If you blog it, they will come

I hate that I haven't been making time to blog lately. I've got so much I want to write about, too. I'm like a baseball player in an extended slump.

Just like a bloop, broken-bat single will sometimes get a slugger going again, here's a quick post that will hopefully get me back on the right track again. Here are links to a couple of entertaining articles about the great theater that is a major league baseball crowd.

Those have helped cheer me up from what's been a disappointing season so far, at least as far as my Tigers are concerned. This is a pretty good representation of how things have gone for Detroit in '08 (but they're actually starting to turn things around the last two weeks; there's hope for the wild card yet).

Six red stripes, seven white stripes and a heckuva lot of stars

Happy Flag Day tomorrow, everybody! To get you in a flag-honoring mood, watch this.

Yes, that's the mayor of my hometown. No, Murray City is not stuck in some 19th-century time warp; only about one-third of the men in town have mustaches like that. The flag shirt is definitely a Mayor Snarr original.

I never thought I came from a hick town; now, I'm not so sure. We have our fair share of celebrities, though: David Archuleta, Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings, and even the mayor's son, who played Don in Napoleon Dynamite. Maybe the mayor got his shirt idea from Rex Kwon Do.

USA! USA! USA!

If you're from Belize, well then ya best Belize it

Yesterday was quite a lyrical day. I blogged about the enjoyment I derive from FOX's Don't Forget the Lyrics, and I gave a sacrament meeting talk about the influence of media in which I opened with the following anecdote:

I was nine or ten years old when I began listening to the radio a lot. One of the songs that was getting heavy airplay at the time was "Gyrlz, They Love Me" by the immortal Heavy D & the Boyz. At one point in the song, D is trying to set the appropriate mood for a date he's about to go on. He says, "turn on the radio, Anita Baker starts to sing." The first time I heard the song, and for many years thereafter, I thought he said "turn on the radio and eat a bacon-sausage thing." This seemed like something someone named Heavy D would do, so I didn't question it.

In my talk I made some contrived comparison to how we can get wrong or confusing messages from the media we consume, but I mostly just wanted to tell that story. (Speaking of sacrament meeting, I found it very amusing that we needed a letter from the First Presidency instructing us not to use visual aids in talks or ask people to look up scriptures.)

There are loads of funny lyrics out there, both imagined and real. This post's title is the logical follow-up line to "Cuz seein' is believin', and you best believe it" from Shaquille O'Neal's (yes, that Shaq) "Giggin' On 'Em." My friend David is well aware that, despite the above story, the biggest Heavy D-related laughs I get are from hearing the opening line from "Now That We've Found Love" (1, 2, tell me what you got--when a rapper counts in a song you assume it's because they needed to rhyme with something).

The aforementioned David has famously (among my friends, anyway) misheard lyrics ranging from ZZ Top to Huey Lewis and the News. Chris, the music programmer from my days working on the "Marie and Friends" radio show, told me some of his favorites: mistaking "I won't put my hands up" for "I will pull my eyes out" from Dido's "White Flag," and instead of "I'm gonna miss everybody" in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's "Crossroads" hearing "anonymous severed bodies."

There's even an entire website devoted to incorrect lyrics, named after a famous Jimi Hendrix mishearing (be forewarned before perusing, though: many of the "new" lyrics aren't particularly clean). If you have any funny misheard lyric stories, leave 'em in the comments.

Tough luck, Tom

New glasses: Check.

Clean teeth: Check.

Car falling apart so I'd probably have to get rid of it by the end of July anyway: Check.

My "return to New York" plan is coming together nicely. I've also made a few other small changes that will hopefully make me more desirable to potential NYC employers.

I switched to a fairly run-of-the-mill message on my voicemail, so I don't confuse callers with comments about fried chicken or British groceries or talking refrigerators or any of the other stuff I've used in the past (yes, my reasons for not answering my phone are usually food-related).

I've also upgraded from my hofferdoffer Hotmail e-mail address to a Gmail account with a more traditional prefix. Not only does hofferdoffer promote the chronic misspelling of my last name (it's Hofmann, not Hoffman), but I haven't seen the guy who called me that in over four years (where are you, Aaron Barth? And why didn't I get a wedding announcement?). Plus, Gchat has changed my life. Or at least made the time I spend at my job more palatable.

I've made one other recent change, not related to any job hunting, but like the previous two items it concerns how I communicate: I cancelled my MySpace account. It's been a long time since I logged onto that site, other than to delete the fake friend request/porn links I would occasionally receive. Facebook is much more fun, much safer, and I'm not too into bands, so there wasn't much reason to keep my account.

I would've actually cancelled it much sooner, but I had to stick to a commitment I made myself. Over a year ago, my profile views on MySpace skyrocketed from about 200 to about 900 in just a few weeks (no idea how this happened; I only had 30 or 40 friends on there), and since I was already thinking of leaving the site, I made plans to discontinue my account as soon as I reached 1000 profile views.

But then I went through a drought. People stopped looking at my profile (maybe they got bored of the picture of Disco Stu I was using). In May, though, I finally reached my goal, and now I can no longer be stalked on MySpace.

Speaking of stalked...here's my most memorable MySpace experience. Just under a year ago, FOX debuted a show called Don't Forget the Lyrics. A karaoke show hosted by improv legend Wayne Brady sounded like it would be right up my alley, and I was right.

The contestant on the premiere episode was a really cute, perky girl named Katie Moeser. She was absolutely adorable, and I was smitten. So the next day I did the only logical thing: I looked her up on MySpace and sent her a message telling her I enjoyed her performance on the show. Two days later, I actually got a response--just two paragraphs, but more than I expected. I then looked at her page, and saw that in the last few days she had received something like 60 wall posts (or whatever the MySpace equivalent is, I can't remember) from guys she obviously didn't know. When I sent my original message, I had felt like I had been charming and thoughtful, but after seeing all the other notes she had received I realized that even mine was a little creepy, and I didn't try contacting her again. Which was too bad--I had some great ideas on how the two of us could've spent the $250,000 she won.

Doctor McSchemey

Getting new glasses was just one part of my master plan to get back to New York City as soon as I can. My plan is basically this: take care of a few necessary things while I have health insurance from my current job, then when it's all taken care of I'll have the flexibility to quit my job and take one in New York as soon as I find one I want. I can even switch to part time if I need to devote more energy to the job search.

My visit to the eye doctor was my first since just after my mission, almost seven years ago. This is in part because I was almost exclusively a contacts wearer for a while (then switched back to glasses; right now it's probably about 60-40 glasses (thank goodness that's not my prescription)) but mostly because my vision hasn't changed.

I was dazzled by the new technology the optometrist was using, but was even more impressed by the guy who helped me choose my glasses. He's an old guy, probably about 60, super nice, super good at his job, and while I tried on glasses he told me stories about people who still buy the old style of glasses, those huge round plastic frames. And he left a funny message when he called to tell me they were ready to be picked up. A quality individual.

The second phase of my plan was less enjoyable but still not too bad. I went to the dentist for the first time in three years, which meant I had quite a lot of plaque or tartar or whatever that had to be scraped off. I don't know if all dentists have followed the airlines' lead and gone no frills or if it was just this one, but as the blood began to flow from my sensitive gums, all they used to clean me up was a single piece of gauze, which was folded over again and again even though after two wipes there was no longer a clean spot on it. When the cleaning was finished, I finally got some water--about a sacrament cup's worth--to rinse. I did get a free toothbrush, though.

My x-rays were clean, but during the examination the dentist found a cavity anyway--the first one I've ever had. I returned the next day to get it filled. I got the Novocaine or lidocaine or whatever it was they used (unfortunately, they didn't give me the option of laughing gas), and everything went fine.

So now my teeth look good and my eyes see good, good enough to go another few years without return visits, hopefully. One more appointment with a cardiologist to check on a potentially serious genetic thing that I have a family history of, and I'll definitely be ready for another extended doc holiday.

Making a spectacle of myself

Last week I got new glasses for the first time in almost seven years. Here's me in my new frames.

Not sure why I made the picture so huge, but oh well. I like them a lot, and so far so have a lot of other people. I've been getting a lot of compliments on them, which I've enjoyed. When I chose them, I thought of them as Buddy Holly glasses, or my Rivers Cuomo glasses if you want a more current comparison (though he has a different look in Weezer's cool new video). They're also similar to Jemaine's (of Flight of the Conchords fame) glasses.

But that's just what the glasses look like; when I put them on, I reminded myself of someone, but for a few days I couldn't figure out who. Then it hit me: I look just like the Verizon guy.

If you have any other ideas of who I look like with my new specs, leave a comment and let me know.