Today was a big day for me.

First, I woke up and sold a couple of my trophies to a friend for use in his hot dog eating contest today.  I am gradually going through my ebay purchase.  I might be close to recouping what I paid in shipping.

Next, I attended the hot dog eating contest.  I just did a little filming and interviewing because I had no interest in participating.  Stuffing one’s face with food and making oneself sick for no good reason seems pretty stupid to me.  Competing for a trophy identical to the dozens I have in my room was not much incentive.  Also, after interviewing the competitors, I discovered that most of them had never won a large trophy for anything before.  Why would I want to compete against a bunch of losers for a trophy that was sitting in my room earlier today?

After the tournament, I made a few comments about how shameful of a performance a number of the competitors put on.  They had six minutes to eat as many hot dogs and buns as possible.  The winner ate 7.5 hot dogs and the guy that I was making fun of had eaten 5.5.  For reference, Kobayashi ate 30 hot dogs in the first six minutes of a competition, and then ate another 20 in the next six minutes.

I continued ribbing this guy for a while, saying how I’d have eaten at least six and how humiliated I’d have been to fail to eat at least one hot dog per minute.  Finally, he turned, looked at the pile of hot dogs remaining on the table and said, I bet you couldn’t.  This possibility hadn’t really occurred to me while I was talking trash.  For me, trash-talk and reality are separated by a huge margin.  Nonetheless, he’d caught me.  So we agreed on some terms and I sat down to take my medicine – in hot dog form.

I managed the six hot dogs.  Just barely.  I don’t think I’m quite ready to compete with a grizzly bear.  I will never do this again.  People complain that my annual pedal boat race is not fun, but that doesn’t even hold a candle to the hot dog eating contest in the no-fun department.  But I will be happy to see Chris proudly wearing an “I Lost to Colin” shirt twice a week for the next month.

Note: hyperlinks to three videos.

Products of the Day!

There are two products that I would like to showcase today.

The first is an awesome Transformers backpack-pillow-jacket by XIP3.  It’s a jacket and backpack all in one, but it is convertible to operate as a backpack alone or to have the jacket turn into a pillow, I think.  The Sierra Trading Post says “you’ll not only have a robot, but a future scholar in disguise.”  In disguise as a human milk-money dispenser, but in disguise nonetheless.  I am simply shocked that the Sierra Trading Post is able to sell it at 75% off the retail price and I am sorely disappointed that it is only available there in child sizes.  Those interested in shelling out for the adult sizes can visit the XIP3 site.  Please send pictures if you do buy and wear one.

For the second product, my writing here is more of a public service announcement than anything.  I got two cans of this Afternoon Pick Me Up coffee drink at a sort of odd lots store in Rhode Island.  It comes in a classy-looking can, which really fooled me.

It is absolutely terrible.  It tastes like it was brewed for months on end and then mixed with milk and left to sit out, but that doesn’t fully capture the flavor – there’s something else wrong with it.

Looking on the can, I found it – the last ingredient (by weight) is Sucralose, an artificial sweetener 600 times sweeter than sugar – the same stuff mixed with filler to create Splenda.  This drink contains sugar and sucralose.  Seems like a belt-and-suspenders approach to sweetening.  How does one come up with such an idea?

“Well, it’s almost sweet enough, but it tastes kinda normal, is there anything we can do about that?  I’ve got it!  Adding an artificial sweetener will make it sweeter and make it taste funny!”

Now the third product placement is for the Catalina Coffee Company, the other unfortunate victims (besides me) in the Afternoon Pick Me Up coffee drink disaster.  Apparently this small, independent coffee shop in Redondo Beach, California is totally unaffiliated with this awful beverage.  Somebody stole their name, mimicked their logo and slapped it on a can.  I called up the coffee shop earlier today and chatted with a guy there, who was very friendly and filled me in on the story.  In my research, I’ve heard very good things about this place and fully intend to stop by, if I ever find myself in the neighborhood.  Seems they have a nice set-up and a good selection of baked goods.  And very friendly, welcoming customer service.  I’m sold.

The boggle tournament was not a great success.  I realized ahead of time that I should have prepared more, but didn’t take it seriously enough.  The paperback Oxford Canadian Dictionary that I bought wasn’t the same one they were using for the tournament, so my word list was off.  In addition, there was a new rule that if you wrote a word that wasn’t in their dictionary, you lost a point.  That got me a couple of times, even though I was mostly putting down normal words.

My friend Logan and I drove up on Saturday night, stayed in a motel, and drove a few miles to the tournament in the morning, which was hosted in a shopping mall.  The organizers welcomed me back when I went to check in and I quickly recognized the scrabble player I had identified as my primary competition the last time.  We said hello and he introduced me to a friend of his, the champion from last year.  Standing around at the tournament, a couple in their forties or fifties came up and chatted with me for a little while, before heading off to church.

The tournament started and I immediately played against the scrabble guy from two years ago.  He beat me in the second of three games when I was surprised to discover that five or so of my words were not in the dictionary – a ten point swing after the penalty.  However, I won the other two fairly handily.  Then I beat another guy pretty soundly.  Afterwards, a reporter came over and interviewed me for a little bit for an article for a local paper.  Then I played last year’s champion.  He beat me in two of three boards, none of which had many words.  One board had only two vowels – I wrote down 16 words and he wrote down those 16 plus “stent” to win 2 to 0.  After the match, the reporter came over and interviewed me for a little bit again, getting my response.  I hope she found a useful quote amidst all the profanity.  I’ll post a link to the article if/when it comes out.

Still, I advanced to the semis, where I beat a woman fairly decisively.  That put me in the finals for a rematch against last year’s champion, with the winner taking $250 in mall bucks and the loser taking $50, also in mall bucks.  He sort of intimated at splitting the prize, but I figured the chances were good that I’d get two decent boards and just run away with it.  Also, I had $100 or so in travel expenses, so I was hoping to take a larger prize.

In the finals, we had two sparse boards and one decent board.  He beat me by a narrow margin in the first round.  In the second round, I beat him 18 to 9.  In the last round, I choked a little, but he beat me fair and square, 7 to 4.  I’m confident that I would have won if the boards had not been so sparse in words, as my speed advantage would have carried the day.  However, I failed to adequately prepare for the prospect of having to grind it out and find every single word and this guy beat me.  I was bitter about losing and I still am, but I was a good sport.  One can hardly justify being a big jerk after winning $50 at a charity event intended to a) be fun and b) promote literacy.

The couple that I talked to before the tournament returned in time to see me in the finals.  They were very friendly and told me they were rooting for me to win.  A little after the finals, they came up and said hi and asked if Logan and I wanted to grab some lunch with them.  I thought about it for a split second and then said yes.  They replied that it was their treat.  Even better.

I have never been treated to lunch by total strangers before.  Pretty neat.  They were very friendly and we chatted about a variety of things.  It turns out that they are somehow involved with a company that sells super-chocolate – chocolate made from specially extracted cocoa that retains an extraordinarily high level of antioxidants.  Evidently, they chose the right guy to invite to lunch.  Anyway, pretty neat stuff, so I asked them a bunch of questions about that.  Apparently many people have raved about the health benefits of this super dose of antioxidants.  The guy actually offered to run home quickly to grab me a sample of the chocolate, since he didn’t have any on him and I was excited about it.  We met up a half hour later and he delivered a square of chocolate each for me and Logan.  It was very good.  Anyway, what could have been a somewhat weird lunch turned out to be very enjoyable.  It was a special treat to meet these people.

I bought a handful of kitchen items at a store in the mall.  Nothing terribly exciting. I returned to the organizers’ booth to thank them again for putting the tournament together.  When I got there, they said, “Oh, Colin, is this your water bottle?”  I had left it at one of the tables and they had picked it up, guessed that it was mine, and set it aside with my name on it.  Very nice of them.  Wonderful people.

Then we went out to the car and I realized I had left my lights on.  The battery was totally dead.  The trunk release wouldn’t work and, for whatever reason, I could not get the car to shift into neutral.  So we were stuck in our spot.  Fortunately, Logan managed to get the trunk open and my extra-long jumper cables were just barely long enough to let a kindly French-Canadian man to pull in behind us and give us a jump.

Then I realized that I’d forgotten to fill up on gas before crossing the border.  As a result, I had to go fill up at a nearby gas station at $4/gallon ($1/L).

And that’s the end of that.  I guess I’ll have to prepare a little harder for next year.  Before anyone starts rubbing it in too hard, I’ll happily take bets on whether I can win the thing next year.

Some of you may know that I am better at Boggle than anyone you’ve ever met*.  I won the first ever Boggle tournament at Pioneer High School in December of 2001 and it was never held again - presumably because nobody was interested in competing against me.  More recently, I have become an international boggle champion.  I am currently preparing for tomorrow’s boggle tournament, where I will reclaim my title.  I won in 2008 and was unable to attend in 2009.  Stay tuned.

*I view Boggle as a word-finding game.  Some people can beat me if we use a very expansive dictionary and they play a whole bunch of words that I (and you) have never heard of before.

Four seconds to see the sign and get excited about getting ice cream (even in one of those awful styrofoam “cake” cones).

One second to realize that the sign wasn’t really for ice cream, identify choicehotels.com as the culprit, and decide never to do business with that horrible organization responsible for raising and dashing my hopes.

Also, who puts cherries on top of an ice cream cone?  Give me a break.

Another already-written blog post that I forgot about.  From last month:

The Calder Dairy is a well established business in Southeastern Michigan, probably best known for its home-delivery service for milk, eggs, butter, and other products.  Their products are also carried in upscale grocery stores like Hiller’s and Whole Foods.  The Arbor Brewing Company serves modestly sized desserts with modestly sized scoops of ice cream from the Calder Dairy as well.

Missing my ice cream touring days, I decided it would be fun to drive out to the Calder Dairy to test out their flavors.  Just like any responsible traveler doomed for failure, I checked their website for store hours, didn’t call them, and planned my trip.  When my friends and I arrived at the Calder Dairy Ice Cream Parlor, we were greeted with two signs:

First:

Yum, sounds delicious.

Second:

Why does this always happen to me?!

The Dairy Store next to the Parlor was open, but did not sell ice cream by the scoop.  We bought some pints of ice cream, egg nog and other dairy stuff, and then headed off to the Country Store at the farm itself, where we were promised ice cream by the scoop.

The farm was pretty neat.  Lots of animals around to pet, gawk at, etc.  Three funny little goats that went wandering around like a gang. 

Reminded me of three Seth Greens from Can’t Hardly Wait.

Now for the ice cream.  Typically, stopping at a farm in the middle of nowhere and buying ice cream yields great ice cream, large servings and low prices.  The rule of thumb is that it is always worth stopping.  There are two exceptions.  The first exception is Flayvors in Amherst, MA, where the smell of livestock overpowers any ice cream flavors.  The second exception is stopping for ice cream in December, when you are the first person to have stopped there for ice cream in three months.

I tried the ice cream.  It was bad.  It very well may have been good months ago when it was fresh, but it was icy, crunchy and pretty gross.

I almost threw away the remaining 2/3 of my cone, but choked it down.  Then I decided to get another cone to give them another shot.  I got the seasonal egg nog flavor because I figured it would be relatively fresh.  I was right, but unfortunately relatively fresh just meant gummy instead of crystalline and crunchy.  They did do a good job on the flavor, though – it tasted just like egg nog.  It reminded me that I don’t really enjoy egg nog in anything but small quantities (like half a scoop).  I also sampled the candy cane flavor, which was pretty tasty.

So to summarize, the Calder Dairy website is unreliable and the ice cream at the farm is old and stale by mid-December.  On the plus side, the other dairy products were very good, the service was good and the atmosphere was nice – the farm is a neat place.  I’ll give them a second chance, though I was disappointed to see high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors on the ingredients list for some of their ice creams.  It kind of runs counter to their promotion of their products containing cream produced right on the farm.

I just discovered RSS feeds and RSS-to-email services.  I don’t know much about it, but what I do know is that it lets me keep track of people’s blogs without having to go check blogs all the time to see if there’s activity.

I read an article about it, because I was looking for a way to keep better track of some blogs and websites that were only rarely updated.  That article referred me to a service called Feed My Inbox, which will monitor RSS feeds and send an e-mail when something new gets posted.  You can monitor up to five sites for free.

I’ve set my account to monitor a handful of things with limited activity.  So no e-mails yet, but also no onslaught of spam or anything, so that’s good.

So the way to set it up is as follows:

1) Go to a blog or website of your choice.

2) Look on your browser for the icon that looks like this:.  In Firefox, it’s up on the left side of the address bar for me.  In Internet Explorer, I think it’s a button on one of the toolbars.

3) Click the icon and then copy the URL it takes you to, which will end in .xml or rss or something.

4) Go to Feed My Inbox and enter your e-mail and the URL.

I’ve been watching some videos on Youtube lately.  A few were noteworthy, so I thought I’d share.

I recently saw some of the David Blaine Street Magic specials from television.  For those who are not familiar with David Blaine, consider watching this video showing him approach some strangers in his characteristic Street Magic style.  Another good example of his style of magic is in this video where he impresses Tyra Banks with some of his magic.  This background is helpful in understanding why I was so entertained by this possibly not work/family friendly (language) parody video , which is the first part in a series of five or six.

The next bit of excitement was watching the Free Hugs Campaign video on Youtube.  In short, it’s a heartwarming tale of a man who was having a horrible day/life, wanted a hug, and made a sign that said “Free Hugs” and held it up in a busy pedestrian area.  He ended up meeting and hugging other people who were down on their luck in various ways and was inspired to make this Free Hugs Campaign, which has received some kind of global following of people who go out with signs and give free hugs.  Neat idea.

Also while on youtube, I ran across the channel of a guy who makes a video every day of something silly, often involving being a kind of a jerk in public to strangers.  Other videos he makes are just funny or odd.  Apparently, there is a Free Hugs man who shows up every Saturday at this guy’s local farmer’s market.  So one day, this guy decided to do some good-natured harassing of the Free Hugs man for his daily video.  I was amused enough to watch some of his other stuff  The channel in general is hit-or-miss by nature, self-promoted as a channel for those who prefer quantity over quality.

Congratulations also to my brother for managing to check the blog immediately before I posted the winner and e-mail me the correct answer (watches).

And further Congratulations to my brother for, after hearing that Craig won, but without reading the blog post, suggesting that perhaps he deserved an “I Lost to Craig” t-shirt.

In light of this and his nail clippers guess, I think my brother may have some psychic powers.  Some of you may also remember from August when a caricature artist at King’s Dominion mysteriously drew a caricature of my brother in place of me.

Congratulations to Craig Frankland for winning the “Guess What I Bought” contest!  He will receive one watch of my choosing from the collection of 24 watches that I purchased.

My brother will receive a consolation prize of five sets of nail “clippers,” one chocolate bar, and an “I Lost to Craig” t-shirt in recognition of his impressive guessing efforts.