Ochocinco was photographed wearing this very cool shirt from the movie the Hangover.  He posted it on his Facebook page.  Check it out.

That is hilarious.  I don’t follow much football, but from what I hear Ochocinco is pretty cool.  This shirt I have in the movie t shirt section, as well as a couple choice comments.  I thing this was a great movie, and in 2023 nerds will be talking about this movie like guys from the 70′s talk about Animal House.

OK, you have more or less done everything you need to do to prepare and are looking to actually pick her up and take her out.  Let’s talk about behavior while on the date.

First question is do you pick her up or meet her somewhere.  Either answer is in general ok, but consider the circumstances carefully.  First of all, what kind of car do you drive?  Most women will claim to not care what kind of car you drive, and some of them will actually believe that, but secretly in my opinion they do.  It’s part of that constant evaluation of your stability and potential partner value that they are running you through the entire time like a continuous feed Scantron of your soul.  If the car is a piece of junk then it looks like you don’t have the ability to potentially provide or partner up with her.  Also, if your car is beat up, dirty, and has a smell reminiscent of wet dog and ass you will look slovenly.

Also, in my experience women rarely understand what is cool from a nerd perspective (unless you are dating a nerd, in which case you are a lucky bastard) so if you have a “nerd cool” car like a KITT replica (shirt courtesy of the television show t shirt category) or classic Galaxy 500 odds are she will not get the idea and you will diminish in her eyes.  Women in general like it when your car blends in with all the other run of the mill junk out there.  Sad but true, in my experience.

So, if your car fits into any of those categories, push to meet her somewhere.  If you have a “normal” car you can ask to pick her up.  Don’t push too hard, because you are asking her to trust you enough to tell you her address.  If she has you pick her up that means she trusts you somewhat.  This is a good sign.  If she doesn’t don’t sweat it.  Odds are she doesn’t trust any guys (not necessarily a bad policy for women, given a lot of the guys I know).

Best way I have found to ask if I could pick her up is something like this:

“So, do you want to meet somewhere in the modern method or go more traditional and I can pick you up”

Work on the deliver, but this generally works.  Even if she doesn’t want to have you pick up, she will laugh.

So yesterdays post was all about the horrible trip I just took to New Hampshire.  At one point the luggage handlers in Chicago managed to find an excuse to leave my luggage out in the rain for about an hour, leaving me with a huge wet pile of clothing and valuable personal property.

So I got home and hung the clothes all over my bathroom, which immediately smelled remarkably like wet laundry.  Go figure.  This morning I got up, went to the bathroom, was hit with the odor, and had the thought “When will this laundry be dry enough to wash…”

So, sufficed to to say, after slapping myself around for a while I am doing my laundry as we speak.  I can swear I should never wear this Einstein shirt (from the Funny T Shirt category, although the best jokes have a strong element of truth to them).

Anyway, I promise my next post will be more dating advice.  Just felt the need to show the world how inept I can be at times.

So I just got back from a trip to New Hampshire.  It may surprise you to learn this, but I do not subsist solely on the sale of nerd shirts and giving dating advice to the socially challenged, although one day I hope to be in such a position.  I have, for lack of a better term, a day job that actually pays my bills and pays a lot of the bills associated with my fledgling business.  I won’t get into the details, except to say that I do work for a company I can reasonably assure you that you have heard of, in spite of the fact that they only have about 40 employees in the US.

Part of the job requires a certain amount of travel, and once a year they require us to travel to a conference.  In spite of my and the other West Coast guys desire to not fly all over the place, inevitably they make us come out to the East Coast.

This trip wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good if you know what I mean.  I have had worse, but not a lot of them.  There were no flights capable of getting the West Coast guys there in time for the first meeting (which was, by tradition, a bunch of masturbatory self congratulations and hand shaking) so I had to fly out the day before and kill time at the hotel.  The meetings were generally good and productive (even marketing, which is normally a bit of a personal challenge to stay awake).  Another tradition is we do something outdoorsy as a team building experience (in spite of the fact that for 99% of the year I work alone or with a single customer service person, who opted out of the trip) and this year I enjoyed a near death experience when the kayak (not sure how rowing a single kayak builds teamwork) I was in capsized in the only water that was more than two feet deep we found on the whole river.  It was kind of a worrisome experience, and I think my next activity will be to take some swimming lessons.  I can tread water, but that is about the limit.  Also, I would like to point out that I was the only guy to flip a boat, and had the rest of the crew calling me “Flipper” for the rest of the conference.  Bastards.

Actually, I seem to have a near death experience every time we do our outdoor experience.  Just once I would like to see us set up a LAN party and play Counterstrike East Coast vrs West Coast.  That would actually teach us some teamwork skills and not involve me making sure my insurance was paid up ahead of time.

Anyway, the meetings were productive and have me kind of excited for the next year.  The hotel was nice (although my assigned roommate seem particularly gassy this year) and the food really good.  In general I had a good time.

The flight home sucked like the pool drain in Final Destination 3D.  I had a layover in Chicago.  It started out pleasantly enough, with me getting to talk to a really cute girl who it turns out is an opera singer.  No joke.  But there was a rainstorm going on that turned into lightning at the airport.  Apparently the policy of the FAA is if there is lightning they don’t allow the ground crew outside in to keep them safe from being struck (a 1 in 750,000 chance).  Incidentally, while they are in a rush to get everyone inside they think it’s perfectly cool to leave my luggage outside in the rain.  Ironically, that morning I scrambled around looking for a plastic bag to put my wet clothes into (remember that whole kayak tipping indecent?)  only to find when I got my clothes the stuff in the bag was dryer than anything else.

So we had about a 45 minute delay.  I finally got on board and took my favorite seat in the very back (I have my reasons, and won’t get into them here).  It was looking like I was going to have the whole row to myself (one of my reasons, although not really a main one) when I was joined in my row by a guy who I will refer to henceforth as Smelly Hippy.  Smelly Hippy epitomized every aspect of that descriptive.  Long hair, grungy bear, small little wire frame glasses, dumb hat, and a collection of clothes that looked like they were rejected by the buyers at Buffalo Exchange.  He smelled of BO and cheap patchouli oil (guys, for dating purposes patchouli oil is a clear statement that you don’t bathe every day) until he opted to take off his shoes, at which time he smelled of BO, patchouli oil, and feet.  He was probably headed to Burning Man (patchouli oil Hell) or something equally obnoxious.

I spend a lot of time in Berkeley, and have had my fill of hippies.  In general they are selfish bastards (if you don’t believe me try shopping at the Berkeley Bowl.  Ever had a foot rolled over by a shopping cart twice in one trip?  I have).  The one thing they all share is they are for the most part desperate for people to notice them, and Smelly Hippy was no exception.  First thing he did was about 20 really loud yawns in an attempt to show the whole plane how tired he was.  We get it, dude.  Then he took his boots off (a level of rudeness and selfishness that goes beyond most human behavior and lands you firmly in the lower primate category) and tried to find a comfortable position, which apparently involved rolling around over and over again until the guy in front of him had to ask him to ask him to not kick the seat anymore.  Smelly Hippy apparently can’t do anything without being a pain in the ass, as the flight attendant found out when he asked for iced tea and then hot tea and a cup of ice when they didn’t have iced tea (I know it’s not such a big deal, but is it so much to ask for something that is already on the menu?).  The net result of this is I had a god damned science experiment going on next to me.

Also, he kept opening and closing the window, which sucked while the sun was out and then sucked when it was night as I like to see the ground as we land.  By that time I was watching Master of the Flying Guillotine on my laptop and blatantly ignoring him.

(By the way, this is the closest thing I have to a martial arts t-shirt, but I have a line on some great Shao Lin and Wu Tang t-shirts.  This shirt is from our movie t shirt category)

Fortunately by the end of the flight he was doing his sleeping thing, to the point that he pretended to sleep through the very rough landing (no doubt trying to prove to the world what a free spirit he is.  Freaking hippies).  I was also surrounded by any number of other obnoxious people, including a party of like six people who more or less drank the airplane bar dry.  They weren’t super obnoxious, just noisy.

Anyway, the title of this piece, and the coolest part of the trip, was the fact that we left at sunset and flew west, which means the sunset stayed with us for most of the trip.  It had some amazing colors, and when I would get sick of Smelly Hippy thrashing around I would look out the other side of the plane and enjoy them.  Kind of cool.

Ok, I”m back on the dating advice.  Enough for now on the good and bad movies I have seen.   I am stuck in a hotel in Portsmouth, NH and am feeling the need to make myself feel important.

You’ve made the call, and gotten her to agree to a specific time and activity for your first date.  You are totally ready and all you need to do is pick her up and enjoy an evening of fun and romantic possibilities, right?  Wrong.

Like we used to say in the Boy Scouts, Be Prepared (or, as my friends in the Marine Corps say, Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.  Take a lesson from ex-Marine Frank Castle, the Punisher (shirt image courtesy of the comic book t shirt category). 

Your preparation should begin as soon as you get off the phone with your future soul mate.  First thing you need to do is make reservations at whichever restaurant you plan to eat at (by the way, if the place you are taking her too does not take reservations, set the Way Back Machine about 45 minutes and pick a different place.  Also if the place you want to go has any kind of “theme costume” for it’s employees, especially clowns or anamorphic animals).  Even if you know for a fact that the place will be dead empty and there is no problem with getting a table, always set a reservation.  You look more sophisticated better prepared.  Same goes with movie or show tickets.

All the rules we went over in terms of dressing and grooming apply double now.  Get a haircut if you are due.

Get your car washed.  Even if you are just meeting her somewhere, you can never tell where the evening may take you, and you don’t want her seeing a car that is in danger of losing velocity from the wind drag of all the detritus adhered to the outer surface of your car.  Get the oil changed, and make sure you have a functioning spare tire (having to change a tire is not a bad thing during a date, and can make you look undeservedly rugged and masculine.  However, nothing looks lamer than sitting in the car waiting for a tow truck and/or walking along the freeway rolling a flat tire to a repair station).

Two critical mistakes novice daters can make are money and gas.  Do not make her wait in the car while you pump gas into it or pull cash from an ATM.  You will look like a complete incompetent moron and totally piss her off, but not in a good way.

That pretty much it.  I am sure some of you thought I was going to talk about bringing condoms, but honestly I don’t think most of you are at the level where you can expect to close the deal on the first date.   In fact, I usually don’t bring them on a first date as to bring them seems really presumptuous.

Yesterday I reviewed a great movie, Inception.  I guess today I have to do the other side, The Last Airbender.  It would be fair to say watching this movie was a painful experience, in the same way getting kicked in the balls by a mule while someone pours gasoline all over your body and sets you on fire is a painful experience.

The part that sucks for me is I am actually a fan of Avatar, the Last Airbender (I guess James Cameron had an issue with them calling this movie Avatar.  Good call, James).  I loved that show and watched it back to back.

I don’t know who thought M. Knight Shamalan would be able to do a credible job with this, except for the idea that as a person descended from an Eastern culture would have an interesting approach to the martial arts aspect of the movie.  However, last time I check he is Indian, which, while definitely an Eastern culture, is not well known for it’s martial arts.  Also, M. Knight has done exactly 1.5 good movies (the 1 was Unbreakable, not the Sixth Sense), so why do they expect him to do anything worthwhile in this one?

Anyway, I waded through this cinematography sewer.  They basically took 22 episodes of Avatar and compressed them into one horrible script.  Instead of concentrated goodness, all the bad was squeezed out and covered the entire surface with an oily, brackish, smelly veneer.  Then the director proved that he is incapable of casting anyone remotely good.  Honestly, if you are going to look for new actors for a movie, there is such a huge pool of wannabe actors in LA (I used to live with a few of them.  We always called them Wactors, as in waiter-actors (or Wactresses)) that there has to be someone remotely talented who would be desperate to prove themselves in something like this.  Instead it looks like he just hired the first 8 morons who wandered in off the street and the kid from Slumdog Millionaire and knocked off for an early lunch.  Truly horrible.

Also, in an impressive display of cultural sensitivity he cast the entire Southern Water Tribe as strait up Inuit and the two main characters as white as humanly possible.  Seriously, they looked looked like whiter versions of PeeWee Herman.

The one thing that unified all the actors together was their inability to deliver a line without sounding like they were reading stereo instructions aloud.  The kid from Slumdog Millionaire was the only one who did anything that sounded remotely human, but even his talent was obscured by Shamalan’s inability to direct.

The only person I felt had a worse experience watching this than I was the poor girl I dragged along.  As a fan of the show at least I had an idea what was going on.  She must have been in the movie equivalent of the 7th level of Hell.  I owe her a nice dinner I think.

I will say the CGI special effects for the water and fire bending was pretty good, but the martial arts choreography was amateurish at best.  It’s fairly obvious that they didn’t hire Bruce Lee (or, for that matter, anyone who really knows anything about martial arts) to set up the martial arts (shirt from the movie t shirt category).

Finally, the kid who plays Ang is really annoying.  I’ve never wanted to beat a kid who looks like he has been undergoing chemotherapy before, but he managed to push me to that level.  Also, in the cartoon I thought the arrow tattoos were part of being the Avatar, but somehow in the movie the were Airbender tattoos.  Kind of cool looking though.

I know I keep promising to write more on dating, and I will, but honestly I am not feeling it at the moment.  Maybe because it is summer and I am feeling lazy, maybe it’s because I have about a million other things going on, mostly about the Star Trek convention we are doing next month in Las Vegas (“I like to call it lost wages”-name that reference).

Anyway, I will get back on track soon, but last night I saw the movie Inception and felt compelled to write a review for it.  In a nutshell, freaking awesome.  I normally approach anything involving Leanardo DiCaprio with the same enthusiasm I would approach a dead, radioactive skunk rotting in the center of a toxic cactus patch.  I saw the trailers and more or less decided to pass, but then my best friend saw it and told me I had to go.  I am very glad I did, and in the course of two hours became a DiCaprio fan.

The story is amazing.  Clean, makes sense, doesn’t try to oversimplify in order to pander to the grunting masses that comprises most of human society, didn’t throw in some dumb hot chick for no purpose other than to show cleavage, and ends entirely appropriately.  All around great plot.

The acting was superb from all participants.  I especially like the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun (a great show) in his first adult roll.  The young hot chick (Juno) actually delivered the weakest performance, but really that is only in comparison to everyone else.  She did a great job.  Just everyone else did better.  I also like the fact that Nolan did not over play her to gain teen sex appeal.  He seems to understand the concept of supporting actresses just supporting main actors.

Christopher Nolan is great as a director and writer.  He did the Dark Knight and I guess it made enough money that he was given free reign with which to prove himself and he did.  I guess every Hollywood director isn’t a complete jackass who lets creative freedom turn into an opportunity to gratify his own overblown ego.

I realized after seeing this movie that I have been remiss in not featuring more Dark Knight shirts in my comic book t shirt section.  In fact I will definitely keep an eye out for Inception t shirts and put them up as soon as possible.

The thing I love about this movie is when a great, intelligent movie makes a lot of money (as this one is obviously making) it encourages the production of other great movies.  This summer has been pretty horrible, movie-wise.  If I see one more sparkly, shirtless, body-hairless, homo-erotic teenage vampire heart throb I will vomit.  By the way, anyone who wears a Team Edward or whatever t-shirt needs to go shopping for a life and then neuter themselves in order to keep from passing their genes on to the next generation.  This summer also has more talking cats and dogs, and the ruination of a great cartoon series, Avatar.  In fact, I think tomorrow I will write a review of the Last Airbender, which I was unfortunate enough to watch last week.

I promise I will be getting back to the dating advice soon, but I will be setting up a booth and hanging out all day tomorrow at a Vitamin Water DJ music event.  If you are in the Bay Area and are looking for something to do come by and say hit.

This is the best shirt I can think of for a DJ event.  It is in our rock t shirt category and pretty cool IMO.  I have expressed some opinions on DJs, but in my experience a real good one (not just some poser with two turntables) can be a lot of fun to listen to.  I am looking forward to this event.  It should be really fun.  Free Vitamin Water too!

I am going to take a break from my dating advice to rant a little.  A while ago I bought the entire Farscape series on DvD and have been watching it while repainting all my Skaven.  I finally got to the end of season 4, which ended in the most obnoxiously contrived cliffhanger ever, only to find that the fifth disk in the box set does not contain any more episodes but just some more of the usual extra drivel that they always saddle complete sets with (interviews, etc).

I have been enjoying the series immensely (enough, in fact, to order this Farscape Logo shirt and put it up in the TV show t shirts category).  I love the fact that they did not try to make every alien out of a human in a rubber suit, and the story is actually pretty intriguing.  But then, it ended horrible and according the the internet, was cancelled.

I have found that there was a four part miniseries funded by some European fans that is supposed to wrap it up, but I am really annoyed at the fact that my “complete” box set in not really complete.  Also, what kind of morons at Sci Fi channel opted to cancel it???  I thought this was idiotic behavior normally reserved by the Fox Network.  Honestly, you would think a channel that produced a movie call Mansquito (yes, half man, half mosquito) would be desperate enough for quality content to keep something like this on.

Oh well.  At least it released the characters to show up on SG1, so not a complete loss.  Still, really, really annoying.

Of course, after she shoots down your incredibly clever and fun ideas, odds are you will end up simply planning dinner and/or a movie.  This is an old standby and generally works well, especially if you have a hard time maintaining a long conversation without falling back to long diatribes about Geordie from Star Trek TNG was 1/2 of the character Spock, the other half being Data.

This, by the way, is a conversation quagmire I have fallen into myself (shirt image courtesy of the Star Trek t shirt category)

If, by any chance, you actually can maintain a decent conversation for more than an hour or so feel free to forgo the movie and simply suggest dinner and coffee rather than a movie.  However, the movie can prove a bonding experience and will give you something to talk about.  Also, you had better be sure about being able to maintain that conversation.

Never, ever agree to just see a movie.  This is something not even friends do.

That’s pretty much it on what to plan.  Next post I will start talking about going on that actual date.