A tip of the hat to All Hail the Black Market for this gem. It fills me with a mix of feelings – both delight, and a bit of shame for the amount of Dragon Age I’ve been playing lately. Additional thanks to @bighandsome for sending me a parody version.

If you want to hear similarly horrible (or similarly awesome, depending on your tastes) non-traditional holiday music, I highly recommend giving SomaFM’s Xmas in Frisko internet radio station.

1. Getting married.
2. Going to Greece for the Honeymoon.
3. Planning to move to Japan at the end of the month.

So yeah, big things that deserve some form of blogified recognition. Posts will come, but for now, I will leave you with MAN BABIES!!

And as a special bonus, how not to pickup girls…

Last weekend, I successfully conquered all ten hills of the “Feel My Legs, I’m a Racer” race. I think I even managed to snag 6th or 7th place overall, with a second place finish on the first hill. Not bad, if I do say so myself. An official write-up hasn’t been posted anywhere, and I’m still scouring the interwebs for photos, but here’s one someone snapped of me. Note the angle of the horizon in the background. That was the first hill, Eldred St., the one this article talks about. While going up the hills was agony (sweet, sweet agony), going down them scared the crap out of me. I had to walk down Eldred St. and a few others, and I think I wore out my brake pads slowly riding my way down the rest. Indeed my fears weren’t unfounded as one rider crashed going down Baxter at 40mph. He hit an unexpected bump at the bottom of the hill, flew off, and slid some 20 feet up the next hill, winding up with a fractured collarbone and a couple of broken ribs, as well as several patches of road rash. But to show you what kind of a manimal this guy was, he still placed fourth overall even though he only did five out of ten of the hills AND he showed up for the after-party at Pure Luck once he was done at the hospital. Insanity.

On Sunday, Bronwyn and I had our engagement shoot with our wedding photographer, Allana of Ars Magna Studio. We spent a few hours wondering around downtown in the Grand Central Market, the Bradbury Building, the Biltmore Hotel, Pershing Square, and a bit of Echo Park. She posted the results yesterday and they’re absolutely fantastic!Check out her blog or the online gallery to see more.

Finally, in completely unrelated news to anything, other than the fact that I’m Filipino, watch this video:

I’m all for experimenting with bacon. I made some great bacon-wrapped scallops last weekend, but this is tragic. That bacon should be in my mouth, not smacking against a guy’s thighs.

In other news, today marks four years of dating Bronwyn, in what we’ve dubbed as our “Valiversary.” Due to its close proximity to Valentine’s Day and our mutual dislike of arbitrary holiday card festivities, we decided to roll what would be Valentine’s Day celebrations into our anniversary. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), since we’re set to be wed in May, this will be our last Valiversary as the dating anniversary will be replaced with our nuptial one. At any rate, though Bronwyn has to work tonight, we’ve got a fun weekend planned of picnics, Thai massages, ice cream, cooking classes, and lindy hop. Huzzah! Since I’m rolling solo tonight, I’ll be heading out to Midnight Ridazz.

WTF?! I have seen no such chairs in Hawaii!

It just goes to show the state of disarray the Republican party is in when one of their fiercest attack dogs would rather opt for a Democrat than one of their own.

Obama, on the other hand, has garnered an endorsement from MoveOn, whose members voted in favor of Obama 70.4% to Clinton’s 29.6%.

Anyways, vacation was great. It consisted primarily of sitting around in pajamas watching the Discovery Channel in high definition. If you haven’t experienced that yet, get thyself to a Best Buy and tell the salesman you want to see some grizzly bears.

I also spent a lot of time acquainting myself with one of my Christmas presents, a shiny new PSP. When we weren’t watching the mating rituals of Galapagos iguanas, one of the things we would do whilst exploring Memphis was drop into the local Gamestops from which I quickly put together a core collection of PSP games. Most notable of those acquisitions are two peculiar games. One is Loco Roco, a game in which you roll a singing blob around a maze, all the while munching on bugs and berries to plumpify your Loco Roco. The hypnotic experience is akin to playing with one of those ink hourglass things that were so popular back in the ’90s, except that this sings and won’t break and stain your carpet. The second game is called Puzzle Quest, which is an unlikely pairing of a puzzle game and RPG. At first the concept seemed a bit too quirky, but the game appeared on the top of 2007 lists of quite a few sites, like Gamasutra’s Top 10 Games of the Year and Gamespot’s Best Game No One Played, so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, you move around a map completing quests, collecting treasure, conquering undead hordes, and laying seige to cities, except that all manner of “combat” is determined in a puzzle game match up. As odd and dorky as it sounds, Puzzle Quest is ridiculously addictive. I had to give it a few hours of gameplay before the mechanics actually started to click and I figured out why I couldn’t beat the stupid giant bat (it’s his shriek spell, duh! Like Officer Michaels’ coitus interuptus of McLovin, I’ve got to block his mana collection).

At any rate, as great as my shiny white PSP is, it pails in comparison to Bronwyn’s other gift to me: the gift of bacon. It’s a collection of five of the top bacons of 2007 according to The Grateful Palate, which offers a bacon of the month subscription service, so they should know their bacon. We cooked up the first of the bacon this last Saturday morning for breakfast, opting for the Jim Oliver’s Hickory Smoked Country Bacon.

Alls I can say is, “Oh, Glory!”