After leaving work around 5:30pm yesterday evening, i once again drove up the 280, a jaunt i used to take every day when we lived in San Mateo. The reason for this wistful drive however was a trip the dry cleaners in Belmont to pick up some overdue clothes for Veronica and i. From there, i headed over to the post office to mail an also overdue form to the DMV completing our donation of the Tercel. As i'd just received a $10 gift certificate for Best Buy in my email earlier in the day, as well as a big reimbursement for my Atlanta trip from ASCO, i then cruised over to San Carlos and decided to buy the newly released Prey. A first-person shooter for the 360 that's getting a lot of good press regarding its graphics and innovations within the genre, i figured it was worth a try. I then searched unsuccessfully for some Kérastase pomade at Longs and a beauty store described by Veronica as the "7-11 of salons", picking up some aspirin at Longs as allergies had given me a nasty sinus headache.

After V came home and i finished watching the end of the baseball All-Star game, we drove down Woodside to Malibu Gran Prix to take advantage of their $10 Tuesdays, during which a tenner gets you unlimited miniature golf and video games. We plunked down our money and got in a round of golf, in which despite an early challenge from self-professed horrible golfer Veronica (i think she was trying to psyche me out), i emerged victorious. We then got in some video games, which was very cool since the place just puts unlimited credits on all the machines, meaning you can go to whatever you want to play, press start, and off you go. Despite the crowds, we played the pistol-shooter Area 51 until our arms got tired. We then shifted onto Super Bikes, a motorcycle racer based on the Fast and the Furious franchise (although luckily not too closely) featuring a bike chassis you sit on and lean to steer. Quite fun. We played a few fighting games (one of the more recent Street Fighter incarnations, and the new Tekken 5), but unfortunately each seemed to be suffering from at least one faulty joystick or button. We got in one game of a Dance Dance Revolution descendent in which you beat on three pads with two drumsticks, in time with backing music. Way cool ... given my long-standing inclinations towards drumming, i was in heaven. More fun than Donkey Konga, despite the lack of good tracks.

My new 300GB Lacie external firewire hard drive showed up at work today, so i'm currently formatting it and will be at long last backing up my overflowing mp3 collection shortly. It's now at 226GB, pushing the capacity of my 250GB internal drives. I may need to explore new storage strategies shortly. My obsession with optimizing the quality of my mp3 artwork continues, and i regularly interrupt whatever i'm doing when i notice some fuzziness, jpg artifacts, or muted colors in the cover image of whatever just popped on my iTunes. By the way, if anyone happens to have the artwork for the 1988 album Concrete by Versus ancestors Flower, or perhaps an original copy of the album and a scanner, please let me know.

The phone operators of United's Mileage Plus program are the stingiest bunch of Nazis i've ever had the displeasure of conversing with. As i'm lackadaisical about updating my contact info, each time i have to go through something with them i'm forced to try to recall my last four addresses. I don't know what my apartment number on 7th Avenue was! Nor do i know my telephone number when i lived in the Presidio. Can't i just give you my social security number and be done with it? I guess they want to make you jump through as many hoops as possible in order to get something out of them. Not an unheard of tactic in the airline industry ... i remember my friend Ryan fighting with United customer service for upwards of 3 hours at the airport to get them to change his flight. Their response went from "that's impossible" to "you can't do that" to "it's done" as he argued with representative after representative.

So Zinedine Zidane is on French TV at the moment, offering a long overdue reason for his unbelievable assault of Marco Materazzi in the waning moments of the World Cup final. His explanation? "He pronounced very tough words about my mother and my sister". Surely a lousy translation, but still ... that's it? Have you ever played in a professional game before? If the NBA went by this logic, we woudn't see more than two seconds of continuous gameplay before a brawl erupted. Like it or not, trash talking is a part of modern sport. And it's going to stay filthy, despicable, and obscene as long as it has its desired effect on one's opponent. Which it certainly did in this case.

Detestable as it may be, verbal abuse is part and parcel of the trade of a professional athlete. I can't see any real way to regulate it, and i'm not sure it needs to be regulated. Someone said something stupid about your mother? Say something stupid about his mother. Or better yet, shove his words down his throat by humiliating him on the field/court/pitch. Zidane is now whining about how he was provoked, and how the authorities always blame retaliation but never provocation, and that without provocation there would be no retaliation, blah blah blah. Did Materazzi punch you behind the ref's back? No. Did he kick you in the groin? No. Did he rape your sister? No. Did he say he would? Maybe. But they're just WORDS. It's still no excuse for you to turn into Andre the Giant. Zidane has apologized but declared he doesn't regret his actions, for if he did it would mean Materazzi's statements were right. I don't really follow this logic, and it's really just a semantic game at this point. I don't think there is any real explanation or justification for what he did, beyond that he lost his s@$# for a few seconds.

Speaking of professional wrestling, what is it with footie players and head butts? There's something completely ridiculous about it. If you're that pissed off, why don't you just deck the guy? Is a head butt more likely to be missed by the refs? Are you worried about injuring your hands? I could see this argument working in baseball. A player with a broken throwing hand is screwed, but nonetheless a bench-clearing brawl is done with fists, not head butts. But for some reason, soccer players are worried about breaking their hands. That they don't use. Odd.