Has anyone else ever noticed just how much Coke® there is in Sixteen Candles? Next time you’re watching it and want to get really drunk, take a drink every time you see a Coca-Cola® product. The cafeteria scene alone will get you extremely pissed.

After much observation, I’ve determined that the real purpose of the presence of the National Guard inside Grand Central Station is to help people find ticket vending machines.

Apparently it’s hot outside.

If anyone’s worried about me getting heat stroke or something, let me assure you that both my home and my office are air-conditioned, and the walk between them is short and often shady*. So it’s okay; I’ll survive.

You’re still welcome to send me ice cream, though. I like Oatmeal Cookie Chunk the best.

* Mom, when I say “shady,” I mean it in a completely safe, free-of-crime way. Don’t worry.

At the Olive Tree Cafe (on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village), they let you draw on the tables with chalk.

Apparently I’m not the first person to use the term “tree-manity,” nor am I the first person to use the entire phrase, “Oh the tree-manity.”

Funny how that works. Granted, if Google didn’t exist, I would definitely think it was the first recorded use of the term, and I’d be all excited. Damn you, Google. Damn you for dashing my dreams of creating a new term. Damn you to… glockensphere. Yeah. It’s an other-worldly plane full of dinging sounds. It’s gotta be someone’s personal hell. And it’s my term, dammit! Mine!

I can’t believe how much trash we produce in a day.

I mean, we don’t actually produce it (at least not the kind I’m talking about), so I guess it’s more correct to say that we… deposit it.

Anyway, what I’m talking about is all the packaging, all the bags, bottles, and cans, all the napkins, paper towels, and so forth. Recyclable or non-recyclable, it’s all trash because it’s all stuff we don’t need anymore. And I’m amazed because I manage to fill the trash can at my desk to its brim every single day with just the trash from my breakfast, lunch, and occasional paperwork.

Naturally I’m not planning to do anything about this, like switching to reusable cutlery or asking for “no bag” when I buy my lunch. That’s for proactive eco-people, and I’m hardly one of those. I’m just amazed by it and thought it was worth mentioning.

Traci works for a newspaper. Her boss asked her to write an article about how pets cope with the hot summer. The task obviously demanded incredible journalistic skills, so I told her I’d ghost-write it for her. Here’s my article:

How Pets Cope With the Hot Summer
BY TRACI

They pant.

_

Pulitzer, here I come.

This Subway Quiz is fun if you live in New York (or at least if you think you’re familiar with the New York City subway). I scored 14 out of 15. I guarantee you won’t do that well.

Remember how I wanted to do a musical using the songs of The Cure? Well, they didn’t exactly steal my idea, but…

The Smiths–a band from Manchester, England, whose singer and lyricist, Morrissey, taught a generation-wide cult how to mope with melodramatic self-consciousness–are getting…Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, a music-theater piece based on Smiths songs. [Read more.]

Dammit! It’s too similar! Now I have to choose another totally different band, like Daft Punk or Fine Young Cannibals.

When my hard drive mechanically failed last year, it was impossible to recover any of the data from it. Fortunately most of it was backed up on my laptop, on my iPod, or on CDs. The big casualty, however, was an album of photos taken at Sammi’s Halloween party (the night before I left for New York).

Last week when my new hard drive failed (non-mechanically), I purchased some file recovery software so that I could copy all of the data off the drive. Now, this software still wouldn’t be able to do anything for the mechanically failed drive, but it sparked an idea.

I decided to run the file recovery software on my digital camera’s memory card. Lo and behold, it was able to “un-delete” several of the photos from Sammi’s Halloween party, and I was a happy camper.