Red Lobster fires president

I guess this is old news now, but I don’t remember reading it before. Red Lobster planned an all-you-can-eat crab special that cost them boatloads of dollars and they had to fire their president.


“It was kind of the worst of all worlds,” one senior Darden executive remarked as the casual-dining giant said Red Lobster management had badly miscalculated how many times customers would take the chain at its word and eat all they wanted – at a time when crab costs were going up.

“It wasn’t the second helping on all-you-can-eat but the third,” said company chairman Joe R. Lee. “And maybe the fourth,” added Dick Rivera, company president and chief operating officer, on a conference call after the market Wednesday.

News from the future

Rather than waiting until Sunday to post a recap of what happened at Coon Dog’s party, I figured it would be easiest to do that now.

So we all showed up and quickly realized we don’t know 90% of the people at the party. This is not unusual, since we’re a bunch of losers, so the first thing we do is head straight for the keg (which is, of course, surrounded expertly by Coon Dog’s ice).

We make a “safe haven” in Coon Dog’s room, which he has haphazardly cleaned in anticipation of our arrival. There are still areas of the floor we can’t walk on, but he has pushed all his crap to the corners of the room to make it a little more liveable.

Because we’re not out greeting people, and we already know the people in the room, we need a way to keep ourselves entertained before everyone is fully drunk. We tell old stories from high school, before Schulte finds something from Coon Dog’s room he can destroy and entertain us all. Eventually Coon wants to keep everyone distracted from his personal possessions, and brings out the computer so we can play videos / surf the web and find more things to make fun of when we’re not busy making fun of ourselves and destroying Coon’s property.

Throughout this time, other people from the party casually walk in and out of Coon Dog’s room, but most of them leave quickly because they feel awkward – like they’ve walked in on some other party. The only new people we meet the whole night are the most outgoing partygoers, who are usually drunk, and looking for anyone to talk to. We manage to make even some of them uncomfortable. Schulte in his semi-drunken state manages to say something so offensive to one of them that we fear we’ve actually caused some attendees to leave the party.

As we get progressively more intoxicated, some of us brave the “outside world” and talk to some new people. We will never remember these new people, nor will we talk to them again. We’re all counting on Tom to take sufficient pictures so we can remember that we even conversed with a stranger the entire evening.

As the evening winds down, Schulte decides to destroy something on his way out for good measure. That leaves us all on a high note. As we all leave we talk about what a great party it was, high-five, say “boo-yeah” and take off. The next day we wake up, check out the pictures from the night before, and think “wow, what a bunch of losers we are.”

Jim McMahon DUI

Former Bears QB Jim McMahon was arrested for a DUI this weekend.

One breathalyzer exam put McMahon’s blood-alcohol level at 0.261 percent; another put it at 0.258 percent. The legal limit in Florida is 0.08 percent.

“During a sobriety test, Mr. McMahon looked at the officer and said, ‘I’m too drunk. You got me,’ ” [sheriff’s spokesman Jerry] Henderson said. “He was pretty well wasted”

In related news, the Illinois Liquor Commission let go of Jim McMahon as their spokesman for responsible drinking.

In the poster, McMahon is seen in his trademark sunglasses, holding a football while sitting at a bar. Above McMahon is the line “Don’t Be a Punk and Get Drunk: Our Servers Serve Responsibly.”

Matrix Explained

This site is a pretty good analysis of the Matrix Trilogy. Don’t read it (or the rest of this post) if you haven’t seen the movie yet – read this article (Schulte sent me) as a refresher instead. I was glad I wasn’t the only one walking out of the theatre disappointed with the lack of questions answered.


Imagine you make a movie and suddenly your hero has telecinetical powers: He stops 4 incoming war machines just by thinking it. Wow, that is a twist.

And how did the Wachowskis decide to resolve this riddle in Matrix Revolutions?

Neo: “Tell me how I stopped 4 sentinels by thinking it…”
Oracle: “The power of the One extends beyond this world. It reaches from here all the way back to where it came from: The Source.”

Ahem, excuse me?

eBay idiot

I was browsing eBay and found this listing. The product? A $20 gift certificate to the iTunes music store. The starting price? $20. Now, why in the world would I spend $20, which I could use to buy anything (including iTunes songs) on a gift certificate I could only use for iTunes songs? Oh wait… it gets better. An actual quote further down in the listing:

There is a $1.00 charge to transfer the certificate to you.

Amazing. Where do I sign?

Tom's Apartment

Sad as it may be, I may have to move out of my apartment at the end of the year. The luxorious Royal Crest Estates is trying to increase my rent. When I originally signed my lease, I was given a “discount” so that my rent was only $879 a month. Now that it’s a new year, they’re simply removing the discount and trying to charge me $1,179. A little steep in my opinion.

If you look at that homestore.com listing though, you’ll see it listed at $1,019 a month for the same apartment. I asked about that, and apparently again that’s a “move-in discount.” So they basically just offer sweet deals to people to get them in there, and then promptly raise the price to the “fair market price” after a tenant’s first year.

This makes very little sense to me for a few reasons. I think the ultimate problem is that tenants find moving too much of a pain and choose instead to suffer through this nonsense (I surely won’t be one of them) rather than move out when they raise the rent. If tenants were more price-sensitive and didn’t mind moving so much, I think we could finally convince apartment complexes that the way it works is like this…
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Pronunciation of "Nuclear"

A somewhat interesting bit on what seems to be one of America’s favorite complaints.


… George W. Bush isn’t the first U.S. president to use it. Dwight Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford were both apparently “noo-kyoo-ler” men. Jimmy Carter, who did graduate work in nuclear physics, pronounces the word nook-ee-uh.

Not that it sounds any less incorrect, but I’d be willing to bet there are more than a few “partisan complainers” who hate Bush’s pronunciation, but manged to overlook the flaw in Nobel Prize-winning Democrat Jimmy Carter.