The Sweet Stench of Victory!

The SpongeBob SquarePants Marathon

A few weekends ago Nickelodeon aired a 50-hour(!) SpongeBob Marathon, culminating in 10 brand new episodes. Our Tivo nearly died from exhaustion. It pulled through, though, and we've been watching new episodes whenever we have some free time. Congratulations, Mr. SquarePants, on your 10-year anniversary!

Wii Sports Resort

I got Wii Sports Resort for my birthday, along with new MotionPlus controllers that enhance the accuracy of the remotes. It is lots of fun! The jet-skiing game is far and away my favorite; it makes me want to try jet-skiing for real. The flight simulator, bicycling, and swordplay are very cool as well. One neat feature is that the game will import characters created by other people, and they'll show up as your opponent, or as fans in the background. At one point Wendy was playing the Air Sports game and realized she was skydiving with Barack Obama!

New carpet

We got new carpet in the upstairs bedrooms last month, after a few setbacks. We originally ordered from Home Depot, and they said it would be installed in 5-7 days. So we spent all of Memorial Day Weekend painting all 3 bedrooms (and ceilings) in anticipation. But the date got pushed back again and again and again, much to our frustration, and finally was going to be 2 months from the time we placed the order. So we canceled it and went to Flooring Discount Warehouse. They had similar carpet for about the same price, and about a week later (on July 4th), they came out and installed it. We are quite pleased with the new carpet and with the new paint in our bedrooms.

Furniture shopping

We devoted an entire weekend last month to furniture shopping, mostly for bedroom furniture. Our first stop was Plunkett Furniture in Vernon Hills, because we heard on the radio they were going out of business. We got there to find they had already closed down. Bummer! We couldn't believe how quickly it happened. It turned out they had other locations in Chicagoland that were still in the going-out-of-business phase, so we visited one the next day, but the "liquidation" prices were still way out of our budget. Then we visited Georgetown Furniture in Antioch (which is where we bought our sofa and loveseat), only to find that they, too, were going out of business. Bummer again! All they had left were a few mattresses and a rummage sale. At this point we weren't feeling so great about the state of the economy. We also hit a couple of places in Rockford, and one place in southern Wisconsin (Steinhafel's Furniture). We saw a few promising things, but nothing great.

Finally, a coworker recommended Crest Furniture in Arlington Heights, and man, it felt like we hit the jackpot. The sales guy took us on a whirlwind tour of all the major furniture brands, showed us the difference in quality between them, and explained the pros and cons of each. Finally he gave us stacks of catalogs to look through, and we got a much better sense of what we want. We have yet to purchase anything, but we left with much more confidence in our ability to make a decision. Thanks, Crest dude!

Selling on Craigslist

We had to move everything out of the bedrooms for our carpet installation, and the futon proved to be the biggest, heaviest, and most unwieldy thing of all. After struggling to rotate it vertically (without hitting the ceiling fan), angle it through the narrow doorway (with barely an inch to spare), line it up with the stairs (without hitting another ceiling fan), we got it halfway down the stairs when we set it down precariously for a break, and Wendy, exhausted, said "Let's sell this f***er". Being quick to recognize good, common-sense ideas, I agreed. Thus, we put it and a computer desk up for sale on craigslist.

The computer desk went first, after about a week, but no one seemed interested in the futon. This basically made our living room unusable, as it was crammed full with a futon, sofa, loveseat, coffee table, and piano. We lowered the price, which got a few people interested, but started to despair when still no one bought it. It felt as if our house was in a permanent state of disrepair. The posting expired several times, I kept reposting, lowered the price again, and finally, this morning -- hallelujah! -- we sold it! Our living room is once again back to its normal state.

To mark the occasion we ate a celebratory pizza lunch and watched more new SpongeBob episodes!

They've come for brains. I'll give them... bullets!

Our Tivo has been working lots of overtime this summer. Last month it was busy recording hours and hours of Tour de France; this month it's the non-stop Olympics coverage. Since our Wii is connected to the same TV as our Tivo, there hasn't been much video gaming of late. But, that doesn't stop me from blogging about video games!

One of the greatest video games of all-time is House of the Dead 2. The premise is simple: kill as many zombies as you possibly can. What makes it so great?


Bad graphics
By today's standards the graphics are terrible. You know right off the bat that this isn't a high budget game. But that doesn't matter at all; the game is so much fun that the bad graphics actually fit right in.

Comically gross violence
By far the best part. You're advised to aim for the head to kill the zombies quickly, but if you aim for their body, they stumble from the shock, arms/legs go flying off, they'll have holes blasted completely through them, but they'll still keep coming. Which leads us to the next point...

Lots of green zombie blood
This speaks for itself.

Hilariously bad voice acting
There's no way to describe how superbly awful the voices are; you just have to hear them. Anybody can do bad acting, but to make it so bad it's funny takes some serious talent.

Staying power
I first encountered the game in arcades years ago; you used a light gun to shoot at the screen which was (and still is) way cool and tons of fun. I could never justify the time and money to get good at it, so I played it infrequently.

The next time I encountered the game was in college as a PC game, only this time it had been reformatted as Typing of the Dead. Now, each zombie had a word next to it, and typing the word correctly fired bullets at the zombie.


Again, TONS of fun!! Whoever came up with that idea is a genius. I was never able to finish the game, though, because it got too hard; towards the end you had to type entire sentences to kill the zombies, and my typing skills just weren't up to par.


Recently, it was bundled with its sequel, House of the Dead 3 and released for the Wii. The Wii is perfect for the game, since it allows you to use the Wii-remote as a light gun, just like the arcade version. I bought the game soon after it came out, plus I bought the Nyko Perfect Shot accessory to make the Wii remote even look like a gun.


This worked well for a while, but I found that the Nyko gun tired out my trigger finger too quickly. I then got a Wii Zapper and discovered that it's the way to go. It's not as cool looking as the Nyko gun, but the trigger is much easier to pull and using both hands allows for much greater accuracy. I am pleased to report that I have, finally, beaten House of the Dead 2! Once the Olympics are over I plan on starting House of the Dead 3.

And, the reason I wrote this blog post in the first place is that today I discovered another House of the Dead game is coming out for the Wii. This one is called House of the Dead: Overkill and there's a trailer for it here (if you enjoyed the movie Grindhouse, then you'll dig the trailer). Here's hoping Overkill is as much fun as House of the Dead 2.

Finally, a post about zombies just isn't finished until I inflict a super-lame zombie joke that Wendy shared with me recently:

What do vegetarian zombies eat? (scroll down)














GRAAAAAAAAINS!!!