Battling Boredom with a Great Wastes of Your Time

Alright...I disappeared again. I'm sorry :-( You will be happy to know that I have answered most of the MGF e-mail...and I swear I didn't abandon you! Here's a post, hope you'll forgive me *blinks eyes*

You know…sloth isn’t really that huge of a sin.

No, seriously.

My days have become so jam packed with stuff to do for work and life that I miss the days of just being able to sit around and do nothing. Basically: I am bored with being busy. We put so much stock in being productive that we fail to realize that a couple hours of non-productivity (that doesn’t involve sleep) is great for the mind and body.

So the last couple hectic weeks, I chose to take yet ANOTHER short sabbatical from things I felt I “had” to do (Along with the blog, my workout and reading took a backseat in the schedule) and tried to discover some stuff that could be considered a productive waste of time.

Yeah, you read that right. A PRODUCTIVE WASTE OF TIME…otherwise known as “fun.”

BBC-America: “A Little Brit Different” indeed! Thanks to the 2007 writer’s strike, BBC-America quietly started to work itself more and more into my viewing schedule this past winter. Sorry Alton, you’re going to have to live with me splitting your time with Dr. Who. But honestly…take a gander at their TV Schedule lately? There are quite a few gems that can keep you captivated for hours. BBC feeds both my Reality TV and foodie fix with shows like Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (The people running the U.S. version are a bunch of plonkers!) and Last Restaurant Standing. I admit to becoming more and more addicted to Torchwood and MI-5. But by far, the cheeky and fun car show Top Gear wins thumbs up from BOTH Lenny and I. I really LOOOOVE me some Top Gear. Jazza, Hamster, and Capt. Slow provide more than enough humor than your standard sitcom! And I don’t care if you don’t know what a Bugatti Veyron is…the fact that they raced it against a fighter jet is JUST. PLAIN. COOL. So if you’re bored waiting for U.S. television to get back on track, check out what our neighbors across the pond are up to!

ytcracker – the Undisputed KING of Nerdcore: If you know me and Lenny…you know agreeing on what is “music” can be a bone of contention. So imagine the magnitude of the eye-roll I administered when he plugged his iPod in while we were driving around town and said, “I have something special. It’s Nerdcore rap!” Oh great. “His name is ytcracker.” Oh heaven help me. But I will admit this right now: My husband was right. (Happy Lenny?!) The Nerdcore sensation, ytcracker makes some fun rhymes while creatively using the gamer soundtrack of my early teens by sampling music from old Nintendo Entertainment System games. If you’re a big X-Play fan, you’ll recognize the catchy “DugDig” on their latest commercial on G4TV. For free you can download the 9-track “Nerdrap Entertainment System (N.E.S.)” and discover how loud you’ll giggle when you listen to “DugDig” and my current favorite, “Meganerd.”



The Lily & Lenny eBay Challenge: The most fun you can have on eBay without spending any money! This game was born one night when Lenny and I were bored and on the internet. It was created upon the premise that eBay has some pretty kooky things on it (thus earning Lenny’s distrust as a consumer center). How do you play? You type up two words into eBay’s search function and see what comes up. No big shakes, right? The laughs really start when you take two words that are so far apart from each other. For instance, one of the first search pairings I remember were the words GOAT and ANGEL. We got 6 pages of results! If you don’t believe me, you will just have to try it yourself. And if you come up with something completely awesome…write us and provide a screen print for goodness sakes!

The Passive Aggressive Notes Website: While I LOVE me some LOL Cats, you do need to mix up the humor every once in awhile. A girl like me can’t laugh at grammatically incorrect cats alone. No matter how cute they are! When the 12-year old in me wants a grown-up, yet completely immature laugh, I now can turn to the world of passive-aggression. Physical anger can be funny – but the pure hatred/bile/bravura poured out in a poorly written note is far more entertaining! The gang at the Passive Aggressive Notes Blog proves that theory so well, the folks at the South by Southwest Festival awarded it with one of their “Best of the Web” awards. Watch just how low human sensibility falls when the need to get over on people takes over.

Sit back from your busy life folks and waste some time – you’ll feel a lot better for it!