If You Dislike This Post, You Only Have Yourself to Blame

In honor of this blog's 50th post, this entry will be devoted to the reader comments - they're the best part of having a blog, and normally the comments are more entertaining than what I've written to begin with.
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An anonymous commenter called Vishal a "cranky, cantankerous curmudgeon" a few posts ago - I've taken a random sampling of his comments, so that you can judge yourself.

On Vince Young:
vishal said...
vince young is trash. always has been and always will be.

On the older brother from "Step by Step":
vishal said...
if you read the message boards listed under brandon call's imdb page, it lists that he now works at a gas station that his parents own in vista, ca.

After someone said they were my "biggest fan":
vishal said...
that was you who posted as your anonymous "biggest fan" wasnt it?

After someone called me a "biatch":
vishal said...
HAHAHA
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Way before this blog, I used to really only write about sports. In an effort to diversify, I've restrained myself from too many sports-related posts. Not a universally acclaimed decision.

Anonymous said...
you sound like the sports GAL
write about SPORTS

Anonymous said...
I want an article about sports.
NEXT!
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I've also restrained myself from making a lot of lists where I just rank arbitrary things that have no business being ranked or can't be compared on an objective basis. This choice has proved very frustrating for someone out there.

Anonymous said...
where are the entries? if you're out of ideas, rank some stuff. everybody loves lists.

Anonymous said...
you should rate other things

Anonymous said...
is this a ranking?
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One of my personal favorites came from a fictional character from "Finding Forrester" after I noticed I used the word "actually" excessively in my writing...

William Forrester said...
No thinking - that comes later. You must write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is... to write, not to think!

madphoenix said...
YTMND!
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Catherine stands up to anonymous people on the Internet. Well done, Catherine.

Anonymous said...
i just checked out your "complete profile," and let me tell you that it's lamer than FDR's legs

Catherine said...
you're lame too, anonymous! :P
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Hey Vishal likes something!

vishal said...
i suggest you watch dance off, pants off on fuse. quite possibly one of the most entertaining concepts for a tv show ive seen in years. AND its hosted by stephanie tanner from full house.

Steve said...
pants off dance off is a terrible show...i don't think there's a screening process for the dancers.
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Memorable undercuttings of the entire premise of a post

On whether I would shake Howie Mandel's hand:
Anonymous said...
howie mandel wouldn't touch your hands anyway. he's a germophobe.

On my plea for people who don't have a TV to buy one:
Winston said...
The few people I know that don't own a TV do not own a computer either. They would have no way of receiving your warning and they're probably already to high to comprehend what you're saying.
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Gotta admire Ali's persistence in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary:

Ali said...
fuck looks like I better defend myself here. Ok Minnie Driver, still hot but where has she gone?
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Sara apparently doesn't like Savage Garden, despite their popularity in the late 1990s:

Sara said...
yo, i did this, and it sucks. i got savage garden twice.
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Steve reveals an interesting bit of information he learned:

Steve said...
Did you know that valentine's day cards don't go 50% off the day after valentines day? they just stop selling them...
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We'll end with whoever compared renting dogs to prostitution...

Anonymous said...
Is it just me or does this whole concept remind anyone else of prostitution? Two quotes in particular:
"And if you like a certain dog, you can try to keep renting the same dog..."
"I bet some lonely folks would get incredibly attached to their rental dog instantly, and be willing to pay through the roof to have the dog forever."
"Dog" -- Sure...Stop pretending to speculate, Eric. You know it's a profitable business.

Understanding the Hype

I once had an argument with Rich (and I think Ali and Rob?) about what constituted "hoopla" for about twenty minutes. My memory is fuzzy on this, but I think I claimed there was hoopla over some upcoming party, but really only like three people had told me about it, which Rich (rightly) claimed couldn't possibly be hoopla, whatever that meant. So me and my tendencies towards exaggeration got shot down, and everyone agreed that there was only a "mild buzz". Since I've refined my understanding of what hoopla is, I've noticed that when something generates real hoopla, I'm only excited about half the time. The other half, I'm totally lost and have no idea what all the fuss is for. Let's recap some memorable moments of excitement or total confusion in my life.

Oh, and I think that it turned out to be a pretty lame party, for whatever that's worth.

Magic Cards
I never used to collect or play with these, so pardon my ignorance here. My impression was that this was some kind of game where you play cards against your opponent (I Lightning Strike you negative 3 points, but then you Illusionista-ed me positive 12) and at the end someone wins. But you collect your own cards, right? Like, kids I knew definitely paid money for better cards. So then, doesn't the richer kid always win? To me this seemed like if you played Connect Four, and if the other kid was poor, you would only have to Connect Three but he still had to get four. You have to come into a game on equal footing. Showing off money isn't what games are for. That's what expensive sneakers and overly elaborate birthday parties with pony rides are for.

Someone told me most people actually don't play the game - they just put the cards in plastic slips and look at them. That seems even stupider to me. Granted, I used to collect basketball cards, but at least that relates to real life and not wizard powers. Maybe I am just discriminating against people who are really into wizard fantasy. I've been known to do that in the past.

Calculator Watch
While I again need the disclaimer that I never had one of these - I was totally sold on this. I wanted one so bad - dude it was SICK - you could do math on your wrist! You could totally, like, cheat on some kind of addition test, which would definitely make you the coolest kid in school. I guess I'm being slightly facetious, but I really did want one of these. People who had them later conceded they sucked, since they looked dumb, were kind of big, you didn't really ever need to do math on your wrist (weird, huh?) and the buttons were so small they were hard to push without messing up. I wonder if those were only marketed to little children. If little kids with their proportionately little fingers couldn't use a calculator watch comfortably, there's no way adults could.

Macarena
You know how it's easy to forget how big a deal some fad was as time goes by? Well, my memories of everyone doing the Macarena have not faded at all - it's like some horrible past I can't escape. I tried this exactly one time, and totally didn't get why it was so fun. Is it because everyone wanted to feel Latin? Sometimes people say it's like the hokey pokey, and I guess I agree, because they are both equally idiotic. If you've forgotten how big a deal this was, I'll point this out. During the 1996 Summer Olympics, I distinctly remember that NBC declined to show actual Olympic events in favor of an exhibition where the women from the U.S. female gymnastics team danced the Macarena for about 15 minutes. Oh, and people also BOUGHT the record. Like, millions of people bought the record. Was this so they could practice at home? I mean, imagine if you bought a hokey pokey CD and played that at home while you studied or cooked or something.

American Idol
When this first became a sensation, I was totally hooked. Season 1 had this girl I loved too (or loved to look at, Christina Christian). Don't get me wrong - I didn't vote or anything, but I eagerly looked forward to each show. I watched Season 2 for a while, but I quickly started to hate it. There was all this filler time and weird in-show-ads selling Coke or a Ford Focus, and I didn't really like all those terrible auditions, because it felt phony and staged. Then they actually start the finals, and this guy who looked like a teenage Conan O'Brian just wouldn't lose even though he was horrible and really everyone in general just seemed like a giant loser. I stopped watching before the season ended, and didn't watch for years after that. But this season, I'm back to watching it, thanks to Tivo. I always like the singing, and that thrill of "are they going to suck?". With Tivo, I can get all that without all the crap. I record it, and then fast forward through everything but the songs (and I'll skip these if they suck) and Simon's commentary. Whole episode takes about 15 minutes to watch and then I don't watch the results show, I just ask someone who got booted off. So I once again get the hoopla over American Idol. (But I'd still never vote. Excluding the 539 text messages I sent for Sanjaya last week. Kidding. Hopefully.)

The Wave
What exactly was so cool about this? In a giant stadium with 70,000 people, if you do the wave, it looks like there is a ripple effect? And that's cool...why? What if we all jumped up and stomped at the same time? That would be really loud. Or what if we all curled into the fetal position simultaneously? That might look cool from a blimp. The whole thing just made no sense to me, but for some reason people would look at you angrily if you didn't do it - I guess my refusal might ruin the whole visual effect. I thought the wave was mostly a thing of the past, but I've been seeing these commercials lately for this place called Buffalo Wild Wings, where they ADVERTISE the place by showing that the customers do the wave in the restaurant. Has anyone else seen this commercial? This is like a legit commercial too, not some low budget production like Cal Worthington's Ford Dealership.

Atkins Diet
Out of curiosity, I tested this out to see what all the fuss was about. Wow, does this shit work or what? I did it for two weeks - didn't eat any bread or rice or cookies (I may have been still eating too much fruit) - and lost like 10 pounds. I felt like complete ass, had no energy, and my only two thoughts were "should I go to bed?" and "I wonder how many loaves of bread I could eat". But I did lose a lot of weight, pretty quickly. I didn't need to lose 10 pounds, so I stopped doing it, but I totally get why this is a big deal - this worked ridiculously "well". Oh I was also extremely thirsty all the time. That wasn't a big bag of fun.

News Update: 50th Post

FYI - To honor this blog reaching 50 posts (and I know a couple of them, including this one, were more like administrative posts), I'll be running a "Best of Comments" entry, spotlighting the best reader comments since this blog began. So you have a little bit more time to get in a witty comment and get featured.

Listen Up, People

Sorry, I know I've stated time and again that I'd rather this blog not devolve into me ranting like a maniac, but this one has bugged me for years, and for some reason today is the day to write about it.

I can't stand guys who don't flush urinals. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you. When you urinate at home, do you not flush? If so, that's completely disgusting. And if you do, why do you? Because you don't want it to smell, right? Well, no one wants public bathrooms to smell either. When you leave your urine sitting there, it smells bad. That makes the air smell bad. That makes the bathroom gross. And it makes you a loser who is stuck in kindergarten and might as well be eating glue off your muddy fingers.

I hear the same crap all the time - you don't want to touch the handle - it could be gross. You touch a MILLION things that could be gross. The door handle when you leave. Other door handles. Taxicabs. YOUR FACE. YOUR FACE is probably gross. And here's the thing - in no other situation where you touch something are you about to WASH YOUR HANDS WITH SOAP LITERALLY IN 2 SECONDS. Do you not wash your hands when you go to the bathroom? Because that's a LOT more disgusting. I don't care, use your elbow or something if you're that freaked out by the act of flushing.

I've always wondered if this happens in women's restrooms - I bet it doesn't. And just so you know, ladies, your dad, your boyfriend, your brother - at least one of them doesn't flush when he goes to the bathroom. Yeah. Chew on that.

I get that some bathrooms are so bad you don't really want to be touching anything, like at some dirty gas station off the highway where they don't even know what it means to clean the bathroom. Okay, that's one thing, I'm fine with that. But in a "clean" bathroom (i.e., a janitor cleans it on a daily basis, like a hotel, restaurant, office lobby)? It's particularly egregious in a public bathroom where you know the other people who use it on a recurring basis, like an office or dorm. Make a small sacrifice (which really isn't a sacrifice at all) and make my world a better place. People disgust me.

Right Between The Eyes!

My favorite days of March Madness are the first two. Don't get me wrong - the later games are great, but they're just great in standard sports way, the way I like the NBA Finals, or the AFC Championship Game. The first two days everyone's involved (because no one's bracket is destroyed yet), and there's so many teams that it's impossible not to find one you really want to root for.

More importantly, it's as close as you can get to a veritable sports bonanza. The massive number of games makes it tough for broadcasters to batter you down with stupid human interest stories, and unless you completely have no life, you're watching a lot of teams for the first time, and it's a nice study in different basketball styles. You see a lot more press and innovative defensive schemes (the VCU halfcourt trap-and-switch system against Duke was very interesting to watch - I think a better PG than Paulus eats it alive, but it certainly caught my attention). If you're a true basketball fan, it's all the basketball, little fluff.

As the tournament wears on, and there are fewer players and coaches for the media to cover (and longer time delay between games), I'm going to get destroyed with touching human interest stories on kids who I won't remember in 30 days, and especially, especially, the coaches. Sometimes I think Billy Packer and company are on missions to get certain coaches jobs at major programs, so they just talk nonstop about how great some random coach is. I wonder if they get paid to make those compliments - seems like a win-win business proposition for everyone involved.

I'll enjoy the rest of the tournament. But we just finished my favorite part. Okay that is all.

Paying Attention

Due to an influx of work, I was only able to sleep a couple hours a day the past few days. It brought me back to finals period in college, where the back-to-back all-nighter was commonplace for so many of my friends. I did it a few times - I always used to hear about people pulling ridiculous hours whenever they needed to - but more often than not I needed regular food and sleep, and just couldn't focus that long. My attention span is below average (I often lose focus on conference calls, etc.) and when I was in school I just assumed everyone had massively better attention span and focus with greater stamina for studying than I did.

So imagine my surprise when a couple months ago, I officially became the last 23 year old on the planet to learn that a LOT of people who don't have ADD take Ritalin (or some competing equivalent) to stay awake and super focused while they cram all night. I had literally NO idea this happened when I was in school. I only even knew this was possible because of a Desperate Housewives episode I saw back when I watched that show, where Felicity Huffman takes Ritalin and cleans her house all night until it's spotless and everyone loves her, but she ends up self-destructing and crying next to a soccer goal.

I guess it's a logical thought process - Ritalin helps ADD kids pay attention, if I take it, my focus will be incredible. My mind just somehow doesn't drift to those kinds of areas. Anyways after I found this out, I started asking people - every single person I asked told me of course they knew people did this, they knew people who did, or even tried themselves. I felt like a caveman or something..."so this is what you mean when you say 'a fork'...ohhhhhh".

My procedure when I had to pull an all-nighter cramming was to go to the Wa at midnight, buy a can of Pringles and a 2 liter bottle of Coke, and slowly drink the coke and eat the Pringles all night. By the time I was done, I had like 32 days of sodium intake and 3 cavities, but it worked well enough. Then I would buy a 20 oz. Coke on the way to the test, just to have a drink if I felt myself falling asleep during the test. After I went through all this, I felt like complete ass for about 15 hours. I can't even imagine what the after effects of Ritalin would feel like. I guess I could use Felicity Huffman as an example, but that is potentially not very accurate.

I'm not trying to bash the people who used/are using Ritalin - not really my place to judge/care - if you think that's an appropriate level of risk for what you are aiming to achieve, that's your choice and I'm not making it my business. I'm more alarmed, though, that I had no idea that this was even happening, even as it happened all around me. It's sad to realize you're not nearly as savvy as you think.

Less Poop Collecting

Allison was telling me about how she wanted a dog, but didn't have the time and energy to take care of one full time. I feel like I hear that sentiment an awful lot, and I'll confess that even though I am supportive of dog-eaters (I remain firmly behind that statement), I too have wanted to play with a dog, but don't have the necessary time or maybe willpower to really become a dog owner. Allison floated the idea of renting pets, and I think that sounds like a decent business idea. I would do this - get to play with a dog or go for a walk or impress chicas - with less poop collecting or vaccinating or sofa destruction.


There's plenty of holes with the idea, and I guess it has high start-up costs (training to accept rental strangers for quick periods of time, operating a physical store, vaccinating and licensing dogs) but I think if executed well, you could turn this into a profitable business. You could even offer an option to buy after the rental, and I bet some lonely folks would get incredibly attached to their rental dog instantly, and be willing to pay through the roof to have the dog forever. That sense of attachment is what a pet store tries to create instantly - here, we let you take a test drive, and only get more attached. And if you like a certain dog, you can try to keep renting the same dog, but you run the risk of someone else swooping in to buy your dog, so that pressure might force you into making a defensive move and buying the dog before someone else does. I think the rental prices will just barely break even, but I think the permanent sales would be the major upside here. (By the way I don't mean dogs as a timeshare setup - you won't rent out your own dog to strangers - these dogs will belong to the rental company).

Anyways, if you don't have a dog, but sometimes think about getting one, mull this idea over. I know I would be interested in this. But maybe I'm insane.

Dead of Winter

With the weather in New York City expected to reach the high 40s this weekend, I thought I'd take a moment to discuss winter. I was born and raised in California, and continue to think of myself as a Californian at heart, despite having lived on the east coast for various educational and occupational reasons for a number of years now.

People from the east coast say a lot of ridiculous things, including "the Knicks need to be winners for the NBA to succeed", "I don't get the whole avocado thing", and "I could never handle an earthquake - I MEAN, THE GROUND ACTUALLY MOVES!" but by far the dumbest thing east coasters say is "I like winter".

The most popular rationale for this bit of stupidity is that "you can't appreciate spring and summer without winter". Apparently you need to suffer through harsh winds and subzero temperatures to actually enjoy warm weather. Imagine, for a moment, if you extended this philosophy to other areas of your life. "Man, I really hate eating brussel sprouts, but I eat them nonstop for 3 months because afterwards, cheeseburgers taste EVEN better!" "I know sending notes to friends via carrier pigeon is somewhat unreliable, but in April, when I turn my phone back on, it's going to feel like a technological miracle!" In truth, the whole "deprivation causes greater appreciation" is something of a red herring. Your appreciativeness shouldn’t be your goal - happiness should be. If the weather is 75 degrees every day, I'm going to be happy with the weather every day, end of story. Appreciation of the weather is entirely the wrong goal.

Then, of course, there's snow. If a lot of snow is forecasted, someone at work will smile and say something moronic like "maybe we'll get a snow day!" Hoping for a snow day is a reflex memory of childhood days people can't seem to let go. True, when you were a little kid, snow MAYBE meant a snow day, and you didn't have to go to school. But I'm not 6 years old anymore, and when it comes to work, it's pretty much never a snow day. For your job to call a snow day, the blizzard has to be so massively bad that you'd be crazy to wish for it. At the office, I ask when there was a snow day, and get responses like "In 2003 there was this one blizzard that left like 5 feet of snow and I think we got one day off - or maybe we just left the office earlier".

As for snow itself, while I concede it looks pretty for about 20 minutes, it quickly become disgusting and dirty, plus all the shoveling that has to be done and scraping off windshields. Water freezes over and people slip on ice and get hurt. Traffic is slowed significantly - all so you can build a snowman, which I bet none of you have done (while not on vacation) in at least ten years. And don’t start with this skiing-sledding nonsense - Californians can do that too, they just need to drive a little bit inland.
Snow's not even the big problem - these brutal winds are. When the wind is physically hurting my face, I don't think "wow, four seasons - what a great dose of variety!" - all I think is "brrr cold cold cold brr brr cold cold cold". Thankfully, this past winter hasn't been as brutal as it could have been, but I still can't wait for spring. And I shouldn't WANT to wait for spring either.

The Music Of My Heart

I'm wary of writing a blog that always 1) criticizes everything (some of the easiest writing to do is just to say why everything and anything sucks) and 2) ranks random things that don't need to be ranked (generally no one cares how you rank anything). So I was compiling a list of my five favorite TV theme songs/openings ever, and I started to rank them, only to realize that there wasn't a lot of basis for objective comparison and no one cares about ranking TV theme songs in the first place. So all that being said, here's five I truly love:

Charles in Charge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ2pQ0YF_ak&mode=related&search=

Seriously, how hot was Nicole Eggert? There's a better version of this theme song on youtube, but it's for the season when Nicole Eggert wasn't on the show, and what would be the point of you watching that clip? I loved the lack of believability of the entire show. Charles was a male live-in housekeeper/babysitter, and when the family moved, the new family (with Nicole Eggert) kept him around! And built out the whole basement as a bachelor pad for him, complete with a bed that folded up into the wall. The most absurd thing was that hot chicks would date this male nanny, who should have been going after Nicole Eggert in the first place. Anyways, it's not the best show, but it's a great theme song.

Family Matters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJmXpstLBSM&mode=related&search=

So the link is for a Norwegian broadcast, hence the "Alle unter einem Dach" title instead of "Family Matters", but this is the full version of the song (the song itself is in English). I love the ch-ch-ch-ch opening, and the moment of suspense before the awesome piano riff comes in. I liked the cast in this season, which includes Jaimee Foxworth, whose childhood stardom went so well she eventually became a porn star, and Telma Hopkins, Aunt Rachel. They could never figure out what to do with the Aunt Rachel character, so they had her open a diner that was meant to become a hangout like "The Max" or "The Peach Pit". Back in high school Ali used to make us eat at this crappy "diner" - it's actually kind of a fast food grill with booths to sit - called "Fantastic Cafe", arguing that our group needed a hangout spot. I must have been there a dozen times, which is a dozen times too many.

Doogie Howser, M.D.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD7STskaKrE

No lyrics here, and a long intro sequence of Doogie's accomplishments before we meet any of the cast. But it's a great song, and I like how they incorporated the music into other moments of the show too. Doogie is now the funniest guy on the solidly funny "How I Met Your Mother", which you should check out if you have the time. Not the best show ever, but consistently pretty funny.

Hey Dude
http://www.retrojunk.com/details_tvshows/249-hey-dude

This is probably the corniest theme song I've ever heard. It's so wonderful in its awfulness - watch this a few times and try not to sing along. Ben Stiller's wife, Christine Taylor was in this show. The two of them came to Princeton my senior year, and someone's "question" was "I loved Hey Dude". I never figured out who that person was, but I'm sure we could make great friends.

Growing Pains
http://www.retrojunk.com/details_tvshows/373-growing-pains

A duet! Great move for theme songs, and I always wondered why there weren't more. Duets are catchy and cheesy - a perfect fit for a theme song. As you know, Kirk Cameron is now an especially serious evangelist Christian - someone linked me to his website once, and a flash animation of him walked forward and asked me if I was a good person, and I had to click yes or no. I mulled it over for a moment and chose yes. Then it told me that most people think they are good people because they haven't done anything really bad, like kill someone. Evidently there is more to being a good person than just that.

Business Travel

Some people get really excited by the idea of travelling for work. "Oh, your job sent you to Orlando? Oh how cool, I never get to travel for work!" On the surface, that might not sound overly ridiculous. Trust me when I say the following: it is completely ridiculous.

The vast majority of people who think business travel is cool don't do any business travel. The people who DO travel for work and still like it are either about to get a free flight with frequent flier miles or clinically insane. I can't believe companies can market travel and somehow people think those jobs should be MORE desirable.

Other than maybe the DMV, I can't think of a location where everyone is so uniformly stressed out as at the airport. It's just such an unpleasant environment. Everyone is unbelievably tense, everyone is about to miss their flight, or lost a bag, or lost a kid, or their reservation wasn't in the system, or the guy at the counter was a prick, or they can't believe they have to throw out their "liquid" hair gel, and why is that guy going through all my stuff like that, he thinks he can do whatever we wants because he's security, etc. Even when nothing particularly bad happens to you, the negative vibes are contagious. If you leave even a 2 foot space in line between you and the guy in front of you, everyone behind you starts freaking the hell out. And even if you're packed in advance, on time, and your flight is on time (an incredible trifecta itself), the best you would say about your time in the airport is, "yeah, nothing horrible happened - I got really lucky." When you're on vacation, you're so fired up to go wherever you're going - you're like this random absurd island of happiness amidst all the fury. And believe me, the business travellers who see you and your shit-eating grin and your oversized bag for your second-rate golf clubs - they hate you. Oh, they hate you.

Then there's actually being on the plane. Some people can't sleep on planes, which is truly awful. One of my personal problems is that it always sucks to fall asleep on a plane, wake up with your mouth open and realize you've drooled a little bit. Does anyone know a way to combat this? It doesn't happen to me every time, but it's kind of gross and sort of embarrassing, even though everyone around is a stranger.

There's a lot of other negative aspects to business travel (food, bed, getting lost, to name a few), but detailing all the outstanding items could take days, and I can't stay up that late since I had to travel for work today. And I didn't even change time zones. Hopefully I won't have to do that again anytime soon.

Wikipedia Brings Sadness

So I'm browsing Wikipedia the other day, and reminiscing about my glorious youth, when I came across some sad pieces of television-related information. You may already be familiar with what follows, but I was not.

Evidently, Myra Monkhouse (Michelle Thomas), Steve Urkel's polka-playing girlfriend from "Family Matters", passed away in 1998 due to a rare intra-abdominal desmoplastic small round cell tumor. I was uninformed of this passing - this definitely should have been bigger news. I don't run the news, but I'm sure whatever the feature story was that day was not as big a deal as this. 1998? What was that - the Nagano Olympics? Monica Lewinsky? Jesse Ventura? Myra was a key character on a seminal show for my generation - I don't know many people who've seen less than 40 episodes of "Family Matters", even if they think the show is horrendous.

Then, I learned that the original yellow Power Ranger (Thuy Trang) died in a car accident in 2001. I didn't really watch this show - I was a little too old at the time - it's hard to watch Power Rangers in the day and switch to Seinfeld at night. But I definitely knew of her, since she was an Asian person on television - at the time, the only other Asian people I saw on tv shows were the girl from "Ghostwriter" and the girl from "California Dreams". I never thought about it at the time, but it was in retrospect very convenient that the yellow power ranger was Asian, the black power ranger was black, the alcoholic-Irish-looking long-haired Tim Riggins one was green, etc. Anyways, I don't mean to belittle anyone's death with stupid jokes. Apparently Thuy Trang was not wearing a seatbelt. I like to wear a seatbelt, even in cabs, which people make fun of me for, but I don't see why not. Screw you and your peer pressure.

Lastly, I read (and these appear to be more like rumors) on Wikipedia that Danny, the calm know-it-all Native American from "Hey Dude" (the Nickelodeon show Ben Stiller's wife used to be on) might also be dead. I'm hopeful this is just a rumor though, like when I heard Kel Mitchell ("Good Burger") was dead, or Jaleel White was dead, or that John Basedow ("Fitness Made Simple") had died in a tsunami.