Potpourri No. 11

As I keep mentioning, my life pretty much revolves around graduate school applications right now. Nevertheless, there are other mental distractions from time to time. Here are some of them:

HPeeved
For Christmas my parents graciously provided me with a much-needed printer. It’s been a lifesaver, especially given the (literally) hundreds of pages of supplemental material I will have printed by the time I’m finished with my graduate school applications. But I’m finding myself increasingly frustrated as, coincidentally, my computer suddenly seems to lag half the time, semi-freezing up and otherwise moving incredibly slowly. I don’t know why the addition of a printer would do this, but it’s incredibly bothersome. My computer worked beautifully before I installed the thing. It makes me wonder what background program it’s running without my explicit consent. Then again, when I first bought my computer, I had to ship it back to Hewlett-Packard three or four times before they worked out an initial kink that was preventing it from booting up half the time. And, wouldn’t you know it, my printer is also an HP. Perhaps my relationship with them is as good as over.

Janie’s Got a Loan…
Speaking of annoyances, one of my biggest pet peeves is when commercials use familiar pop tunes but change the words—and they aren’t even close to the original! Not that I’d be enamored of an advertisement that deftly played upon the lyrical content of a golden oldie, but I sure would appreciate it a lot more. As it is you typically get the opening line of a song like “Mony, Mony” (Here she comes now, singing Mony Mony) turned into some crap like Come to Mervyn’s, we’ve got a great sale now. Apparently all it takes to be an advertising executive is the ability to count syllables. Presuming it’s not a local phenomenon, this tactic seems especially prevalent in used car radio commercials. But in what sense does this even begin to be creative? And more importantly, who’s so charmed by these ad-trocities that advertising agencies continue to fall back on such a nauseatingly hackneyed convention?

I’m Big in Japan
It seems that a small percentage of web surfers who end up on my site are in fact doing an Internet search for the phrase “Benny K.” Sadly, I cannot take credit for inspiring these people to plop down at their computer and Google my online moniker. Based on the evidence, most of these people are probably looking for Bennie K, a female Japanese pop duo. While their site is largely unreadable, I’ve fumbled around enough on the official Bennie K webpage to hear some samples of their music. Not too shabby. What this means, of course, is that the lackluster entertainment found on my blog is disappointing Internet junkies on a more global scale than ever imagined. Now that’s something to brag about! Oh, and should your cat be choking on the curiosity, BennyK.com (spelled in good ole’ white-boy-from-the-USA fashion) is a registered and active web page as well. Funny enough, the site is the amateur homepage of a young man who got married in the latter half of 2005 and whose main picture is an obscured wedding photo. Did somebody say Twilight Zone?

Pick a Number Between One and Nine
If you’ve never heard of Sudoku, now you have.

Where am I???
What Potpourri entry would be complete without a list of recent (and strange) Internet searches that have brought people to my site? And so, the latest list of culprits include:

• James Gandolfini fart song (Google, #10 search result)
• The Sims 2 “naked baby” (MSN, #5 search result)
• Poophead definition (Yahoo!, #10 search result)
• The brain of an eleven year old (MSN)
• Hyperbole in children’s novels (Webcrawler, #3 search result)
• General+Tao's+Chicken picture ingredients (Yahoo!, #1 search result)
• Colorful brain pictures (Sympatico MSN, #17 search result)
• Chi Omega white panties (Yahoo!, #3 search result)
• Jukebox self-adhesive stamps (Yahoo!)
• “Free Super Bowl tickets” (Google, #1 search result)
  

Thanks for tuning in!