1. Exercise more.

2. Stop procrastinating.

3. Um... um... ah, fuck it. I'll finish this list tomorrow.

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'Twas the night after Christmas, when all through the house
every creature was stirring, except for this mouse.
He drank too much eggnog and now he's lying dead.
And look! Two other mice are feasting on his head.

NOM NOM NOM... BRAINZZZ....

I hope all you sickos enjoyed the gruesome sight.
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

---
Thanks for the picture, Chinesemafia. My condolences for your headless dead pet mouse.

The girlfriend and I are planning a trip to Tagaytay, and we've been trolling the Web for info.

You'd think that Tagaytay.com would be a good place to start, and it is, but I had to laugh at their timid tagline.

Hey, it could be true. We don't know for sure, but Tagaytay is probably the most pleasant city in Asia! I mean, it's possible that you would have a decent time over there. Perhaps the food would be edible and maybe you wouldn't get cholera. There's even a chance that you wouldn't get mugged or raped. Yay?

* * *

The search for a good place to stay was long and quite boring, but I did come across something mildly funny on the room rates page of a hotel called Casablanca.

What? A honeymoon suite for 5 people? Well, I guess it makes sense if you're a Muslim dude with 4 wives.

* * *

In the end, we picked The Boutique Bed and Breakfast, which is probably a pleasant place. Wish us luck.

Since he threw his shoes at George W. Bush earlier in the week, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi has become a folk hero of sorts in the Arab world. Check out these Palestinian journalists holding a protest rally in his honor.

"You devervet it"? This deverves a fatwa from the spelling Taliban.

The incarcerated Mr. al-Zaidi isn't living up to his hero billing though. While people are rallying to support him, he's already chickening out after a few days--he's now crying and begging for leniency.

Is it true remorse or did he drop his soap one too many times in jail and just couldn't take the pain anymore? Who knows. But you'd think that someone with the balls to throw shoes at the most powerful man in the world would have the testicular fortitude to not apologize. Sounds like someone failed Martyrdom 101. What happened to the unwavering willingness to die for the cause? Tsk... kids nowadays....

No word yet whether the Egyptian man who offered his daughter to al-Zaidi in marriage has withdrawn the proposal.

Good journalists are supposed to stay fair and balanced, but this Iraqi reporter at the press conference during George W. Bush's surprise visit to Baghdad clearly showed his liberal bias.

Shoo, filthy American dogs! Shoo!

President Bush may not be the smartest guy on the planet, but man, he sure has amazingly quick reflexes. If that were me standing at the podium, I would have caught the shoe... with my face. Bush dodged it as deftly as he does with foreign policy questions. I'm impressed. People may call Bush a lame duck, but come on, that was an awesome duck right there.

I don't know what the angry shoe-throwing journalist was ranting about, but I'm pretty sure that he was shouting "Don't tase me bro!" in Iraqi as he was tackled by the always efficient Secret Service agents.

For the last few months, this site has been getting more spam comments than real ones. Here's an example that showed up here this morning.

Having "Personals" as the subject line made it instantly obvious that the comment is spam. What made it amusing though is that it was posted by "Christian_Dating."

Hmm, Christian spam? Now that's somewhat unusual. It sounds like a spam link for one of those Christian dating sites like BigChurch.com, where God-fearing Christian men and God-fearing Christian women meet each other to not have sex. (Ironically, BigChurch.com is owned by Penthouse. It's true. I'm not kidding.)

But, as you can see, the body of the comment made no mention of anything Christian. It just said "date dating" (ooh, meta-dating) and "jewish on line dating"--perhaps something like Jsingles.com? Interestingly, unlike the Christian dating site, the Jewish one allows man-seeking-man and woman-seeking-woman searches. Them Jews sure have come a long way from the good old days of stoning homosexuals to death in the desert. I think that they still don't like pork though (unless it's in the form of spam).

Anyway, the spam comment was posted under my old "Rapists" blog entry, which raises a disturbing question: do Christians and Jews often confuse dating with raping? Also, it's not clear whether Christians or Jews (or both) are the target audience of the cryptic spam comment. The only way to know for sure is to follow the link, which takes us to this:

What? "Larges" what? Somehow, I don't think that Jehovah or his son would approve of this. But hey, sex with "no commitments" sounds enticing. Let's click on the "JOIN FREE!!!" link!

Huh? What does that even mean? Is that what a Christian/Jew orgy is like? I'm disappointed.

Oh well, at least it's free.

... and now I have to make a new one.

Okay, so Twitter didn't really steal my lame joke, and I didn't really have to make a new one. But I did anyway.

From time to time, I change this site's top banner. Today, I decided to put up a Christmas-themed one, so I dug up the old banner from last year's holiday season. Longtime visitors of this site might remember this.

Hmm, now why does that look so familiar? It took me a while to realize that the same lame joke is in the new Twitter fail graphic that replaced the beloved old Fail Whale.

I don't want to have the same joke as stupid Twitter, so I decided to make a new one. Amazingly, it turned out to be cornier than last year's.

If you don't get the joke, don't worry. It's not funny anyway.

And yes, the snowman does have a naughty snow cone, but it's small and the same color as the rest of his body, and that's why you can't see it.

No, not to your penis, buddy. That one is a hopeless cause. Sorry.

This ad banner I saw in a mall promises to add inches to something else: your height.

I found the whole concept hilarious and mock-worthy. Also, those shoes look like something straight out of Kim Jong-il's wardrobe, although admittedly more stylish.

Bradford's website is full of dubious statistics and marketing lines like "women find taller men more superior, smarter and significantly more attractive." Yeah, and everybody knows that there's nothing manlier than high heels. Heh. Trying to impress a woman by wearing high platform shoes makes as much sense as stuffing socks in your underwear to make your tiny penis look bigger. You're just setting her up for disappointment (and setting yourself up for embarrassment) when the shoes (and the rest of your clothes) come off.

The site also has unintentionally funny nuggets like "imagine you looking down on people instead of always looking up." Hey, I'm not tall, but I don't need stupid elevator shoes to be looking down on people--I already do that quite well actually. Ha!

I'm reserving judgment on their line of high athletic shoes though, because they actually sound useful... at least in theory. I've always believed that I wouldn't suck so much at basketball if I were 6 feet tall, and a pair of those wobbly-looking giant sneakers might just prove me right... or wrong. Hmm.

24 is back! Yay!

Well, that's not true... not yet anyway. The 7th season of the hit show was supposed to start back in January 2008, but it got postponed by a whole year thanks to the stupid WGA writers' strike.

24 will return in January 2009, but last week, fans of the show got something to whet their appetite. Fox aired a two-hour TV movie called 24: Redemption, which bridges the gap between seasons 6 and 7.

The movie had our hero Jack Bauer running around a fictional African country trying to save children from ruthless rebels, while, halfway across the globe, America swears in its first female president. That's right, I said a female president. And oh, her name is Allison Taylor, which is like the most vanilla name ever.

Eat your heart out, Hillary.

Eight years ago, way before Barack Obama became a household name, 24 made David Palmer America's first black president. Some pop culture pundits even credit the show for helping to make the idea of a black president palatable to some American voters, and thus possibly helping Obama's campaign.

I know that sounds stupid in all kinds of ways, but you know what else is stupid? The average American voter. Now, if season 7 of the show hadn't been postponed, Allison Taylor would have been the president on 24 right when Hillary Clinton was fighting Barack Obama for the nomination earlier this year. Could the writers' strike have cost Hillary her shot at the presidency? I guess we'll never know, but it's fun to think about.

Anyway, having a female president is nice, but Allison Taylor isn't exactly eye candy. Fortunately, we get a good dose of that from Samantha Roth, her son's hot girlfriend.

Unfortunately, she was putting her clothes on and not taking them off.

In the 24 universe, all beautiful women are either A) annoying damsels in distress who get innocent people around them killed, or B) heartless homicidal bitches who work for the bad guys. So which way will Samantha swing? My money is on B.

The classic example of A is of course Kim Bauer, Jack's hopelessly dumb daughter. In 24: Redemption, she managed to get one of the good guys killed, which is quite a feat considering that she didn't even make an appearance. I swear, the mere mention of her name causes people to die. I would hate her if she weren't so pretty.

Overall, 24: Redemption was not great, but it was a decent fix for fans like me. The body count was satisfyingly high too. One smart-ass poster on IMDB said, "Jack Bauer has surpassed AIDS as the leading cause of death in Africa." He may be right.

P.S. There was even a cameo appearance by two wayward cameramen. See if you can spot them.

Cut! Get out of the shot, you morons!

I guess this is where you send your future gay son for day care.

Observe the boy in the purple shirt. Where is his hand going??? Looks like someone is blossoming already.