked neatly on the floor. It was pretty ghetto and we were tired of staring at the mess of wires and crap, so yesterday we picked up an entertainment center for our living room at Target. Check it out.

It was only $100, and we had a $50 gift card that we’d been hanging on to since Christmas, so it was a pretty sweet deal. It was easy to put together, and only took a few hours, but by the time I started building it I was pretty wiped out from cleaning toilets and doing some gardening and driving all over the place to get various house stuff.

I think I went to bed around 1, and anyway I’m pooped today.

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Tammy’s a huge Harry Potter fan, so of course we did the midnight run to the bookstore just now.

I haven’t been living in Anaheim Hills for very long, but I have never seen our Borders parking lot even half-full. Tonight it was out of control. Every space was taken, cars were double and triple parked, and there was mayhem all around.

Once you were through the doors, there was a line to get a number, and then another line that snaked back and forth through the aisles several times, finally ending at the cash registers where you would actually pick up the book. They had just called out number 23 when we got 322, so we could tell we were in for a bit of a wait.

Then Tammy remembered that the Ralph’s supermarket up the street had also planned on selling the books at midnight. I called them to find out what the line was like, and they said it was only about 30 people. That was all we needed to hear. We left Borders right away and only had to wait behind three people in line to get the book…and our Ralphs club card saved us like five bucks off the cover price!

If it wasn’t for Ralph’s, we’d still be waiting in that line at Borders right now.

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Monk’s second season starts tonight at 10pm, PST.

If you haven’t seen Monk before, tune in tonight or tell your Tivo to grab it! It’s great. Tony Shalhoub stars as the obsessive-compulsive Adrian Monk.

This was the sleeper hit of 2002′s TV season if you ask me!

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