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Another year has gone by and it’s time for my annual holiday greeting. From everyone here at production headquarters we wish all of you a safe, joyous, and happy holiday season!

Welcome to the seventh part of our series that features what we here at ET.com found to be entertaining stuff on the Internet.

During the summer, popular humour web site The Onion announced it had been sold off to a Chinese company. Specifically, it had been sold to Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Group. The web site for the company listed it’s phone number as 1-877-YU-IS-FISH, which if you speak Cantonese is fairly amusing.

What followed on the Onion web site was a slew of humourous articles and videos that suddenly either dealt with the faltering of the United States as a nation or the emerging strength of China as a superpower.

Consider the video below entitled “Police Still Searching For Missing Productive, Obedient Woman”.

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/onn_embed/embedded_player.swf

If that wasn’t entertaining enough for you, why don’t you have a listen to the Chinese Andy Rooney? If articles are your thing, we recommend “Potato-Faced Youngster Lauded For Memorizing Primitive 26-Character Alphabet“. A direct quote from the article is:

“Christopher Pierson, a glassy-eyed, slothful lump of a child who still watches cartoons despite being tall enough to reach a polymer-injection molding station, was endlessly praised Monday for recalling the scant 26 letters in the American alphabet.”

We here at ET.com were thoroughly entertained by the entire list of China-themed Onion offerings.

Stay tuned for part eight as we countdown the best of the Internet for 2009!

Technically today was day one of my holiday though I already had the weekend as a head start. I wish I could say I’ve done some constructive things with my time but I can’t. So far, I’ve done nothing but sleep lots, relax, eat lots of food that’s not good for me, play video games, and make an even bigger mess of my apartment.

I’m really enjoying my time off. It’s hard to believe I was thinking about working until Thursday. My enthusiasm for these days off is slightly tempered by the fact that there appears to be a fairly significant amount of people on my team who opted to work until Thursday. I checked my e-mail today and there was a surprising amount of chatter going on. I got a few bugs assigned to me. I’m going to have to keep an eye on what’s happening at work, until at least Christmas Eve, where I hope everyone will take a few days off. What keeners!

I think I’m going take next week off. Our paid winter holiday starts on the 24th. I have the option of working until then but I can also take three vacation days and just begin relaxing Friday afternoon. I kinda have an aversion to taking vacation days but I have over 21 of them saved up, so maybe it’s ok to use a few of them.

An odd circumstance is that even though the paid holiday doesn’t start until Thursday, all studio services are shutting down after Friday. I know at least one person who doesn’t have any holiday left so they’re forced to work next week but there will be no cafeteria to feed them nor any other support services to help them. I believe our team has arranged for a catered lunch for those days so it won’t be that bad. Maybe I should go in one of those days just to see what the lunch is.

Anyways, with me skipping the annual Vegas trip this year, I’ll be looking forward to some sleep and rest.

If you were to ask the fine people at Travelers, my apartment reached its one year anniversary yesterday. In their eyes, my home is one year old now. The previous owner was given the keys to my place on December 15, 2008. Of course, because of the various details, you could measure the age of my apartment in different ways. First, because the previous owner never moved in and no one actually lived in my apartment until me, you could argue the apartment didn’t start “aging” until I took possession on February 6th. Alternatively, you could say things didn’t really start until I moved in completely which would have been late spring.

Depending on how you squint at it, my apartment is either one year old, almost a year old, or barely six months old. I prefer to go with the six months assessment but I’m biased of course.

Once in a while, I allow myself to try something new at the supermarket. Usually, it’s a product that I think will taste good but might have no guarantees in that respect. I’d been seeing this President’s Choice Chicago-style deep dish frozen pizza for a few weeks. I was hesitant for a few reasons, first I wasn’t sure how deep dish would taste from a frozen state. Second, it was about $9 and since I’m cheap, that’s a pretty expensive single item from the supermarket.

A few weeks ago, I just decided to give it try since I wanted something different for dinner. As you can see above, it looks pretty damn good the box. Once I got it out of the box, this is what I saw below:

It was sealed up nice and fresh with a plastic wrap. There would be no freezer burn here. I wasn’t expecting it to come in cast-iron pan so I guess the aluminum pan was reasonable. I then removed the plastic wrap to reveal:

Hmmm… my pie didn’t have a lot of cheese on top. The picture showed a bit more cheese that I was expected. Still, it didn’t look too bad at all. Overall, it was a hefty pizza. I had no doubt it probably did weigh about 2 lbs. The next step was to put in the oven and just the required 40-45 minutes for it to cook. When it was baked to my liking, I took it out of the oven and this is what I saw:

The crust was a golden brown and I took it out before it had a chance to start to burn. Without a lot of cheese, the top was just this baked layer of tomato sauce. I didn’t really know what to expect. Tentatively, I cut my self a slice and placed it on a plate:

By this time, I was fairly hungry, so I devoured the slice in short order. I was pleasantly surprised. I was apprehensive that the crust would be too greasy or oily but that was not the case. It was almost crispy and reminded me a bit like a pastry crust. It wasn’t doughy either. While the toppings weren’t overflowing with meat, I can honestly say there was a good amount of pepperoni and sausage distributed to each slice. It sure felt like a slice of deep dish to me.

For better or worse, I happily ate the whole pizza over the course of three days. I would probably buy it again but probably not every week.

Despite being over the age of thirty, I bought a pair of skinny jeans at Gap a few days ago. I hadn’t planned on buying a pair that day. I was just casually looking around when I decided to try a pair on, just to see what the kids were wearing these days.

The first pair I tried on had a waist size of 32″. Normally this is just about fine for me and since these skinny jeans sat low on the waist, I didn’t think this would be a problem. I was right, the waist wasn’t the problem. What was a problem were my legs. Being a dude of Asian origin, I have typically large calves even though I don’t really workout at all. Combine my large calves with the skinny jeans and I had recipe for discomfort and tightness. I managed to get them on but sitting down was really not working. Walking was tough too.

Just for fun, I decided to get a pair with a 34″ waist. Now normally, any pair of regular jeans or other pants at a 34″ waist would be ridiculously oversized for me. I was prepared for a hilarious pair of clown-like pants as I pulled them on. To my pleasant surprise, it wasn’t all that bad. The waist was sure roomy but the jeans weren’t falling down. My calves weren’t compressed like a flight suit anymore but they weren’t swimming in material either. With a fashionable dark wash and a decent fit, I thought this would be a good purchase.

If you see me with my new “skinny” jeans on, get out of my way because I’m going to be listening to Menudo or whatever band skinny jeans people listen to. If you’re interested in reading more about skinny jeans on men phenomena, click here.

I took a taxi home from work this evening. I’ve done it a million times before when we used to work downtown but this was my first time from Burnaby. Since we’re in the middle of nowhere, the security desk has to specifically call a taxi for us. In better times, we’d just saunter over to the taxi stand outside the Pan Pacific Hotel.

Since it was Sunday, the wait for the taxi was no more than five minutes. Instead of Vancouver Taxi, the Burnaby location is serviced by Bonny’s Taxi. After an uneventful ride, the fare came to about $23. It probably would have taken another $20 had I been coming from downtown.

Let’s hope I don’t take too many taxis home before the project is over.

After watching the Canadian dollar go up and down, I finally just jumped in and bought Mythbusters: Season 5 on DVD. I ordered it online on Sunday but it didn’t actually ship until just two hours ago. The total with shipping came to about $60. Meanwhile, the Discovery store put the exact same DVD set on sale today at 40% off. I wasn’t able to cancel my original order and re-order with the new price. If life were fair, the people at the Discovery store would have given me the discount in light of the four day wait.

Maybe I’ll buy some American Chopper DVDs next. It’s sure entertaining when Paul Jr. and Paul Sr. get into arguments. Wait, what? Junior got fired from OCC? When did this happen?

Another product of attending last evening’s strata council shindig was that I found out how to get a copy of my apartment’s home warranty. In a bit of an oversight that I take full responsibility for, I did not get a copy of the warranty when I bought my place. Since my apartment is new, I have one year to get a list of deficiencies reported to the insurance company and the builder. Not having a copy of the warranty, I wasn’t really sure when my one year was up.

Talking to the strata council president, I found out who to call to get this info. This morning, I made the call. It turns out my one year date is next Tuesday. I was lucky. I cut it real close. This also tells me the previous owner, who never moved in, took possession one year ago on Tuesday.

I now have to spend the next few days going over my apartment to make up a list of deficiencies so I can send it out on Monday. Luckily, I don’t think I’ll have anything major to report. My fear is that I’ll overlook something major because I don’t know any better right now. I guess it’s time to do some research on the Internet now.