I have come to a conclusion recently:

Black men can pull off a shaved head without glasses. In fact, with glasses it seems… not as appealing as without them
White men cannot pull off the bald head look without glasses. With glasses it looks good, no glasses just doesn’t work

That is one thing you can’t get away from when it comes to race: What a man looks good in. I mean, you have so many things to take into account. Especially with suits and tuxes.

If I was going bald I would totally do the ’shaved head with glasses’ look instead of trying for a comb over. Although if genetics serves me right I will go gray instead of bald. Not sure if I would dye my hair or not… I guess if it was single strands of gray mixed in with brown i would look i would dye it… Kinda depends on how ‘respectable’ I look with the gray.

I should go work at Macy’s in the suit department. Some of the guys there have to be the most amazing people I have ever met when it comes to menswear. I was picking out a tie a few months ago and was unsure about what color to get. I had the best customer service experience of my life and I came home with a kickass tie at just the right price. It even works with both a blue collared shirt and a white one with the same suitcoat. The same tie with two colors. I sent Macy’s an email saying how awesome my tie is. Hopefully that guy got a raise.

Try getting that kind of service at Target.

Now that I have a bunch of time on my hands I am going to do something I should have done years ago: Actually design a theme for this site.

Right now I am using a modified form of the default theme for WordPress called Kubrick (after Stanley Kubrick, in my opinion one of the best directors of all time.) All I did was take the default theme and make my own header images. The top of the design is fun to mess with and I have about 15 different versions I have played around with.

Some of the headers were topical to posts or pages (this one was about movie posts and this one was about the music page) and some where just stupid (this one had a picture of JFK and this one was cut out of an image I found online)

But none of these things were truly ‘original.’ They made this blog look like every other blog out there, and while this is pretty much like every other blog in the world (run by a single narcissistic person with wayyy too much time on their hands… wait… nevermind) it is also something of a journal that I decided to post to the internet. Some people document their entire lives, I try to document what I think I should document so perhaps someone would learn something from it. Perhaps myself…

Or the entire Loyola mock trial team, family members, a few random people who seem to enjoy reading it, a spattering of colleagues, people who find stuff on Google/AOL/MSN, people who read it on Facebook, people who forward posts and just about everyone who searches for “ghetto prom pictures” for some reason. And some of it has become REALLY useful. Like a post I did about Vector Marketing and their misleading mail. Which has a bunch of comments from people who needed to search for information about this sham company. You never know when something is going to be useful to somebody…

But such a personal thing can not be put on just any old theme. There needs to be a theme that is kickass and really expresses my intent with this thing. It has been around for 3 years, so I am going to scrub through old posts and go through some statistics software to see where people are visiting and from where and start work on a new theme.

Update: Here are all the headers

In the past 7 or so years I do not remember being asked: “What is your opinion of President Bush.” I guess there have been polls I have taken, but usually I just respond to questions with “Dissatisfied” or “Unfavorable.” I don’t go into much detail about it. If you search this blog you won’t find much in the way of criticism of Bush or his policies. In fact, this may be the first post I have ever done that has much to do with my opinion on the current president.

I guess if I am going to have a blog where I post my opinion about things I should probably have an opinion about the current administration. But to be honest, I’m just too exhausted to really focus on it. I know we cannot have 4 or 8 more years of this crap, but I don’t know that we can leave Iraq as it is now. I have something of a “you broke it, you bought it” mentality about the war.

This administration just really sucks at cleaning up its own messes.

Will an Obama administration be better? God I hope so. But can we just leave tomorrow? No. Would I vote for someone who took every troop out tomorrow? Besides that being completely impossible to do I would have a hard time answering that

My cousin is going to Afghanistan in a few months (or a month, I don’t have the details.) He signed up for the Illinois National Guard and got called up. At least he is going to a place I support us being in. The way the Taliban treated their people was unacceptable and the way they supported those that want to hurt us is… obvious. It is good to know that it isn’t ‘America’ that is at war in Afghanistan, it is ‘NATO’ (in ‘’ because I believe Australia is there, and they don’t have much to do with the North Atlantic ocean) that is fighting.

I was reading newsman Keith Olbermann’s book “Truth and Consequences.” Olbermann has a show ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ on MSNBC every night. He ‘counts down’ the top stories of the day, with #5 being the most vital and #1 being the most stupid. Sorta like “start you with the difficult stuff, end on a lighter note.” He is considered ‘liberal’ in a lot of ways, towing the democrat’s line much of the time. Of course, he is a member of the extremist left compared to his competition on Fox News. When he first started ‘Countdown’ he started seeing some things that really… disappointed… him about America and this administration. Starting with Hurricane Katrina.

My definition of ‘Hurricane Katrina’: 1: Deadly humanitarian disaster caused by extreme inexcusable malice at all levels of government following a massive failure of poorly maintained and designed federally managed infrastructure; 2: a display of no comprehensive disaster preparedness and response

In other words “everybody, especially the administration, fucked up. And people died because of it.” Olbermann points out the first words out of ‘Homeland Security’ Secretary Michael Chertoff’s mouth at a press briefing immediately following the disaster: “The city of Louisiana is under water…” Olbermann rightly claims ‘There is the problem right there.’ That (hopefully) unintentional gaff sums up the administration’s response to the disaster: one of absolute incomprehension.

So that is what I think of this administration: A group of people who simply cannot comprehend the real problems of the world around them as anything other than ‘possible security threat.’ A city underwater isn’t a ‘security threat.’ I don’t think that Bush is ‘dumb’ or that his administration is ‘horrible’, I mean, we haven’t been attacked again so they seem to be doing something right. But they are going about it the totally wrong way… I think that Bush and his administration think its ONLY responsibility is to prevent another terrorist attack on the United States and they must do so at all costs. And every other responsibility of the executive branch is best left to people who don’t know what they are doing. Except damage control… obviously not physical damage control… just damage control when the people they put in charge of things fuck up.

Thank god we only have a few more months of this shit. Hopefully.

I was looking through all of the things I have in the subdirectories of my ‘dump everything into this domain’ domain Armygrade.com and came across a pretty cool idea I had for a scholarship back in December of 2003.

Here are the details of the scholarship
- Provide scholarships to undergraduate students ‘with a strong drive towards success’
- Those receiving scholarships must keep an online journal detailing their lives at college and how they are changing the world around them
- Those receiving scholarships must stay in school until receiving a full undergraduate degree
- Those receiving scholarships are responsible for picking future recipients of the scholarship
- Those receiving scholarships are responsible for funding the next year’s scholarship at or above the previous years funding

Kinda cool idea. I think the original plan was for me to get the first scholarship (of course) but maybe I don’t think that would fly with donors. Would need to form a non-profit, but that isn’t amazingly difficult to do. Time consuming, but not too difficult.

I went to the grocery store yesterday to get a few things… While there I went by a refrigerator with orange juice in it

I picked up some of this “Simply Orange” brand orange-juice… I kinda like the taste over Tropicana (the stuff in the boxes) and it isn’t really all that much different in price.

I opened it this morning to pour myself a glass and on the label it states prominently: Not From Concentrate

Now this is just crazy. All ‘concentrate’ contains is orange juice without the water. It takes up less volume (so it is cheaper to transport) and it stays fresh longer. And anyone who thinks that there is a taste difference is crazy.

Anyways, I still like the taste… especially of the kind that has medium pulp. Maybe it is the box they put the Tropicana in doesn’t stay as fresh as the plastic of SO? Or they make it different?

Whatever, my point still stands.