The Rockafeller Skank

At this point, I'm just going to start titling posts based on whatever song happens to be running through Winamp at the time. Therefore, if I happen to ever title a post something like, "Fuck tha Police" or something, just keep right on moving. It doesn't mean anything. This post is, of course, courtesy of Fatboy Slim.

I've been getting a lot of searches for Gabrielle Reece lately, like this one that's searching for information about Gabrielle Reece's boyfriend. I think that we can put the mystery to rest now that I've been hiding the information from all of you that, yes, I am indeed Gabrielle Reece's boyfriend. Sure, she's a supermodel and beach-volleyball player (or she was, anyway), but I've just got some kind of magical spell that I cast over women ... Yeah, and up is down, left is right, white is black, and you have just stepped into Bizarro-World.

I'm amazed by the fact that I couldn't find the Metallica documentary, Some Kind of Monster, at work tonight. It's supposed to be a really great documentary, which is surprising because it covers the recording of the St. Anger album, which ... well, it sucked. It did. There's no two ways about it. Anyway, the documentary is directed by the guys who brought the world Paradise Lost, which was about the child-murders in some community (which escapes me), and ranks as one of the best documentaries I've ever seen; kudos to HBO. However, the point is Metallica fans are buying a documentary, for God's sake, to say nothing of the fact that fans of good cinema (and documentaries in particular) are buying a documentary about Metallica.

Maybe I was right about that Bizarro-World comment.

In other news, Bill Gates praised China for creating a new form of capitalism. I'm not sure about if that's particularly accurate, but he (according to an AFP news story) characterised the Chinese model in terms of "willingness to work hard and not having quite the same medical overhead or legal overhead". In other words, China is now taking its inspiration from Electronic Arts. *zing!* Seriously, though, this is the part where I'd go off on a rant about United States trade-policy, but I'm tired, so I'm going to bed instead. Lucky for you.

EDIT: I figured that I'd tack this on for good measure. While watching tonight, I saw one of the finest pieces of writing they've put together since the "Schweddy Balls" sketch. The following is Colin Farrell discussing the media's overwhelming attention to the treatment of the title character's possible homosexuality in Saturday Night LiveAlexander. This transcript is taken (without permission) from snltranscripts.jt.org, where you can also read the transcript of the "Schweddy Balls" sketch.
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Colin Farrell: Thank you. Thank you, Tina. I’m very proud of “Alexander.” It’s an honest, multifaceted portrayal of one of the greatest figures of the ancient world. And yet, all anyone seems to talk about is how this guy liked men as well as women. He’s so much more than that!

I mean, this is a man who was able to take a group of fresh-faced young boys and whip them into one of the greatest armies the world has ever seen. And it’s not like it was that easy to get these guys to go off and follow him. As everyone knows, it’s very hard to get Greek men to leave their brothers behind. So he looked all over Greece, and found men who were anxious to leave home because they didn’t like the way they were being reared.

Tina Fey: Th- This is fascinating. And during this whole time, the Greeks were constantly being attacked by the Persian army, right?

Colin Farrell: Yes, that’s right, and the Persians were strong, manly fighters. But Alexander managed to beat off the entire Persian army.

Amy Poehler: Amazing, amazing. And yet, all people can talk about is that he mighta been gay!

Colin Farrell: Sad, isn’t it? I mean, he united all of Greece, and got them to fight together as a nation.

Amy Poehler: So he used Greece to beat off the men of the Persian army?

Colin Farrell: Yes he did, Amy. Without Greece, the job of beating off the entire Persian army would’ve been much harder. I mean, this way he can finish them off quicker.

Tina Fey: That- that’s true. I know that, ‘cause I’m Greek. So, what was a typical battle like for Alexander?

Colin Farrell: Well, his preference was always to take the Persians from behind.

Amy Poehler: Of course, sure.

Colin Farrell: Alexander would use his troops to form a long phalanx, and then he would spread their flanks and ram the head of the phalanx into the Persian rear. And then his master stroke—you’ll like this, Amy—unknown to the Persians, Alexander would hide an entire battalion of the Greek navy inside the phalanx.

Amy Poehler: Really? Wow.

Colin Farrell: Yes. So finally, after pounding away for hours and hours, a raging torrent of Greek seamen would erupt into the Persian rear.

Tina Fey: Amazing. And all we Americans care about is the fact that he may have had sex with a man! We’re so provincial, unbelievable. Colin Farrell, everybody!
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AIM: therbmcc71

Sunshower

My friend Jessica is in town for about a week or so, prior to her deployment to another country for the next three years. Really, her husband is being deployed, but she's along for the ride, because she pretty much married into it, for better or worse. Therefore, since she's been back, I've been debating politics and the lack of art in popular American cinema and literature (though I don't care to call books without artistic merit "literature").

I have to work in less than two hours, but I'm unfortunately so wired on coffee that I haven't been able to sleep in the ninety or so minutes that I've been home. As such, I've decided to take this opportunity to once again remind and assure my three readers that I'm not dead. Not that anything bad has happened to me that might in the remotest of possibilities cause my death, although when Joe Black came knocking at my door, I lied and told him that he was looking for the fifty-something redneck next door. With any luck, I fooled him.

I don't understand the attraction people have to Mischa Barton. She's waify. I hate waify. Sarah Michelle Gellar up until about the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer looked way better than she did in later seasons, when she really seemed to thin out to the point where I started wondering if Freddie Prinze had put her on the Atkins diet. Better example of Sarah Michelle Gellar would have to be Cruel Intentions, but that's just because we all love a bad girl; especially one who would ever use the line, "You can put it anywhere." ... I don't care whether or not she means it, but it takes quite a girl to say something like that.

I have a tentative date with a girl for sometime in the future that has yet to be determined, provided mutually beneficial schedules can be found. In other words, sometime around June, I'm probably going out on a date. I didn't ask, really. I would have, really; no seriously, I would have, but Jessica got tired of listening to me talk to the girl about everything except going out on a date, and took my cell phone from me and proceeded to inform the girl in question that she should drop all of her plans and go out with me sometime, because I'm a very nice guy. Jessica can say this sort of thing, because she's married and lives in another state, and therefore doesn't have enough time to spend with me, so as to find out how nice a guy I'm really not. In any case, I've got a date that will be scheduled and rescheduled six times over before I actually go out on it. This is how my life works.

Unfortunately, this date means that I have to break the promise to myself that the next girl that I go out with will be Eliza Dushku. Sadly, reality had to set in sometime.

Today's payday, and I'm supposed to go out drinking with Jessica tonight, although there's a real lack of anything to do in the area. The bar scene out here really sucks if you don't feel like playing NTN trivia, I'm not sure where a good place for karaoke is any night other than Monday, and Five Year Jacket is about a week from losing its place on my sidebar because Kevin's not in the band anymore. Oh, I'm sure they're still a great and fun time, but it's just not the band that I bootlegged down in Seneca. This probably means a trip out to Tavern on the Fox, where they have the best Guinness that I've had in northern Illinois (coming in fairly close to Fat Jack's in Bloomington).

I've been looking at the notion of sticking sponsors up on my site, since I think that I'd be able to make something on the level of about fifty cents a month. If I didn't have to write that up as taxable income, you'd be seeing ads on this site for Viagra and -I would hope- ads for various "XXX" websites that would prominently feature the boobies that you don't find here. ... Speaking of which, I recently watched the trailer for XXX: State of the Union; the sequel so bad that even Vin Diesel wouldn't do it. Yes, it's probably even worse than Chronicles of Riddick.

Anyway, I have to be at work in 63 minutes, so I think that sleep is out of the question at this point. If I'm lucky, I'm not going to have to deal with a broken photo-developer, but I'm almost positive that I will, since the people that seem to want to work in Tarzhay's photo-lab-thing are people who don't give a shit about their customers or their customers' pictures; they just want the easiest job in the store. And it is the easiest job in the store, until I deem it necessary to vote them off the island because they're absolutely fucking incompetent; which is probably going to be the case today. I hate those fuckers, why does the company keep insisting we train more people in a department where three of us have been running the desk for a month without a problem? Because they're fuckwads, that's why.

Anyway, one of these days, I'm going to get perilously close to having boobies here, as we're going to talk about Bloomington's own Eden Prairie (there's a word that looks wrong any way you spell it), the Eastland Mall; home to attractive internet models who don't get naked. You're damn right; I'm going to sell out.

AIM: therbmcc71

Reprint from Nov. 9, 2003

The following is a comment that I made on Fubar. I could have sworn that I posted it here at some point, but it turns out that I didn't. Hence, I'm posting this here, as I tend to do with all of the better work I've done over at Fubar:

I'm afraid of panties. Deathly afraid of women's undergarments. I had to pull my mother's laundry out of the dryer, and interspersed among about three-dozen socks and a few nightgowns were her ... well, you get the point. Now, I have no problem with folding her socks or her nightgowns, but the underwear just gets dropped on the pile. I'm not folding her underwear; there's not enough whiskey in Ireland to make me do it.

I think all of this goes back to my parents' pressures on me to abstain from sex, pretty much forever. My mother always told me, "If you get a girl pregnant, her family had better like you, because you're out of this one." Strangely, I think that warning even extends after such a time as I get married; not that the whole marriage detail matters, seeing how I can't even get a girl to like me for more than a day or two, let alone getting her to stick around "for as long as we both shall live, or until one of us gets sick of the other."

So, I ended up taking each individual pair of underwear (you really can't call them "panties" when they belong to your mom) out of the dryer in such a way as one would pick up a piece of roadkill, using only the very ends of my thumb and forefinger to grasp them and quickly drop them when the forward-motion of the garments would be sufficient so as to propel them onto the mostly-folded laundry pile. And I realized after the second or third pair that I'm deathly afraid of women's undergarments, which explains why I've never been able to walk into a Victoria's Secret.

Well, that and because of the time I asked them if they had a thong in a child's size. ... just kidding.

I mean, it's not as though I'm afraid of women who are wearing only their undergarments. I just don't want to handle them any more than I want women seeing or handling my underwear, which is why I've always got my shirt tucked in. Of course, then again, that's like an extension of the neurosis that makes me so tremendously self-conscious that I'm uncomfortable being seen in anything less than a parka, explaining why I'm always wearing several layers of clothing. Yes, I have many, many more issues than your average heterosexual man.

Seriously, I don't think that most guys ever had these sort of mental problems, or -if they did- they somehow got over them. Maybe they had fathers who patted them on the back during a hunting trip and simply reminded them, "Son, I'm going to tell you about sex now. No glove, no love. Now let's field-strip this carcass and get out of here." At least those guys were afforded some sort of encouragement to have sex, provided it was protected sex. Me, I basically got the equivalent of, "If you're having sex, we will find out about it and then we'll kill you."

Maybe I'm reading a bit too much into that, but I think that I associate panties with sex, and I associate sex with death (or at the very least, being evicted from my rent-free existence), and so I'm absolutely terrified of panties. Especially any ones that are not white and cotton. Colors and non-cotton fabrics only serve to cause me more mental distress, because they're "fancy," and imply sex, thereby implying death, et cetera, et cetera.

So it's no wonder that I don't try harder to get myself a girlfriend. Because I'd eventually have to deal with panties. It's like going out on an adventure with Indiana Jones when you're afraid of snakes, because you just know there are going to be snakes. They just come with the territory. Women come equipped with panties. There's no way around it, short of a girl who just plain doesn't like them, and just goes commando all the time, and I'm pretty sure I'd have issues with a girl like that, too.

So, that's right. Why am I single? The answer is simple: Panties.


AIM: therbmcc71

Cogito Ergo Sum

Some people would say that it's precocious to start a post with the most well-known of Cartesian quotes. If you are one of those people, you should go watch Blade Runner and see what you start thinking. Myself, I just watched Ghost in the Shell, which treads a lot of that same ground, just like a lot of the elements in the PS2's Xenosaga. After being subjected to as many years of Matrix-mania as I have been, and "the world is an illusion"-style philosophies that would be more welcome after a viewing of The Truman Show, it's always nice to get back to the classic question of, "What is human?"

As you can tell, I'm on a bit of an anime kick right now; no doubt the result of my complete and utter loathing of the consistent stream of complete and utter garbage that Hollywood churns out year after year. After watching a movie in the theater, I find that more often than not I end up thinking about whether or not it was a good movie, and then I never think about it again. American studios don't like to put out films that require any brain-activity beyond basic autonomous functions. As such, making a film that would require the audience to consider cracking a book by Descartes... well, that's never going to happen.

Of course, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Reading works by Descartes should only be done by philosophy majors who want to write books on why Descartes was wrong, so they can be shelved at the local bookstore right alongside the fifty other books by their classmates on that exact same subject.

Anyway, I've been on this bizarre run lately, where I've been plumbing my DVD collection for films with any philosophical subject matter to them at all. I mean, Fight Club may be totally nihilistic, but at least it's got something going for it. A.I. is another one of those Blade Runner-style films in which robots become so human that finding the difference between the two becomes essentially pointless. In a few months, the last few discs of the Platinum edition of Evangelion should be out, so by then I should know whatever the fuck it's about.

What it eventually comes down to is the notion of the Polyvarius. It looks like a Stradavarius. It sounds like a Stradavarius. ... It smells like a Stradavarius! If you've got something that's artificial but can't be distinguished from the real thing, doesn't that pretty much define it as being real? ... Of course, none of this really hits on the notion of existence and Descartes and what-not. I'm just rambling because I've got a bitch of a headache, and I'm going to take about eight Advil and go to bed.

AIM: therbmcc71

Still Alive and Rambling

I bought Troy on DVD today, and I have to say it’s no Gladiator. I mean, it’s better than the Gladiator boxing-movie that had Brian Dennehy, but not the Russell Crowe film. I mean, I have to say that it’s not without flaws; the stereo separation is quite good, particularly when someone’s spilling blood off to the left or right of the screen. But I think the inherent problem with it is the fact that it’s a larger-than-life epic that’s told on the human scale, which just doesn’t work on a fundamental level. Furthermore, there are a lot of actresses out there who are considerably better-looking than the one they got to play Helen of Troy, not that I could understand what she saw in that pansy Legolas. On the plus-side, I’m going to say that Brian Cox has been having a great couple of years, what with this, the two Bourne movies and Super Troopers.

A couple of Gladiator-style beheadings would have also been nice. And some of the confrontations between the Greek and Trojan armies are just way too obviously computer-generated, making WETA’s work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy (the latter two films in particular) look even more spectacular. I’m not looking for pixels, but in Troy, the rushing army seems to all run in the exact same way, hold their shields in the same way, making them utterly stilted and inhuman.

I’ve been playing a great deal of World of Warcraft and Metroid Prime 2 lately. Both are absolutely fantastic games, managing to suck copious amounts of time out of me. This is a good thing, since I used to just go out and drink after work. The drinking itself wasn’t necessarily bad, but it ended up costing me a fuck-ton of money over the course of a month. When I considered that I could get a game like Metroid and get tens of hours out of it for the cost of a few nights’ drinking, it all justified itself.

And I just realized that I totally forgot about the only thing I do religiously around Christmas, and that’s watching E.T., which I guess I’m going to have to do tomorrow night or the night after. Basically, I watch E.T. only once a year so the movie never gets old. I go through most of the movies in my collection once every couple of months, but E.T. is the only one that I deliberately watch once a year. As such, this will mark the fifth time in my life that I’ve watched the movie; an astounding fact, since it’s over twenty years old.

And, for anyone from Fubar, no, I don’t look at Drew Barrymore in that movie and go, “Man, she turned out hot.” That’s an honor I reserve for Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. … One of these days, I really have to do a running-commentary on a movie. I think that the front-runner right now for that is Live Aid, since it just frees me to ramble for about eight hours. Unfortunately, between work, videogames and general laziness, I have to find some time to do that.

AIM: therbmcc71