brykmantra.com

I posted my t-shirt design a couple of days ago, and yesterday Vickie told me to hurry up and get it online “so we can buy one!”

Wow. I really just made this for me, to flaunt the blog I’ve had for almost 5 years now, but if the rest of y’all want to help me publicize it, I’m all for it.

So, last night I set up shop on CafePress, and the brykMantra.com online store is open for business!

For now I’ve just got the one item, a long-sleeved white shirt, but if you’d rather have the logo on a different style of shirt (or even something like a mug or mousepad), please let me know and I’ll set it up.

(By the way, the design is slightly different from the one in my post from a couple of days ago — mostly, just a few more clovers … Let me know also if you’d like the other design instead …)

And, for the record, I’m setting up my logo items with zero profit margin, so all you pay is the CafePress base price; I don’t get a penny out of the deal.

After all, it would take some industrial-grade nerve to ask you to pay me for the privilege of advertising my site!

Anyway, thanks for your interest, Vickie, and to anyone else who is hankering to be a participant in the brykMantra revolution.

Ever since I was about 10 years old (or around the time that Get Smart and Man from U.N.C.L.E. debuted), the new fall TV season has been a time full of promise — at least until 90% of the new shows prove to be total crap.

Yet every year I keep holding out hope that this year will be different.

The problem this year is that all the networks are starting their shows the same week (just like they used to when I was growing up), and there’s a lot of good stuff competing against each other. Tonight at 7C, for example, there’s the new series Chuck (geeks and spies!), another new series Big Bang Theory (geeks and cleavage!) after the passable How I Met Your Mother (Allison Hanigan!); there’s also the second episode of the new season of Prison Break, which my wife and I both watch, and the new season of Dancing with the Stars, which my wife likes but which I have on WINEIO (Watch If Nothing Else Is On) status (which is still better than most stuff on the air, like, say, any of the 10,000 Law & Order spinoffs), so we’re going to have both VCRs going (yes, we’re the last household in the solar system to not have a TiVO or other DVR system, shut up).

And this is only the first day.

I’ll comment more as the week goes on, but for now …

I gotta go watch TV!

You know you’ve always needed this: A list of fictional characters who have worn the Nixon mask in movies and TV shows.

And with Halloween coming up, you also need to know where you can buy a Nixon mask of your very own.

You’re welcome.

So what have I been doing lately instead of blogging several times a day like I used to?

Living life to its fullest, if you must know.

Okay, not really; more like “to a little over a quarter of its fullest”, because anything even close to a half totally wears me out.

But the quarter is still filled up with lots of smaller life-items, like organizing intense word game competitions at lunchtime (more boring details about that at some other time), trying to survive an audit by a Polish health inspector from Australia (long story) during that segment of work that we call “non-lunchtime”, and replacing a brake light on my pickup (just dying to know every tedious detail about that, aren’t ya).

But back to my point at present: I’ve finally taken the plunge — after almost 5 years of blogging — and designed a t-shirt on Cafe Press. I’m mainly motivated by the fact that I’m be flying to visit my mom in a few weeks, and it would be cool to parade my domain name through the airport, the plane, the other airport, and my little tumbleweed-trap of a hometown.

Not that any strangers in the urban places will know that it’s MY domain, and not that any of the hometown hayseeds will CARE that I’ve staked out this little portion of cyberspace and even have a t-shirt to promote it.

But it matters to ME, and it’s my shirt, dammit.

I suppose that soon I’ll “open my shop” on Cafe Press to see if anybody else wants to buy one (I’ll probably set the price so I’ll have zero profit margin, just to see if I can sell one), but most importantly I want to put a picture and link in my sidebar to show readers who wind up here accidentally that this little mess of a blog actually has merchandise, which must surely count for some kind of cred in this media-whore society of ours.

In other words, it’s all part of a grand experiment, and the Internet is my lab rat.

Blast.

I forgot (until this morning) that this is International Talk Like a Pirate Day — and after the big 19-day commemoration I did four years ago on my old blog …

Oh well, I guess that was my proof-of-concept trial-by-fire, showing that I’m “down” with the whole pirate idea, so I don’t have anything to prove now.

And anyway, I’m too tired to toss about the seafaring lingo tonight, so I’ll just point you toward the official website, and, even better, to their Flickr page with hundreds of photos of people celebrating the day. (Also check out their public group of folks uploading their own pics — again, in the hundreds.)

(Full Disclosure: This post is almost word-for-word what I wrote one year ago today, and I bet nobody would have noticed, but I had to be up-front about it, because … um … that’s the pirate way. Yeah. Yarr.)

And here’s another article about an unintentionally hilarious brand name: In Dallas, our public transportation system is called the DART; in Seattle, it’s called the …

(Via Fark, once again.)

Best Name for a Sports Team EVER.

(Via Fark.)

The caller in this video is unclear on the concept of 20 Questions — he can’t even handle three … :

Here’s a great video-interview site: IHateYoungPeople.com. Check it out:

(Via Attack of the Show)

But about the things the older people say about music, I’d like to point out a few things:

1. Not all hip hop is bad. There is actually some interesting non-gangsta rap out there.
2. Not all young people like rap.
3. There is a lot of good new alternative music coming out these days, all the time. A lot of it almost rivals the best of the Baby Boomer music.
4. Remember that an awful lot of the music we grew up with was crap, too. We might not hear it as much today, so we can put it behind us, but we had to slog through it on the radio and dominating the pop charts at the time, so we really don’t have a position of moral superiority on this matter.
5. A large percentage of young people have a great appreciation for the best of the Boomer music. A lot more 20-somethings and teens like Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and ZZ Top, to name just three, than we had appreciation for our parents’ music back then.

So shut up about “the music today” already. Just change the channels when the latest prefab Beyonce video comes on, and seek out the good stuff.

And if you don’t know how to find the good stuff, just ask me.

“Do these dwarven greaves make my butt look big?”

Seriously, I try to get around to posting, but there’s so much of life that needs living!

And there’s even more goofing off, and I find myself doing that as well, as evidenced by the above shot of my recent renewed dabbling in Oblivion.

But I’ve posted pictures, so that will do nicely for now.