LMNOP

It's LMNOP Invitational Time!

It's time for the 4th Annual LMNOP Invitational, the only March Madness pool that is LMNOP-sponsored and Cathy Addison-Weemer-approved!

Entering a bracket is super easy and at least mildly fun, so your participation is highly encouraged.  Before we go over how to join, let's go over why you should:

1. It's free
2. The winner will be immortalized in the LMNOP Hall of Fame
3. You get to come up with a clever nickname for your picks
4. Cathy Addison-Weemer is doing it

Convinced?  Here's how to join:

1. Sign up for a Yahoo account if you don't already have one.  It's free.
2. To join the LMNOP Invitational group, click here and enter "122859" for the Group ID and "weemer" for the password.
3. Fill in your bracket before the first game tips off Thursday!

As mentioned above, the first place winner gains entry into the very exclusive LMNOP Hall of Fame, and even if you don't win you will get to experience the thrill of having your progress tracked on the official Leaderboard, which will occupy the top right sidebar and be updated nightly.

If you have any problems registering, email me and I will send you a direct invite to the group.

World Trip, Day Five

(Previously: Days one, two, three, and four)
Going to a beach for the last day of our world tour seemed like the only appropriate option, since jealousy over friends' beach trips was what inspired our travel in the first place.  Inspired by Michael Scott's vacation choice in a recent episode of The Office, we decided to pack our bags and head for Jamaica!  Well, Jamaica turned out to be a splendid choice, and we have spent our day drinking on the beach and making new friends.  Kelly even bought a new hat for her collection.

Going into this trip we thought we knew everything there was to know about Jamaica.  Guess what, though?  IWe was way wrong!  It turns out the following things are not true about Jamaica:

Jamaica has only been around for 14 years.  We had thought Jamaica was invented as part of the plot for the 1993 movie Cool Runnings , but whoops!  That's totally not true.  This is not a situation like how the NHL created a Mighty Ducks hockey team in honor of the movie; Jamaica existed way before Cool Runnings.  Cool Runnings is, in fact, actually a true story!

Gwen Stefani is about as authentically Jamaican as it gets. Also false, believe it or not.  Despite the fact that she named her baby Kingston and has a history of wearing the colors of the Jamaican flag, Gwen is not even a Jamaica native.  Who knew?

Jamaica is a huge place. Considering its cultural reach (as determined by the number of people in college who had Bob Marley posters + the current popularity of Sean Paul), we had assumed Jamaica was a pretty big place.  Not so, mon. Jamaica is smaller than Connecticut!  However, when was the last time you saw people walking around wearing Connecticut flag wristbands and talking about how laid back and great Connecticut culture is? 

In short, Jamaica is awesome.  The people are great, the weather is fabulous, and it's not Connecticut.  What more could you ask for?

Kelly and I hope you've enjoyed reading about our world trip as much as we've enjoyed taking it.  We'll be back in Bethesda soon, but the memories of our travels will surely stay with us for a lifetime.  A LIFETIME.  Did you hear that, Elle, Carolyn, Emily, and everyone else who went on vacation this winter?  WE HAVE A LIFETIME OF MEMORIES, JUST LIKE YOU DO.  So there.

World Trip: Day Four

(For more about our trip around the world, check out days one, two, and three.)

Today we went to Iceland.  We had thought we were being all clever because we remembered that grade-school anecdote about how Greenland is the icy one and Iceland is the greeny one, but guess what?  It's cold as all F here.  20 degrees. 

I would tell you what city we're in, but there's no point. They all have totally crazy names.  In fact, of the list below, I bet you can't tell which five are actual Icelandic cities and which one is just something I made up by hitting a random combination of letters from the others.

• Kirkjubaejarklaustur
• Vestmannaeyjar
• Hvammstangi
• Wejsduroewwer
• Garoabaer
• Borgarfjorour

So yeah, don't worry about where we are exactly.  Anyway.  Here's a picture of us on a majestic mountain (Kelly insisted on buying one of those dorky jester ski hats.  I told her she would look like a total noob, but she insisted).

I was very excited to arrive in Iceland because I had read about how all the people there are rich, happy, and well-educated regarding evolution.  Let me tell you, they did not disappoint!  I cannot tell you how many times we visited in restaurants or stores today and were stopped by jubilant Icelanders offering to use their personal, sizable per capita share of the GDP to pay for our stuff.

"By the way, did you ever notice how some of a population's inherited traits become more common at the expense of others over successive generations?" they would cheerfully ask as they forked over their money to pay for our dried fish or miniature Icelandic flags. "It's a process that's usually measured in terms of the genes that encode the competing traits!"

Given the genial and intelligent nature of its people, we certainly enjoyed our day in Iceland. We'll be glad to be going somewhere much warmer tomorrow, the final day of our trip, but this was certainly an educational and delightful stop.

It's time to head out, so I'll close with a traditional Icelandic farewell: "Goodbye--and don't let the door hit ya where the good years of genetic progression split ya!"

Oh yeah--FYI, the city I made up was Wejsduroewwer.

Kelly and Lauren's Not-At-All-Fake Five-Day Trip Around the World: Day Three

Our initial goal in visiting Tokyo had been to get a look at the shopping, technology, and general metropolitan mega-coolness that the city is famous for, and to maybe even try some crazy food we'd never had before.  Upon arriving, though, we immediately changed our goal to just getting out of the airport before we had to be back there again.

Tokyo is probably the most confusing place on the planet.  Take a look at their subway map:

No wonder Japanese schoolchildren are outperforming Americans at every level of academics--just being able to read their subway map takes brainpower not often found in the US outside the darkest, nerdiest corridors of of MIT.

Knowing what we knew of Japanese culture in advance--namely, that these were the people who produced a video game involving Italian plumbers traversing a world of waddling mushrooms and killer turtles--we should have expected things to be pretty confusing.  Still though, nothing could have prepared us for this place.  It's like a gigantic maze that, even if you could solve it, you wouldn't know you had, because "start," "finish," and everything in between are marked up in a language you couldn't even master if you had 40 years to try.

Still though, I'm glad we had the chance to visit Tokyo.  In a world where globalization and homogenization are increasingly prevalent, it's nice to see that there are some places that are still different as shit from the United States.

Tomorrow we're going somewhere cold.  Bundle up!

Kelly and Lauren's Not-At-All-Fake Five-Day Trip Around the World: Day Two

Today I am writing to you from PARIS, FRANCE!

Let me just start of this travelogue entry by saying that I am absolutely blown away by the kindness of the French.  These must be the warmest, friendliest group of people in the world!

Just kidding.  They are horrible. 

Introducing Kelly and Lauren's Not-At-All-Fake Five-Day Trip Around the World

So here's the situation: my roommate Elle is in Puerto Rico this week, and my friend Carolyn will be joining her in a couple of days.  Also, my friend Emily just got back from a blissful stay in Mexico, and my BFF Kelly and I are feeling pretty jealous of them all--that is, we were feeling jealous, until we had the great idea to go on a five-day trip around the world!  Sayonara, suckers!

Every day this week I will be filing a dispatch from a new and fabulous place, because vacations are no fun if you can't brag about them! We'll call this feature:

Without further ado, here's today's dispatch, live from the SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK IN TANZANIA!

Day 1. Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

Boy, are we having fun at the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania!  It is amazing to be in a continent where so many great celebrities get their babies.

It turns out, however, that there is much more to Africa than baby orphans!  There are also lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, buffalo, cheetahs, gazelles, giraffes, and birds.  I had seen some of these animals in zoos before, but it's amazing how different they are out in the wild.  I mean, they look the same and everything, but they don't know as many tricks.  I think that's a shame, actually.  Safaris are pretty much like big zoos without any organization.  These poor animals out in the wild don't know how to do anything cool, and they don't have any helpful fences around them to show them what area is theirs.  They must get so confused sometimes! 

Hopefully someday one of the more environmentally-conscious celebrities (Leonardo DiCaprio, I'm talking to you!) will start raising awareness about this problem and we can send some animal trainers over here to help these animals out.  It just isn't the same watching an elephant who won't raise up his front leg to win a peanut!

Our tour guide even pointed out a group of lions that were watching some gazelles drink water.  She said the lions were keeping an eye on them so they could kill them and eat them later.  Say what?!?!  That's so barbaric!  Once Leonardo DiCaprio goes over there and puts all the animals in cages, though, I think that will solve the problem.  We'll make sure they get supplied with lots of yummy fruit peels and hay and whatnot!

Here's a picture of us in our safari gear:

Boy, is the weather ever great in Tanzania!  It was 75 degrees today.  El Nino and Al Gore be damned--that's a full 10 degrees warmer than it was in Washington DC today!  Hope all you suckers back home didn't get frostbite!

Tomorrow we're going to another exciting place with lots of culture and history.  Stay tuned!

And Yes, When People Ask Me How Old I Am, I Will Be Saying "Twenty-Three and a Half"

It's my half birthday--half cupcake, anyone?

Feel free to wish me a 'Hap Birt' on this halfway-important day.

Happy Halfies also go out to Katie, Jack Johnson, Tina Fey, and many others.

Michelle Presents: "Stop Being a Craigslist Douchebag"

When Michelle stopped blogging, I issued her an open invitation to come guest blog whenever she wanted to.  Guess what?  She has!  (If only PT Cruisers and senators would start taking my advice too, this world would be a much better place.)  And what did it take to temporarily bring her out of retirement? 

Craigslist Douchebags.  Enjoy!

Memo: Stop Being a Craigslist Douchebag
By Michelle

I am trying to find a place to live, and it is killing me slowly. It is a death not unlike the tobacco horn worm caterpillar experiences when wasp larvae eats the caterpillar from the inside out. Why do I feel like I'm being eaten alive? Because craigslist is giving me the dirty sanchez treatment. Please forgive my use of colorful language but it is the only way I can really let you know how truly and deeply craigslist sucks. In my quest I have emailed probably about 100 people, and actually met about 30 people from almost 15 houses, and, with exceedingly few exceptions, almost all of them sucked.

I can look beyond the inadequate descriptions that use the word awesome in just about every other sentence as if that really let someone know what a house looked like. I can also look past the inability of 90% of posters to correctly provide a link that accurately indicates the location of their house. Once I clicked on a link that had apparently used the address "silver spring washington dc usa" to let people know where the house was.  I can even look past the blatantly discriminatory postings that indicate they will not consider a person based on their gender or age (some people won't overlook that though because apparently it's like illegal or something...) And after I get past the initial sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I don't really mind coming across the creepy sex-for-housing ads from northern virginia. But there are some craigslist transgressions I cannot abide. Someone needs to tell the craigslist users of washington dc how not to be a douche bag, and I feel that the following suggestions are a good start:

The Results of the LMNOP Invitational

Aaaaaand the first LMNOP Invitational Tournament has come to a close. The bracket contest went largely without coverage in the blog, and for good reason--namely, because I wasn't doing very well and therefore lost interest in it.  However, I feel like I should at least post the final results and congratulate the winner, Emily Guskin.

Way to go, Emily!

I don't want the guys who participated in this pool to feel bad about losing to a girl, so I will post this picture of Emily (on the right) with Dick Vitale, because it makes her seem relatively sporty.  The truth, though, is that she is small, blonde, and likes to wear things like baby blue trench coats and pale pink pumps. (Not at the same time.)

By the way, we're totally giving Cathy hell over here about coming in last.

Final March Post

Oh. My. God.  March is FINALLY over.  I am going into hiding until Sunday night after Grey's Anatomy, at which point I will put up the new April site design and resume normal posting.  However, the three new posts from Michelle, Adam, and Jonah are plenty of reading material to keep you busy until then.  Also, for my final March post, I have decided to recognize National Noodle Month.  You can read that as well.