I was in a convenience store today, and a young guy came in wearing black pants with pinstripes and a Ruth's Chris t-shirt. I couldn't hear the clerk, but his side of the conversation went like this.

I just heard the story about how Maxim gave the new Black Crows album 2 1/2 stars out of 5, despite having never bothered listening to the album.

I started a contract with a company last week, and they set me up on their network and email systems. Their convention is first initial-last name, so mine should have been bschultz. Unfortunately, bschultz was already taken, so I got first initial-middle initial-last name. bmschultz.

I can't believe that we actually had a viable presidential candidate this year who denied evolution. Let's think through the rationale of a guy who wanted to lead the free world.

Yesterday, we went to a dumb little Valentines day party at Vanya's preschool. All the toddlers danced around while their teacher sang, and then we watched them eat their lunch. Then we watched them get grouchy as it came close to nap time.

It's been a half-year of firsts for us: First Halloween with a kid, first Thanksgiving, first Christmas and New Years, first day of preschool. Perhaps the most fun has been in the past week, which featured both the first Mardi Gras as well as Vanya's first birthday with us (and second overall).

I didn't get too much into Super Bowl pregame hype. For some reason, that one off weekend made it seem like a month since the conference championship games. To top that, I didn't have a strong rooting interest in the game, since neither team was local, and since I had no money on the line. There were bad reasons for me to cheer for either team.

What do you do if you're a big, giant corporation with bad financials?

When I upgraded to a 4-door Jeep Wrangler last year, it came with a free year's subscription to Serius satellite radio. The radio has 6 buttons, each of which hold two stations' worth of presets. Push it once for the first station, and push it again for the second. After almost a year of messing with it, I have the buttons laid out like this (actual station names listed in case you are familiar and curious):

Lost in the news about Heath Ledger's mysterious dropping dead, you may have caught a flattering obituary for Suzanne Pleshette. Lost behind even that was the death of Allan Melvin, who you might remember as Alice's boyfriend Sam the Butcher on The Brady Bunch.

I recently went back to listening to my Russian language lessons while walking the dogs at night. I had gone through pretty many before our last trip to Russia (55 of 90 lessons), and while it was definitely helpful, the actual Russians speak way too quickly for me to understand even the occasional word or phrase that sounded familiar to my ear. But I think it would be cool to speak Russian to my Russian kid, so I'll keep trying.

I'm reasonably terrible at seeing famous people and then having the ability to identify those people. I'm glad there are no red carpet shows, because I spend the whole time wondering who these people are. But I don't ask, because they invariably end up being someone completely obvious. Like Tom Hanks.