New rule, amigos.

New rule, effective immediately:

No directly addressing days of the week. All statements like the ones below are officially verboten:

"Dear Monday: We didn't get along last week. Let's try harder this time, eh? Love, Me"
"Friday, how I love you more than your nearest brethren."
"Tuesday: Stop being so rainy. I'm le bored."

Those who continue to post such statements will be penalized 5 Twitter followers for each subsequent statement.

Look sharp, friends. The Cool Police are watching - and they beat my ass like Rodney King just last week.

Resolving to be a gentleman with less meat on his bones

This year, I broke with tradition and actually made New Year's resolutions. Here are all two of them, in their fully resolved glory:

1. Be a perfect gentleman.
I spent too much of 2009 lavishing attention on girls I simply had my eye on. Granted, it's natural for red-blooded males to do as much, but after a while I started to regret not spending more time with the people who more consistently made me happy, like good buds from college, my brother + sis-in-law + niece, or dogs. [Yes, they're people.]

2010 is the year that I settle down with a nice girl and spend more time being fulfilled. I'm off to a good start - I hosted my former girlfriend from my tiny village in Japan and showed her a wonderful time around San Diego, without an ounce of hanky-panky. It was classy and enjoyable in exactly the way I hoped for.

2. Eat less meat.
Thanks to Sir Paul, I was awakened to the Meat Free Monday campaign, which is encouraging people to simply eat less meat, not give it up entirely. Not only is this a convenient new diet path for me to try, but one day a week without meat is relatively painless (and a nice gateway into two or more days).

Here are some good reasons why meat might kill us all:

-CO2 emissions are huge: depending on estimates, somewhere around 15% (give or take 3%) of all world CO2 emission.
Here's where my grad studies come in: as Brazil, India and China go from poor countries to rich countries, the world demand for richer (both in calories and in monetary value) food will skyrocket. If you've heard the phrase that meat-eating Prius owners are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than vegetarian drivers of normal cars, well, it's true. Climate 'skeptics' are quick to admit that methane (from cows) has 25 times the greenhouse-gas properties of CO2 (thus effectively acknowledging climate change, no?) - so stop with all the cows.

-If you thought producing biodiesel was bad for the world's food supply, consider how much basic grains go into livestock feed. It's a lot. Producing food for our sake would be more efficient and bring world food prices down. Africa would starve less, which would lead to less violence in that part of the world.

-It's just healthier not to eat meat. Populations with lower meat intakes have fewer health problems and much longer life expectancies.

-And, as aroon points out, we should be good to the animals.

And there we have, from my book, the recipe for a solid 2010. Wish me luck.

Super-late photos: Sir Paul

This is the fourth activity I referenced after my London trip.

Sir Paul McCartney. Fifth-row seats.

The man can play a show. An entire section of seating was set aside for his friends and family (it was the last stop on his tour, and the only one in England). Two-and-a-half-hours-plus with no breaks. So much heart.

As excited as I was to see the legend in the flesh, I was more excited for my mom. She is to The Beatles as I am to games. She knows every factoid, every detail, every ounce of their personal history. She spent her youth following them from the great Internet-less distance of rural Oklahoma. She never saw a Beatles concert, but I was going to make damn sure she saw the closest possible thing during her lifetime.

And she did. That box got a big, fat check mark put in it. For her and for me.

As miserable as the rest of the trip was (Mom + jetlag + British food = not fun), she was beaming for a solid 48 hours (before she caught swine flu on the way home and became more miserable). "We saw Pauuuuuul," she'd coo. During those 48 hours, miserable British food, or having to ride the Tube, or the weather became non-factors. We did what we went there to do, and it felt great to do it.

Indeed, we did it. We saw Pauuuuuul.

I, for one, welcome our 2010 overlords.

Holy crap, it's 2010. Twenty-ten. We can finally stop saying "two-thousand and ____." 

Update: wow, it took me a long time to correct that line from "tho-thousand." I'm losing my edge.

Back to story: I, for one, am relieved.

It's been pretty popular to make lists of the best (or worst, or whatever) of the decade we just completed, but I thought I'd try to do you guys a service and lay out a few ground rules for the decade to come.

1. Piracy will become uncool.
Trendsetters in the gaming world have already moved in this direction, and the freeloading style of downloading music and movies will no longer be edgy and cool. It's a thing of the Naughty Oughties, people. A lot of this will come thanks to affordable, usable digital content. Netflix and iTunes are leading the way, and marketplace competition from big sellers like Amazon (or legit free rides like Spotify) should make things a lot more interesting. $8 for an album ain't bad. I'd rather pay $5-7, but we're getting there.

I'm not suggesting that piracy will disappear. But it will be one of the lamer corners of the Internet, like 4chan.

2. You will be nickeled and dimed to death.
Small fees for things will go completely out of control. Have you seen those commercials for Ally Bank, the bank that doesn't deal in small print? Yeah, they deal in small print. Maybe, just maybe, we'll move toward a haggling culture in response. We've already moved this way with cable and Internet providers, for example.

3. You will carry a networked device everywhere.
iPhone users, even 3GS owners who reluctantly got one with a Christmas 2009 gift card, are early adopters in terms of buying come sort of persistently handy, persistently connected device. If I had to guess, cell phones will be our social devices and tablets will be productivity machines. As a result, asking IT to troubleshoot your iPhone 4G will be considered rude, but you'll be having lots and lots of problems with your wonderful, foldable, handwriting-recognizing tablet machine of awesomeness.

4. "Baby mama" and "baby daddy" will become commonplace social entities and will no longer be considered damaged goods.
Thanks, divorce. Easily offended groups of unmarried people with babies will come up with a politically correct term for baby mama/daddy, and it will be such a stupid term that it's beyond my creative capacity to name it now.

5. Rich Americans will finally work out and eat healthily and do these correctly.
Health gurus will go upmarket, resulting in Dr. Oz-branded foods at Whole Foods. What's more, the Ugly American will now rear his head in strange new places, like Southeast Asia, when such a tourist asks if the snake he's eating was killed humanely.

6. The price of oil will rise steadily.
You'll start paying attention to those "10 things you can do to lower your energy bill" articles, and you'll end up a miserly user of energy. You may also buy a car that looks cool and goes slow, like the Ford Fiesta or whatever becomes of the Toyota FT-86.

7. Airline crashes will increase dramatically.
Fly on big planes between big cities, amigos. Regional jets will continue to be flown by exhausted, underpaid, illegally under-rested young pilots. These guys already sit on the poverty line, and they'll continue to take the brunt of cost reductions so you can still have your $99 ticket to New York. The solution is obvious, but for deregulated airline management, easier said than done.

8. Sorry about that last one. You'll have more fun this decade.
Time management and getting things done (GTD) will be a big fad in the mainstream. You'll get more chores done in your off time, leaving you more time to chill with amigos.

I'm ringing in 2010 by being exhausted. Finishing this post now, while it still gets posted as being on January 1st. Happy new year!

Photographic evidence of London

My Christmas was spent - lucky me - with only one relative, in the wonderful locale that is London. Unfortunately, however, Mom and international travel are still trying to get along, so in our week-long stay we managed to complete 4 activities. Four.

Of those, three are pictured here: the British Museum, St. Paul's Cathedral, and shopping on Bond Street.

The fourth, which made the entire trip worthwhile, will come in another post.