Quick Note: On The Use of a Phrase

It occurred to me today that there's no point in ever using the phrase...

"you'll be the first one to know"

...because, almost invariably the party being informed will, in fact, not be the first to know. The party making the offer of post-discovery information sharing will be the first with access to whatever new-found knowledge comes about. Often, the informed party is twice or even three times removed from the actual source of information. You're promising first hand knowledge to somebody when your true intentions are to give them tired, watered-down old news. Anybody who's read any Plato or played a game of Telephone knows this to be a bad thing with possibly disastrous consequences. To hell with common usage. I'm extricating this phrase from my speech starting today. For those of you who would like to join the revolution, here are some possible replacements:

"You'll be the second (third, fourth, seventy-fifth... be truthful, damnit!) to know."

"I'll let you know when I do."

"As soon as I know and then tell you, then you'll know too."

or,

"I told you already, Ma, we're not keeping it even if it is a boy."

I hope this has been as informative and fun for you as it was for me. Thank you for your time and support.

Rant Number Two: Sneering

So this last Saturday, while I was waiting patiently for Delta Airlines to "misplace" my baggage during my layover in Salt Lake City (Mormons, represent!), I decided to snag a delicious Cinnabon. There I was, trying hard to remember whether or not there was a sales tax in Utah - or airports for that matter - when I saw it. The look. Two otherwise attractive girls (maybe women. I didn't get a good look at their I.D.'s) walked past the Cinnabon queue (That's right, I said queue instead of line. What!?) with the most grotesque facial expression I've seen since we informed Graham that his "french fries" were in fact fried squid legs. I've since decided to name their look the "Half 'Tarded Sneer," or HTS for short.

www.dictionary.com defines a sneer as "A scornful facial expression characterized by a slight raising of one corner of the upper lip." The look I'm describing is more dramatic than this, however. The HTS does involve a raising of one side of the mouth, but it also involves a heavy slackening of the jaw, leading to an open mouth. It gave me the impression that perhaps the airport girls had split a botox treatment between them, each having one half of their face juiced.

Now, I wouldn't have thought much of this except that I've noticed it on a few seperate occasions in the short time since then - a moderately to highly attractive female with the I'm disgusted-with-the-world sneer distorting her face. Blondes appear to be at higher risk for HTS abuse, from my experiences thus far. Abstent-minded activities (such as driving) may also pressure you into HTS use. I truly hope this is not a growing trend and that I've merely been unlucky over the past half-week. Women (and men as well, I suppose), please refrain from using the Half 'Tarded Sneer in the future. Check the mirror every morning and if you find HTS on your face, do what you can to get rid of it or see a doctor. HTS use is not "cool," nor does it make you seem "sophisticated." Stop it, people. Just say no!

Alex's Very First Geek Rant

OK, after a hard day of...you know, eating breakfast and doing stuff... I retired to play some Halo 2 with a friend from back home. I'm not going to lie for the sake of modesty, me and Dr Dru (my geek buddy) are awesome. Shotgun surgeons, pistol pimps, sniper...insert s-word here...you get the idea. Anyway, during the course of our time spent meeting the geek quota for the day, we ran into some rapscallion cheaters, two sets of them, in fact. The first set may have deserved whatever mods they had on, since it was clear that they had muscular dystrophy and were playing with their feet. Dru and I managed to massacre them soundly. The second set had no excuse to be a-cheatin' as they quickly rocked us (Dru's butt is still sore).

What the hell? Why do people cheat on videogames. It's 'tarded, and let me explain why. Basically cheating-through whatever dastardly means you choose-in a video game makes you a poser-geek. How lame is that, folks? I'll tell you: the lamest of the lame, lameness that has settled to the bottom of the lame pool and is currently seeping into the aquifer of life, poisoning it with... well, lame. (Phew) If you want to be a part of the geek phenom, just join in, and do it properly. Let's just say that a nightclub tailored to people with pasty skin and a sack full of different sized dice would be far from exclusive. And, not surprisingly, the geek community (the thing I'm using the nightclub as a metaphor for, for those of you who didn't catch on) is not difficult to enter into. Trust me... I'm writing a rant about video games in my own blog after all. Now, maybe these cheating street-urchins don't want to be part of the geek arena and are just in it to mess with the geeks, high school style. In this particular case, then, they're spending something like $70 just to piss people off. This would, hypothetically, put them in a lameness bracket that i cannot even begin to imagine, and I'm a published poet.

So, in conclusion, if you're not good enough to play with the big boys (i.e. myself), just don't play with them. Oh, and don't cheat either, you poser-geeks. ALE.X out!