 That’s a picture of Emily throwing her arms up to block a picture from being taken during a small break from riding bikes. We biked about 5 miles to the movie theater today, then back. Definitely their longest biking trip to date. We stopped at their moms, Fred Meyer, and Circle K for movie theater candy on the way. We saw, of course, Indiana Jones 4. Normally we stay at the theater for a 2nd movie, but nothing else really worth seeing was there. Indiana Jones was good, albeit incredibly unbelievable. I know you’re supposed to suspend disbelief and just enjoy movies like this, but they were just asking us to accept way too much. Like, did you know that you can lock yourself inside a refrigerator and be launched hundreds of feet through the air (via a nuclear explosion) and walk out of the fridge perfectly fine? Or that you can drive your boat car off a 100′ cliff into the water and you don’t even fall out? Then the same boat can fall down 3 separate water falls and you’ll still be fine? They barely even fell out of the boat and just climbed right back in each time. Gotta love movie physics. Oh, and then there were at least 4 scenes with Indiana and his friends running away from heavily armed bad guys, all of them shooting but nobody ever gets hit. There’s just no way they all missed him. The kids and I watched the first 2 Indiana Jones movies this week and last. I’ve actually never seen either of them all the way through. I’ve only caught bits of them on cable throughout the years and thought they looked kind of boring. I have seen #3 many times, though, since I worked at a theater when it came out. So that’s my weekend so far.
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 Yesterday after work, I biked all over Albany for about 3 hours to take pictures of pay phones. Why do I want pictures of pay phones? Well, aside from my lifelong phone obsession, I just think that in another 10 years they’re all going to be gone and it’d be cool to have photographic evidence that pay phones once existed in the town I live in. (Even though I plan to leave this city in about 10 years.)  In the 2 years that I’ve lived here, I’ve seen a pretty significant decrease in public pay phones. In 2006, they renovated the mall and they didn’t bother reinstalling any of the pay phones that they’d ripped out. I think there were 12 throughout the mall. Now there’s none, except for one single pay phone that’s outside one of the doors. And I’ve also been seeing them disappear in public at a pretty significant rate. Most of the time they leave the booth or stand and just take the phone. It’s weird that I notice the decline in pay phones since I haven’t used one for legitimate purposes since… geez, probably not since about 2000 when I bought my first cell phone.  So I want to take pictures of all the public phones and see how long they last. I really think 10 years has got to be it for pay phones. I’m not going to be like 2600 and declare them officially dead this year. Because people obviously still use them. I think. Come to think of it, I guess I never actually see anyone using pay phones anymore. I just assume they still do.  Here’s my set of Albany pay phones: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbcp/sets/72157605149367852/ I added them all to the Flickr group called Pay Phone Planet, which is a place to preserve pay phone history. There’s a lot of good pictures on there. I did this in Alton too, back in the early 2000’s. Here’s my small collection of pay phone pictures from there: http://www.notla.com/sites/altononline/payphones.php  I’m going to take another long bike ride later this week and get more pictures. I think I’m just going to keep at it until I’ve covered all of Albany. It shouldn’t take that long. Oh yeah, for the most part I tried to be somewhat stealthy about taking these pictures to avoid having conversations with other humans. But when I took the one in Two Rivers Mall food court, an old man asked me what it was for. I told him that I wrote for an internet publication and we were doing a story on the death of pay phones. So he goes into story mode and starts going on about pay phones and rotary phones and says he actually remembers crank phones when you had to tell the operator who you wanted to talk to. I told him how I had to teach my kids to dial a rotary dial phone (it took them awhile to master it) and that their friends that come over have usually never seen one. It was a fun conversation.
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I finished up Harry Potter #7 today. I think I started it on Thursday or Friday. It was easily the best book of the series. I thought it would be boring when I started it. I mean really, after 6 books of wizarding crap can the 7th one really be any different? But yeah, it was great and I couldn’t put it down. I’ve also listened to 3 “seasons” of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC radio show now. I did a lot of driving around this weekend, so I was able to finish up the 3rd one. It’s great stuff as well. I ended up at a Wal-Mart and picked up a few phone calls for customers when I heard someone paged to pick up a phone line. It was mostly because I’d been itching to test out this telephone recording device of mine, which resembles a wireless phone earpiece that people wore before everyone had bluetooth. I stupidly messed up the recordings of most of the calls I answered, but here’s one I got: http://www.phonelosers.org/stuff/do_you_sell_tires.mp3 Yesterday I went on a 4 1/2 hour hike in Corvallis. 
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A few years back, I was using Sprint PCS as my wireless carrier. I decided that I needed more monthly minutes, so I called in to change my calling plan. I think at this point I’d been a Sprint subscriber for 4 or 5 years, so I was no longer under their 2 year contract. The person I spoke with said that to make any changes to my calling plan, they would have to renew my 2 year contract. Just to pay Sprint more money, I would have to renew the contract. I argued for a bit and even talked to a supervisor, but they refused to let me make any changes without renewing. I told them I would likely switch to another carrier before I would sign another 2 year contract with Sprint PCS. So that’s what I ended up doing. I signed up with Verizon Wireless a few days later (yes, I had to sign up for 2 years of Verizon Wireless) and then I called Sprint PCS to cancel. The man at Sprint said he was sorry to see me go and asked what he could do to retain me as a customer. I told him that he could change my calling plan without locking me into another 2 years of service with them. He said he couldn’t do that, but ended up transferring me to some other department who are supposed to do whatever they can to keep their customers. At this point I had no intentions of staying with Sprint PCS since I already had my shiny new Verizon Wireless phone. I just wanted to see if they would change their minds. And they didn’t. All I wanted to do was pay them more money per month and remain their customer like I’d been for several years. But they weren’t having that. So today when I read several times in all my blogs that Sprint has lost 1.09 million wireless subscribers and $505,000,000 so far this year, that made me happy. Neener neener, Sprint! This weekend the kids and I (and a neighbor kid) went to see Speed Racer and Iron man. Both were great. I actually liked Speed Racer better than Iron Man. Which is weird since I really didn’t even care about seeing it. It was amazing, though. Really cool visuals and story. Too bad it bombed horribly at the box office. I’m unhappy with my new web host. The sites keep slowing to a crawl and locking up. Their tech support claims that MySQL doesn’t work so great with virtual hosting. So I guess going with an actual dedicated hosting plan will clear things up, which I’ll do soon. It’s just annoying, though. Why even offer MySQL if it’s just going to lock everything up? Today I listened to the first 3 episodes of the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show. I downloaded them all a couple years ago, intending to listen to them. But then I discovered podcasting, which has become an obsession of mine that leaves very little time to listen to non-feed based audio. But talking with John recently has reminded me that I have them, so now I’ll probably listen to all of them over the next few weeks. I’ve never heard any of them before.
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I hate Rick Astley. Back in 1988, this horrible song called Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley came out which I immediately disliked. But, being a fan of Top 40 music, I couldn’t escape it. It was on the radio and MTV all the time. This was the decade where MTV played lots of music videos and I watched it a lot. Which meant I watched Rick Astley a lot for a few months. I never even liked the song a little. Like some bad songs, this one didn’t grow on me. Not even after several years. Sometimes you’ll hear an old song that you used to hate and nostalgia alone makes you suddenly think that it’s not so bad. Not this one. As far as I’m concerned, it will suck forever. I’ll never understand how that song made it to #1 on the Billboard charts. I had to listen to it on the radio for about a year. And after that song’s momentum died down, he came out with another single called Together Forever which was even worse than Never Gonna Give You Up. (Click here to watch the video for that one.) I don’t remember if that one made it to #1 or not, I just know they played it nonstop on the radio and MTV too, making me endure even more endless months of Rick Astley. So I go about 15 years without thinking of Rick Astley or his horrible music. And then some jerk creates Rickrolling. Sure, I thought it was amusing at first and I remembered that painfully awful song. But geez, people have been Rickrolling for a year now. That’s about how long I had to endure Rick Astley the first time around. When’s it going to stop? I’ve heard that song so many times over the past year. Not as bad as when it was on the radio, but still a lot. The reason I’m going on about this is because I kept hearing that song in my dreams last night. Yes, my dreams are being Rickrolled now. You know what’s going to suck? Now that Rick Astley’s song is sort of popular again, somebody is going to remake it. And it’s going to end up being played on the radio all the time again. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for that to happen.
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(I didn’t write any of these. But I found them on the imdb message board and just had to steal the good ones. You’ll either understand them or you won’t.) 1: Chunk stole his uncles toupee 3: Mikey is “a good ki…er..person” 6: Chunk’s top score on Pole Position is 1632. 7: It’s “booby traps”, not “booty traps”. 8: Stay to the right! 10: It takes 376 lawn mowing jobs to earn enough cash for a new bike. 11: Always separate the drugs! 12: Astoria’s water system supplies enough pressure to launch people 8 feet into the air off of toilets! 13: God puts large rocks in place for a reason, and we shouldn’t move them. 17. If God meant to put it that way we’d all be pissing in our faces! 21. You can tell where Mikey’s been by looking at pipes. 26. Michael Jackson never used the bathroom at Chunk’s house but his sister did. 31. Brand’s bike is his most flattest thing in the world. 33. The only thing that is served at the Lighthouse Lounge is tongue. 34. Ma Fratelli always sides with Francis. 38. The only thing that is in Chunk’s attic is Hanukkah decorations. 42. Those aren’t candles. 44. HEY YOU GUYEEES. 45. Mouth really believed that a quarter would grant his wish, and turned to petty theivery when said quarter failed to do his bidding. 46. Kissing Andy heals respiratory problems. 49) Troy’s such a cheap guy. 51.) There will be no signing today..or any other day. 53.) Abnormally strong adults born with birth defects can become great by the power of The Baby Ruth. 54.) When all else fails, treat it like a MAD Magazine. It might work. 55.) If it doesn’t work we’ll all “B-flat”. 56.) Dancing octopi, although enigmatic, are cut for a reason. 57.) When tracking kids, look for size 5 footprints and smell for bubblegum. 58.) Pack extra batteries. Because they don’t last so long. 59.) Drug dealers wouldn’t be caught dead wearing polyester wags. 65) puree is the perfect setting on a blender to grind up a kids hand 71) Stef’s looks aren’t so bad, when her face isn’t screwing them up. 73) Pirates liked waterslides. 74) Andi is not Liberace ya know. 75) Goonies never say die. 76) It’s there time up there and it is our time down here. 77) Wearing red undies when sitting down to use the bathroom is possible. 79) A dead body in a garbage bag is probably just restaurant trash. 80) The zoo will sell chains to wanted fugitives. 84) There’s 50 more houses to tear down after the Walsh’s. 85) Precious cut gemstones are more important than marbles. 87) If Mr. Walsh gets his next 400 paychecks in 24 hours he can fix the housing situation for everyone. 88) If you push your sister down the stairs, blame it on the dog. 89) Saying you don’t wear a hair piece doesn’t make it true. 90) If you pig out at fat camp, you will get kicked out. 91) Water is wet ain’t it, so drink it. 92) It’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket. 93) Detroit is the birthplace of Motown and has the highest murder rate in the US. 94) There are pictures available of Chunk’s mom naked taking a bath and they are real cheap. 95) Brand does not wear braces. 97) Mrs. Walsh is going to commit Harri Krishna! 98) Mississippi Mud and Chocolate Eruption are ice cream flavors. 99) Fifty Iranian terrorists took over all the Sizzler steakhouses in the city. 108. The longer prisoners bark, the colder their lunches get. 109. Rosalita is in a crazy house. 114. Brand’s going to hit Mikey so hard, his clothes are going to be out of style. 128. Our parents are off buying Pampers for us kids. 130. The water is not going down yet. 134. If Brand hadn’t failed his driver’s test, they all would be goin’ out in style, cruisin’ the coast, sniffin’ some lace, downin’ some brews. 138. When translating Spanish, it is necessary to speak with an Old English accent. 140. Sixty and another forty is an even one hundred. 144. Chunks got it, he’s got it…he don’t got it… 145. It could have been a tremor. 146. Matzo Balls are comparable in size to bullet holes. 147. When watching a car chase, don’t press your Strawberry shake to a window. 152. When confronted with a murderous kidnapper, recite the Torah. 155. Frozen pizza is worth shooting someone over. 156. Brand hopes his house is turned into a sand trap. 159. No pen, No sign!! 163 - Chunk can smell ice cream 167. If all else fails…slick shoes! 170. Take any treasure you like but always leave Willy his share. 178. Bats carry rabies. 180. Trust in your old mother, boys! 199. If you do a bad job, you’ll be locked in the attic with the cockroaches for two weeks without food and water 213. The cops don’t care if you dump 3 or 4 gallons of gas outside the police station. 216. Mouse-trap is not only a kick-ass game, but a great way to open the gate. 217. You wanna scare the crap out of a girl? Stick a fish-head on a rake! 224. When depressed, often the best remedy is Ready-Whip straight out of the can. 226. When writing a pirate message in Spanish, always make sure it rhymes in English 245. If you bang on water pipes, water fountains can be lethal. 246. Police are afraid to jump over 3 foot flames. 251. There are no other houses to buy in Astoria if yours is foreclosed upon in order to build a golf course. 252. The price of fixing Sloth’s teeth is the same as a toupee. 253. Rosalita tends to search through the pockets of other people’s jackets. 257. Oregon contains a complex array of subterranean mazes that have went undiscovered for hundreds of years until a group of 12 year olds just happen to stumble upon them. 260. Booby traps hundreds of years old always work as intended. 261. If this is triple stones, then THIS must be copper bones. 272. It’s OK to borrow a small Asian Girl’s bike as long as you say, “I owe you one.” 273. Chickens lay eggs at the moment they are startled by popping balloons. 274. Air displaced by bats flying has the power to blow fireplace grates aloft. 292. You should always have an in depth conversation with a Pirates skeleton before taking his long lost booty. 321. The Hardy Boys put treasure in one tunnel and hid in another. Obviously I skipped the boring ones. But if you want to read them all, they’re here:
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