So my weekend went something roughly like this ...

Saturday, 10am: I wake up, a bit late for me these days, and wander groggily into the kitchen to finish masking the cabinets and begin priming.
1pm: I finish priming the left half of the kitchen and take a much-needed shower. V then gets me out to lunch and a little shopping.
6pm: After a little break i return to kitchen priming. I complete the cabinets by midnight as V watches the old Judy Garland piece A Star is Born.

Sunday, 8:30am: Assisted by my alarm, i rise early and set about adding white semi-gloss (technically, "foggy skies") to the primed cabinets. Through an amazing show of resolve i complete the process after five straight hours of work.
2pm: V informs me that i've painted most of the cupboards shut, necessitating a bit of sanding and repainting.
5pm: We head over to Fremont for some relaxation in the form of dinner with the folks. Afterwards we manage to catch most of the Oscars.
10pm: Back to the grind, putting our new Restoration Hardware hardware on the cabinets. First handle ... and it won't go on. Hrm. V and i fuss with it for 20 minutes and discover new modes of cursing. Before giving up entirely, we try putting a different handle on a different cabinet. Works fine. Oooooookaaay. Another one, no problem. Turns out that for our first handle we picked the only bum one in the bunch.

Monday, 12am: We close the book on the kitchen and turn towards tidying the house for our 8am appointment with the appraiser. I somehow find the energy to motor through the final stages of beautification and hit the hay at 3am.

It's now Tuesday night and my arm is still whining about wielding a paintbrush all weekend long. But the end result is pleasing. And the kitchen is now ... officially ... done. For all our efforts, the appraisal took all of ten minutes. We're now impatiently waiting for word from our loan officer regarding the magic number the appraiser came up with.

V is currently watching the latest episode of Dirt on tivo. As near as i can tell, the entire show is built around Courtney Cox shocking everyone who still regards her as Monica Friends Geller. There's her weekly masturbation scene and constant crassness, bitchiness, and opportunism. This week the plot seems to have devolved into sub-All My Children levels. Has Vincent Gallo sunk this low too? Well, Ebert did trash Brown Bunny.

Speaking of AMC, i was perusing the official show website the other day ... these actors have got the whitest names ever. Are they all from Buttf@$#, Iowa? I guess middle America is the place to find people who actually regard daytime drama as high art.

And speaking of racism, i spent an hour earlier this evening perusing the works of science fiction writer and Asianweek op-ed bigot Kenneth Eng. For those who haven't heard the story, he's caused a furor this week after publishing an editorial in the weekly Bay Area publication entitled "Why I Hate Blacks". It's filled with hateful racist diatribe and is wholely laughable, if not for its nasty potential social effects. What's more amusing is this guy's bio, billing himself as the youngest published science fiction writer ever, having put out Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate at age 20. Wasn't the kid who wrote Eragon 15? Beyond that, a quick read of the book's first few pages as well as some of Eng's blog postings reveal his pseudo-scientific treatments of race and religion. I had to stop going through his crap. It's like reading Ann Coulter or Debbie Schlussel. You can spend all day getting riled up by their blustering, but in the end that's what they want ... to keep your attention.

My initial glee over Winning Eleven 2007 (abbreviated title) has been tempered a bit lately by the AI's amazing skill at corners and crosses. I'd like to know what fraction of the goals i've conceded have come from those situations. Attackers just won't be marked when the ball comes in from the wings. And while i appreciate having a player of Shevchenko's skill in my squad, he's just a little too good at maintaining possession and beating defenders. Especially when held against his recent real life performances.

Last but not least, i caught the highlights of Chelsea's Carling Cup final win over Arsenal Jr. Great resolve from the team to come back from a goal down (nearly getting run off the pitch in the first twenty minutes) to equalize and triumph on the strength of a brace from team MVP Didier Drogba. His winner was an exquisitely weighted header off an Arjen Robben cross. But the big stories were the game-ending brawl (thankfully for me more reflective of a frustrated Arsenal than more bad Chelsea behavior) and the horrific injury to Chelsea skipper and emotional leader John Terry. Having miraculously returned from a midweek ankle injury to start in the final, he suffered the full force of a boot to the face when diving for a header and meeting an attempted clearance kick from Abou Diaby. Watching the footage, i could feel the impact in my own skull ... no two ways about it, he was kicked full force in the face. Terry was out cold but thank god seems okay now and returned to celebrate the win with his team. That guy is a true iron man, and my hat goes off to him.

I keep finding things to do other than posting. Like work. Damn job.

I checked my retirement account as part of our preparations for refinancing our home loan the other day. Thanks to Stanford's incredibly generous contributions and my maxing out my donations, i'm up to $50k. Which means i could retire next month and have a kickass time for four months or so. Maybe that's a good model for the rest of my career, work for a few years then retire for a few months. Hrm.

I finally got back my framed reprint of a Peter Saville Factory poster, and hung it on my wall at work. There's an odd synergy between it and my PhD. A cog in the machine?

One of these days i'll post another album review. I've had a few notable thoughts lately on short-lived heroes Life Without Buildings and recent releases by Arcade Fire and Bloc Party. I was watching TV today and heard the banjo-laden sounds of the Magnetic Fields's "I Think I Need A New Heart". Not on some indie music show mind you, but in a freakin' dog food commercial! Funny they left out some of the lyrics ... i don't know if "i always say i love you, when i mean turn out the light" would encourage people to buy dinner for Rex.

Speaking of refinancing, i've sent a wealth of financial information over to the Stanford Federal Credit Union for their consideration. The critical step, appraisal of our house, is scheduled for first thing Monday morning. I spent a bit of time over the weekend painting the remaining unmodified kitchen walls yellow. This weekend, thanks in part to the cancellation of our scheduled MIPS junior faculty retreat, i'm going to tackle painting the kitchen cabinets. We bought new handles for them at Restoration Hardware that should complete the look. V is painting the kitchen windows, which should put the finishing touches on the room. On Monday i also picked up some timers for our external lights, which i mounted in the switch boxes in the house. They're digital and provide some nice functionality while integrating with the wall.

Kevin returned from his Hong Kong sojourn on Sunday morning, two days earlier than V expected (no story there, just a miscommunication in dates) so his phone call at 8:40am awoke us a bit rudely. But we rose and fetched him from the airport, grabbing breakfast at Copenhagen Bakery in Burlingame and then doing a bit of shopping at the Apple Store and Best Buy. Kevin passed out on our couch that afternoon after his long journey across the Pacific, while i did more random domestic chores and watched the Empire Strikes Back on HBO.

While V had to work on President's Day, Kev and i watched the original Planet of the Apes on cable then headed out for lunch at Bombay Garden in San Mateo. We spent much of the rest of the afternoon cruising up and down the peninsula, checking out an import video store Kevin used to frequent and running a few of my errands. We got cornered by someone collecting surveys for an outfit called Body Feng Shui in the dry cleaner parking lot. As she was rather cute we both filled one out, and i have since received three calls asking when i can come in for a free consultation and massage. That'll teach me.

As promised, here's a [rather stylized] shot of me and my long(er) hair. Naturally it has to be shown with me strumming a guitar. I'm getting more used to it ... thoughts of shaving it off immediately are becoming less and less frequent.

I've been trying to watch the True Story of Black Hawk Down on the History Channel. I liked the movie, and i find the subject matter intensely interesting. But it's just so damn depressing. What a clusterfuck. Probably a good lesson to ponder while debating what to do in Iraq. On the political tip, while it's comforting that Dubya's reign has less than two years to go, i'm not so sure his ridiculous approval ratings will translate into a Democratic victory in 2008. Hilary and Barack? I like both, but let's be realistic here: America is not ready to elect a woman or an African American to the oval office. At this point Republican former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani may be the favorite. Which isn't an entirely unpleasant prospect, as he's got fairly liberal views on many social issues. Enough that he's not endorsed by many ultraconservative members of the GOP, which is another plus in my book.

I'm wondering how much longer Fox is obligated to wait before busting out the "best season ever!" ads for American Idol. Especially because as near as i can tell they've run out of talent. What a bunch of boring performers. Who chose the past-their-prime Tears for Fears stinker "Sowing the Seeds of Love" for the group performance on Thursday's elimination show? And who would've thought the ensemble would've been so lacking in harmony? Also, there's no doubt in my mind that Paula was either drunk or heavily medicated on Tuesday's show. Slurred, fawning speech? Check. A noticeable lack of equilibrium? Check. I kept waiting for a bottle of pills to appear on the judges' table and a producer's hand to quietly enter the frame and snatch it out of view.

I've been increasing my proficiency with Visual Basic, and as a result my iTunes Log application has grown by leaps and bounds. I've integrated some of my assorted iTunes perl scripts with it, along with basic functionality for controlling iTunes directly from the Log. Every week or so i have a hot idea about what else it can do, and spend a day or so fiddling until i get it in there.

That seems to be my mantra of late ... think of something cool to do, and do it. In the house, at work, on the computer.

stuck a pin in your backbone, spoke it down there all i ever wanted was to be your spine lost your friction and you slid for a mile overdone, overdrive, overlive, override you're not the one who let me down, but thanks for offering it's not a voice and i'm not around, but thanks for picking it up, on the radio sampled your rust from a faucet, i know i've got a magnet in my head, a magnet in my head extra thick, extra long, the way it was wasted and there's a chance that things'll get weird yeah, that's a possibility although i didn't do anything, no, i didn't do anything all I ever wanted was to be your spine and a mouth kept shut and a tongue twist tie you're the web in front, you're the favorite lie you're a buck my lip, you're a lash my lie you're the web in front of a favorite lie

Mr. Anderson drove up from L.A. for the weekend to stay at Casa RC for a few days, before continuing on to Tokyo and Hong Kong. He arrived on Saturday bearing his Wii for our troubles. For the week he's in Asia, at any rate. He mistakenly left The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess at home, so we gave the bizarre Japanese MD simulation Trauma Center whirl. Odd. If extracting shards of glass directly from a car crash victim's heart isn't weird enough, slowing down time to handle delicate procedures by ... drawing a pentagram? Who was this doctor's medical school mentor? Could it be ... mmm ... SATAN? Anyway, the game is amusing, making effective use of the Wii's motion-sensitive controller. We saved a few lives before beautifying and heading up to the city for dinner and drinks with Hakeem in Japantown. Then it was off to the mashup club Bootie at the DNA Lounge. One day i'll write my treatise on the evil of mashups. But for today, suffice it to say that i wasn't the most happy-go-lucky clubber Saturday evening. V however had a right old time, along with her longstanding club crew of Kevin, Hakeem, Gary, and Jenz. We left for home at 3am. Too late for my blood. About all i remember from the club is a union of Nena's "99 Luftballons" with a Jay-Z rap that went something like "99 problems but a bitch aint one". And a lot of the Black Eyed Peas. Good night.

I got about six hours sleep that night, but was lucid enough the next morning to gather V and drive up to the city for a Sausalito brunch with Naomi and Phil. A perfect cure for the mild hangover from which i was suffering ... the special and a few cups of coffee. I raised the idea of driving a few miles north to the Marin Best Buy afterward, where i found a copy of the new Winning Eleven and V grabbed a few new DS games including Diddy Kong Racing and the cartoony culinary simulator Cooking Mama. The store had a stack of 60GB PS3's in between the games and DVD's, the first time i'd ever seen one in stock. We had a conversation about the system's troubles in front of the display, until i suggested we relocate before my willpower broke and i grabbed one of the alluring boxes. My rational thought is that i'll wait to buy one until they've got more games to play beyond their sole worthwhile exclusive app Resistance: Fall of Man. My irrational obsession is that if i'm around them too long, i'll whip out my debit card. Luckily i escaped. This time. Back to SF we went, dropping Naomi and Phil in the Richmond and fetching Kevin from Hakeem's place in Japantown. We dined at a new Vietnamese place in the RC, after securing dessert in the form of a dozen cream puffs from new local favorite Beard Papa. The shopping area downtown around City Hall and the new movie theater is coming along nicely. Then it was back home to relax and watch the Grammys. I'm no huge fan of award shows, but the Police's reunion performance was worthwhile.

This week i've gotten another paper from my group accepted for publication, the third so far this year. Should be a good jumpstart to the renewed development of the Graves lab at Stanford. More on the way! I've also initiated the refinancing process for our house. The rates are good at the moment, and we'll soon find out just how much our house has appreciated in our three years of ownership. The predictions i've been quoted by several lenders on both how much our house is worth and how much it will cost to consolidate into a long term fixed rate mortgage are encouraging, so we're moving forward. For Valentine's Day i sent V a collection of roses at work, then drove up to the city for a late afternoon haircut followed by dinner for two at SoMa Thai restaurant Koh Samui and the Monkey. I've been growing my hair out since last October, at V's encouraging. I'm not sure i'm into it ... i've been suppressing my curls since 1996 ... and the new hairstyle given me on Wednesday by Samuel still causes me worry. Long hair in the back? Nervous memories of a mullet at age 15. What the hell do i do with this hair over my ears? Veronica tells me it looks stupid when i push it behind my ears, and if i let it hang down then it breaks into uncontrolled waves and worse, tickles my ears. I'll press on, if only because i like the way it looks when i play guitar and bang my head. Rock on.

V bought me a nifty Barcelona track top from Niketown for V Day. I've acquired several pieces of Barça wear of late. I dig the style, and have grown fond of of their grace on the pitch as well. The endless soap opera at Stamford Bridge has grown weary for me, so it's nice to have another squad to look upon and smile. Although now Samuel Eto'o is kicking up mud in Catalonia ... oh great, more drama. I've gotten a few pieces of Nike gear recently, including the Barcelona top and a Mexico track top. Very nice ... the child labor outfit may yet draw my commitment away from Adidas.

V and i may return to our home improvement efforts this weekend, in an effort to impress the forthcoming appraiser. Finishing the kitchen shouldn't be too much of a challenge, then our travails will shift to the problematic bedroom. Just thinking of emptying that room makes me tired. Yawn. Good night.

When Winning Eleven Pro Evolution Soccer 2007 was released, i read a couple of reviews at IGN and EGM that were decidedly mediocre. As mediocre as an 8 out of 10 can be ... the complaints were that the series hadn't evolved (despite its name) from its recent offerings, and if anything it had gone backward. While acknowledging that in terms of gameplay WE still kicked FIFA's ass up and down the block, the reviewers were united in the opinion that the graphics were still lackluster, and the omission of the popular edit mode was puzzling. Despite these warnings, my jonesing for a new soccer game won out and i picked it up in Marin last weekend with a collection of Best Buy gift certificates.

With my first match, i was dumbstruck. I was expecting the same textures, the same muddy tones as in my last game of Winning Eleven 9 the day before. Not as far as i could tell ... the latest installment looked vibrant, with revamped textures and greatly improved animations. The feel seems improved as well, with the ball moving with more weight and exhibiting a nice thump when a player slides a through pass. I played through my first match as Chelsea against once and future rival Middlesbrough, remaining scoreless until three minutes before time when Didier Drogba controlled a crossing pass in the box, turned and sidefooted a shot past Mark Schwartzer into the corner of the net. A nice footballing move, made even more memorable by the silky smooth animation of Drogba wrongfooting his defender and sliding the ball home. A step backwards? Not by my count. I subsequently started a league campaign and won my first three matches on the strength of eight combined goals from Drogba and Andriy Shevchenko. It's as addictive as ever.

The missing edit mode is odd ... it means i have to live with Chelsea being labeled as "London FC", seeing as they withheld the license that they granted the year before. Arsenal and Manchester United represent the two accurate English teams. For someone who spent countless hours correcting Konami's errors, this absence is both a blessing and a curse. A curse as i have to live with *gasp* erroneous team and player names, but a blessing as i am now temporarily liberated from my OCD. The character models this year seem a bit wonky, with Drogba's head looking apelike and Frank Lampard appearing as a 15 year old version of himself. But the aforementioned animations are definite step up, and the gameplay is its old seductive self. The AI has gotten adept at scoring on corners and crosses, and i've found it hard to keep attackers from stepping in front of my defenders and nodding home goals. However, within only five matches i've already had a handful of "wow, that was sick!" moments. Winning Eleven's death has been greatly exaggerated.

Tonight marks the first time in about three weeks that i've allowed my mind to wander to regions where work is no longer in sight. Whew.

When was the last time i wrote something here? Geez, January 26? Two weeks? What witty repartee has been lost forever because i didn't make it to fac13 in time to record it for posterity? We'll never know. When was January 26? The week before the Super Bowl? Ah yes ... the Stanford Radiation Oncology retreat was held on campus (not such a long distance to retreat) on Friday and Saturday. The Thursday prior i was up until 4:30am getting the latest version of my grant written, working while the Michael J. Fox vehicle The Secret of My Success played on cable. Probably the third or fourth time i'd seen that old flick that month. I slept until 9am on Friday morning, then headed in to work to solicit more comments on the grant. The retreat began at 1:30pm, and i had yet to begin preparing the two talks i was scheduled to give Saturday afternoon. I made an effort to listen to the biology talks on Friday, but sat in the back so i could work on my laptop without calling too much attention to myself. Turns out i can now connect to the Stanford wireless network, so i got a lot done. By 6pm however my body was crying foul, so i passed on the retreat dinner at Su Hong and headed home.

Saturday i did some much needed sleeping in, but made it to Stanford by 10am to finalize my talks then head over to the meeting. My afternoon imaging and physics session went well, but to be honest i was just glad things were over. You see, by this point in my grant preparation i was routinely staying up past two and consuming a pot of coffee every evening around 10:30pm.

Because apparently i am a huge masochist, i somehow made the fairly ridiculous decision to get up at 7am Sunday morning to drive to Gilroy. Why? To get a Wii at Wal-Mart. Yes, the same Wii that i've been saying for weeks i don't care about. Blame it on the sleep deprivation. I arrived in the garlic capital at 8am, the time at which i'd been told the Wii's would go on sale. No big lines outside, looks good. No big lines at the electronics counter, also good. However when i posed the pivotal question to the clerk, i was told they'd sold out of them at 11:30pm the night before. Damn 24 hour store. Driving home past the outlets i wanted to stop to pick up some new running shoes, but of course it was only 8:15am and the stores wouldn't be open for another few hours. Well, that was useless.

Monday was d-day for the grant, which by this point (another 2am session Sunday night) was mostly complete. However my research process manager told me i could submit it to her on Tuesday morning, which actually annoyed me a bit since i was all set to get this thing away from me. I filled out the assortment of poorly-implemented electronic forms and had a leisurely read-through that afternoon. Tuesday morning the 100 page document was gone. I'm happier with this application than the R01 i put in last summer, so we'll see how it goes. That other one is going to be rewritten and resubmitted come June. Something to look forward too. Unfortunately i had a variety of other work things to attend to, so i couldn't just take the rest of the week off. Interviews, meetings, journal clubs, yadda yadda yadda. Siestas sound nice. Maybe i'll take V's advice and move us to Spain.

I've been grabbing new music as usual, but the specific acquisitions somehow are less interesting to me at the moment than the fact that i'm only 1400 songs away from 50,000.

I tried to curb my coffee addiction the following day, but was rewarded with a massive headache for my cold turkey attempts. This malady was compounded by the fact that my new 17" LCD monitor arrived at work on Monday, which i planned to coordinate with my existing 17" display to get the dual monitor thing going. That went fine from a technical standpoint, but teaching my brain to handle two displays induced further headaches and a good deal of dizziness and nausea. I adapted within a few days, but it took some of the shine off my post-grant destressing.

On a techie aside, the dual monitor setup rocks. I can work on Word on one screen and Powerpoint on the other, have iTunes running full screen on one, and generally optimize many of my work flows. In other geek news i finally gave my long-neglected copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 a whirl. I picked up a copy of Teach Yourself Visual Basic in 24 Hours and found it was much less daunting than i had built up in my head. Within three days i'd written a VB application embodying my iTunes log program. I subsequently upgraded to Visual Studio 2005 and am now adding assorted bells and whistles to the software. Very cool. Maybe i'll now finally learn C as well. I'd love to get my hands on the iTunes plugin SDK, but according to various message boards you have to get a license for it from Apple. I don't think telling them "i want to play with it" will be convincing enough.

Last weekend was Super Bowl time, and i had arranged to have a few Stanford chums over to watch the big game. Fred had intrigued me with his descriptions of the wonder of deep fried turkey, and i had said we should cook one together sometime, so the Super Bowl became sometime. In addition, i shopped Saturday and Sunday mornings for other assorted food and stocked the kitchen with a variety of deli meats and cheeses, chips, soda, and beer. In order to get enough sleep to be capable of cleaning the house Sunday morning, i left V in the city on Saturday night after an evening at the tenth anniversary of Leisure. She headed over to New Wave City with Gary and Naomi while i came home to get my beauty sleep and comfort the lonely dog.

My Super Bowl plans were complicated by the issues inherent in cooking a turkey. Fred, Amanda, and Ethan arrived with the fryer at 2pm, and began setting up the huge vat and cooker in the driveway. I had neglected to check my BBQ propane tank and we learned it was near empty, so i had to drive around for a half hour until i found a U-Haul that could fill it for me. We therefore didn't get the oil boiling until 3:15pm, a scant 15 minutes before game time. I had also failed to appreciate that unless i was interested in burning the house down, it was probably not a good idea to leave the turkey cooking on its own for the hour it required. Which meant someone was going to have to watch the fryer and miss the first quarter or more of the game. But in the spirit of improvisation, i grabbed the TV in the garage's rumpus room and some coaxial and power extension cables so it could be set up on the driveway. My careful preparation of the living room for football revelers was for naught as our friends wound up collecting on the driveway. It was a very chill party, with football mixed with conversation and food in a laid-back fashion. After the turkey was done, Fred fried some wings that we subsequently dowsed in either honey barbecue or Frank's red hot sauce. Those were fabulous, easily the dish of the event. Although little Ethan was suffering through a stomach bug and Tara pestered everyone in her attempts to grift some food, the party was a success. Fred even got to see his hometown Indianapolis Colts win their much-deserved first championship of the Peyton Manning era.

In overseas sports, since their 2-nil taming by rivals Liverpool my Blues have reeled off a few wins in the FA Cup, League Cup, and Premiership, including a 3-nil drubbing of the Blackburn bruisers. However, every time we come up with a resounding triumph it seems Manchester United trumps us, producing a 4-nil victory over Watford on the same day. Anything you can do, we can do better. It's hard to deny that Ronaldo, Rooney, Giggs, and co. are dazzling their pursuers these days, and as i've said before Chelsea are looking second best. The Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko experiments appear decided failures (i remain hopelessly optimistic about the Ukrainian, however), and the injuries keep piling up. Ah well. As with most of my other leisure activities of late, football has been towards the back of my mind. Even David Beckham coming to L.A. can't get me excited. Don't even get me started.

My brain had seemingly not gotten enough of the work late, OD on caffeine lifestyle, because due to sheer procrastination i neglected to prepare the materials for my first of two consecutive bioE 222B lectures by Sunday night. I therefore arose at 4:45am Monday morning so i could get to work and have things ready by the 9am class time. All went well, but by that afternoon's 3pm MIPS seminar i was dead. Home to sleep.

The rest of my work week was occupied readying for my Friday lecture. I also laid out a plan of attack for the rest of the spring, as grant writing always seems to help me prioritize my academic efforts. V and i made it up to the city for a long overdue rendez-vous with Jenz at Betelnut on Wednesday evening, allowing us to catch up over dragon dumplings and firecracker calamari.

I haven't been playing much Xbox 360 these days. I've tried to return to Rainbow Six: Vegas on a few occasions, but have gotten frustrated at my first death and turned it off within five minutes. I'm sure i'll return to my video addiction once i calm down a bit more following my work odyssey. I was all juiced to get my hands on the latest edition of Winning Eleven, the even more cumbersomely monikered Winning Eleven Pro Evolution Soccer 2007. However reviews of the new release, while asserting that the Konami series remains the best soccer game on the market, have been decidedly mediocre. Apparently for the third or fourth year running the game is basically the same. Doh. Maybe Crackdown or Lost Planet will draw me out of my gaming doldrums.

I've made a few recent eBay purchases, including a long sleeve Ronaldinho Barcelona jersey (including shorts, which is an amusing bonus but i can't imagine wearing them), a nifty although probably bootlegged Ian Curtis t-shirt showing three shots of his silhouette doing his characteristic dance, and a reprint of a Peter Saville Factory Records poster that is currently being framed for display in my office. I also bought a copy of Designed by Peter Saville from Amazon, which displays the iconic designer's work nicely but is not quite as engrossing as the Complete Factory Records Graphic Album. I just received the jersey on Saturday, and it turns out it's fake. $12 and from China? Probably not good signs. It's a reasonable facsimile however, so i'll hang on to it. No positive feedback though.

I like mushrooms. The regular kind, you delinquents.

This whole Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare incident strikes me as absolutely ridiculous. Granted i'm a fan of the show so when i saw the LED-laden devices, distributed around several metropolitan cities as a guerrila marketing tactic, i knew what they were. Many others however saw a circuit board with wires and immediately thought of marauding terrorists planting bombs. Is this the society we live in now? It's a cartoon character flipping the bird! Does that sound like an Al Qaeda operation? Boston mayor Thomas Menino threw a literal fit following the episode, claiming the city spent a million dollars responding to the "threat" and demanding that Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of personal fave Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, cover the costs. Turner obliged, but if anyone came out looking stupid it was those who misinterpreted cartoon ads as weapons of mass destruction, not the people who put on an underground advertising campaign. The press conference of the two Adult Swim guys arrested for planting the devices was a perfect riposte. I'm now enjoying observing the variety of real and fake devices for sale for thousands of dollars on eBay.