This week’s Thing That Does Not Suck is a bit weird.  I’ve featured some weird ones on here before, like this one, for instance.  And then there was the time I wrote a haiku and talked about my daffodils.  And then there was the time I featured a muppet.  In fact, looking back through my TTDNST archives reveals that very little of what I’ve featured hasn’t been weird in some way.

This week’s Thing is so strange, however, that it caused a spontaneous smile to break out all over my face.  I tripped over it this morning and it’s been giving me smiles all day.  There just comes a time in life when you realize that what you never knew you were missing in your life was a gigantic necklace that spelled out something blatantly obvious:

I wonder what his underwear says...

Yeah.  There you have it: What may be the lest helpful necklace ever constructed by the hand of man (or woman).  Apparently this guy’s name is T-Pain.  I don’t know what he does, or why he was there, but I don’t really think that’s important.  What’s important is that this guy wants you to know what’s going on.  With this guy, you know exactly where you stand.

Imagine with me, if you will, some of the other necklaces he might keep at home…

• Hungry For Dinner (For fancy dinners out at nice restaurants)
• I Haven’t Showered (He’s very responsible to let us know)
• I Have Teeth (Just in case you fail to notice thanks to the spinners or whatever he has in his mouth)

As long as there is weird crap like this floating around the universe, I think we’re all going to be just fine.  Recession, nuclear Armageddon, whatever.  Forget about it.  Because you know what?  When aliens are desiccating what’s left of our culture after they finally land to explore our planet, the only thing that will be left will be that necklace.  From it, they will deduce that we were a planet of gigantic, majestic creatures who were wiped out after a worldwide natural disaster.  And then they’ll make a movie about cloning us and putting us in a park, wherein we will escape and, naturally, consume and destroy everything we find.

Can you believe how sad and lonely my blog has been this week?  It’s almost like I took four different flights in less than a week or something!  Obviously blogging on Tuesday was out, what with the running through the San Francisco airport with my huge duffel bag and all, and then Wednesday came and went in a haze of work emails and laundry, and now here’s Thursday kicking me square in the jaw.

What?  What’s that you say?  I feature something every Thursday or something and that’s why I’m crawling out of the woodwork to write a much-belated blog post?  Nonsense I say!  I’m merely motivated, and disciplined, and not at all crippled by a hugely crazy work project and whine-inducing headache.

No, I don’t believe me either.

I played hookey last night, hoping that by taking a night off and going to bed early I could get back into the groove.  It didn’t work, because I had a dickens of a time getting myself to the keyboard today.  It doesn’t help that we just started watching a really cool show called Dexter.  I love it, which makes pulling myself away from the TV to blog a bit more difficult than anything ever really needs to be.

As much as I love our new show (even a paltry four episodes in), however, I have bigger fish to mount on my wall and brag about.  This week’s Thing That Does Not Suck is a bit dichotomous in nature, because it both sucks and does not suck.  It does not suck because it’s glorious, and delicious, and the best idea ever.  It sucks because it isn’t yet available all over the place.

It is with the pride of a conquering hero that I present to you this gift, borne over from the dry, arid land of California.  This long-awaited culinary delight that will delight your belly and take it easy on your poor beleaguered wallet.  It is…

Yogurtland, brought to you by the tenacious reporting skills of myself and my little brother.

This mecca of frozen yogurt (aka Yogurtland) is a truly revolutionary idea.  It’s a store that empowers you to completely customize your frozen yogurt.  Imagine, please, a wall of 30 or so knobs, each of which dispenses a different flavor of frozen yogurt.  After you dispense your yogurt to your heart’s content, you turn to a self-serve bar of toppings.  The toppings range from fresh fruit to sprinkles to cookies and everything in between.  You heap the perfect combination of toppings (knowing in your heart you could use all 50 toppings and no one would care) and then stagger over to the register, where they charge you by weight for your delicious confection.

This?  Is what we’ve all been waiting for.  Creamy, delicious, sort of healthy (if you go for the fruit toppings), and an undeniable treat.  If you ever have a chance to patronize one of their locations I highly recommend you do so.  Don’t worry, I scoped them out and can vouch for the deliciousness.  I took it upon myself to visit their store twice while I was in California.

The heat is sucking my creativity right  out of my eyes, replacing it only with a strange anxiety about my plane getting hit by lightning tomorrow and the creeping realization that I may never be finished with the project I started at work last week.  This heat is nefarious, I tell you.  If I didn’t have so much cold booze lying around, none of us would ever make it out of this alive.

Thanks to the heat and my insane craziness at work lately, I have had next to no time to troll around the Internet looking for fun things to show off to you.  Sorry about that.  In lieu of a lame post about how I have no Thing That Does Not Suck for today, I thought I’d leave it up to you.  I’ll propose some things that I think definitely do not suck, and you guys can pick for yourself.

Ready?  Set?  Rock the vote!

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Giddyup!

According to the guy who took these pictures, these are real.  I guess there are a bunch of wild chipmunks that live in his parent’s backyard and those chipmunks have become quite friendly over the years.  Friendly enough to go on a date with a wookie, I guess.

This is exactly like Lady and the Tramp.

But not friendly enough to resist being horrified by the fierceness that is a rampaging Ewok.

Can't you just hear the little chipmunk scream?

There are very few creatures brave enough to be friendly in the face of an irate Ewok.

Grrrrrr.

When I was young I used to have this recurring nightmare in which I went bowling with friends and the party was broken up when a terminator robot busted into the bowling alley and slaughtered everyone.  I escaped the building and hid under a car until the terminator removed his head and rolled it under the car, whereupon it exploded and I woke up.

Knowing this, you’d think that I hated the terminator movies but you’d be wrong.  I have no idea how old I was when I first saw a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger stroll into a bar to the tune of “Bad to the Bone,” but I have loved the movies ever since.  It’s been approximately one million years since I watched one, but I still hold a very dear place in my heart for those movies.

As a result, this week’s Thing That Does Not Suckis a no-brainer: The new Terminator movie.  I’d always been curious about what the post-apocalyptic world of the future the first movies hinted at looked like, and now I get to find out.  I have no idea whether or not the movie is any good, but I have to be honest: I’ll probably love it even if it’s terrible.  What can I say?  We all know I’m a sucker for action movies of dubious quality.

Also, it certainly doesn’t help that the movie stars Christian Bale.  I have a lot of respect for him as an actor after watching what he did to himself to star in the movie The Machinist (dude, I’ve never seen a living person get that skinny).  I think he’s terrific in the Batman movies, I adored his performance in 3:10 to Yuma, and I think he was creepy as could be in American Psycho.  He’s a fine actor, and I have faith he’ll make the new Terminator movie look good.

The extra-special treat?  The movie muckety-mucks in Hollywood must have known how much I love the Terminator movies because they decided to release the movie right before my birthday.  How sweet, right?  I can’t think of a better, more thoughtful gift from them!