The Daily Adventures of Mercat

OMG OHIO YAAAAY I'm so proud. This goes out to everyone who says we suck as a state. SCREW YOU.

Jones soda is making D&D flavors... I'm posting this only because I know there are some D&D fans and some Jones soda fans out there. Personally, I can't do Jones soda, the holiday flavors killed it for me (it's the aftertaste). Also, I'm glad to see gamers are getting their foot in the door with advertisers, like the WoW and Halo Mountain Dews. Okay Mountain Dew, you know what's next? Indy V, I want to see some fucking DELICIOUS marketing. Enough with that Dr. Pepper bullshit

Oh, and did I say Indy V? I think I did.

(Also, Jones soda has a perfect in, but I hate it so please don't. I'M BEGGING YOU, PEPSI, DO THIS FOR ME)

Also? It's about damn time someone made an INDIANA JONES PUZZLE GAME, goddamn. I want to buy it but sadly I don't think games transfer from phone to phone...? also, nerd moment, that article number is 1135 goddamn i'm a huge nerd

I'm actually surprised this didn't happen sooner, and that it wasn't a youtube mashup, but a real piece of music.

This man can draw perfect circles. It is ridiculous.

I always knew Abercrombie & Fitch was a pretentious pile of overpriced bullshit, but I didn't realize they actively discriminate. Yeah, glad I never shopped there, and now I never will. Ugh.

Fur Elise arranged for owls, loons, cats, and a wood stork:



Scanning dead salmon in fMRI machine highlights use of red herrings. I admit, this title immediately caught my attention; salmon was a joke at Troop this summer, and it's also become a (different and completely unrelated) joke here in PoD's trumpet section; also, ever since Katy introduced me to the Planetarium Puzzle I've always been drawn to anything regarding red herrings, maybe simply because I'd never heard the term used before. I have no idea why I am so obsessed with the concept, but I am. Anyway, it's a good article.

An interesting article on cursive and print. Another topic I've become fascinated with ever since I found out cursive was no longer being taught in schools. It came as kind of a shock to me, because, well, we're going to end up with people who can't read it. Not that it's too difficult, but I imagine for some it could be, especially with letters like the old style Q, or Z. See, I don't even remember anymore because they (who is they?) changed it when I got to second grade, so we relearned some letters. Anyway, I mean, I can understand that so many people type now that it rarely matters. I mean, fuck, pretty much all my teachers refuse to accept handwritten assignments. But I am inherently drawn to fonts (I don't know why, I just am--I sketch fonts when I'm bored, for god's sake, random words that pop into my head just because I want to make them look interesting) and it makes me sad that an alternative sort of alphabet could disappear. Anyway, just some thoughts there, nothing really pressing.

Depp unsure about Pirates 4, which would be a bummer considerig the first movie is so much better than the second two.

So, I decided to start chewing gum. This was at first a challenge because Juicy Fruit, ever since they changed their recipe or something a few years ago, it tastes terrible. Although I DID finally find sugarless Juicy Fruit in the US--it comes in those 60 piece BigEPaks. So despite that I'm a little bit of a chomper and I get tired of chewing it pretty fast, this is the plus list I'm trying to focus on: I don't bite my nails as much, it prevents me from eating as much snack food, and it burns some calories. BUT Orbit peppermint is pretty good (I don't think it's sugarless though?) and Trident bubblegum is pretty good, too.

ALSO since Pittsburgh sucked so much this weekend, all I did was pick up a halloween snowglobe. I wonder how long it will last. HOWEVER, it is awesome.

[Error: unknown template qotd]Well, uh, it was the summer and not the holidays, but we hit the airport flying out of Alaska (Gustavus?). Yes, we hit the airport. It was a tiny little two-strip runway with one main building (Delta and Alaska Airlines, or something like that--anyway, probably smaller than your average post office building) and a few shacks from small plane owners who flew for hunting trips and tours and that sort of thing. So anyway, we're on this medium-sized plane, backing out to fly out. (Oh, it was small enough you still got on the plane from a set of stairs on the runway... That was cool.) And I guess the pilot just wasn't paying attention, because the guy on the left wing was waving like mad, a lot of people on the plane were yelling (except mom and dad because they figured the pilot couldn't hear us through the door). Grandma and Grandpa were flipping the fuck out, let me tell you. Max and Kyle and Laura and I were just kind of bemused.

So anyway, the guy keeps going and clips a beam of the building with the tip of the wing. He broke probably a foot off the end of the wing and broke a good four or six foot section off the beam of the building. And it was one of those big, square beams, too, probably 1'x1' or 2'x2' or something like that. I don't remember exactly.

Anyway, so then we all had to unload, and we would have had to wait forever for them to get another plane in there, and Uncle Steve was desperate to get back because we had 50 pounds of frigging halibut in our luggage that was going to go bad. So we all marched our stuff over to one of the tiny shacks to see if the guy could fly us out to a larger airport, and we were going to have to leave some of the luggage behind because you only have so much weight per passenger (and we would be taking two small planes for the ten of us as it was), and I was incredibly pissed off because mom and dad and Uncle Steve were going to make me leave my bag here and take their fish for my weight instead. (And by this time, two weeks in Alaska, I was absolutely disgusted with halibut. And I haven't really eaten any since, either.) But eventually they got a plane that had been slightly larger than the one we crashed to some to that airport rather than going straight back to the continental US, (it was slightly out of the way, maybe flying out of Juneau or something? I can't remember) and we were all able to get on there and end up in Chicago or something, I don't remember exactly.

Anyway, that's the story of how we crashed a plane into an airport.