The House Of Odd

That tubby kid from Stand By Me grew up to make a mighty funny parody of the latest wackiness from Tom Cruise. Jerry O’Connell discusses being an actor and does a mighty spot on impersonation of the number two ranking Scientologist Cruise.

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Craig Ferguson of the Late Late Show also did an amusing take on the Tom Cruise video the other night.

There has been a term that has been thrown around the Internet a lot of late. The term I refer to is ‘bat-shit crazy’. It seems to be used a lot to describe a few of the rouge Republican presidential candidates, namely Ron Paul.

Just how crazy is ‘bat-shit crazy’? The Urban Dictionary defines it as “One step beyond just plain crazy” and “Acting in a generally insane manner”. But why ‘bat-shit’?

Real bat shit, or guano as the Spanish prefer to say, is really quite stable. Once excreted by the bat this dull fecal matter just stays plastered to a cave wall or left to pile up on the ground. Most would say that is far from crazy. It’s doubtful anyone would consider this nitrate-laden poop as even eccentric.

When one wishes to describe someone as being crazy beyond what is consider just plain old insane you really should use something that truly is nuts. Perhaps ‘Scientology-crazy’, or ‘Tyra Banks crazy’ would be better suited to describe a loon that goes takes crazy to ‘eleven’.

So it is the start of a new year and most people are back to work.
Today some kind individual brought in a lovely store bought cake and
dumped it in the break room.

The unwritten law of food in the corporate world is if you leave it
out in a common area it is fair game for every one. If you don’t want
it to disappear stick it in the fridge with your name on it.

The problem is on the table sits over half a potentially edible cake
and there is no silverware to be found. The horror. Not one fork,
knife, or plate in the entire break room. Not even the useless
plastic ones common to the office environs.

I suppose if one were desperate enough they could tear off a chunk with
their bare hands and attempt a quick getaway before any coworker were
to catch them in this food handling faux pas.

The lesson for today is always keep a spare set of utensils at your
desk just in case food appears out of nowhere.

Well we’re in the final few days of 2007 and what is the end of the year without a slew of craptastic lists. Here a brief list of some of the best song parodies from the past year.

4. Ding Fries Are Done Family Guy / Trans Siberian Orchestra Remix
Some dude going by the name Total Music DJ creates a fresh version of the internet classic Ding Fries Are Done by combining the Family Guy parody and Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s version of Carol of the Bells.

3. Tre’ Cool Chocolate Rain
Green Day’s Tre Cool creates a palatable version of Tay Zondya’s internet juggernaut Chocolate Rain. Tre appears to be ad-libbing the lyrics as he goes. The end result is simply splendid, some would say more inspiring than the original.

2. Sad Kermit Hurt
Originally written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Sad Kermit creates a funny and disturbing version of Hurt in the style of Johnny Cash’s 2002 cover. The video depicts Kermit’s downward spiral into drugs and despair after the loss of his BFF Jim Henson.

1. Alanis Morrisette My Humps
Far superior than the Black Eyed Peas original version, Alanis Morrisette creates a hauntingly beautiful renditition of My Humps.

It’s been about a month since acquiring an iPhone. For the most part it’s been a splendid little device. It’s allowed the opening of a new a trail blazing section here at the House called Thoughts From the Throne.

There are the usual annoyances, AT&T’s Edge Network is rather slow, and the ‘keyboard’ is a bit tiny for grown-up sized fingers.

The one thing that has been the most annoying is randomly disappearing emails when using Yahoo email. It seems to occasionally just loose an email. Once you press Send it just goes “Poof”.

It doesn’t end up in the Draft of Sent folder, it’s just gone. Which can be extremely frustrating especially after laboring over the miniature keys to eek out an important message to your loved one.

A little investigation revealed that this is a known issue by both Apple and Yahoo. Others report loosing emails as well. Some have issues with the IMAP push email not pushing like its ‘pose to and requiring a manual check to retrieve messages. Some experience emails disappearing once they have been moved to a folder. It just ain’t right.

To date there seems to be no word from either Apple or Yahoo when this issue will be resolved.

Some of the suggested workaround include:

-Using the forward feature of Yahoo email to forward to another POP account or Gmail.

-Upgrading to Yahoo’s Premium service and using the POP setting to retrieve email.

You know it’s almost too late to get any shopping done before Christmas.  Maybe there is a Walmart or gas station still open for the ultimate procrastinator.

But you’ve got kids and they love music and they sure would love an iPod this Christmas.  But the problem is they don’t come cheap and your budget is hovering at 3 bucks.

The good people at O2 Cool have come up with a frugal alternative.  They call it the iFan.   While it has the appearance of an iPod it doesn’t actually play digital music.   What it does is provide you with a fun way to cool off with a barely adequete fan embedded in it’s study plastic housing.

Yes with only the required 3 AA batteries your loved ones will enjoy hours of DRM free air.  It even comes in last year’s stylish U2 iPod color scheme.

If you know someone who likes iPod shaped things and sweats alot they may really get a kick out of this fine novelty item.

Cars (2006)

Jenna: I wasn’t very excited about seeing this movie since it was about talking cars. Ethan has a lot of Hot Wheels cars and I sometimes hide his cars in his shoes. But it was a Disney Pixar movie and I like their stuff a lot.

The computer animation is very good. Not as good as real life, but a lot better than Jimmy Neutron. I thought the cars looked very realistic, well as real as a talking car can look.
The main character is a red racecar named Lightning McQueen. He thinks he is a good racer, but he’s not as good as he thinks he is. In the big race he tied with an old race car and a mean green car that always says ‘Ka-chigga’.
Since they tied, they had a special race to find out who would be the champion. On the way to the race Lightning McQueen falls out of his truck trailer and gets lost. He ends up in a small town with a lot of other crazy cars. They must have gone crazy from living in such a small place.

Lighting gets in trouble in the town and has to pay back his debt. The judge car makes him fix the road he destroyed. Last year I lost a school book and mama and daddy said that I have to repay them by doing chores. They made me change the cat litter box. I think we need to get outdoor cats.

Lightning McQueen meets a tow truck named Mater. Mater really likes Lightning even though he wasn’t very nice. Mater took Lightning out at night to scare the sleeping tractors. Daddy said in the human world that’s called ‘cow tipping’. He said he tried it once. They don’t tip over; they just walked away when he got close.

Ethan: This was a good movie. I have 5 of the cars from the McDonald’s Happy Meals. I tried to get them all but Daddy said he couldn’t eat there more than 3 times a week.

The red car, Lightning McQueen, is my favorite, he is really fast. I’d like the blue car too if it wasn’t a girl.

I asked Daddy what do the cars eat. He said “gasoline”. I asked him how do the cars go potty? He said he wasn’t sure but that maybe the exhaust from their tailpipes was their ‘poop’. Then I asked Daddy where did all the people go? He said in their world there were no people, the cars were the ‘people’. So I asked him how they could build the buildings with no hands. He just said “let it go”.

They have Cars cereal at the grocery store. I convinced Daddy to get it. Turns out it was just Lucky Charms with the pieces shaped like cars. Seems like all the movie cereals are that way.

Today after perusing through the web logs I came across an interesting thing. Well not a thing really more of a noteworthy nugget. Among the many search strings people use to find this place one stuck out. It was simply ‘avoid work forever‘. Wow, this is powerful. Can the answer to this eternal question be found amongst the millions of web pages on the interweb? Unfortunately this wanting soul wasn’t able to find the answer to his quest from the House of Odd.

Good luck to you and your noble goal. If you ever do find out the answer to ‘avoiding work forever’ please come back and share it with us. Just like Kevin Spacey would do and Pay It Forward..

Today’s thought is in the form of a question. It goes out to all the germ phobes out there.

You know who you are, in public restrooms you use a paper towel to turn on and off the water facet. Some off you even grab one more paper towel to open the door with, then hold it open with your hip as you toss that soiled towel into the trash.

Its a given that you flush using your foot and probably suffer from back pain due to hovering over the toilet.

My question is this: what do you do the rest of the time?

Those same people that don’t wash their hands that you carefully go to painstaking lenghts to avoid being contaminated by exist outside the restroom too.

What about the coffee pot, the stair rail, elevator buttons, photo copier, and the change from your latte?

If they didn’t hose off the germs in the bathroom they take those same ‘poop hands’ and smear them on all the things you need to interact with everyday.

Try to answer that question wthout reaching for your bottle of Purell hand sanitizer.

Survivor China is almost over, but what better way to acquaint yourself with this season’s cast then by checking out their MySpace page. I’m sure they would love to be your ‘friend’.

Amanda Kimmel

Todd Herzog

Courtney Yates plus check out Courtney’s modeling page

Peih-Gee Law

Jean-Robert Bellande

Mike ‘Frosty’ Zernow

Erik Huffman also Erik’s Band

Ashley Massaro

Leslie Nease or Leslie’s official site

Jaime Dugan

Sherea Lloyd