My father’s hobby was entering contests and sweepstakes. He entered a lot of them and as a result won a lot of things as well, including a six wheel all-terrain vehicle that I, damn it, was too small to drive, and a dirt bike that, again, I was too small to drive.

During my childhood, my father encouraged myself and my siblings to do coloring contests, as well. At ten years old, I won an all-expenses paid trip for four to Disney World in Orlando as a result of one of those coloring contests. Seriously. The contest was the "How Many Licks?" contest, used to promote the Tootsie Pop lollipop, the one that has Tootsie Roll in the middle.

I think I won the contest because I was very creative with the notion of coloring between the lines; let’s just say I added a lot of decoration between the lines. This is the Tootsie Pop commercial that was running at the time:

I recently watched the HBO documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, about the torture our government has sanctioned (and tried to cover up) in Iraq.

It’s disheartening that we’re no longer considered the good guys internationally. We used to be advocates for countries to go above and beyond the standards set by the Geneva Conventions but now our government has adopted torture as policy. The documentary was made by Rory Kennedy (uh-huh, those Kennedys), so it will obviously have a bias in favor of human rights but then wouldn’t any documentary about torture? I highly recommend Ghosts of Abu Ghraib:

Milgram’s Experiment

The documentary makes chillingly clear the banality of evil demonstrated by Stanley Milgram‘s social psychology experiments of the 1960s. This clip is from The Human Behavior Experiments on the Sundance Channel:

I saw this Domino’s Pizza ad over the weekend and it made me laugh out loud. I don’t know that it’s a particularly effective advertisement, but it sure is funny:

I saw this Domino’s Pizza ad over the weekend and it made me laugh out loud. I don’t know that it’s a particularly effective advertisement, but it sure is funny:

I saw this Domino’s Pizza ad over the weekend and it made me laugh out loud. I don’t know that it’s a particularly effective advertisement, but it sure is funny:

I saw this Domino’s Pizza ad over the weekend and it made me laugh out loud. I don’t know that it’s a particularly effective advertisement, but it sure is funny: