Here is a slideshow of a collection of great photos featuring Santa scaring the living daylights out of little kids. We’re taking Bay and Koa to a Christmas party tonight, so I hope to capture a couple photos just like these.

[link via Chris]

Anyone want to exchange friend codes for Animal Crossing: Wild World? Email me using the form at the bottom of THIS PAGE. I am desperate to try out the wifi features!

We watched House of Flying Daggers a couple days ago at a friends house. I enjoyed it, but what made it really interesting was that we watched the dubbed version, with subtitles on as well, and the dubs and subs were really different. And then I was talking a friend about The Jerk, and how they changed some of the words to make it acceptable for TV. Anyways, that got me thinking of a couple other nice big-screen to television translations.

Shithead -> Stupid : Steve Martin’s character’s dog’s name
Fuuuuuck youuuu! -> Forgeeeeet Youuuu! : Kevin Bacon’s character in Tremors
… I guess you’re up shit creek -> … I guess your up THE creek : Jake in The Blues Brothers

And then the dude in Johnny Dangerously used to disguise the dirty words: Fargin Icehole, Corksucker

My friend Tony has been telling me how funny Kung Pow was for a couple weeks now. I finally got it from Netflix and watched it. He was totally right. It was hilarious! I was laughing out loud a bunch of times. They combined clips from an old kung fu movie (1976) with new footage, and added voice-overs for everything. Really excellent! I highly recommend it. It’s so crazy. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!

I suppose I have sunk to a new level of otaku/geekdom… I have been listening (and enjoying) the soundtrack to the games SimCity 3k and SimCity 4. The music is really good! The SimCity games are some of the only games in which I keep the music on all the time. The only weird thing is that whenever I hear the music, I have visions of traffic moving along, buildings being destroyed, lots cleared, and skyscrapers being built.

I was checking out some of the blogs that I often visit when I came across a link to Dooku.net. It’s hilarious. Click on the button to change the soundtrack. I like the Benny Hill song (Yakkity Sax) and the Price Is Right Yodel song the best.

[link via Octopusdropkick]

I finally received my GPS unit, a Garmin eTrex Legend, last Friday, and have been having fun using it this weekend. The coolest thing I have found is that it records “Tracks”, which are the routes that you have taken. You can then upload the tracks to the software on the PC and save them there. I guess I am a geek about it, but I find it very interesting to map out the routes we have taken. It’s neat to see the route we took to go to breakfast, then after that, to the park, and then to the market, and then back home. When I expand the map, I can see that the route I like to take to the market isn’t necessarily the best way, at least distance-wise.

My only gripe about the software is that it doesn’t merge data nicely between the GPS unit and the PC. I haven’t figured out a way to keep all the tracks from different days in a single file. And the GPS unit keeps waypoint data stored in a different format. It is fine to create routes and waypoints on the PC, then download them to the GPS. But if you upload them back to the PC, the data is “truncated”, and it overwrites some custom data that the PC makes use of, but the GPS doesn’t, such as custom icons and waypoint descriptions. Maybe the newer software fixes that. In the meantime, when I upload data, I just select Tracks, but it creates a new file, not merging it with my normal file. So I just save that to a file named tracks_20051024.mps so they keep in order.

I painted the replacement front fender I bought a year ago. It was originally red, and I plan to paint it dark blue, along witht the bike frame, but temporarily painted it an off-white color, the same as the side covers. I didn’t want to have a red fender on my light blue bike. I used Rustoleum “Paint for Plastic”, and it turned out pretty good. I will put on a coat or two of clear coat in a couple days after it dries a bit.

The Dodgers are renovating Dodger Stadium this off-season, and a number of the original seats are on sale. Prices range from $250 – $600 a pair. Damn, the blue reserve level seats would look good in the gameroom of our new house…

I read “The Perfect Vehicle” by Melissa Pierson a couple months ago, and enjoyed it a lot. I read it pretty quickly (for me at least), in about a week. It follows the author getting into motorcycles, buying her Moto Guzzi, a couple road trips, and her relationships. I found that I most enjoyed the parts where she talks about motorcycle history, and her riding experiences. It was especially cool to read about her trip to Europe, and her visit to the Moto Guzzi factory. I think that must have been heaven for a Moto Guzzi enthusiast!