Late to the Party!

Today I'm going to kick off my blogging year with a new feature in which I demonstrate my advanced age and decrepitude by describing things I've only recently come to realize, but which you've most likely known a long, long time. It's... Late to the Party! Part the First: The Wii is Awesome. That picture to your right (presented in a wistful sepiatone to convey the feeling of olde timey days) is me gettin' busy with my new Wii, which Santa was nice enough to give me permission to buy for myself and my ladyfriend after she planted the seed several months ago (by mentioning that "it could help us get in shape") and promptly forgot about it. I'm well aware that all you video game types are totally over the Wii, but for someone whose most recently owned video game system prior to this one was an Atari 2600 purchased by my Grammy in 1982, this was a pretty major leap to make. But 25 years seemed like a long enough time to allow for technical improvements, so I took the plunge (productivity be damned), and let me tell you that it was worth the wait. So far I've learned that a) my arms don't know the difference between swinging a Wii remote and swinging a baseball bat, b) I am just as crappy a virtual bowler as I am an actual bowler, but the shoes don't smell as bad, and c) my girlfriend can beat the crap out of me at boxing (to the point where I actually found myself yelling "I'm trying to punch you in the face! Why can't I punch you in the face?!" followed by "Stop iiiiiiiiit!"). In any case, I'm just now discovering that it's awesome, so be kind to your elders and cut me a break. Part the Second: Rihanna is a Hottie. While visiting my ladyfriend's parents on New Years, I happened to see the video for a song called "Umbrella" for the first time. It's by a singer named Rihanna, who spends the entire video strutting around in fishnets being splashed with water and naked covered in silver paint, and for all I know it's been all the rage for the past five years while I was living alone in a cave teaching myself to juggle balls of mud. (I also think I read somewhere that the song was originally offered to Britney Spears, but I for one am glad she declined it, since I would just be spending the whole video thinking about how bad all that water would be for her toe fungus.) But in any case, while the song is inarguably catchy, let me state now for the record that I concur with the 98% of men and lesbians worldwide who strongly believe that this Rihanna lady could melt the paint off Satan's furnace. It is a scientific fact that an ordinary man accidentally seeing Rihanna in person would literally have his genitals burned completely off. So exercise caution if you believe she may be in your vicinity. But speaking of exercising caution... Part the Third: It Is Possible to Be Eaten by Wild Animals at the Zoo. Who knew, right? All those times I was dragged off to the zoo to stare at sleeping lemurs as a child, I was actually entering a terrifying death trap. The most interesting thing that happened while I was there was when the giraffe took a really enormous crap.