Perfect for slow-cooking a football on Super Bowl Sunday...

Sorry, mom, you might want to think about biking it for a while

Yep, the price of gas has plummeted around here in the last week or so. I think we paid around $2.07 a couple of tanks ago, and now it's $1.859 at most places in Carthage (Jasper County). By contrast, my mother, who lives in The Dalles, Oregon (Wasco County) appears to be paying about 80 cents more per gallon, and she's driving a Ford Explorer. Yowchies!

Map: GasBuddy.com

I'm jumping on the bandwagon, which then crashes into 15 other bandwagons

Last night my mom tipped me off to this local (Portland local, not Carthage local) video of several cars trying to drive on the snow and ice and getting into like 15 car wrecks. The first car is so crazy because it doesn't just hit a car, it pushes it into like four other cars after the impact.

If you don't know how to drive on snow and ice, stay home or let someone else drive!

Link to video

Get your free pizza while you can!

This was the sign we saw at the Pizza Hut in Carthage last night:

Bonus points for getting the dollar sign backwards.

Let me know (sniff) if I've (sniff) double-blogged this

So I've had this cold for the last few days, and my nose has been pretty runny. Lots of sniffling and nose-blowing.

Lately, it seems that a new passage has opened up between my sinuses and my right eye, because now, whenever I blow my nose, I feel air trying to escape from under the eyelid.

I know it's kind of gross, but you just know I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to turn this into some kind of a party trick.

Open (my mind,) sesame

I was eating a cheeseburger from a burger place today, and it (the burger) had a sesame seed bun. I realized that I have always taken sesame seeds for granted, in the sense that I've just always irrationally believed that they just sort of come from out of nowhere.

So I began to wonder, is there a sesame flower? A sesame tree with a sesame fruit? Where do these seeds come from, and what would they grow into were it not for the fact that they were diverted to my hamburger bun?

Delivering irony, one commercial at a time

Perhaps you've seen the recent commercials for UPS, featuring a guy and a white board explaining how Brown can work for businesses, yada yada yada. Perhaps you've noticed the music playing underneath the advertisement: An understated electronic medley of simple notes and beats that doesn't overpower or distract the viewer from the message.

Here's the ironic part: That music is part of the instrumental version of "Such Great Heights" by an electronic indie pop band called...

The Postal Service.

Duh Moment #526: The key to success is somewhere on my key ring

These days, most of what I have to unlock I can do by remote control. There's the little remote on my key ring that locks and unlocks the car, and of course we have the garage door opener that gets us into the house.

So after work tonight, when I went to open our post office box, I held out the remote and pushed the button. Couldn't figure out why nothing happened.

Not surprising, coming from a company that spells "Are" as "Я"

In late December, Nicole and I were shopping for toys for our nephew, and we saw this display:

That's right, it's Gloden, G-L-O-D-E-N. What they were actually selling were copies of Golden Books' Saggy Baggy Elephant. To kids. With impressionable minds that are still learning how to spell things.

Good job, Toys "Я" Us.

Heck, at this point, just call it a Valentine's Day tree

The other day, Nicole and I found the perfect item for those who wait forever to take down their Christmas trees:

That's right, they're heart-shaped ornaments. In the Valentine's Day section of Wal-Mart.