Dhivael/Anne’s Hyperactive Blog

If you haven’t seen Dr. Horrible yet, today’s your last chance to do so for free.

It’s very good, even if I wish it had ended differently (which I won’t spoil for you; just go see it).

Have you? If you haven’t seen Doctor Horrible, you only have two days left to see it for free! It’s good, really. If you think musicals are awful, you should still watch this. Some music. Light dancing. And, best of all, a mad scientist who wants to rule the world. And his nemesis, bent on stopping him. Follow the banner below to go see what I’m talking about. You know you want to.

Yes, what IS a ‘monstor’?

Originally uploaded by annelions

Alright. So. Really. People should learn to spell if they want to run Google ads. ‘Monstor’? Honestly, that’s something that any decent spell checker will pick up. If you bother to use it.

Of course, the page that this ad points to is… very boring indeed. And pretty inappropriate. When ‘loch ness monstor’ doesn’t come up, it searches simply for ‘ness’. Which brings up… well, there are a couple of Loch Ness monster related items, but not really.

I love tortilla chips. And, of course, Dorito’s are some of the best, if not the best. Cool ranch, spicy guacamole, nacho, spicy nacho, etc. Delicious. I never thought that they could do anything that would make a Dorito chip taste bad.

I was wrong.

‘Lemon’, ‘lemon pie’, ‘lemon meringue’,  ‘lemon cookie’… all these are ways you might choose to describe the new Dorito’s ‘The Quest’ chips. You’re supposed to guess the flavor, go online and then there’s a contest thingie.

So what delicious flavor are these ‘mystery’ chips? Mountain Dew. Yes, soda flavored tortilla chips.  All I can say about them is that they are… unique. And not completely horrible. But would I buy them again? No! If I want Mountain Dew with my chips, I’ll buy some on my own. I don’t need them to be making my chips flavored with soda. And they don’t even really taste like Mountain Dew. One person described it as ‘Gatorade’ flavor. And that’s a pretty accurate description. It’s definitely a flavor that no tortilla chip was ever meant to be.

The last time that they did a mystery flavor like this, it was cheeseburger. What’s wrong with chili dog? Bean burrito? Steak & cheese? Even ‘Italian dressing’ flavor might have been a good choice. Instead, we get… EGH!

I guess Doritos got paid to do product placement and they didn’t bother to stop and think whether or not many people would actually like the flavor.

Is the monsoon coming? Or is it already here? I never can remember. Either way, I found some lovely images of monsoon weather.

Lightning is spectacular (if you go watch it) during a desert storm, and I found a picture of lightning as a backdrop for a local Bank of America building. Definitely difficult to tell, but from the angle, that lightning strike might very well have caused a rare power outage here. But I’m not positive. It’s hard to tell where the camera’s pointed, let alone how far away the lightning really is.

If you look online, you can find a ton of before pictures of monsoons, but it’s not as easy to find a picture from the inside of a local dust storm. I found another, though. Both are… wow. Yeah, it pretty much looks like that for at least the first 5-30 minutes, until rains come to wash the dirt back down again.

California gets earthquakes. The mid-west gets tornadoes.  The southeast gets hurricanes. The northeast gets blizzards. And we get dust storms with pretty lightning. Yeah. I’ll take the dust storms.

I now interrupt your day with this dose of cuuuuuuuute kittens. These kittens aren’t my kittens, but darn are they cute! There are a couple of stray kittens outside right now that look like the grey ones, but the kittens are too scared of me.

Oh well, at least they know I mean ‘food’, which is a good thing.

Darn, kittens are just too cute! I wish cats would stay kittens forever, then they’d always be extra fun. Older cats are okay, but they’re just not as funny as kittens.

Or as cute.

Riding the buses in the Phoenix Metro area (also known as ‘The Valley’ or ‘The Valley of the Sun’) is a bit like playing roulette. Tempe is not too bad, they seem to pour a lot of money into the mass transit system. Most of the bus lines run on Sundays and even run on major holidays. There are many buses that run every 15 minutes, including the free Orbit shuttles. Plus, many of the north-south busses connect with either Chandler or Scottsdale, both of which are affluent areas. So Tempe gets shiny new buses.

Mesa, on the other hand, you’re lucky if the bus runs every half hour (as opposed to every hour). There is pretty much no Sunday service. No free shuttles. And there is certainly not service on major holidays.

But one thing remains constant, about all the buses in the system. They all break down fairly frequently. And yesterday, I heard something a bit alarming. The bus was stopped at a light and the driver was chatting with another passenger while waiting for the light to turn (better that than a cell phone, which some drivers do). He mentioned rather matter-of-factly that the previous day, a certain part had broken on his bus that meant he couldn’t do his last run of the day.

Pretty routine, yes. The alarming part? He also mentioned that the mechanic noted that many of the bus parts used were ‘illegal’ and ‘not up to state specs’, but that nobody says anything for fear of losing their jobs.

Considering how often buses break down, it sounds pretty realistic to me. And definitely scary.

(BTW, I also passed the ‘expensive gasoline‘ station yesterday and it was up to ‘$41.79′ now. Hasn’t anyone noticed the misplaced decimal? I guess not.)