Do you ever read McSweeney’s Internet Tendency? It’s funny, you should check it out: especially the lists.

The McSweeney’s humorous list, some friends of mine and I were thinking, has become a genre all its own. And it seems many a dabbler in the Intarwebs has submitted a list to McSweeney’s and been rejected. A casual inquiry turned up four instances, one of them being me.

But reading my friends’ lists, and rereading my own McSweeney’s reject, made me realize that, although they missed publication due to hard luck, I was very glad McSweeney’s had the wisdom to pass mine by. So I had to make a new one, which I will get rejected sometime in the future.

Without further ado, 12apostrophes’ list of McSweeney’s reject lists:

Top Five Numbers
By Dingus

1). 1

2). 2

3). 3

4). 5

5). 4

Worst Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Choices:
By Eric Nolan

“If you think that Sergeant Slaughter should charge ahead without really thinking it through, turn to page 76.”

“If you think that it would be a good thing to explore the dense jungle on your own without a guide, by all means, turn to page 25.”

“If you would like to follow Deathman into the cave, turn to page 199.”

“If you think inside the treasure chest was a stash of pristine Middle Eastern pornos, turn to page 135.”

“If you are only curious as to know the most gruesome ending, turn to page 90.”

”If you are undecided at this point of the story what should occur, welcome to my world and turn to, I don’t know, page 13.”

”If you would like to ignore all the foreshadowing that I’ve intricately woven into the text, turn to page 55.”

“If you think that Encyclopedia Brown would be foolish to turn down a free sex party, turn to page 2.”

Semi-Droll Listservs That I Maintain:
by Donnie Boman

Lacanian-Marxist readings of ancient Sumerian texts LacMarxSumer-lserv@lacmarxsumer.com

Chihuhahua owners for revolutionary social justice cofrsj-list@cofrj.org

Obama-Perot 2008 obamerot08-L@obamerot.com

Vendors who make great Tabouleh without mint, united vwmgtwmu-L@taboulehminus.net

Droll ideological bullet lists DIBL-list@macsswain.org

Other Titles of Lists McSweeney’s Has Rejected:
By Kris

Thing My Boss Said That Made Me Mad Last Week, I Don’t Know Why

Links to My Blog

Name of Observable Star Cluster in Quadrant M49 or Word I Just Made Up?

Smelly Facts about Races, Religions, and Nationalities Other than Mine

That Thing that Happened Yesterday that Was Funny But Won’t Be Soon? 36 Things About That

Captions to Funny Cat Pictures (Without the Pictures)

What I Have in My Pocket that I Shouldn’t

Pet Names for My Mother

Methods of Suicide I’ve Contemplated if I Don’t Get Accepted into McSweeneys

The fifth installment of the Triple Rock Social Club’s Pub Trivia Night is tonight at 8 p.m. If you weren’t planning on going, I would instead. Triple Rock Trivia has proved to be some serious fun.

At the end of this post is a pop vocabulary quiz. But first, a little history of Triple Rock Trivia Nights so far:

The first time out, the winners were “The Winners” — a team who, full of optimism, named themselves that, then spent all the goodwill they may have garnered with their winsome name by actually winning.

When “The Winners” kept their name, somewhat mawkishly the second time, and won again, they were reviled by all. When “The Winners” won for the third time, foul play was suspected and blows threatened, until it was revealed by the hosts that there had been a simple “mathematical error,” and “The Winners” hadn’t really won. Conspiracies were propounded, but the riotous crowd was quelled.

The fourth time around, my team, “Ample Recompense,” won. Some say this had a lot to do with Team “The Winners” not being there. Some say it had everything to do with it. Who knows?

As a little practice for tonight’s trivia, let’s do a vocabulary quiz. Vocabulary may not have appeared at Triple Rock Trivia so far, but that only makes it exceedingly unlikely rather than impossible to appear this evening.

For another vote in the vocabulary quiz column, I’ve visited Free Rice.com a lot recently, a site where you’re tested on your vocabulary knowledge, and when you answer correctly, they give rice to hungry people around the world. (This is for real.) Which can lead you to really really think about you guess, what with the starving children’s lives in the balance and all.

We don’t have any rice. But if you get these wrong we will stop in for dinner at the residences of several destitute families, which comes to the same thing.

Click “Read the rest of this entry” to take the quiz, and to read an answer, click your mouse and roll over the grayed text.

(more…)

Ah, Spring!

When a young man’s fancy turns to gloves.

Zarafa (South Africa)
2007 Pinotage
$4.99 @ Trader Joe’s

Pulao and I started to frequent Trader Joe’s last fall, and we’ve waited for the wine on the cheap God-send to stock a Pinotage ever since. This past Saturday we found it.

If you’ve never had a Pinotage, get to it! Two of our friends, dbay and Duodecad, introduced Pulao and I to the Pinotage varietal a year or so back. “This red wine tastes like butter,” they said. If that doesn’t sound good to you — well, that’s understandable. But it is. Good. And they do — most of the most pleasant bottles of Pinotage I’ve tasted had smoky, creamy tones in the nose and the finish.

Zarafa’s 2007 Pinotage has that buttery, smooth texture, as well as a ripe, delicious berry-ness. Not too acidic, but not too sweet. This was the first bottle I opened with some folk Saturday night (by the time a party gets to the third bottle or so, remembering how the wine tastes gets a little more . . . beside the point) and it was well-liked. The following bottles, even a decent Chianti stand-by from Trader Joe’s, tasted a lot more like $4 wine when they had to follow the blossoming flavors of the Pinotage.

As you might have guessed, Pinotage grapes are a hybrid of Pinot Noir and (as you almost certainly have not guessed) Cinsaut Noir (which used to be called Hermitage — hence the portmanteau name Pinot-tage). Just like my experience with Pinot Noir, when Pinotage is good it’s great, and when it’s bad it’s total swill.

So on that note, an important note: this review regards the Zarafa 2007 Pinotage. Do not buy the 2005. The Zarafa 2005 Pinotage, as any quick blog search will tell you, is apparently pure death.

I also read that many Piontages, which I haven’t noticed, reportedly taste of banana — I’ll have to buy another 2007 Zarafa or two and test out that theory immediately.

Last week, I got my yearly performance review. Although the words in the review seemed pretty positive, the number ended up being a positively small 3%.

Don’t get me wrong! — a 3% raise is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (don’t try that at home). But I think my company makes it hard to get the big raises on purpose. The performance review is all online, and a big part of it is a self-assessment. Check out the instructions:

1. At least one objective should be set for each scorecard category.
2. No more than three objectives should be set for any one category.
3. The weights for all objectives should total 100%.
4. The total weight of objectives for any one scorecard category should not exceed 50%.
5. An objective should not be weighed less than 10% nor more than 30%.

This definitely favors people who aced the math and logic problems on the SATs. Two trains leave the station traveling at least 30 mph but no more than 55 mph. When do they get to Baltimore? I think if you can fill out the forms correctly, they automatically make you a VP of Operations.

The final insult, in the boss part of the performance review, was this:

Particularly, please document what the employee has done to achieve results by demonstrating the [My Company's] values: Simple and Open.

Simple and open aren’t the first two words I thought of to describe the online forms, I admit. I can only hope, then, that the employee who designed the performance review had to fire himself afterwards.