No Boobies Here

Waiting For Somebody

2012-01-05T04:10:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure when my last post was, and I'm pretty sure it was a few years ago, but I decided to put this wonderful love letter on the internet. See, when you quit a game that charges a monthly fee, they tend to want to know why, and usually people probably give pretty short answers. I don't. To: BiowareJan 5, 2012, roughly 3:30 AMI'll be honest: The game's just not very good:- It feels like a

The Kids Are Alright

2010-01-01T04:34:00.003-06:00

So I just signed up for Netflix a couple of days ago, basically for the express purpose of saving money on DVD's, because I spend an extraordinary amount of money on bad movies. Most of the time, I know they're bad going in, but I really want to watch them at the time. However, thanks to the wonder of streaming video and $8.99 a month, I'm now able to watch a ton more movies than Hulu offers at a

Clowns of Death

2007-10-19T17:34:00.000-05:00

Quick question before I take my pre-karaoke nap. This is the sort of thing that I ponder for substantial periods of time while I'm at work:Okay, so if a kid comes to my door on Halloween and says Trick or Treat, and I produce a rabbit out of a hat, am I then allowed to say, "Good day to you, then," and close the door?After all, the kid is saying Trick or Treat, which implies that he'd rather have

Liars Everywhere

2007-10-19T04:31:00.000-05:00

So, I was bopping around the internet, as I commonly do on nights like this, where I just can't sleep, and I noticed the news story about the Turkish killings of a number of Armenian people, and how Congress is trying to figure out whether or not it's genocide, and whether or not they should condemn it. And this is one of those parts where we realize that Congress, despite being run by the

We Care A Lot

2007-10-07T21:12:00.001-05:00

So, I'm typing this post on my nifty new iPod Touch, and it's kind of a rough go, but I'm getting faster by the minute, and the predictive spelling is very nice on the regular occasion that I mistype a word. It's really a neat device, but I don't imagine I'll be using it for this sort of thing very often, as it really is a bit of work. And I have no idea how you kids do text-messaging on phones

Update 6: Hey There Delilah

2007-09-23T01:06:00.000-05:00

I'm home, finally. I got my truck back yesterday and drove sixteen straight hours to karaoke, where they made me sing. Ugh. As much as I like karaoke, and as much as I really respect these two guys' ability to sing Linkin Park (they're almost as good as the Stevie Nicks guy, but in a totally different way), but a man can't drive a thousand miles and be expected to sing as Eric Cartman at the drop

Update 5: Hold Me Now

2007-09-16T22:46:00.000-05:00

So while I've been stranded at the house here in Denver, I've been watching a great deal of Top Chef and have been considering making risotto for days. It's a side dish, which we had with these really good steaks in a teriyaki marinade and baked potatoes. I wasn't quite sure how the risotto was going to come out, though, since the guys on Top Chef are always bitching about how the risotto came

Update 4: Edge of Seventeen

2007-09-13T16:09:00.000-05:00

Okay, so you should have seen this guy at karaoke several nights ago. The guy looked like he should have been the front man for a heavy metal band, and he goes up to the stage, and I hear this guitar riff with a delay on it, so I'm like, "Okay, so is this Floyd?" because "Run Like Hell" and "Another Brick in the Wall" both have this delay effect, and then he starts singing the words, "Just like

Update 3: Come Pick Me Up

2007-09-10T15:54:00.000-05:00

So, about two hours after my last post, I got into a fender-bender in the parking lot of the Denver International Airport, so I haven't been able to get to the local Pantera Bread to keep everyone updated on my vacation. At the moment, I'm quite stuck here, as some broad blew through a stop sign and ran into my front-left quarter-panel and knocked the wheel about ten degrees off of vertical.

Update 2: Nebraska

2007-09-05T17:06:00.000-05:00

Nebraska smells. No, seriously, it does. In fact, lengthy sections of my trip reeked of cow, pig, and I think I may have passed a lemming farm along the way, which you'd really have been amused by the sign for. Sadly, I brought no digital camera, which I may very well have to rectify sometime while I'm here in Denver, as we do have Tarzhay stores here. Sure, they're all inconveniently located,

Update 1

2007-09-05T14:27:00.001-05:00

Have been in Denver for about two hours now. Am currently at the Apple Store, where I've been for about two hours now. New iPods announced, probably not arriving today. Must leave computer before I am discovered.AIM: therbmcc71

River Road

2007-09-04T09:05:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm just about to leave on the Great American Road Trip. No, I'm not going to be seeing all of America, but I'm going to be seeing the most important part of it; the part that isn't made up of tourist destinations and travel resorts. No national parks, no Disneyplaces, just America. Yes, I'm going alone, now stop looking at me like that. I've got 23 hours of music on the iPod, more on my

Eclipse

2007-08-25T02:32:00.001-05:00

In keeping with my regular updates on the weekly Trivial Pursuit game, Greg and I lost to Jay in Genus 5 last Sunday. We blame bad rolls, trying to get two pie-pieces and hitting the center, as we were up six pieces to three, and then Jay rallied to win the game in a finish that would have made Seabiscuit jealous.Yesterday (technically, seeing how it's after midnight, so we're talking about the

Lecture 03: Orbiter Sub-System Design

2007-08-08T03:00:00.000-05:00

So, the coolest thing in the world on iTunes is this whole iTunes U thing, in which you can listen to lectures from schools and courses you might never be able to afford or get accepted into. I'm currently listening to a 44-hour lecture course on Aircraft Systems Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because the entire course centers on the space shuttle. So I've been doing

Hot, Hot, Hot

2007-08-07T19:25:00.000-05:00

So today, because I'm extremely tired and I don't feel like coming up with my own material, I'm stealing it from comments left on other people's blogs and products I found on Amazon, because I found them terribly entertaining.Actually, there was a bunch of potential candidates for this first one, but this particular comment was the one that stuck out, because it made me actually stop, try

Don't Stop Me Now

2007-07-23T03:03:00.000-05:00

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

Shiny Happy People

2007-07-16T16:17:00.000-05:00

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

Over and Out

2007-06-30T03:01:00.000-05:00

I'm so pissed off about this whole Chris Benoit thing, and in a number of ways.I have to tell you up front that I hope the guy rots in Hell for what he's done. I do. Whatever mitigating circumstances there might be, there's no excuse for what he did. None. I don't care what kind of drugs he might have been on, there's no excuse for killing your kid, unless you've got testimony from at least two

Stupid Typo

2007-05-23T22:35:00.000-05:00

So, I thought I was going to look at pornography this evening, but instead I'm reading about rhotic versus non-rhotic accents. I had no idea there was even such a thing or terminology to define it. I figured accents just vary so wildly that it's impossible to simply categorize them as one or the other. During all of this, I started to read about African American Vernacular English, which is

Alex Descends into Hell for a Bottle of Milk

2007-05-15T21:37:00.000-05:00

So I can't find the notebook in which I placed the review of the opening band for the last show I went to. Oh well, I think we'll all live. I'll find it eventually and cruelty will ensue.At the moment, I'm involved in a war of comments over at Joystiq, with regard to the sales of the Sony PSP versus the Nintendo DS. There's a PSP fanboy over there who seems to think that the DS and the DS Lite

Come Sail Away

2007-04-05T02:53:00.000-05:00

So it didn't hit me what Danimal's passing really meant to me on a personal level until probably twenty-four hours after I made my last post: I'm never going to be able to sing "Come Sail Away" ever again, because I've lost my Chef. I don't do anything else well at karaoke, and now my Chef is gone. So it reminds me of this tribute to Mel Blanc:I have to be at a funeral in seven hours, so you'll

Fell On Black Days

2007-03-31T17:05:00.000-05:00

So I was going to post this running commentary I was scribbling last night while I was out seeing the band, but I'm not going to bother doing that today because my friend (and the guy who runs the karaoke I regularly attend) Dan died suddenly yesterday. One of those "just dropped dead" things. So I'm not really in the mood to type up something really extravagantly entertaining. I think he'd have

Boys Don't Cry

2007-03-18T03:13:00.000-05:00

So I told Kevin that I'd try to update. To be specific, I told him that I'd try to try, but I took the time to hit iTunes and go shopping. I still haven't found anything that I particularly want to buy, but at least I'm out of this bizarre week-long fetish that I had for post-Rammstein European electronica/industrial music that I only use for playing player-versus-player in World of Warcraft,

Until the End of the World

2006-12-05T20:34:00.000-06:00

The last week or so has been absurdly crappy, so I'm going to go low-profile for a few weeks or so. In the meantime, I'm going to ponder things like the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the ontological argument; where Superman Returns ranks in the grand scheme of superhero movies; whether I have to replace the CD-R drive on my desktop because of its sticking door; whether or not to buy Trauma

Eight Days a Wiik

2006-11-26T01:09:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I've got no shortage of Wii puns for the blog titles. Anyway, it's been about a week that I've had the Wii, and it's only now that I'm finally getting back to my blog to say how obscenely cool it is, beyond initial impressions.It is obscenely cool, even after a week, which is odd, given that most videogame systems (or, more appropriately, the games themselves) don't really keep my attention

Everybody's Workin' for the Wiikend [update 2]

2006-11-19T10:09:00.000-06:00

It's all hooked up, and now I'm waiting for the update to finish. This is probably a lost cause and Nintendo's probably totally bogged down in their update pipeline, so I probably shouldn't bother trying to access the weather channel. I might add that it's terribly cute, and I now totally understand why the wrist strap comes attached to the Wiimote (no, I didn't accidentally throw it).... After

Everybody's Workin' for the Wiikend [update 1]

2006-11-19T07:30:00.000-06:00

I got in line at 6:45, and they started handing out the tickets at a couple of minutes after 7:00, as expected. I got ticket number 56 out of 81, and I'm now typing this at the local Pantera Bread (where thrash metal meets sandwiches). Since my console is guaranteed until noon, I'm not going to hurry back. It's cold outside, and I need coffee.And I've crunched the numbers, and I'll have just shy

Everybody's Workin' for the Wiikend

2006-11-18T22:24:00.000-06:00

Preface: I still hate Blogger's lack of support for Safari (the official Mac web browser, for you poor, unwashed Windows users), which forces me to use Firefox. Not cool.So it's a little after ten o'clock right now, and there's about fifteen or twenty people camping out in front of my store, waiting for the Wii tomorrow morning. I'd include pictures, but I lack a digital camera, so you'll just

Night in my Veins

2006-11-17T02:14:00.000-06:00

I've gone and switched over to the new Blogger software, which has since killed all of my counters and various other links. Please comment if you feel you've been slighted by this technical difficulty, because I don't remember more than about three people's sites. But I can tag stuff now, just like the cool sites. Losing my counters is kind of a downer, but I think I actually saw them ticking

Losing My Religion

2006-11-12T02:56:00.000-06:00

With the holidays approaching, I have taken a long, hard look at the notion of Intelligent Design, and I have found it to be perfectly plausible. As such, I've decided to take up religion:I am going to become a Pastafarian.Further information on the Pastafarian religion and the Flying Spaghetti Monster (which created everything) can be found at venganza.orgI just thought I'd clue you all in

Creep

2006-10-22T04:35:00.000-05:00

I had this post all written up about why I haven't updated this blog, but it went all emo, and I don't get emo in front of other people. I'll update again someday. Maybe. Depends on whether I can ever dredge up something coherent to say.AIM: therbmcc71

Gloria

2006-09-27T16:57:00.000-05:00

No, not the Van Morrison version. I was dicking around on my guitar a couple of days ago, playing A and E chords, and I found myself suddenly playing "Gloria" by Laura Branigan. And I really enjoyed it. It's terribly catchy, even twenty-four years later.Today, some dickwad decided it was in the public interest to place a sticker on one of my fixtures at work. This is bad enough, in and of itself.

Human Touch

2006-09-16T02:15:00.000-05:00

So I haven't posted anything in a while. I still really don't have anything to say, since I haven't seen any good movies, played any new games, or done much of anything with the sort of entertainment mumbo-jumbo that I tend to talk about here. As such, I'm going to entertain you with a relatively lengthy bit of prose from Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon, which I found fairly entertaining

God Only Knows

2006-08-14T05:08:00.000-05:00

By and large, I can't stand Beach Boys music, but I've been listening to Pet Sounds for the better part of a week now, and I can't stop.My ten-year high school reunion's coming up, and I've been having trouble coming up with a cover identity. There are really precious few people who know what I've actually been doing for the last ten years, which comprise of jack and shit, and so I've been

Vacation

2006-08-12T05:54:00.000-05:00

To recap what's been going on prior to this week, I picked up the VH1 Behind the Music: The Go-Go's Collection disc off of iTunes; a whopping $7.99 for eighteen tracks. I'm always quite happy when I find a deal on iTunes, and I certainly was in this case, because Belinda Carlisle was the first great love of my life, at the age of six. Girls in bands are just cool; oh, it's true.This week, my

Living After Midnight

2006-08-02T04:22:00.000-05:00

I have to work in four hours. Stupid days off screwing up my sleep schedule. I've spent the last forty-eight hours doing as little as humanly possible, with the exception of watching movies, eating, and playing videogames. This is how everyone should live, but, sadly, I must go back to work. Stupid work.V for Vendetta was pretty good, though I'd have never pegged it as being a Wachowski Brothers

Tonight and the Rest of My Life

2006-07-30T03:22:00.000-05:00

So anyway, it was karaoke night, and I'm tremendously drunk; so drunk, I might add, that I was surfing iTunes for something to listen to while I go to sleep, and I came across some startling knowledge of such paramount importance that I thought you all have to know. Yes, both of you have to know:The new Nina Gordon album comes out on the 8th. Yes!!! After six years, I've finally got the new Nina

Back In Time

2006-07-21T04:45:00.000-05:00

All righty, and it's been something like a month since my last post, and I'd desperately like to say that I've been terribly busy with new, important, and fantastically interesting things, but I'm sorry to say that's not the case. I've been doing karaoke on Saturday nights, and pretty much playing videogames, working, and sleeping most of the rest of my time.That said, here's a rundown of the

Twistin' the Night Away

2006-06-24T01:51:00.000-05:00

I'm on a Sam Cooke kick tonight, probably because tomorrow night is karaoke night, though I'm fairly certain there isn't any Sam Cooke to be had in the Saturday Night Music Club catalog. However, tomorrow night at the bowling alley, I will be singing my usual Eric Cartman version of "Come Sail Away," though I'm fairly certain that I'm going to preface this with "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch," as well as

Bad

2006-06-09T23:57:00.000-05:00

So, no shit, there I was (all stories become ten times better when started with this phrase) at the bowling alley after work. I occasionally go there after work for a beer because it's the quietest bar around, but tonight I was drinking in the bowling alley proper because there was a private party in the bowling alley bar. Yeah, draw your own conclusions about that. But I digress.Anyway, I'm

Stuck in a Movie You Can't Get Out Of

2006-06-08T02:35:00.000-05:00

I will preface this post with an excerpt from Roger Ebert's review of North:I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it. In a nutshell, this is my

Workin' for a Livin'

2006-05-26T04:11:00.000-05:00

The only thing that came out this week that was remotely worth buying was the Huey Lewis & the News Greatest Hits album. This has left me sitting at home over the course of my two days off this week with little to do other than surf the internet and covet the black MacBook and sneer at its $1500 price tag. I mean, seriously, it's an awful week for a media addict, such as myself.Def Leppard rolled

Build Me Up Buttercup

2006-05-21T02:41:00.000-05:00

By and large, my night of karaoke... was shit. I mean, it was garbage from beginning to very nearly the end. The Commitments' version of "Hard To Handle" is generally pretty easy for me, but I couldn't hold it together until the last part of the song. And then I was going to sing the Barenaked Ladies' "If I Had a Million Dollars," but I apparently, being relatively drunk, wrote down the wrong

Hard Times

2006-05-10T01:22:00.000-05:00

So it's been a while since I posted, and that's ... as much as I'd like to say that I've had a social life, that's largely untrue. I went out to see Five Year Jacket, and bookended that weekend with weekends of karaoke, in both of which I set new standards for bad renditions of Wilson Pickett songs.I got my 40 Years of Avengers DVD-ROM, and it kicks considerably more ass than the Fantasic Four

Revolution

2006-04-28T08:21:00.000-05:00

So you say you want a Revolution? Well, you're not going to get it, because Nintendo made the bizarrely questionable decision to name its new console "Wii," which is pronounced the same as "we," which also functions as British slang for urination. Oh, sure, it's also pronounced the same as the French word for "yes," but that doesn't make it any less stupid. No, it makes it even more stupid,

Combat Drop

2006-04-22T03:01:00.000-05:00

Still alive, but there's really not a great deal to talk about. This week I bought the score to Aliens, my Avengers DVD-ROM still hasn't shipped, and nothing came out on DVD this week that was worth buying. "What about Hostel?" you ask? Get the hell out of here, I don't know you!The band's playing at the Venice Tavern tonight (Saturday), and then next Saturday at the Tiger Club. Both should be a

Come Pick Me Up

2006-04-10T03:51:00.000-05:00

I really don't have much to update with, other than the fact that the Pirate Radio set was every bit as good as expected. That is to say that it's nothing short of fantastic, given that this is the Pretenders we're talking about. In other news, my 40 Years of the Avengers disc has been delayed yet again, going from 3/31 to 4/7 to "mid-April." Fuckers. I haven't yet gotten a digital-SLR, either,

The First Cut is the Deepest

2006-04-03T01:32:00.000-05:00

I've had a really rough last couple of days, so I don't have any funny to spare anyone, outside of my little instant-messenger club. I've been watching Grey's Anatomy for the last couple of days, and I find myself looking up medical terminology like 'central venous catheter' and 'Seldinger technique' on Wikipedia. This is yet another category of Wikipedia that I'd never previously tapped

Trapped in the Closet

2006-03-25T03:29:00.000-06:00

This thread has been edited for the purpose of making it easier for people to find the information that they're actually looking for.In other news, I've declared war on the front-page management over at That's Just Not Right, because the front page hasn't been updated in over a month. The war would be ongoing, but unfortunately a cease-fire was ordered by said management, since they can lock down

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

2006-03-22T03:11:00.000-06:00

Yeah, yesterday was election day here in Illinois, and I pulled a Democratic ballot. Let me tell you, I really thought it would be more exciting than it was, because nobody ran for half of the county posts. Granted, you're throwing your money away if you're running as a Democrat in the suburbs (fucking rich Republican fat bastard stronghold, this area), but you'd think they'd at least try to get

Hot in the City

2006-03-12T22:02:00.000-06:00

So I bought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas last night, and I managed to somehow make it farther in two hours than I'd previously done in about six. I figure this probably has something to do with the fact that I was using an Xbox controller instead of a PS2 controller, which many regard as the greatest controller in history, but I still hold that particular honor goes to the Gamecube. Now, if they

Time Has Told Me

2006-03-06T17:38:00.000-06:00

So, as a little break from my coloring (which I find terribly relaxing), I've been reading the first three issues of the Spider-Woman: Origin mini-series, and I'm having some difficulties parsing some of what I'm reading and keeping it in sync with what I remember from a lot of the characters Bendis decided to bring in.Generally speaking, issue #1 isn't much of a stretch and pretty well follows

Banzai Washout

2006-03-03T03:45:00.000-06:00

This is what I'm working on right now. I just got a 6 x 8" Wacom tablet for my Mac (works on PC, too), so I'm taking it for a spin in Photoshop Elements in the most appropriate manner possible for myself (caution, dialup users! about 300K worth of stuff here!):Original:Stripped down to line art:Color layer:Current layers combined:I'm not sticking strictly to the original coloring job because I

The Mark Has Been Made

2006-02-28T19:48:00.000-06:00

My friend Davy, in today's musing regarding the new Mac mini, mentioned something that I somehow overlooked in today's announcement that the Mac mini will now be powered by Intel Core Solo or Core Duo processors (depending on configuration): Apple stripped out the shitty ATI Radeon that was in the prior model, replacing it with an even worse Intel GMA950 graphics processor.The GMA950 sports 64

Who's Crying Now

2006-02-27T01:56:00.000-06:00

For those of you not on the Bloodhoof server of World of Warcraft, there's something you might not be aware of: There is this guild on the server named Elf Slappers, and I have to tell you that they're all a bunch of total douchebags. Oh, it's true, it's true. A bunch of slack-jawed junksluts is what they are. So retarded are they that the vast majority of them have Paladins as player characters

Electric Eye

2006-02-25T17:11:00.000-06:00

So last night, my friend Scott and I had about a two-hour discussion regarding artificial intelligence (and very real stupidity) in today's videogames. He was of the opinion that the bots' dodging abilities in current 3D shooters was a good example of artificial intelligence, to which I said, "They're stupid." Essentially, it's a kill-or-be-killed issue, and a sense of self-preservation exists in

My Father's Gun

2006-02-14T04:25:00.000-06:00

Dick Cheney's going to have to go hunting for a lawyer, following a hunting incident Saturday, in which the AP news story begins, "Vice President Dick Cheney has been given a warning citation for breaking Texas hunting law by failing to buy a $7 stamp allowing him to shoot upland game birds."Now, if a news story starts out like that, you'd think that would be about the gist of it. And, really, it

Diamonds and Rust

2006-02-08T03:15:00.000-06:00

Earlier in the week, I picked up The Best of Judas Priest and Priest's new album, Angel of Retribution off of iTunes, almost immediately after watching an hour-long show on VH1 Classic featuring Rob Halford, Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing. I'm quite happy with both of the albums, but –as far as the song "Diamonds and Rust" goes– I still have to say that I like the Joan Baez version better than the

She's A Rebel

2006-02-01T18:31:00.000-06:00

I'm just going to selectively quote and reorganize this Yahoo News story, because I find it absolutely fucking hysterical. Facts are not misrepresented in any way in this excerpt. You get only the funny parts:Police removed Sheehan and Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., from the visitors gallery Tuesday night. Sheehan was taken away in

Chill Factor

2006-01-29T01:03:00.000-06:00

On Thursday, I received in the mail my order for what is unarguably the very most insanely cool anthology ever created (the Bible has now fallen from the Top Ten; sorry, God). For only forty bucks each, I bought 40 Years of X-Men and 44 Years of Fantastic Four on DVD-ROM, each of which contain basically exactly what they're titled. Oh, sure, some people might complain (*cough* kvl! *cough!*) that

Why Aye Man

2006-01-24T04:57:00.000-06:00

So tonight I picked up the $11.99 Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits 22-song best-of album, and it's really very good. Oh, sure, I could have just dropped four bucks on "Sultans of Swing," "Walk of Life," "Money for Nothing," and "Romeo and Juliet,"but then I figured...Okay, I can't even keep typing this, because right now I'm listening to this audio stream by this guy named Gunther, and I can't tell

Don't Let the Green Grass Fool You

2006-01-20T03:18:00.000-06:00

About five minutes after uploading my last post (which has yet to be disputed by anyone whose answer isn't, "Dave Matthews makes my ears bleed"), I found the unfortunate news that Wilson Pickett died. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if this page isn't becoming a big obituary column. Regardless, here's a brief opinion piece:Wilson Pickett was best known for the songs, "In the Midnight Hour"

Girl with Crimson Nails, Jesus 'Round Her Neck

2006-01-19T17:47:00.000-06:00

Okay, just a brief little post as I play World of Warcraft, and it entails a scientific discovery I made today:SCIENTIFIC FACT:The act of hearing the song "Crash into Me" by the Dave Matthews Band reminds everyone in the world of someone else. This is not, in and of itself surprising. The surprising fact lies in the discovery that the person that you think about is not your current significant

The Deepest Blues Are Black

2006-01-14T04:31:00.000-06:00

So, while I'm working on my thesis about the decline and fall of X-Men comic books, I've been watching Macross, which is the original Japanese series that the first third of Robotech was based on, and I can tell you honestly: I hate it.I hate the show for a lot of little reasons, because it's, by and large, exactly the same show. The voices are all wrong, which I wouldn't even notice if I hadn't

No One Lives Forever

2006-01-13T03:02:00.000-06:00

Oingo Boingo always seems to have a good and fitting title for a blog post; fitting today because my favorite Second City teacher, Jim Zulevic, died on Monday at the age of 40. If you live in the Chicago area, you might recognize him as the red-shirted guy who did the promos between episodes of The Simpsons and Seinfeld. And now he's dead. Seems to be a lot of that going around.Anyway, I managed

Debaser

2006-01-08T18:47:00.000-06:00

Parental Advisory: The following post contains explicit content that may be unsuitable for readers under the age of 18, anyone from Utah, and the majority of Republicans. Don't say I didn't warn you.I love news stories focusing on the general retardation of callow religious folk:A movie theater owned by Utah Jazz owner Larry Miller abruptly changed its screening plans and decided not to show the

Cryin'

2006-01-06T03:18:00.000-06:00

As a preface to this hopefully-short post, I'm just going to say that the version of "Cryin'" that I'm listening to is indeed Roy Orbison. You can't substitute on Roy, and if you think the Van Halen version of "Oh, Pretty Woman" is better than the Roy Orbison original, you should check yourself into a mental-health center immediately.Anyway, we're going to talk about cover songs for a second,

Jimmy Olsen's Blues

2006-01-03T00:23:00.000-06:00

Yeah, so I'm watching Smallville, right? And it's such a phenomenally bad episode (Season 4, Episode 8) that Mark Snow's background music often goes so far over the top that it's the musical equivalent to Tom Cruise's portrayal of Lestat, or Alan Rickman's portrayal of the Sheriff of Nottingham in Prince of Thieves, but without the award nominations. But then again, the music's just trying to

Darkness on the Edge of Town

2006-01-02T01:11:00.000-06:00

Last night, as soon as midnight struck, people in my neighborhood started lighting off fireworks. Tons of them. I'm not sure what the reasoning for this is, except for perhaps as a sort of celebration that the year 2005 ended without George Bush causing a global nuclear exchange.Today, Doug Flutie hit the first drop-kick that the NFL has seen since 1941. I didn't even know anything about this

Dedication

2005-12-28T23:40:00.000-06:00

So right now I'm (obviously) listening to a song called "Dedication," by Thin Lizzy, available only on Thin Lizzy's Dedication - The Very Best of Thin Lizzy album, which is available on iTunes for the low, low price of $5.99! No, I don't make any money off of this, but if you dig Thin Lizzy, it's eighteen tracks of the band's best work, for just under six bucks. Totally worth it, I think.Now,

Suck

2005-12-27T23:32:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I just watched the trailer for Date Movie, starring Alyson Hannigan, and I have to say that it is, bar none, the most absolutely not funny trailer for a movie that I have ever seen in my life. I mean, when they say that it's from two of the six writers of Scary Movie, it gets to be pretty obvious that those two writers must have been the talentless hacks who only managed to get

Boyz in the Adulthood

2005-12-26T00:51:00.000-06:00

Just one thing: Right now I'm listening to Talk is Cheap, Vol. 1 by Henry Rollins, and it's the funniest album I've ever heard. I have no idea what happened in the twenty years since Black Flag that would have caused him to morph into this, but it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than most of his spoken-word stuff. Seriously, it's goddamn hysterical. Pick it up for $11.99 through iTunes or

Are We the Waiting

2005-12-25T12:42:00.000-06:00

So it's Christmas, and we did the gifts thing last night, because my sister and her family are going to my brother-in-law's family thing today. My nephew likes his new camcorder (and he's too young to realize that it's really not that good); my niece likes her soccer goal (which I have to give my brother money for, still); and I spent a combined total of twenty dollars on my parents, having

The Ecstasy of Gold

2005-12-20T00:58:00.000-06:00

So I just finished watching Blue Gender, which is a 26-episode Japanese animated series from around 2000-2001, and ... it was okay. I mean, I've seen a lot worse (most of it being the stereotypical "high school girl saves the world from invasive green tentacles" storyline), but this one just... okay, I'll break it down point by point, good versus bad:First, at least it had a plot. FUNimation's

Things Behind the Sun

2005-12-18T02:08:00.000-06:00

John Spencer, best known for playing Leo McGarry on The West Wing, died on Friday. Just thought that I'd get that out of the way, since I like that show so much. It's really gotten a lot better during this season, barring the live episode, which was ... why did they do that, anyway? Well, anyway, it's a sad day for all of us West Wing fans. It'll be almost as sad when they finally cancel the show

Born To Be Wild

2005-12-08T23:04:00.000-06:00

And, in my third post of the night, Fez from That 70's Show has signed on to play Ponch in the big-screen adaptation of the beloved 70's cop-drama CHiPs, courtesy of the same studio that brought you The Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky & Hutch. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.So, when do we get a big-screen version of Knight Rider? Hell, I bet David Hasselhoff would probably do the movie for peanuts,

Aerodynamic

2005-12-08T22:44:00.000-06:00

People who know me well know how much I hate flying; that I want to go back to the U.K. at some point, but I've no intention of flying there, and that I'm more likely to create a madcap scheme that involves driving up through Canada, on to the polar ice cap (until the Bush administration completes its melting of it), over to Russia, through various European states, until finally taking the

Brilliant Disguise

2005-12-08T21:03:00.000-06:00

Okay, so in the highly likely event that you didn't read it, here's a link to my review of three live-music DVD's that came out a few weeks ago, all of which are very much worth buying; an article I creatively titled Trading Wings for Wheels on a Holiday Where the Streets Have No Name. It's a couple-thousand words, and there are no pictures (because I got lazy and didn't cap any), so it's a

Just Like Heaven... or maybe not.

2005-12-01T21:46:00.000-06:00

I'm watching Kingdom of Heaven right now, a movie which I bought last Saturday for $8.88, and I think I really got screwed on it. This is just an awful movie, the likes of which haven't been seen in several years. It's not as though Ridley Scott is infallible or anything, and ‚Äìtruth be told‚Äì¬†Gladiator wasn't really as good as you think it was. The guy just doesn't make anything really

American Idiot

2005-11-25T23:27:00.000-06:00

Question: What’s it gotta be like to be one of the Bush daughters, not being allowed to like the new Green Day album because it makes fun of daddy?I’m looking across my room at a stack of DVD’s, particularly all of my Japanese animation, is about ready to fall over on to the spot where my laptop generally sits. A great pile of Robotech (the complete series), Evangelion, Appleseed, Ghost in the

Hitchin' A Ride

2005-11-20T01:05:00.000-06:00

I've been listening to a lot of Green Day since I bought their new CD/DVD, Bullet in a Bible, package on Tuesday. I probably wouldn't have ever gone back to listening to Green Day (as I haven't for about the entirety of the ten years since Dookie) if not for the fact that American Idiot is such a brilliant album. If you're George Bush or a staunch supporter, then I'm sure you don't agree with

The Kids Aren't Alright

2005-11-04T21:55:00.000-06:00

Because I was asked for help with a persuasive essay on this very topic, I have decided to write this, despite the fact that my statements on such went pretty much completely ignored.When our children turn on the television, it's bad enough that they have to sit through the complete and utter garbage that's shoveled up to us on a nightly basis by the networks, as though they feel the overwhelming

The Boatman's Call

2005-10-31T19:03:00.000-06:00

I remember seeing Titanic with my ex-girlfriend when it came out in the theaters in December of 1997. I think we saw it on either opening night or the night after, and the print was nothing short of pristine. It was simply the finest, most utterly scratch-free print I'd ever seen, which made it easy to get lost in the spectacle of the film. Unfortunately, the first half of the film had to do with

Sultans of Swing

2005-10-23T23:26:00.000-05:00

Virgin Radio UK has a thing for Dire Straits, because I'm listening to "Sultans of Swing" right now, and last night they were playing "Romeo and Juliet." Maybe it's just the overnight guy, I don't know. In any case, it's a hell of a lot better than anything you're going to get from the non-college American airwaves, and generally better than most of the streamed internet stations out there.FEAR

The Hand That Feeds

2005-10-22T00:51:00.000-05:00

So, I've been toying with GarageBand, remixing Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand That Feeds," and it's been a fun little time, eliminating the guitar track and replacing it with the Eastern Santoor 01 loop, making for a bizarre mixture of Nine Inch Nails and Ravi Shankar or something. It'll be better in a few days, after I've run Trent's voice through a filter or something.So this week, I bought Black &

Someone Shit On The Coats

2005-10-15T21:36:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I'm listening to Dane Cook right now, because I'm installing Black & White 2 on my PC, which I bought because it was on sale. Sure, it wasn't on the $20 off sale that was Myst V, but I didn't pick up the last two Myst games until they were on super-mega-clearance, so I'll probably wait until this one is, too. However, since there was still a copy of Black & White 2, I decided to pick it

Run Like Hell

2005-10-15T01:41:00.000-05:00

I actually wish I was listening to Pink Floyd's "Run Like Hell," but -alas- I can't find the second disc to my copy of Pulse, their live album from the Division Bell tour. Furthermore, as you can see by the rampant italicization, I have gone about installing Firefox on my iBook for the sole benefit of making my blog look at least semi-respectable, which we all know that it's not.And, before I

Katrina: The Gathering

2005-10-14T05:09:00.000-05:00

So I'm listening to a version of "Ave Maria," as sang by Chris Cornell, and it's really good; I can't stress how good it is because these Blogger people have a thing against using Safari as a blogging browser, and they want me to move over to Firefox, which I'd happily do on my PC if I hadn't already, but not on my Mac. Sadly, even copy-pasting italicized text doesn't work. Oh, sure, they SAY (

Mixin' Liquor in a Pot Like Gumbo

2005-10-12T01:37:00.000-05:00

So right now I'm listening to a never-ending loop of Nina Gordon singing N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton," and it really cements what I've been saying for these months since rediscovering Nina Gordon, that her voice is pretty much the gold-standard for great voices. My friend Louie says that it's Allison Krauss, but I think he's only saying that because Krauss is apparently from Champaign, from

Leper Messiah

2005-10-04T13:09:00.000-05:00

And we're going to Metallica today for a post title, because George Bush has announced his Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, who has absolutely no experience as a jurist, but plenty of experience as an avid churchgoer who likes to lobby the American Bar Association to change its stance on a woman's right to choose.That said, I'm completely fucking floored by the fact that Pat Buchanan was on

Walking On Sunshine

2005-10-02T01:03:00.000-05:00

It's really funny if you get the joke with today's subject. If not, then you don't remember who made the song.Just to get us all on the same page, here, I'm going to tell you the best joke I heard about recent events. It's kind of highbrow, so if you don't get it... well, it's your loss as usual:"Musical group The Animals would like to retract their statement. There isn't a house in New Orleans."

It Just Works

2005-09-21T23:39:00.000-05:00

First things first: Mark, call your mother. I know you're going to read this eventually, and probably sooner than later. Call your mother; she wonders and probably worries about you.I don't have a song to use for this post, because I'm typing from my new toy, which doesn't have any music installed on it at the moment, and I'm not at my house, so I can't use my wireless network to screw around on

She Hangs Brightly

2005-09-18T03:25:00.000-05:00

At three in the morning, as I was walking home from my friend's house, as I tend to do after playing Xbox games (and might I add that I'm not sure if I like Burnout Revenge as much as I liked Burnout 3), I looked up at the sky and noticed something terribly peculiar: The full moon was so tremendously bright that the sky was blue and the clouds were white. It managed to overpower everything else

Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey While Waiting for World of Warcraft to Patch

2005-09-13T22:11:00.000-05:00

It's a fifty-six megabyte patch for World of Warcraft this month, and it's taking forever to unstuff itself, which is making me mad because I have to go in and re-spec my hunter. In the meantime, I'm sure you're all wondering about what it's like to be me, so here's twenty-five questions: o1. When you look at yourself in the mirror, what's the first thing you look at?: The strange man standing

The World At Large

2005-08-30T15:59:00.000-05:00

Don't hang on. Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.Yeah, I'm quoting "Dust in the Wind," but it's fitting on a number of levels, one of which is representative of my classically venomous yet vaguely poetic self; a little quality that I've made all my own. In any case, generally speaking, nothing lasts forever, barring the above exceptions made by Kansas, and the current presidential

Float On

2005-08-29T16:12:00.000-05:00

So I'm trying to decide right now whether to get Hot Fuss by The Killers or Good News for People Who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse. I'm leaning toward the latter, because it's a lot more eclectic and won't remind me in twenty years of that group that sounded like a less-pussified, dance-remix friendly version of Maroon 5.Bought Angel Season Five on DVD the other day and noticed that I'd seen the

Fall To Pieces

2005-08-16T01:56:00.000-05:00

While sitting at the bar tonight, there came about a conversation that led me to thinking about one of my ex-girlfriends.Assume the following: I've gotten married and have had children. An outlandish notion in and of itself, but I'll put it this way: Given that, if my ex-girlfriend called me and said she wanted me back, I'd leave my wife and kids on Christmas morning for this girl. She's got

It Makes No Difference

2005-08-15T00:55:00.000-05:00

I'm in a world of hurt right now from knocking down half of a twelve-ounce bag of Raisinets in a sitting. This is the result of there being no food in my house, barring about a half-pound of ground beef in the fridge, which I don't want to cook because I don't want to have to clean the pan after I'm done. Raisinets, on the other hand, are a decidedly low-preparation, low-mess kind of food,

Escape

2005-08-11T01:13:00.000-05:00

Last night I received an invitation to move out to California from one of my friends, who happens to be moving out there on Sunday. I think that I'm going to take him up on the offer just as soon as I can figure out what the hell I'm going to do there, but not before attending a wedding toward the end of September. Between that and sometime circa November is anyone's guess. I just have to be out

Make It Rain

2005-08-07T04:20:00.000-05:00

I have no idea how Tom Waits does it, but he did an entire album that sounds like Son House would have the morning after a night of drinking thirty shots of Jack Daniels, smoking an entire carton of Camel Wides, selling his soul to the devil, and waking up in a gutter. That said, Real Gone isn't necessarily a very good album. It might be for other artists, but I think most of us just want our