I went one and one in Trivial Pursuit tonight. I'm pretty impressed with the Totally 80's edition of Trivial Pursuit, in that it was apparently mixing the absurdly easy (for anyone who was actually semi-conscious in the 80's) with the ridiculously difficult. As I see it, since I don't have much experience working as part of a team in the game, the hardest part seems to be coming to a consensus while the other team sits back waiting for your team to come to a unified answer. Yes, this has to do with the Elvis question. No, I'm not assigning blame to anyone, because Elvis was dead for five years, while Lennon was only dead for two, but my first guess was still right.
Regardless, it was good seeing Kevin, Jay, Greg, Krista, Matt, and the other people whose names I don't actually recall at the moment. If I didn't have to work until close on Saturday night, I'd have gone to see the band in Yorkville, but that wasn't the case. And then I have to close the joint on Friday night, too, which means I'll miss the band yet again, but at least I'll be able to get some Neil Diamond and maybe some Otis Redding or something in. No, I won't be drunk enough in two hours' worth of drinking to do any Smokey Robinson or Marvin Gaye, so don't even ask.
A couple of guys from the not-so-old days are crashing my guys-from-the-old-days internet hangout, and it's just not cool, particularly since one of them referred to me as a prick at one point. Had I only the power to call down the thunder like the old days (read: ban them and then alter their personal photos to some horrific act involving livestock), life would be good and life would return rather quickly to normal, but I don't and it probably won't. Regardless, I look at the two of them showing up in such a short time-frame as meaning only one thing: Invasion. I figure everyone else would consider me paranoid for this line of thought, but my job has taught me that paranoia is your best friend because it keeps shit from going horrifically wrong.
Anyway. Getting back to that post before about The Hunt For Yoshi and the song "Somebody", I've been listening to what fairly little Depeche Mode I've got (hey, I was dark and emo once, back when emo didn't put you on a list of people likely to shoot up your high school), and I'd never really noticed how unique David Gahan's voice is. Furthermore, it's made me really want to get the six-hundred-plus track Complete Depeche Mode collection that's available on iTunes, but I don't have the $170 to drop on it, which is a shame, because it's about fifty percent bigger than the Complete U2 collection I bought about two or so years ago, and only twenty bucks more.
I suppose that all goes back to my nature for being a completist. I like to have the entire collection of things, even if I don't necessarily enjoy them. It lets me sit back and contemplate the evolution of a series of works and come to a conclusion about its overall artistic merit. This is never more evident than in my need to buy Marvel Comics collections on DVD-ROM for about forty bucks a hit, which is a phenomenal value, considering the price of back-issues, but I can't help but notice that the majority of comic book issues are mediocre at best, particularly in the 1990's. Regardless, once I start into something, I end up having to complete it, like a sort of absolute necessity. It drives me completely batshit insane that I don't have the fifth season of Smallville or the ninth season of X-Files on DVD, because I've got all the others.
Anyway. It's no wonder there are no women here as I type this. I have the house to myself at the moment, and I should, by all rights, be knee-deep in shepherds' daughters, but instead I'm bitching about the fact that I don't have the last season of X-Files. And I know you're thinking the same thing I am: What the hell is the point of the last season of X-Files, since Good Ol' One-Arm Krycek is dead? I mean, that fucker should've had his own spin-off show instead of that Millennium show with Lance Henriksen.
Don't get me wrong, Lance Henriksen is the shit, but I think Chris Carter was grasping at straws on that one. I mean, it's like how I worked for a company called Video 2000. Where the hell do you intend to go with a show called Millennium if it gets picked up beyond January 1, 2000? It didn't, and I'm pretty sure Video 2000 folded by the middle of 2001, most likely because the bosses didn't believe me when I said this new DVD thing was the future and we oughta jump on that bandwagon.
I'm sure I initially meant for this to be a short post that was relatively to some point or another, but now I've lost it, and I freely admit that. I figure I'd probably update more often if I had an editor, preferably an attractive female editor who's smarter than myself, as that would really serve to inspire me to write more often. If she used red ink to correct errors and such on my pre-published posts, that would really kick ass, as that would inevitably cause me to have flashbacks to my high school political-science student-teacher, because that woman was built like a brick shithouse.
You remember that scene in Big, where they knock over the books on the desk so the teacher will bend over so they can look down her shirt as she picks the stuff up? It was like that. I like to think those are the happy memories we go back to when we die.
Oh, fuck yeah, I forgot: Terry Moore, the guy who wrote Strangers in Paradise, which is probably my favorite non-Alan Moore-miniseries comic book, is going to be writing Spider-Man Loves Mary-Jane, which is this super-cute little saccharine-sweet comic book about Peter Parker and Mary-Jane in high school. It's drawn pseudo-anime style, but without, like, the tentacles and giant robots and huge spherical tits on the high school girls that one might tend to expect from anime after a lifetime of watching nothing but hentai pornography.
Okay, that is seriously too much personal information that I have given away now, so I am going to go to sleep and attempt to forget that I have ever written any of this.
AIM: therbmcc71
Monday, July 23, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
Shiny Happy People
So I'm listening to this bunch of 90's covers by The Hunt For Yoshi (appropriately titled Nintendo Goes 90's), and they're really quite faithful to the original material, except they sound like they're being played through a Nintendo Entertainment System (yes, the 1985 one) sound processor. It's fun, but you really have to be into that sort of thing. The cover of Depeche Mode's "Somebody" is actually better than the original, I think, but equally depressing for the die-hard emo Depeche Mode fan.
I'm in a financial/business news kind of mood today:
Gerber is recalling half a million packs of organic rice and organic oatmeal cereal that may pose a choking hazard to infants. The non-organic stuff apparently doesn't have this issue. So take that, you damn hippies. You're just going to have to feed your kids the same genetically engineered stuff that your parents gave you when you were a baby.
If you're in college right now, I'm sorry, but your books are probably going to cost even more, since Houghton-Mifflin is buying the Harcourt divisions of Reed Elsevier, which, if I look over my old college textbooks, basically breaks down to ... over seventy-five percent of what I've got. Not only that, but consider the implications for potential abuse, such as if the head honchos at Houghton-Mifflin were to one day go, "You know what? The Holocaust was bullshit. We're not putting that in the history books anymore." I'm pretty sure that just about all of my high school textbooks (outside the Norton literature anthologies) were from either Houghton-Mifflin or Harcourt-Brace, so it doesn't bode well for anyone in the future.
The International House of Pancakes is buying Applebee's. I can't understand why anyone would buy Applebee's, because that's where you take your wife for dinner when you've been married for thirty years and neither of you gives a shit anymore; it's just too much work to go through the divorce, so you just stick it out until the other one dies. I'm pretty sure that's the point my parents are at. They go to Applebee's once every couple of months.
I also read that McDonald's is pushing breakfast and coffee more, which is driving up their sales, apparently at the expense of Starbucks. I'm not too sure that it's necessarily that McDonald's is taking away from Starbucks customers, as much as I think it's the fact that you can feed breakfast to a family of eight at McDonald's for the price of a venti latte and a scone.
Okay, it's not quite that dramatic, but, having worked at Starbucks, I know how the two companies differ with regard to their systems, and McDonald's, over the past few years, has turned into this amazing logistical spectacle. If there's five cars in front of you at McDonald's, you're still going to get your food in probably five or six minutes and be on your way. Starbucks? Fuck that, you're in for the long haul, especially when it gets hot and people start ordering three different kinds of Frappuccinos per car, because those things don't come out of a soft-serve machine; they have to get mixed and blended individually.
If you really want to see the Starbucks logistical nightmare in a level of chaos that could only be equaled by the release of a biological agent into a heavily populated area, watch what happens to a Starbucks drive-thru when it rains. The cars will wrap themselves around the building, and people will wait for twenty minutes for a cup of coffee they could have gotten in two, if they'd just gotten out of their cars and walked in the front door. And then they complain about how long they've been waiting, which was always my favorite part. It's like, you see how long the line is, you see that it's not moving, but you get in it, and you stay in it, even after the ten minutes before you reach the point of no return, where you're now stuck in the drive-thru line. Rain or shine, though, that McDonald's drive-thru gets the cars in and gets them the fuck out.
I suppose it all comes down to a mission-statement sort of thing, where McDonald's figures what's good for everybody is essentially good for the individual, whereas Starbucks takes the tack that every individual is different. Personally, I think it's just a matter of too many fucking options over at Starbucks and not enough automation. It's just coffee, people.
AIM: therbmcc71
I'm in a financial/business news kind of mood today:
Gerber is recalling half a million packs of organic rice and organic oatmeal cereal that may pose a choking hazard to infants. The non-organic stuff apparently doesn't have this issue. So take that, you damn hippies. You're just going to have to feed your kids the same genetically engineered stuff that your parents gave you when you were a baby.
If you're in college right now, I'm sorry, but your books are probably going to cost even more, since Houghton-Mifflin is buying the Harcourt divisions of Reed Elsevier, which, if I look over my old college textbooks, basically breaks down to ... over seventy-five percent of what I've got. Not only that, but consider the implications for potential abuse, such as if the head honchos at Houghton-Mifflin were to one day go, "You know what? The Holocaust was bullshit. We're not putting that in the history books anymore." I'm pretty sure that just about all of my high school textbooks (outside the Norton literature anthologies) were from either Houghton-Mifflin or Harcourt-Brace, so it doesn't bode well for anyone in the future.
The International House of Pancakes is buying Applebee's. I can't understand why anyone would buy Applebee's, because that's where you take your wife for dinner when you've been married for thirty years and neither of you gives a shit anymore; it's just too much work to go through the divorce, so you just stick it out until the other one dies. I'm pretty sure that's the point my parents are at. They go to Applebee's once every couple of months.
I also read that McDonald's is pushing breakfast and coffee more, which is driving up their sales, apparently at the expense of Starbucks. I'm not too sure that it's necessarily that McDonald's is taking away from Starbucks customers, as much as I think it's the fact that you can feed breakfast to a family of eight at McDonald's for the price of a venti latte and a scone.
Okay, it's not quite that dramatic, but, having worked at Starbucks, I know how the two companies differ with regard to their systems, and McDonald's, over the past few years, has turned into this amazing logistical spectacle. If there's five cars in front of you at McDonald's, you're still going to get your food in probably five or six minutes and be on your way. Starbucks? Fuck that, you're in for the long haul, especially when it gets hot and people start ordering three different kinds of Frappuccinos per car, because those things don't come out of a soft-serve machine; they have to get mixed and blended individually.
If you really want to see the Starbucks logistical nightmare in a level of chaos that could only be equaled by the release of a biological agent into a heavily populated area, watch what happens to a Starbucks drive-thru when it rains. The cars will wrap themselves around the building, and people will wait for twenty minutes for a cup of coffee they could have gotten in two, if they'd just gotten out of their cars and walked in the front door. And then they complain about how long they've been waiting, which was always my favorite part. It's like, you see how long the line is, you see that it's not moving, but you get in it, and you stay in it, even after the ten minutes before you reach the point of no return, where you're now stuck in the drive-thru line. Rain or shine, though, that McDonald's drive-thru gets the cars in and gets them the fuck out.
I suppose it all comes down to a mission-statement sort of thing, where McDonald's figures what's good for everybody is essentially good for the individual, whereas Starbucks takes the tack that every individual is different. Personally, I think it's just a matter of too many fucking options over at Starbucks and not enough automation. It's just coffee, people.
AIM: therbmcc71
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