The World of Stuff .com

19

I’m 19 years old today. This is my last year as a nominal teenager. Next year, I’ll be “in my twenties.” That’s frightening. But for now, I am still someone with “teen” in his age.

You know how, whenever it’s your birthday, you remark that you don’t look or feel any older? I sometimes do. But yesterday, I looked in the mirror and saw that I did look a year older. It occurred to me that Brendan Leonard and his friends were 19 when they produced and starred in The Brendan Leonard Show, which I watched avidly when I was 13 and 14. Now I look almost as old as they did then.

I had dinner with some friends last night. I chose Smokey Bones, which is a barbecue place, but a nice one. I don’t even like ribs or anything, but they have good burgers and steaks and things of that nature. Unlike last year, more people were able to come than I expected, so it was nice to see everybody. After that, I stopped over at Gerri‘s luau-themed party for a little while, but then I decided to go home.

My birthday has been pretty much like a typical Sunday except that my grandparents are here. After brunch, we went to a bookstore, which was convenient for me because I got a Barnes and Noble gift card for my birthday. I bought a book about the history of Fermat’s Last Theorem. It should be interesting, but I wish I could understand the proof.

Plans for tonight: dinner at home with the fam. They really are the best gift of all. That and money.

Similar to the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the ACLU has its own Surveillance Society Clock going. Both are currently at five minutes to midnight.

What would you do if you had 1,500 Xbox hard drives? The correct answer is to stack them and play hard drive dominoes. It’s absolutely mesmerizing. I bet they’d all be broken after that, though. Those things are fragile.

You know those t-shirts that say “I’m big in Japan”? Mark Rowswell of Toronto is big in China. Millions of people there know and love him because he can speak Chinese more skillfully than many of them. Yet at home, he’s just an ordinary guy.