20 Random Things You Didn’t Need to Know About 2008

2008 was a big year in Mike May blogs for obvious reasons.  Still for those among you who somehow didn’t get enough from this blog last year I thought I would put up a few of the less essential facts that I've kept track of during 2008.

 

1)  Number of times in 2008 that I was able to bust out the phrase "Pardon me ma’am, but by any chance have you ever worked as a lion tamer before?" to a woman at a poker table and have her reply “Why yes I have”:

1 (at the Venetian in Las Vegas)

2)  The 5^th most popular search keyword used to find this website:

"Vagina cookies" (It was actually the number 1 most common search keyword that did not contain some form of “Mike May” in it.  I understand that the “vagina cookie” readership is probably a niche audience but I’ll take whatever I can get at this point.  Other interesting ways to search for this blog in 2008 included search phrase #28 sexy odors, #56 “Steve Martin” legionnaires disease, #60 “What happened to Paco”, #165 Republican blonde fembots, and #202  young ripe melons – Brooklyn)

3) Amount of money I lost last year holding a starting hand that included the 4 and 7 of hearts in any poker game:

$195 ($5 in limit Stud hi/lo, $15 in limit Omaha hi/lo, $80 in pot limit Omaha, and $95 in no limit Hold’em.)

 

4) The picture from 2008 that most should have made it onto this blog:

The Genoa Club.  All good things...

 

5) Number of African American presidential candidates that I did not vote for in 2008:

1 (Allen Keyes)

 

6) Total number of times that I've flossed in 2008:

52 (There is a long list of things I could do to make myself a better person.  At the top of that list would be caring about and/or striving to become the best person I could possibly be.  However I have conceded that that would probably take a buttload of effort.  Much farther down on that betterment list is something I proudly thought myself capable of, flossing at least once a week on average (not actually weekly per se).  So that was my one New Year’s resolution last year.  And all I have to say is, mission accomplished!  Aim high kids.

 

 

7) Number of Limo rides I've gotten because of this blog in 2008:

1 (which along with Jay Greenspan’s book Hunting Fish may be the only two things of actual quantifiable value that I ever have or ever will get from this blog.  Yay writing!)

 

8) The picture from 2008 that most should not have made it onto this blog:

3 women, some real, some not.

  

9) Hand drier I was most excited to see being used in American public restrooms in 2008:

The Dyson Air Blade.  How much does that thing rock?  Copious amounts of rock, that’s how much.

10) Hands down the single coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life (in 2008):

FLCL.   

This anime originally released a couple years ago, is not the coolest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.  But while I was in the act of watching it I was able to think “THERE HAS NEVER EXISTED ANYTHING THIS COOL IN THE UNIVERSE EVER BEFORE, IN THE UNIVERSE EVER!”  I miss being able to watch something and actually believe it to be the stone cold greatest thing that has ever existed.  That’s one of the joys of being young that tends to fade as the world grays.

Ostensibly, FLCL is a coming of age story about a kid with a pan dimensional portal in his head, and there’s this hot older chick who has a bass guitar with an internal combustion engine in it, and when she whacks him with it a robot grows out of his forehead, and after seeing it it will make even less sense. All you really need to know is that Fooley Cooley, as it is known, somehow manages to congeal the frenetically illogical superbadassery of being young and packages it into six 22 minute slices.

(Honorary Mention in hardcore Nerd media from 2008 goes to The Venture Brothers.  I watched a few episodes when the series first came out and wasn’t too impressed.  But then I finally got around to watching some of the 3^rd season episodes that were clogging up my Tivo and I was pleasantly hooked.  Go team Venture!)

 

11) Total number of words I've written since putting up my post, around 180 days ago, jokingly promising to write only 13 words a day on a long form project:

Maybe 78 or so.

 

12) Number of ex-girlfriends that started both blogs and Facebook pages in 2008, which much to my surprise took some of the fun out of stalking them online:

2 (though one of them changed her privacy settings effectively locking me out of her Facebook page.)

 

13) Number of new blogs written by ex-girlfriends that Christi scours vigorously for grammatical or stylistic mistakes that she can point out to me in casual manner, as in "Hmm, now that's a novel way to use a comma."  :

2

 

14) Number of better-than-I-deserve girlfriends who didn’t dump me last year even though they’re not always fairly portrayed in this blog:

1

 

15) Toughest Sophie’s Choice scenario of 2008: 

Trying to decide which is the greater sign of lyrical genius, Ne-Yo’s song lyric I won’t attend your pity party/ I’d rather go have calamari. (from “So You Can Cry”) Or Lil Wayne’s Swagger tighter than a yeast infection / Fly go hard like geese erection (from “Dr. Carter”)  Am I more impressed with the ability to rhyme “party” with “calamari” or am I more awed by an artist unafraid to make poetry out of both yeast infections and geese erections in the very same song.  I suppose I have to declare them both winners.

 

16) Board game genre that I most excelled at in 2008:

Medieval farming simulations.  (I flat out destroyed in Agricola last year.  Suck it, all you subpar, sucker-peasant agrigariasts!)

 

 

17) 2008 movie that had the most misleading ad campaign of 2008:

Wendy and Lucy (the dog movie).  First of all, Jenifer Aniston looks way younger with short dark hair.  Second of all, I don't remember even seeing Owen Wilson in it at all.  Still, the commercials didn’t lie about one area, it was funny.

 

18) Single greatest album that came out in 2008 or any year for that matter:

Diamond Hoo Ha from Supergrass (To be honest with you I haven’t actually heard a single song from the album.  I just so liked the title that I wished that I had started a band instead of becoming a degenerate poker player in the off chance that I would have come up with the idea of naming an album DIAMOND HOO HA.)

 

19) Painter who produced the empirically best oil works of 2008:

Nick Dileo.  If you made a ton of dough in credit default swaps last year or have a wad of TARP money burning a hole in your pocket, drop him a line and pick up something nice for the office.  Some of his older work can be found HERE. 

20) And finally, this video, like most of my memories, looks somewhat washed out and faded but I think it very eloquently puts images to the subjective feelings I have of 2008.  So I close with a little video I like to call "2008: a Fond Farewell to the Way You Made Me Feel".

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