You know how whenever you’re near a set of speakers with your mobile phone it makes the speakers go all crazy and make these half-beep/half-static noises?

I hate that.

I don’t think this phenomenon has a name yet, so today I’m going to start calling it stabeeple. That’s so catchy!

Treos are the WORST. The guy in the office next to me has a Treo, and even though there’s two sheets of drywall and some metal framing between us, HIS phone affects my speakers more than my own phone does.

Nextel’s entire iDen network is pretty bad too. I used to get HORRIBLE stabeeple when I was with them.

$250 and a US launch date of November 19th.

Nice.

Check out the interface videos at Nintendo’s Japanese site. (They start on page 5.)

I just hope they don’t use the same asinine “friend code” system that they do for the DS. The Wii needs a buddylist like the 360!

For our anniversary gift this year my parents took Tammy and I to see Willie Nelson at the Hollywood Bowl. They had won some box seats in a charity auction, so we tagged along and watched the Nelsonator on Friday night.

Willie’s first set was mostly slow songs, but the LA Philharmonic played backup and it was pretty sweet. The second set was longer and just had his usual honkey-tonkery, with some funny new stuff thrown in at the end. I’m no big Willie Nelson fan, but I had a great time that night.

I hadn’t been to the Hollywood Bowl in at least fifteen years, but I decided I really liked it there. The box seats all had these little tables so my mom had brought this big salmon dinner with appetizers and all kinds of neat stuff. They even let you bring in your own booze! That was nice of them I thought.

I like this picture because it makes the lighting rig look like an alien spaceship.

Whenever I eat hot dogs I feel like I’m doing the meat industry a favor.

I imagine the inventor of the hot dog must have been sitting around the dumpster of his meat processing plant one day, watching all of the waste before him and wondering if things couldn’t change somehow. We’ll call him Joe.

Joe turned to his assistant and asked “What else can we do with all these hair, snout, anus, and hoof fragments, Frank?” Then a lightbulb went off and he jumped off his bench in excitment. “Let’s grind up everything in this dumpster and squeeze the puree into tubes two-fingers wide! We’ll grill them like ground beef and I bet they’ll taste pretty similar!”

Frank looked up at him from the bench. “That’s disgusting, Joe. You’re insane. In fact, I just threw up in my mouth a little. So thanks for that.”

Undaunted, Joe then reached the length of an entire arm into the dumpster and pulled it out to reveal a flap of discarded pork skin dangling from his elbow. “Look at this anus! This is a perfectly good anus, Frank! The newborn Baby Jesus himself could not have had an anus so perfect. Are you going to tell me that this anus is unsaleable? This dangling asshole is discarded profit!”

Joe wordlessly shook his head in disgust and walked back to his office inside the plant. Frank was crushed a few minutes later in a bizarre dumpster-dropping accident. While mourning the loss of his best friend, Frank decided to give the crazy idea a try and he whipped up a batch of hot dogs. They tasted wonderful, he called them “Franks,” and the rest is history.

Despite their varied components, hot dogs still taste like hot dogs, year after year, week after week, pig after pig or cow after cow. I guess I really don’t care what they put in them, as long as they taste like hot dogs.

We went to Dave and Buster’s Friday night for a little holiday weekend partying.

I got totally addicted to the ‘drop a coin in and see if it makes the little pusher things knock more coins off the edge’ game.

You know what I’m talking about, right? One of these bad boys:

I was seriously the master of arcade tickets that night. I knew when a coin-pusher machine was hot, and I knew when it was time to cut ties and move on to a new machine with more potential.

And no matter where I went, I kept winning! And winning big!

It was like I just couldn’t stop machines from spitting out tickets! I’m telling you I was on fire. As soon as a machine finished up spitting out one run I’d make another big score and more tickets would come out in an unending stream!

Drunk girls stared at my fistfulls of tickets in awe. Their vato boyfriends would come up to me and ask me what my ‘secret’ was. I have no secret guys, please don’t shoot me in the parking lot later.

I collected my spoils and took them to the redemption counter. 2600 tickets! Can you imagine how many plastic spider rings that’ll get me! Oh boy!

Wait..what? You have no plastic spider rings? What kind of establishment is this! Every redemption arcade in the HISTORY OF MAN has plastic spider rings, and you’re telling me you have none?

Oh I see, I can get 26 Dave and Buster’s shot glasses. How practical! 2000 gets me a coffee maker, eh? That might be a good deal if I were a moron, but thanks for the suggestion!

In the end I couldn’t find a single thing in their redeption store that I wanted – not even a little bit. I decided to bank my tickets (they store the value on a magnetic-stripe card) and I’ll come back another time to grow my winnings.

In the meantime more suckers will go play those machines and load them up with coins that teeter on the edge for ME to push off!

Who doesn’t like Castlevania music? Besides terrorists, pretty much nobody.

Check out HOUSE coming at you live from Shane’s bedroom. He does an expert acoustic/electric guitar rendition of Castlevania 3′s greatest hits!