A few (relatively) recent observations...

-I was borrowing an air mattress to sleep on the floor of an Atlantic City hotel room on New Year's Eve (yeah, I know). It was a fancy air mattress, with a built-in air pump and an attached controller. That controller had a button for "inflation" and a button for "deflation," but it did not have a button for "stagflation." That made me very sad, as I was quite eager to see what would happen when I pressed that button. Clearly, the air mattress was not built by economists...which probably explains why it didn't catastrophically collapse during the night, killing everyone in the room.

-Rest Assured(tm) is a toilet seat cover. You know, those filmy things that you can find in nicer public restrooms. They're there for you to place over the toilet seat if you're so afraid of germs touching your bare ass that wiping off the seat with toilet paper isn't good enough and you simply must have another layer between bum and bowl. Can someone please tell me why, "We got your ass covered," is not their slogan? What the hell were they thinking? Clearly, they were not. Thinking, that is.

-If the Zombie Apocalypse hit right after Michael Jackson died, how many people do you think would have been frantically swarming around his walking, moaning, flesh-craving corpse, desperately hoping that their crowning achievement in life would be getting bit by the King of Pop?

-My office window looks out over the Russian embassy on 16th Street. The whole time we were laboring under the 2 ft of snow that Snowmaggedon II: Snow Harder brought to DC (correction: I was laboring every day that week while the rest of you were "working from home" [i.e. eating Oreos and catching up on "Lost"]), I often wondered what the Muscovites next door were thinking. My thoughts were along the lines of, "Ha! Look at these pitiful Washingtonians, paralyzed by 2 ft of snow! Back in Moscow, we break out the shorts and sandals when there is only 2 ft of snow left on the ground." But then I came across this article. Apparently, Moscow just got hit with a record snowfall this past Monday and Tuesday...and it was only about 25 inches. My first thought: lame! That isn't that much! My second thought: hooooly shit, how much does it suck to be the guy that just got transferred back home after dealing with DC's near-record snowfall, just to face almost the exact same thing as soon as he lands in Moscow. My third thought: there's a "In Soviet Russia, ____ [verb]s you!" joke in there somewhere, but then figured that's been way overplayed. Have at it in the comments, if you like.

-I'm currently reading a book that weighs more than my laptop. It kind of makes me feel like a rebel. Like the very act of pulling the enormous approx. 1300 page tome out of my bag, setting it on my lap, flipping to my spot and settling down to read is an enormous "FUCK YOU!" to the yuppie with the Kindle sitting across from me. Is there such a thing as an anachronistic rebel? Well, maybe the rebel feeling also stems from the fact that the book is a circa-1950 hardcover copy of Max Eastman's translation of Leon Trotsky's "The History of the Russian Revolution" that I got from a local bookstore. It is a kind of visual joke, in and of itself. Feel free to get a pool going over how long it takes someone to ask me, with an ironic smile, "Doing a little light reading?"

-Of the many, many words and phrases I've invented over the course of my life, possibly the one I'm most proud of is the verb "to squirk" (squirking, squirked, etc.), as it has entered my normal lexicon over the past three years since I came up with it. I feel quite natural using it in regular conversation. Definition? When you are trying to pee, but you can't; the frustrating time between when you try to take a leak and when it actually begins flowing. This seems to be a more common phenomenon (and one that lasts longer) among males than females, owing to differences in anatomy. When you are suffering from "stage fright," you are squirking. Sometimes, you will be squirking for quite a while until you let out a fart, at which point the flood gates mysteriously open up. I squirked for like 30 seconds earlier today and it was pretty annoying.

-Morrie Scheisse is a venerable old man. His name also doubles as a superlative swear word, sometimes shortened to just, "Morrie!"