Every house or apartment you go into is the same. The living room has a TV with several pieces of furniture pointed at it. The TV might have a few components hooked up to it or maybe a video game system. There’s a shelf packed full of DVDs. Sometimes there’s another shelf packed with CDs or books. The dining room table with something in the center of it. Maybe a fish tank or a bird cage or a litter box. An exercise machine, microwave, piano, computer. Maybe something weird on a wall somewhere to help define that person, like a few swords or a bizarre painting or, in my case, a pay phone. Pictures of families on the walls, maybe some posters. The patios and yards are all pretty much the same too, with their BBQ grills and outdoor furniture and maybe a few kids toys and some fake bamboo tiki torches.

Rich or poor, every living space in America is nearly identical. Probably in every other country too, just with subtle changes, like up in Canada all this stuff is in their igloos. Even those movie stars and musicians on MTV Cribs all live in identical places, and they have the money to do anything they want. Sure, they’ve got pools and mixing booths and giant garages for their exotic car collections, but aside from that there’s really not much difference. Seems like someone could come up with a radically different way to live by now.

This week 7-Eleven put a Red Box movie rental machine in front of their store. I bet the other 7-Elevens did too. Those things are popping up everywhere now and I can think of at least 6 places we have them just in our town now. Knowing how completely screwed brick & mortar video rental stores are makes me happy for some reason. I can’t explain it. I just love for old business models to be completely screwed over in favor of new ones. They just closed down the Blockbuster is Corvallis and the Hollywood Video in Salem. I think I read that each company is closing around 1/3rd of their US locations over the next year. Good riddance! Physical media is dumb anyway.

I’m cheering for the death of music stores, newspapers and the post office too. I would love for the entire postal system to just crumble, leaving us all without U.S. mail. UPS and FedEx would figure out ways to take over for us since they actually know how to run a business. I think it’s hilarious that magazines are clinging on for deal life, hoping that the Kindle and iPad will save their outdated print formats when we all just read blogs everyday instead of month-old magazines. Die, corporate scum! And welcome, new corporate scum, good to have you here!

Spessa gave me a new digital camera yesterday and I’m taking it apart right now to clean it. It was a mess. She got it used from somebody. I’m glad not to be cameraless anymore. Thanks, Spessa!

Roxy started up a new website called amuseyou.net and she stupidly trusts me with full access to the admin functions there. I changed the site’s theme and made a header for it and even posted an article on it. I’m going to build up her trust for awhile, then suddenly wipe out her site and replace it with goatse or tub girl. She’ll never see it coming. Until then, everyone reading this should go read the stories at amuseyou.net. Because they’re amusing.

The kids and I have been playing the new Super Mario for Wii nonstop for weeks now. I got it for them for Christmas. I’ve always kind of resented owning a Wii, thinking it was pointless and a waste of money. I got it for free a few years ago and I was originally just going to sell it on Ebay for money, but a friend convinced me to keep it. It’s free, so good deal, right? Not really. I’ve blown so much money on extra Wiimotes and games and Wii Points and other accessories. And the games are rarely that great. I look at all the stuff we have for it and think how it could have been better spent on our Xbox 360. Not that I even play any games without the kids, so why should I care. Anyway, Super Mario for Wii has given me a change of heart. I love that game and we’ve had a lot of fun beating it and we’re still having fun, doing extra stuff on all the levels now.

Remember a few posts back I ranted about how much I loved Yelp? I still love them, but they deleted my review of Target. Check out this letter I got from them.

Hi Arbie,

We hope you will continue to provide great reviews, while keeping in mind our Review Guidelines. See you on Yelp!

I knew that would happen. At least they kept up my review where I talked about hitting on the 16-year-old girl at Arby’s. I pasted the Target review they deleted to Roxy’s new site.

Alot’s happened in the past couple weeks. A spelled “a lot” like that just to annoy Spessa. I post all my crap on Facebook now. I remember last weekend the kids and I went bowling. Then we went to Jessica’s to eat her food. Work has been busy lately so I’m really behind on all my important blog reading. I’m going to paste stuff from Facebook now.

I got this email from someone and I thought it was kind of cool: “Hi Brad, I was wondering if you could do me a favor. My fiance passed a little over a year ago and she left our voice mail greeting. I would like to know if you could send me a recoding in WAV and MP3 format if possible. I would appreciate this very much. The number is 856-….”

So I hacked into his voicemail and deleted her greeting. Then I sent him an mp3 of a chimpanzee screeching. Okay, just kidding, I sent him an mp3 file of her voice. I even put the mp3 in an editor and brought up the voice levels for him. He wrote me back: “”They are perfect; thank you very much. I do not have any real skills with the exception of financial analysis but if you need that or anything done in the South Jersey area I owe you one.”

Even better is this email that I got a few days before that one. “Brad – I told my friends about your food coloring prank an before school we booby trapped the phone an railings, an we were calling the pay phone luckly enough people curiously picked it up an not to many people were happy with blue food coloring on there spirt week costumes thanks for posting that!” He’s referring to my old food coloring prank from high school, which you can read about on this page. I’m so proud that my shenanigans from 20 years ago are ruining kids clothing still today.

The same guy sent me a video of another prank from that page where he replicated the prank where I put a note on a classroom door, telling students to meet for class in another room. Only he actually videotaped the class hanging out in an empty auditorium, waiting for the teacher. Here is the video of it.