DAMN STRAIGHT

Two people at the office have birthdays over the weekend, so there's cake. We're out of plastic forks, so I'm eating my (large) piece with a knife instead. Know that this is because I am the hardest possible core.

WHAT IN THE NOISE, INDEED

Did any of you hear anything weird in San Francisco around 9:10pm last night?

I was sitting in my living room watching a rerun of Mythbusters with the windows and porch door open (it was hot in my house) when I heard and felt a loud crashing noise come from outside. And when I say "felt," I mean it: It was like standing in front of a giant speaker stack that emitted a single, sharp bass note -- a resonation in my chest and a brief feeling of pressure on my body in general.

My first thought, I'll admit, was "Something blew up outside." I hadn't seen a flash of light, but it seemed like the only credible explanation for the loud crashing sound and what had felt to me like a shockwave. Maybe a car had slammed into a gas truck on Lincoln Blvd or the Golden Gate Bridge? I went outside and greeted a neighbor who'd walked out at the behest of his wife to find out what the hell had just rattled their windows. No lights, no noise, no sirens.

My neighbor went back inside, and I walked down the stairs to Lincoln Blvd just to see if there was something, anything. The abandoned building on Hoffman apparently has an alarm system, because I could hear it going off, but other than that, nothing. An owl hooted a few times. I went back up the stairs.

I still have no idea what could have made that kind of noise -- accompanied by a shockwave that rattled windows in my neighborhood along with my ribcage -- that leaves no trace nearby. I went to put gas in my car later that night, and on the way home, there was no sign of a disaster on the Golden Gate (traffic would've been bad). What the hell was that? A ghost exploding? A boom tube? A mini-Tunguskan interdimensional cross-rip event?

I got nothin'.

MAN KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS

I got my hands on a promo excerpt of the book Soon I Will Be Invincible and read it over dinner at work. I subsequently made it a point to stop at Green Apple on the way home (after picking up Halo 3) and get it. As soon as I stepped into the store, I saw it, grabbed it, and turned smartly around to walk the three steps to the counter. This post's title is the remark the girl manning* the register made; it was by far the shortest amount of time I have ever spent in that store.

* girling? it has never occurred to me until just now how weird "manning" sounds when applied to someone who has two X chromosomes

I AM THE FINAL BOSS IN HALO 3

I AM THE FINAL BOSS IN HALO 3

Sorry to have spoiled it for you.

AH, FOAM

Those of you who have been on tenterhooks since May can now relax: The downstairs bathroom's main dispenser now contains real soap that foams instead of the weird "lotion soap" that I always suspected was "just lotion." I don't know what prompted this switch. Were there others like me who washed their hands with trepidation and wondered, secretly, in the backs of their minds? Or was the janitorial staff just out of the strange stuff? I'd like to believe the former, but I choose the latter as likelier.

VAPORWISH

You know what I'd find really useful that has no chance of ever existing? A feature on movie websites that lets you know when the movie is leaving theaters. That would actually be extremely helpful to me in deciding which movies I need to make a priority. You know what I'm sayin'?

IS IT REALLY THAT HARD

Does this already exist: A group blog written by people who ride buses, whose entries consist of detailed notes about the inane, obnoxious conversations of others? Perhaps we could build complete pictures of these ostentatious assholes' lives.

I assert to you that there is a difference between

CONVERSATION A: "Hey, I just wanted to let you know I'm going to be half an hour late for dinner, I had a meeting run over. Okay, cool, I'm on the bus, I've got to go, talk to you later."

CONVERSATION B: (an uninterrupted 45-minute discussion on who's moving in with who, how their trip to Spain was, who they ran into, omigod are you kidding me, and did you hear about this guy who hurgh blurgh arf puke)

How the fuck hard is it to just not talk on your damn phone for half an hour while you're crammed onto a bus with people who just want to go home or listen to their iPod? I mean damn, I understand if you have essential information to communicate, but that should take a minute or two, tops. It's not that it makes me really mad to have to listen to someone babble to someone else about the essentially meaningless-to-me details of their life, it's just that to talk in a confined space like that as though you're the only person there seems to betray a level of self-absorption that's almost literally toxic.

This is ... this is probably not new information to you.

MINOR URINAL MYSTERY

The urinal I typically use contained, at 11:30am today, a blue foamy liquid that I can only assume was soap, maybe the soap used by the janitorial staff to clean it. But for it to still be there at 11:30am? Was nobody else drinking liquids today? I realize that there's a whole other urinal and two toilets just in that one bathroom, but it seemed kind of weird.

Unless ... unless there's something I don't know about that urinal.

POWDERED CARBON(?)

At work we have the archetypal water coolers, which I make use of fairly frequently. Sometimes I discover one to be empty, so I do the thing where I take the top off a new bottle and replace it.

Something I'm noticing, though, is that lots of times, these bottles have this weird dust on them that I wipe off before I put them on the cooler: an extremely fine, uniform black powder. What in the gibbon is that. Does the water company do that "activated charcoal filtration" or whatever, and is this somehow a byproduct thereof? That's my guess, anyway.

MY BODY THE BIOREACTOR

"You burp a lot."

I've had two people remark on this within about three days or so. It's probably true, but it's not like I do it to be gross. I think my guts are just highly efficient at converting food matter into gases. Also -- crucially -- both times, I had just consumed a meal that involved a carbonated beverage (Orangina and Fanta respectively; I like orange drinks).

This update on my guts has been brought to you by my blog.

YOUR SONIC WARNING

I jingle when I walk now.

I'm trying out a new personal note-taking system that requires me to keep my keys somewhere other than the pocket where they used to live, so now they hang from my belt utilizing a clever system of hooks, cables, pulleys, and a diesel-powered winch. So far the only thing I've noticed that's different is that the keys make a jangly noise when I move around, which is probably going to put my side career as a stealthy night-stalking crimefighter on hold for a while. These are the kinds of sacrifices I have to make now.

WHY'S IT GOTTA BE A THING

For the past couple of days, Google Maps hasn't been working right for me, at least not at work. I'm not going to bother taking a screenshot; basically it just doesn't load correctly, there's no stylesheet apparent, and clicking on things doesn't produce a result of any sort. I don't know why this is, but it's got to be on my end, right? I can't imagine Google Maps could be broken for two days and the world not getting set on fire. Is there a setting somewhere that got flipped? Some sort of script or language thing? I haven't monkeyed with my browser settings basically ever. It's Firefox, for fucksake, it just works. Or at least it used to. On this one page.

edit: It's also broken in IE. This is actually kind of baffling.

I AM COMFORTABLE ADMITTING THIS

I had a real-life Halo dream last night. Not about playing the game. Basically it was me and a bunch of other people practicing with powered-down real-life versions of in-game weaponry on small, robotic targets. These "practice" weapons were so weak, they wouldn't actually kill a spider I saw crawling across the floor; I had to use a grenade on it.

This is the official sign that I need to start doing research on a new TV for my impending Xbox 360 purchase. These will be the last big things I'm going to buy for a really long time.