Update: I couldn’t resist, click play to listen. 
The loveable Vince of Sham-Wow fame has returned, and this time he is slanging the Slap Chop. I have seen the Sham-Wow commercial so many times, when it comes on I actually greet Vince with a warm hello. He is nearly part of the family in our house. 

So the Slap Chop seems to be the same crappy $9.99 chopper i had years ago with a new name and the backing of the best salesman in the world; Vince. Though Vince is quick to explain that is definitely not like the one I used to have, and then “sinks” the most unlikely of behind the back shots ever! I only made it 37 seconds into the commercial before I felt like a substandard piece of shit for not owning 3 Slap Chops. Vince made it very clear that my life is boring, and that it has no chance of being exciting until I am Slap Chop-ing my troubles away.

He had me on the hook, I was reaching for my credit card, and then he said it. “YOU’RE GONNA LOVE MY NUTS”.

Holy Shit. It was right then I thought maybe this is a parody? Is this just a joke? No, Vince was deadly serious about how much you will love his nuts. I can imagine the 25 takes it took to get that right, because Vince sounds quite sincere about his nuts. Your gonna love my nuts, your gonna love my nuts, Your gonna love my nuts.

And it is true, his nuts are uniformly chopped and lovely.

Well played Vince. 

I was just over on fox.com, which I consider more entertainment than news. Anyway I saw this article where some patriarch of a huge family in the West Bank was quite impressed with the reporter who threw his shoes at President Bush. So impressed in fact that he has offered one his daughters to him as a bride with a dowry of $30,000. 

The daughter 20 had this to say: 

“This is something that would honor me. I would like to live in Iraq, especially if I were attached to this hero.”

Check out the article on: Reuters, Fox

How come every other car company in the world seems to be able to re-tool for electric and hybrid vehicles except for the US ones? I didn’t even know they had an electric Mini Cooper in the works, but there it is, ready to sell right now in 2008. The Chevy Volt will be lucky to see the light of day in 2010, if it ever does at all. Talk about too little too late.

The way things are looking we may not have too many US automakers by then anyway, once our bailout for them fails to change anything. You can’t plug up a hole in a glass by pouring more water in it, so how can you fix companies that are hemorrhaging money by throwing more money at them?

Unless they change their ‘business as usual’ nothing will change…

Cool Mini Cooper though…

Last Saturday night December 13th, my girlfriend and I met up with some of her work friends for some drinks. The location was chosen by the people we were meeting, they had been there a number of times before and said it was a good spot for Mexican food and drinks.

The restaurant we ended up at that night was Tres Pesos, on Woodlawn Road in Charlotte. Not much to look at from the outside, and unfortunately that is the best thing I can say about it. It is not that what I got tasted bad, in fact I thought their Carne Asada was pretty good for NC (and I used to live in California where the real stuff is)! The problem is anyone who ordered anything with Chicken in it got a first class ticket to the emergency room. And I don’t mean 1 or 2 people from our party of 8, how about more like 5. What this means is if you go there in a party of 8, you have a 62.5% chance of being carried out, and not because of too many tequila shots.

OK, that is an exaggeration, you would not be carried out on the spot, because whatever it was they had took about 24 hours to incubate in their system. So what I meant to say is, there is a 62.5% chance that some one will be driving you to the ER within 48 hours. And that is just what I had to do with my girlfriend when she started puking and had not stopped after 7 hours. Thankfully after a number of IV’s in her arm and some anti-nausea shots she was able to go back home and rest. However she has been passed out in bed for the last 2 days, too weak to get up. All because we wanted some Chicken Tacos.

Anyway in case you were wondering Tres Pesos passed their health inspection on11/13/2008 with a 97.5. As nice of a score as that is, it doesn’t change the fact that they poisoned 5 people last week. That we know of. Of course we notified the health department about this, and one hospital is cooperating with them to provide stool samples that were taken from one of the sick individuals. After all they still need to determine if it was bad chicken, improperly handled chicken or good chicken handled by a person not washing their hands or sick. I can’t wait to hear the results. Will post em if I get em.

I just wanted to whine for a minute. I am selling my motorcycle, and I am pretty sad about it. I am impressed I had it for 3+ years, and didn’t kill myself. Perhaps it is smart to sell it while I can still walk. 

Our old friend Boxee is up to some new tricks with some recently released updates. It looks like they have improved streaming with Hulu, but even cooler they have now added NetFlix as one of their already many media sources. From what I am reading it is not up on the AppleTV yet, but I am sure it is only a matter of time. Very cool Boxee.

In the meantime I am still loving the instant movies from NetFlix on my XBOX.

Alright, I finally plugged in my XBOX after months of other distractions and down came a big update. After the update I noticed that there was a link for NetFlix in the menus…interesting and exciting. Well as you might have noticed from my previous posts I have been in search of the right media player for a while. I have used a Windows PC with 3rd party software (JRiver MC), Windows with media center (WMC), and of course my Apple TV with the Boxee. 

The only one I could stand was the Apple + Boxee. And even though Boxee is still in Alpha, it is a crap load better than using WMC. It is the integration of video sources like Hulu that really make it great + the ability to view my local media makes it indispensable. If you couldn’t tell yet, my goal is to get as much media as possible to my TV with the least amount of BS.

I also like to have a variety of media sources like internet based as well as my local media files. Just video though, audio is all handled by my Sonos. Anyone who knows the Sonos, knows I am not in the market for a new audio streamer as I already have the best. I love it so much I am gonna name my first born Sonos. But where is the Sonos for Video? 

OK so I still don’t have that all in one solution I am looking for. I don’t believe there is a way for me to play my local Xvid – DivX files via the XBOX MC (I haven’t looked yet), but NetFlix on the XBOX is awesome. Go online, and drop something in your ‘Watch Instantly’ queue and it immediately populates on your XBOX, ready to play on your TV, in HD in some cases. It is quick and easy and it doesn’t even take long to buffer on my shitty Time Warner connection. Well worth the $8.95 a month for so many high quality movies and tv shows sent right to my XBOX. Yesterday I watched 11 episiodes of Jericho and the movie FEDS with Rebecca DeMornay, and I have about 100 things after it in the queue including the full seasons of about 10 other shows.

Well worth $8.95. Plus I still get movies sent to my house if it is not available for instant streaming, like Ed and his Dead Mother. A classic for any fan of Steve Buscemi or the walking dead. (sitting in my mailbox now!) 

So I guess I am going to mess with my XBOX to see if I can get it to play movies requiring codecs, I am sure there is hack around by now. If I can make that happen, it has a chance of being my perfect media player. Oh and if you don’t want to mess with your XBOX for movies, Roku makes a box for $99 that will pull down NetFlix instantly in the same way; sans all the Microsoft gaming malarky.