The Chantastic Blog

My friends Stephe, Cobra, Jimbo, and Catalina have known each other for years. One of the things we always do is start unbelievably long e-mail chains where we reply all extremely frequently. How frequent? Here’s what my inbox looks like after an initial e-mail about going to a Raptors game. After a couple of e-mails, the topic changed to our new mutual obsession: the awesomeness that is Jersey Shore.

Note how everything stops right after 8 PM. That’s when Jersey Shore began (my e-mail account isn’t set to Eastern Standard Time and I don’t know how to fix it), and we decided that we needed a running live chat on MSN to discuss the show as it unfolded.

Isn’t it great to see technology being put to such constructive use?

Remember when I noticed a while back that someone from school had de-friended me on Facebook? Well, it’s happened again, and again I found out when I clicked on that person’s name, only to discover that I indeed had been removed from the person’s list of friends. This de-friending is much less confusing to me than the first one, as I have a pretty good idea why it happened. Everybody at school initially adds each other on Facebook in the rush to meet everyone, but after a year and a half you discover that you don’t have much in common with some of the people you added. Some people feel more strongly about this than others, hence the need for some to start de-friending. I’m completely fine with this, and to be honest, I’m rather intrigued by the whole de-friending process because I now see an opportunity to amuse myself. To make things extremely awkward for the other person, I think I’m going to go out of my way to talk to people who have de-friended me.

One of my favorite shows is Cold Case. The premise of the show is that detectives from the Philadelphia homicide department investigate old murders and, through a series of interviews and flashbacks, solve the case at the end of the episode. Inevitably, the murderer turns out to be one of the people originally interviewed during the show, so it’s always interesting to see which person it was.

So the plot is designed in such a way that the murderer is always one of the guest stars. That’s not a problem…unless it becomes blatantly obvious who the murderer is right at the beginning of the episode. And that happens on Cold Case all the time. How? When one of the guest stars is a recognizable actor, that person will inevitably wind up as the killer. This makes sense in the world of acting - if you’re an actor with a decent resume, you’re going to want the juicy part where you end up being the killer.

However, this destroys any suspense that could have been built up during the episode. When someone with the acting resume of Sam Anderson shows up as a guest star for an episode, he might as well just write “I Did It” on his forehead.

I bring this up because I was watching Cold Case tonight, and five minutes in, an actor who looked vaguely familiar showed up, and I knew right away that he was the culprit. Fifty minutes later, I was proven correct.

This is both extremely frustrating, and a sign that I watch way too much television.

I just realized that I was Facebook de-friended by someone at school, and I have no idea why or when it happened - it could have been yesterday, it could have been months ago. I wouldn’t have even noticed, except there was a list of people for something (I don’t even remember if it was a group, an event, or what), and next to this person’s name, it said I could add this person as a friend. Of course, since we had been Facebook friends before, this struck me as extremely odd. So I clicked on this person’s name - perhaps this person cleaned up the friends list and cut down the people that aren’t close friends - yet we still shared nearly 100 friends. Interesting. I don’t know this person that well, but anytime I see this person, we appear to be on friendly terms. But apparently not on friendly enough terms to be Facebook friends.

This is the second time I’ve noticed this happen to me. The first time, it was a friend of a friend who I didn’t know very well. The thing is, I wasn’t de-friended until after she started playing on my co-ed ball hockey team. She waited until we started playing together to do it, but still acted normally and talked to me like nothing was wrong. It was bizarre.

And who knows how many other people have de-friended me without me noticing…

I wonder if this happens to everyone.

Here was an original blog post I typed up a few days ago, but didn’t post right away:

Is it just me, or is there something extremely hot about having your Swedish nanny of a wife come to your rescue wielding a golf club, breaking down windows, and dragging you out of your motor vehicle?

I’m going to rescind my thoughts after reading this article about the rumors of what really happened between Tiger and his wife…

This led to an e-mail exchange where my friend Catalina said, “Also he may be cheating on his wife? Has he SEEN his wife?”

She obviously doesn’t believe in the importance of inner beauty like I do…

If there’s a “Full House” reunion movie, which Olsen twin plays the role of Michelle Tanner? The twins were used to split the role because they were babies when the show first started, but obviously that wouldn’t be necessary now. Yet another reason why a “Full House” reunion movie won’t happen. And yes, I would absolutely watch it if it were to happen. After all, Jodie Sweetin (Stephanie Tanner) was a former Mrs. Chan candidate before she became a meth addict. No doubt she developed the habit as a way to cope with being unable to find her Chantastic soulmate…

All of this involuntary coughing while I’ve been sick means my stomach muscles have been contracting a lot. Despite this overuse, I have yet to see a six-pack develop…but it’s inevitable at the rate I’m coughing at.