Okay, I need a sanity check here. First, watch this YouTube clip of a Heinz commercial currently running in the UK.

Do you get it? Mayo with a New York deli flavor. Mom is making the sandwiches with New York deli flavor, so Mom “appears” as a rough, tough, stereotypical New York butcher. Get it? Ha haaa… Clever-ish. And the kiss at the end comes off as slightly comical, with some shock value.

Enter my friends at the American Family Association. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I respect what those guys do. I appreciate the work. I need someone else to keep an eye on things that I don’t have time or opportunity to watch. Without the AFA, I would not have known about Ford pumping money into “gay pride” parades and running explicit ads in “gay” magazines because, well, I don’t go to those parades nor do I read those magazines. I don’t have eyes or ears in the advertising market to let me know when someone’s putting money toward that kind of thing.

But there are times, when the folks at the AFA really puzzle me. Did anyone watch that commercial and jump to the conclusion that Heinz was promoting gay marriage? I could be wrong, but I don’t think gay marriage is even a hot button issue in Britain. It’s not legal and I haven’t heard anything about a push to legalize it.

You can read the AFA’s alert here.

Is it just me or is the AFA way off the mark on this one? I mean, seriously. Who looks at that and thinks, “Oh, that big, burly butcher with the New York accent must be the homosexual lover of that wimpy little Brit. And look! They have kids!” I can just imagine what that big, burly butcher would say if you told him that, but I can’t print it here because my blog is rated PG.

Some of you may not have been around when I first explained the White Board Quip of the Week. I touched on its origins in the first WBQotW post. There I mention the first true weekly quips that showed up on my cubicle white board when I interned at Hewlett Packard, my first “real” job in the industry, in 1998. But really, the tradition has deeper roots.

The real impetus was a college calculus class in 1994. My friend Galyn and I would usually arrive early for class. It was in a newly renovated building, one of the first to have white boards rather than chalk boards. Galyn and I were both (and still are) given to odd sayings. We were both fans of Ren and Stimpy, odd t-shirts, and funny bumper stickers. So, we began anonymously writing the weirdest things we could think of on the white board, just to see the reactions of our classmates as they came into the room.

This week’s quip was one of the first from those crazy days at Amarillo College. (It’s a weird one that you have to think about. It was written in the form of a mathematical proof.)

1 Funeral Procession = Absolute Right of Way
> 1 Funeral Procession = Funeral Processions Increasing w/out Bound

(You may want to read the WSJ editorial that inspired this post.)

Have you noticed all the news coverage of the war in Iraq lately? No?! Funny. Neither have I.

I remember not too very long ago national news was reporting deaths and casualties daily. When there were no soldiers lives that they could gloat over, they talked about Iraqi civilian deaths (even conveniently neglecting to mention when those civilians where, in fact, insurgent fighters or homicide bombers).

But in the last few months, those reports have disappeared. In fact, there haven’t been any major reports since the Iraqi army routed the Shiite militias in Basra and Sadr City. Their murderous leader, al Sadr, has resorted to hiding in Iran (which the media calls a “truce”). In May, the U.S. suffered the fewest casualties in any month since the war began five years ago.

The truth that the (big L) Liberal media does not what you to hear is that we are winning on all fronts in Iraq. The Iraqi government has finally started taking some responsibility. The Iraqi army is maturing and starting to fight its own battles. And all over Iraq, terrorists are losing. They’re losing in the streets and in the media (which is where their only hope for victory lies).

Why would the MSM not want you to know that? Elementary, my dear. It is because their darling, messianic, presidential candidate needs for us to be losing in Iraq for his moronic, cowardly, surrender and run policy to make any sense. Plain and simple. If you’re an anti-war nut-job, victory is bad for business.

Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone could be so blind. Yes, peace is a good thing. Yes, war is a bad thing. But anyone with half a brain should be able to see the lessons of December 7th and September 11th. If you don’t fight oppression and terror abroad, it WILL fight you at home.

It seems that every human has a miraculous, powerful, innate ability to justify the dumb things they do. (Hey, that would make a pretty good white board quip itself.)

I believe in karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it.
-Dogbert

It’s that time of year, boys and girls, when we gather around the charcoal pit, turn on the flood lights, flush two extra times, and leave our SUVs idling in the driveway. Yes, June 12th is Carbon Belch Day!

In response to the idiocy of the “carbon footprint” nazis, we, the intelligent few who recognize a poorly conceived conspiracy theory when we see it, are celebrating today by producing as much “climate changing” carbon dioxide as we can in a single day.

Read all about it at the official Carbon Belch Day website. You can even calculate your own personal belch. (Tammy and I combined will belch approximately 145 pounds of carbon today.)

And in honor of this great celebration, last night Katie helped me make a Carbon Belch Day video. Thanks, Katie!

And please don’t think that Carbon Belch Day in any way besmirches my parents’ wedding anniversary, which is also June 12th. Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad!

I got motivated. (I know! Amazing, huh?) So last night, I sat down with my video camera and Roxio software and pieced together my first attempt at video blogging. The lighting is bad, the sound is worse, the performance abysmal. In short, I’m not happy with it, but it’s my first shot and it’s probably good enough for public consumption.

If this works out, I’ll add an icon to posts that have a video or audio version. Please let me know if this doesn’t work for you. You’ll probably need iTunes or MediaPlayer 10 to see it.

Clicky clicky.

Surely you’re not serious!! Four years?!

It was June 9, 2004. I’d spent a week in a Microsoft training class with nothing else to do but read other people’s blogs (most notably, “cockeyed.com” and “I Awoke in Britannia”). I was amazed at the creativity, but still couldn’t help think, “I could so do that.”

So I did. I signed up for a free account on blogger.com. For months I had scoffed at the idea of blogging. As I wrote in my first post:

“[W]elcome to the 21st century, where entertainment has become as trite as reading someone else’s diary.”

You might say I was a cynic. That’s exactly why, when I was asked for a title for my blog, I typed, “Surely You’re Not Serious.” No one would believe that I had a blog.

This year, I’ve got a couple of goals for SYNS. I’d like to start adding an audio or maybe even video feed in which I read a few choice posts to give them the voice they deserve. I also hope to redecorate. I’ll stick with the 40’s advertising line art, but with a new design and color scheme. After all, this one’s nearly four years old!

So here’s to you, faithful readers, and here’s to four more years!

After seeing (and being pretty well disappointed by) Crystal Skull, I needed a fix to repair my respect of Harrison Ford. So, I watched Blade Runner on NetFlix. Ahh. Much better. (Review forthcoming.)

Laugh it up, fuzzball!
– Han Solo

[Edit: I wrote this last week, but was busy with work and didn’t notice that I forgot to publish it. Sorry about that.]

I was seven years old when “Raiders of the Lost Ark” hit theaters. I still remember the shock and mild nausea I felt when the big bald guy splattered across the airplane canopy. Good times.

I’ve discussed at length the trilogy trap that the Indiana Jones series represents. And now, almost three decades later (Yikes, am I that old?!) Dr. Jones is following Rocky and Rambo in a sad new trend.

Studio Exec: We’re hemorrhaging dollars here, boys. We need a real hit! What have you got?

Pitch Man: How about this? Will Farrel plays an obnoxious, offensive, stupid <insert sports profession>?

Studio Exec: We’ve already got two of those in production!

Pitch Man: Drug addled, sex crazed, wise cracking teenagers make fools of <insert hard working, grown ups and/or parents>?

Studio Exec: The lawyers are still working on the last one.

Casting Director: She said she was 18, I swear!

Studio Exec: Shut up! I thought I fired you already.

Pitch Man: How about cute yet irreverent CGI animals? You know, with fart jokes for the kids.

Studio Exec: One in theaters, two on the drawing board, and four straight to DVD this month! No, what we need is a real block buster, like back in the good ol’ days.

Pitch Man: What I wouldn’t give for another Rocky or Indiana Jones.

Studio Exec: Perfect! Are those guys still alive?

Casting Director: Clinically? Yes.

And so, good ol’ Indy was back, cracking his whip, dusting off his fedora, and slathering on the Bengay between takes.

Was there lots of action? Of course. Was there clever humor throughout? Clever-ish. Was the movie fun? Yyyeah. I’d say so. Then why I’m I so reluctant to to say I liked it?

Honestly, the formulaic script was a little too predictable. And maybe it’s been too long since I sat down to watch the old… er… young Indy, but in this new one the suspension of disbelief was off the charts. They drive a truck off a cliff, into a tree, and the tree bends over and sets them gently down, as if Bugs Bunny were behind the wheel. C’mon!

And then there’s the over-arching premise. Remember how everyone hated Temple of Doom? Remember how stupid all the voodoo, oogy-boogy crap was in that one? Well, this one’s worse. I’m hesitant to spoil it for you, but I feel you must be warned. This one is about aliens. And I don’t mean the kind that you underpay to clean your house or mow your grass. Yep. Straight up, Roswell conspiracy, big-black-almond-shaped-eyed, gray skinned, flying saucer aliens.

There I said it. It’s out there in the open, drawing flies like the pile of poop it is. I wanted so much to like this movie and there are parts of it that stir that seven-year-old kid in me. But the rest of the movie makes the 34-year-old guy in me really mad that they’ve done this to Dr. Jones. And just for that, two grins!

Today, for the first time, I worked from home. To be honest, it was great.

I thought I’d be miserable working on my single 19″ CRT instead of my cushy twin 21″ flat panels at work, but it worked out fine. I thought go crazy working over a laggy VPN remote desktop, but (other than a few hitches in the morning) it worked out fine. More than anything, I thought I’d be battling the temptation to go sit on the couch with a bowl of ice cream, but I actually got some good work done and everything worked out fine.

I didn’t get any extra sleep, but I did have a much more leisurely morning. I did take a shower and dress, but I was able to work more comfortably than at the office (if that’s possible considering our lax dress code). I rode my bike down the block for lunch. I got the laundry caught up. And I redesigned two database tables, three SQL scripts, and rewrote a web service to handle new, more complex, XML requests. All this and I saved one gallon of gas.

I’d say the day was a roaring success. Go me!