Cell phones were originally used to call people

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I recently got a new cell phone for work. The thing does everything from GPS navigation to emailing. Heck, I could even update my MySpace page from it, if I had one. It's a lot different from my first wireless phone.

I decided to finally get a cell phone during my Sophomore year of college. I was sitting in class, watching some guy pick up on some girl--so I started taking mental notes. Before they parted ways, he smoothly pulled out his cell phone and asked her for her number.

That's when I decided to get one, so I could have something to put chick's numbers into. I went down to Cricket Wireless and signed up for the cheapest plan they had. No texting, no voicemail, and my service area was only in-state. All for an even 20 bucks a month, which matched the amount I budgeted each month for dating.

To my disappointment, I quickly found out that women wouldn't flock to me just because I had a mobile phone. When the opportunity finally came, and a girl was standing in front of me rattling off her number, I couldn't figure out how to type in her name with the stupid numeric keypad. And so Dgtmmg became the first female--that wasn't a relative--to grace my phone.

I also learned that I wouldn't suddenly muster the courage to call a girl just because I had her name (some form of it) and number programed into my cell phone.

Since then I've been through a number of phones. My personal favorite was the one that would randomly call 911. I'm not sure how it would happen, but the phone would be in my pocket, think there was an emergency, and dial away.

It happened once on a date. I got a call from the police, saying I had dialed 911 and they wanted to know if everything was all right. I told them it was, and explained my phone's bad habit. Then they told me they looked up my number and that there was a warrant out for my arrest.

A couple month's prior I had received a traffic ticket. I paid it right away, but somehow my payment didn't get recorded. It was a lot of fun handling that call in front of my date.

My new phone sure is slick, but it probably does too much. Looking back, I kind of wish I could go back to my first cell phone and the simple world that went along with it: dial and hang up.

The Kool-Aid tastes funny in Arkansas

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In a particular Simpson's episode, Homer is on tour with the The Smashing Pumpkins. In a scene backstage, he is quizzed by a couple members of the famous rock band:

Billy Corgan: Hey, Homer, looks like our next stop is your hometown, Springfield.
D'Arcy: Is it true that we have to bring our own water?
Homer: We got a little rule back home: if it's brown, drink it down; if it's black, send it back.

In Arkansas, bright blue is the new brown...

Earlier this month, a day-care operator near Little Rock served windshield wiper fluid to 10 children. According to reports, the operator thought the brightly colored liquid was Kool-Aid. It was even chilled in the fridge before serving.

The good news; all 10 kids were quickly released from the hospital and are doing fine. The bad news; Arkansas just reaffirmed its usual stereotype.

I imagine a lot of people are outraged at the incident (like, say... the parents of these 10 kids), but I can understand the screw up. As a youth, I went through many unpleasant experiences while trying to figure out which liquids were palatable, and which were not.

For instance, my mom would always save the juice from cans of vegetables and use it for soup stock. When I came across the pale-colored liquid while sneaking through the fridge, I'd often mistake it for pineapple juice. It shouldn't be a surprise when I tell you the sweetness of green-bean juice certainly doesn't measure up to that of the pineapple.

On that same note, I also vividly remember a time when I found a mason jar full of brown liquid in the fridge. Mmmm... root beer! After taking a hearty swig, I was quickly reminded that my mom was big on homemade maple syrup.

I guess kids just have a knack for expecting things to be better than what they really are. That is, if it's wet, drink it down. How else do you account for Kool-Aid's success?

If this blog were a plant, it'd be a perennial

Experts say 50% of businesses fail within the first year. I should know, my "Abercrombie & Your mom" T-shirt business never made it to the mark... those eBay buyers are cutthroat.


I imagine the same stat pertains to blogs. Take my friend Jeris, who started a blog about a year ago. The introductory post was titled "Just one more thing to neglect." At least he was being frank--three post and three months later, his blog gave up the ghost.

A blogger's life is tough. Regularly coming up with new content and hoping we don't have any typos is the bane of our existence. We're avid expressionists flooding the Inernet with amateur writing and Ads by Google that nobody clicks on. With no reward but the comments left by our readers, we regularly have to look deep within ourselves to find a reason to keep posting.

That being said, please join me in celebrating this blogs one year anniversary. It's hard to believe, but rockmitchell.blogspot.com began on March 12, 2008. Since that date I've offended several family members and friends, had articles published in two newspapers, and made a little over 3 bucks with the Google Ads in my sidebar.

You're probably aware of the Sitemeter thing at the bottom of this blog. It not only keeps track of the number of visitors, but it also keeps tabs on where visitors come from, as well as what search words they may have used to end up here.

My most popular article, overall, is Rubber cement boogers vs. cell phones in school. It's most often stumbled upon by people from Ivy League schools Googling something like "effect of cell phones on education." Those poor saps sure hit a dead end when they arrive.

My most popular international article is Mistaken for something great. For some reason, people from South America and Eastern Europe love to search for "fubu boots." All they get, though, is an article about how much I suck at basketball.

My most popular article with the country folk is Big hunting trucks don't scare me. It's usually dudes from the bible belt or the deep south that are using search words like "I wanna see big trucks," or "cool elk hunting stickers."

The same experts that say 50% of businesses fail within the first year also say 90% of them fail within the first five years. Don't get your hopes up, oh faithful readers.

Why even get out of bed?

http://gothamist.com

Well, I had quite a week. On Monday I got kidnapped, but my captor stopped at a convenience store for a drink and I was able to slip away to the back of the store and lose him. I hid out there for a long time, and survived by sneaking bites of ice cream from the freezer.

Tuesday got really interesting. I was castaway in the ocean on some air mattress with a few strangers. Eventually we floated down to Mexico, where I "woke up" up on some bus. The driver kicked me off and I had to walk home in the snow. I certainly didn't expect snow in Mexico.

The rest of the week: Wednesday - befriended a stray dog; Thursday - ran a marathon; Friday - rolled a stolen RV, then tipped it back up; Saturday - bought a bunch of ice cream, but couldn't keep it from melting.

That all happened while I was in the subconscious. Unfortunately, my waking hours weren't so interesting. Work, filing my taxes, and getting an oil change were highlights of the cognizant moments of my week.

As you can tell, I decided to keep a dream journal. I'm not sure why, maybe I just wanted to find out how messed up my psyche is. And yeah, it's messed up.

I went to a dream interpretation website and checked a few things out. Since two of my dreams involved ice cream, I decided to see what it meant: To see or eat ice cream in your dream denotes satisfaction with your life. Ok, good so far... To see ice cream melt in your dream symbolizes failure to realize your hopes and desires. Dang it!

How about that castaway dream? To dream that you are lost at sea suggest that you are drifting around in life without any direction. Luckily I wasn't at sea forever; as you will recall, I ended up on some bus. To dream that you are riding a bus implies that you are lacking originality and are taking no control over where your life is taking.

After a week of recording dreams, I wondered "why get up at all?" Dreams seemed like a lot more fun than real life, until I found out that all my dreams mean I'm a failure with no direction in life.

Turns out, I'm glad I did my taxes when I was awake: To dream you are paying taxes represents the price you are paying for the way you live. The dream may be stemming from some sort of self-guilt and the debt that you owe to society.

We're all becoming germ freaks

A while ago my wife came home from the store with a big jug of hand soap to refill the soap dispensers in our house. I picked it up and said, "you know this isn't antibacterial, right?" That's when panic set in.

She wanted to throw it away and immediately go buy another jug with antibacterial powers, but I refused. I knew soap in the olden days was made from potash and lard (in fact I made some for a science project in 5th-grade). So I figured that what was in the jug was just as good as the stuff people had been using for hundreds of years prior.

Indeed we were going to wash with it until it was gone, come what microbes may. Funny thing is, over the months that we refilled our soap dispensers with the non-antibacterial soap, we survived just fine.

Not that I was surprised, though. Any boy that's gone to a summer camp has spent a week without coming into contact with anything remotely related to soap--including toothpaste. To men not under the supervision of women, "washing up" is a water-free process consisting of wiping their hands on the front of their pant legs.

I've always had a bad habit of chewing on my pens. I also have a bad habit of never buying my own pens; I just use ones I find laying around or ones I forget to give back after signing my credit card receipt. Studies show pens are one of the most germ-laden things in an office, and I treat them like a piece of licorice.

These days, folks are just too obsessed with sanitation. We're scared of hand shakes, public transportation, and stair rails. I know people that go through their house once a week and Clorox every door handle and every hard surface in their home. This is all done while their kids are in the backyard eating dirt.

And then there's the instant hand sanitizer craze, the biggest "this is better for you" scam since the introduction of bottled water. The stuff kills 99.9% of the germs on your hands, but then the 0.1% left behind go ape because you knocked off all their friends.

I miss the pink powdery soap we used in elementary school; it was better than instant hand sanitizer. Boraxo was the brand name, I believe. It cleaned not so much by creating germ-killing suds, but by abrasion of the outer layer of skin.

I don't think we should stop washing our hands, I just think our germ-free world could loosen up a bit. We ought to get back outside and taste the dirt. We need to learn a lesson from man's best friend and drink water from the toilet. Or at very least, the tap.