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In Lancaster, California, Honda decided it would be fun to carve grooves in a road such that when you drive over them, the vibration of your suspension plays a song. They decided, for unknown reasons, to use the William Tell Overture, by Giaochino “Joey Chinos” Rossini. In case you haven’t watched the Lone Ranger recently, listen to this.

Then, go watch and listen to this.

Notice anything? Am I the only one? They spent heaven knows how many man-hours gouging grooves into that road and did it to produce the wrong fricking notes. This commercial gets played at least once every time I watch a Daily Show online and it makes me insane.

Just so you know.

I feel guilty for laughing at these things, but cannot help myself:

• Andrew Sullivan shows us how the Catholic Church feels about its youth.


• This young lady loves her some John Mayer. (For which I do not fault her; he’s like a tattoo’d god.)


• A new iPhone app that everybody would want, if Apple hadn’t immediately taken it out of the App Store.


• Penny Arcade brings us a special new Rock Band.

Oh yeah. Dilbert knows how I feel.

Regardless of your personal feelings of Rachel Maddow (I find her to be extremely AWESOME and also sneaky hot), you need to stop everything else you are doing and watch the reconstruction of the short flight of US Airways 1549, with the Air Traffic Control radio sync’d to it. Forget special pants; I’m surprised that Cap’n Sully’s enormous brass testicles don’t upset the weight balance of the airplane. I almost had a panic attack just watching this.

Rachel is only involved because video is from her show, so if you dislike her for some reason, rest easy knowing her participation is minimal.

Horrible nightmares last night, for a variety of parties. Charles woke up crying around 9:30pm because of, we suspect, a bad dream, although he couldn’t put into words what the problem was. After a few minutes of cuddling with Mommy he asked to get back into bed, and did so without difficulty. Weird.

For my part, I dreamt that Charles had become unruly and ill-behaved, and it was decided, by me, that the problem was that he was Too Smart. (For unknown reasons, all these was taking place in some kind of sepia-toned office, something straight from the 50s, all wood panelling and glass.) In order to desmart him, I mixed some kind of concoction for him to drink so that it would damage his brain. Why my dream-self thought this was a good idea is unknown to me, but in the dream Charles drank it, and I instantly had Chemist’s Remorse and began sobbing uncontrollably. It was horrible. It haunts me, even now; just typing it out is making me depressed and angry with myself. ::shudder::

The other nightmare was one just before I awoke, involving venomous “spiders,” as they were called in the dream, that weren’t spiders at all, but hand-sized bugs in the shape of Imperial Star Destroyers. They were color-coded to match the severity of their venoms, which ranged from “causing severe gangrenous flesh wounds at the site of the sting” to “neurological toxin resulting in painful seizures followed quickly by death.” Annoyingly, even after I woke up and said “Wow, what a horrible nightmare!” I rolled back over and went to sleep to dream of them some more.

It was not a restful night.

This is a new ad campaign I’m putting together in A City Near You:

Yea? Nay?

Just a few collected ideas that jumbled around in my head this week:

• So far, President Obama has appointed political rivals to his cabinet; apologized when he screwed something up; closed a torture center; and worked major bipartisan magic with regards to the “economic stimulus package.” Is it just me, or has he accomplished more positive things in 16 days on the job than the last schmuck did in 8 years?
• Favorite Super Bowl commercial: Free Doritos!
• Speaking of the Super Bowl: why don’t the Eagles ever have Larry Fitzgerald/Santonio “San Antonio” Holmes-type receivers? The best we can come up with is a past-his-prime whiny TO for a season? Andy Reid needs to explain to me why, exactly, the Eagles run a pass-first, pass-second, pass-always offense and yet the best receiver on the team is the running back. I hate football.
• Speaking of TO: the greatest thing about him is that he will someday die, just like the rest of us. That will make the world a far better place.
• Speaking of sports: pitchers and catchers report in 10 days. Excited? You bet. I just peed a little! Okay, a lot.
• Always back up your computers. Do it. Get an external hard drive and back your stuff up. More info on this tomorrow.
• If any of you are local to northern DE, keep an eye out at the Boothwyn Farmer’s Market (aka the Bethel Mall) for when the little Cajun restaurant sells duck gumbo. It was fantastic. A little spice, mushrooms, a sauce so heavy it might have been used in early Manhattan Project experiments; I don’t think I ate for days after polishing off a quart of that bad boy. I’m pretty sure the container had an entire duck in it. I couldn’t even walk for a few hours, I just rolled myself around on an office chair and moaned occasionally.
• Had a lot of snow days lately. They are remarkably less fun if you have a job that requires you to show up anyway. I guess I’m saying, don’t grow up too fast, man. ::sob::

More tomorrow. Probably. Woo!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWn7zbgxZ4&hl=en&fs=1]

Since I reach a significant Age next week, I had to go to the DMV and renew my license. My car is also going to require renewal in two months, so I figured, hell, they’ll let me do it now, why not kill two birds with one stone! Particularly when those birds are massive, slavering creatures with Adamantium talons who hate me and everything that we as a nation hold dear.

So I snuck out of work for an early lunch hour, thinking I’d beat the crowds. this handy website shows the wait times for various functions, and it was saying I’d wait no more than 5 minutes for my license, and maybe 10 for my registration. Awesome!

I arrived shortly after 11, and got into a short line at the inspection lanes. As I later twittered, I, as always, picked the wrong lane, and watched as 3 or 4 cars who arrived after me got in first. But the joke was on them! I had, completely on accident, picked the one lane that could do all the regular checks (turn signals, lights, horn, etc.) plus the ODBII check (where they plug into your car’s computer to see if you’ve downloaded porn to it)! All the other lanes could do the car checks, but then you had to get into another lane for the computer read-out. This seems like a foolish way to do it, but I grinned happily as I parked and went inside, where I discovered that the South Wilmington DMV, unlike the New Castle one that is technically closer to my house but horribly inconvenient for a lunch hour visit, doesn’t actually have “line;” it has a take a number system, so you can sit and read horrific books while you wait! (I went with Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore, a book so painful that I got it at the dollar store. For a dollar.)

They were on number 202 when I sat down; I had number 222. So I read, and occasionally glanced up when the shift supervisor, the Mother Superior of the DMV, would get called over to yell at some poor soul who believed they could renew their car’s registration without having the current one, or without an insurance card, or without retrieving their car from the impound lot whence it was towed for unpaid parking tickets. (An aside: some of these people were at least fifty years old. Folks, how do you not know how this works? How do you reach the age of fifty, probably renewing at least one vehicle every two years, and not know what documents you require for this process?)

Finally I was called up to a very polite gentleman who took my documents and money and gave me a new registration and sticker in three minutes flat. I fail to understand why this is such a difficult process for some people.

By that point it was roughly 12:30, and I had to go get another number to wait for my license renewal. I was number #177; they were at #140. I shed a few silent, hot tears and sat down next to some sort of kiosk. After 20 minutes or so, they had gotten only to #150, and a young woman came out and started fiddling with the computer at the little kiosk. In a flash of brilliant insight, I deduced the following:

1. Eventually, this lady was going to open this kiosk for business;
2. It was likely that they intended it to be an express lane, meaning it would most likely be available for people with simple class-D license renewals (no truck licenses, no new licensees, no state IDs, etc.);
3. It was also likely that the line would be first come, first served;
4. The instant they made any sign of opening up, I needed to spring to my feet and sprint to the head of the line, hardly a challenge since the kiosk was approximately three feet to my left.

Sure enough, at about 1:10pm, a supervisor came out and started to announce that they were opening the kiosk for simple license renewals, and before he had said two words I was standing next to the nice young woman running the show. I think I even semi-accidentally butted in front of another fellow, but he sensed that were he to confront me, I might roll up a Driver’s Education Manual and beat him to death with it, so he held his tongue.

Because I know how to handle a drive-thru bureaucracy (just like a fast-food drive-thru; no special orders, basic meals only), I was through the line in three minutes, had my picture taken, and handed a literally piping hot new ID by 1:15. A little creative driving had me back at the office at 1:35! I think the word I’m searching for is “WOO!”

In short, the DMV is slow, news at Eleven.