Entry 667: Back-Up Blog

I had written about half an entry before I deleted it to start this one. It started getting really heavy and political, and I just didn't have it in me to finish it. I saved it, so I might complete it and post it at some point in the future, but for now it's like... it's Father's Day weekend, it's a quasi-long weekend, the weather is sunny and warm, and I just want to keep things light. So, I'm just going to do some bullet points on whatever non-serious thoughts enter my head and call it a post. It'll be whimsical.

• I say it's a "quasi-long weekend" because it's a long weekend for seemingly everybody but me. Monday is Juneteenth, which most people in the District get off ever since Biden declared it a national holiday way back in 2021. But it's not as commonly celebrated in Maryland where my office is located, so it's not one of the holidays we get off. I thought about working from home so that I can attend a neighborhood block party in the early evening, but S scheduled the cleaning ladies to come on Monday, and I hate working while they are here. I have to tiptoe around them, and the smell of the cleaning solutions irritates me. First world problems, I know.
  
  
• We watched Terminator 2 tonight with the kids. It's pretty violent, but it's mostly machine-on-machine violence, so it's appropriate for kids. One I thing I noticed is that Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature lines are actually very understated in the movie. They're just dialogue, and it's not clear to me why they became culture memes (before memes were even a thing). "I'll be back," for example, isn't even a standalone line. He says, "Stay here. I'll be back." Why is the latter so famous? It reminds of the "It's not tumor" line, which I've mention before on this blog. I think it's because Arnold is such a common target of impersonation, and sometimes we conflate impersonations of celebrities with the celebrities themselves. In my head, for example, George H.W. Bush doesn't sound like he really did, he sounds like Dana Carvey pretending to be him.
  
  
• Two other things I noticed about the movie is that Danny Cooksey is not the same child actor as Jared Rushton, and Dean Norris (Hank in Breaking Bad) plays one of the SWAT team members. That was a pretty good pull by me, as I recognized him through a gas mask in like a three-second scene.
  
  
• We've started playing Settlers of Catan literally everyday as a family. It's pretty fun. I would say I win about two-thirds of the games (build cities early), and then S wins the rest with a few wins by Lil' S1 sprinkled in there. I think Lil' S2 has won at least once before, but he usually can't maintain focus long enough to seal the deal, even when he gets a lead. The other thing he does is he announces whenever something good happens, even if, strategically, he should keep it a secret. Actually, Lil' S1 does that too. He's even worse, as he just straight-up tells us what his plans are. I'm going to try to get to the 2-to-1 sheep port, and then I'm going to start build roads to try to get longest road, and then... We bought the seafarers edition, and it took us like 45 minutes just to set it up. We didn't even play; we just left it in place for tomorrow.
  
  
• There was a sonic boom in the DC-area a few weeks ago, and I heard it. It sounded like somebody banged on the windows, but nobody was around but me. If I were less of a skeptic, I might have thought our house was haunted. Instead I thought, Whoa, that was weird; I wonder what caused it. And then later that night I saw randomly on the news that there was a sonic boom, and it all made sense.
  
  
• I started watching MrBeast videos with the kids, and I gotta say, I'm now a MrBeast fan. I think his detractors are straight-up wrong. If I could earn millions of dollars making inane YouTube videos, I would give it all away too.
  
  
• One of my favorite random running songs is "Turn the Beat Around" by Gloria Estefan. The original (Vicki Sue Robinson) is probably better overall, but the cover is better while exercising because it's a little bit more hype. Both versions have the same lyrics and there's one ingeniously bad verse:
  
  Flute player play your flute 'cause
  I know that you want to get your thing off
  
  A bunch of other musicians are mentioned throughout the song, in the context of what their instruments add to the song (cause when the guitar player start playing with the syncopated rhythm, with the scratch, scratch, scratch) but with the flute player, it's like, just play it -- nothing special. I don't know why, but it makes me laugh every time I hear it, and the fact that you can hear a flute in the background during this part only adds to my amusement.
  

Alright, I can see it's time to go. Until next time...