If Bill Cosby said it, it must be good

Reason number 103 it's good to be an adult: If you want cinnamon toast at 1 a.m., you can have cinnamon toast at 1 a.m. If you don't have the ingredients to to make cinnamon toast at 1 a.m., you can go to the grocery store at 1 a.m. and make cinnamon toast at 1:15 a.m.

Same goes for chocolate cake. When you live alone and you want a chocolate cake, there's no reason not to make one. So you make it, and it's good. It's only after you make it and have enjoyed a piece or two that you realize that you now have an entire chocolate cake on your hands. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. Some might even suggest there's something very right about it. And as the name of this blog would suggest, chocolate cake goes fine with any meal. But when you live alone and have a whole chocolate cake on your hands, you could have that cake for every meal and still be eating it for two weeks. You just suck it up and shovel it down and realize there are worse things to have on your hands.

Turn a flakier shade of pale

I did my best to stave off the inevitable skin peel -- and not the chemical kind that you pay lots of money for at the spa. The sunburn simply was too much for the back of my neck and shoulders. I might have done enough to avoid significant peeling on my face and arms. That's crucial because I can cover up my peeling shoulders well enough. Should be back to normal in another day or two.

In other news, it's time to start getting excited about Harry Potter again. We're a month out from the release of the fifth film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. And later in July, we've got the release of the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. So, now is the time to bust out the first four DVDs for a pre-movie screening. Or crack open Book 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to catch you up on where the series has left off. Or fire up your iPod to listen to the downloaded book on CD that you may or may not have illegally. Now's the time.

And if you, for some reason, need a little help becoming excited, here's a little reminder:

Turn a redder shade of pale

Yesterday, apparently I joined the entire city of Corpus Christi on a 2.5-mile stretch of beach on North Padre Island. That was the site of the 30th annual C-Sculptures event Saturday. A combination of beach, sand sculpting, live music and lots of people. When you're still relatively new in a town and experiencing events for the first time, it's hard to know much about the annual events and if they're worth attending. My general rule is that any event where you can be barefoot and half-dressed and not be in the minority is bound to be a fine time indeed. So I headed out just after lunch Saturday. On any normal day, I could leave my apartment and be standing in the ocean in less than 20 minutes. On this day, I was still in my car an hour and 20 minutes later. It's kind of hard to get to the beach when all the access roads are closed and the police are wandering around the roads looking confused. It was easy to blame them at the time, and I did. But I had no idea.

I mentioned earlier that I joined the entire city of Corpus Christi at the beach. And I wasn't exaggerating that much. If I told you there were 30,000 people on the couple of miles of beach yesterday, you'd probably envision a pretty crowded time. Well, 30,000 was only the number of people who camped out on the beach the night before for the event. Police estimated there were 100,000 people on the beach at any given time throughout the day. It became so crowded that police shut off beach access roads and turned people away. They estimated that as many as 250,000 people tried to attend this one day event. Considering the city has roughly 280,000 people, that's a pretty high attendance rate. Upon discovering that, police were absolved from any responsibility in the traffic gridlock.

And traffic gridlock is exactly what we experienced. That's what happens when you try to filter that many cars through a few access roads when everyone is trying to leave. So instead of getting caught up in that, I hung out on the beach while the crowds thinned. Not a bad alternative to idling in a row of cars. Except when you don't prepare your skin for that sort of exposure. I'm usually religious about sunscreen application. But I didn't make provisions to reapply. And so now, in the days after, I still get to lay around barefoot and half dressed, but that's mainly because my shoulders don't like the feel of anything other than aloe and lotion for the time being.

'With the first pick of the 2007 First-Year Players Draft ...'

It's 2 a.m. Perfect time for a late-night snack of bacon and pineapple-orange-banana juice. It's also the perfect time to get back to blogging.

I'm going to label myself as a real baseball nerd here, but I've spent the past couple days keeping up with the MLB draft both on TV and online. It's the first year the draft has ever been aired on TV, mainly because there usually just isn't enough interest. It's difficult for even baseball fans to get excited. First off, the draft is 50 rounds long. With 30 teams picking, that's up to 1,500 names called in a two day period. Compare this to the NFL when just over 200 will go, or basketball when around 60 will be drafted. And in the other sports, even the casual fan will know about the top players being drafted. You'd be hard pressed to find and NBA fan this year who doesn't know the names Greg Oden or Kevin Durant. Most NFL fans knew JaMarcus Russell hailed from LSU. But before yesterday, I would wager a guess than 95 percent of baseball fans didn't know who David Price is, much less that he played for Vanderbilt. Now, he's only the first overall player selected in this year's baseball draft by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. I'd bet that even after yesterday, 70 percent of baseball fans still don't know who he is. And why should they right now? Even the best prospects out of this draft won't sniff the major leagues for a couple of years. Realistically, teams are looking at 3 to 5 years of development before these prospects are ready to help out the major league team. It's just hard to get excited about the 2011 season yet. Unless, of course, you're a Ranger fan, when that's probably all you've got to look forward to for the next couple years.

The main thing worth noting after watching the first round of this draft on TV: Commissioner Bud Selig seemed very confused.



He'd come wandering out from behind the curtain up to the podium every 5 minutes to announce each pick looking like he wasn't quite sure where he was or what he was doing. His announcements of each player drafted were more like questions, like he had just heard of some of the players and some of the teams. But I won't bash Bud too much more. He gets plenty of that from everyone else around the league. I did realize something else about Bud though. He's got a long lost brother, from a fairly weighty gene pool.



It's none other than the brilliant astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. That's not meant as a slight to either one of them, but the resemblance is uncanny. But don't just take my word for it, or even just the pictures above.



I'll never be able to read A Brief History of Time the same ever again.

Outsourced

I've accepted the fact that if someone needs to call Microsoft for product support (and you can bet someone, somewhere, at this second does need Microsoft product support) that when they dial the number and someone answers, they are not speaking to you direct from Redmond, Wash. More like New Delhi, India. Or at least some remote location here in the states. Major corporations often outsource these kinds of jobs. It's cheaper. It allows them to focus on other things. It's a common business practice. Fine, I get that. But there's some places that when I look up the phone number in the phone book, I expect to be talking to someone at the address listed in the phone book. Like when I order a pizza. Apparently, I was wrong.

I decided I wanted Pizza Hut yesterday because I hadn't had anything from there in a while. It's not the greatest, but it's a good choice if you want a place that piles on the pepperonis. I look them up in the phone book to find quite a few locations around town, all listed with different phone numbers. I find the one that's in the shopping center directly across the street from me and call to make my order, which I plan on going to pick up at the store. So I wait 15 minutes and head over. When I give them my name, the woman just kind of stares at me and asks what phone number the order was under. So I give her my phone number and she proceeds to type it in on the computer only to discover that no such order is at the store or was taken by the store.

The story goes on, but here's basically what happened. Apparently, when you dial any one of the different Pizza Hut phone numbers in Corpus, even though there's many different numbers, they all are answered at one single, mystery location. The order is then relayed by computer to whichever location you called. But calling the number for the specific store you want to use apparently didn't matter to whoever was answering phones yesterday because they sent the order to the store on the other side of town. The lady actually at the Pizza Hut store made it sound like this was a common problem. Two pizzas were made for me yesterday. I paid for and received one. So whatever money they are saving by not having someone answer the phone at each location, they're losing in wasted pizzas. Thanks a lot, outsourcing.