Eclipse

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 24th of August) was Danimal's birthday. Is, was, I'm not sure what the terminology is, exactly. I posted something about it briefly several months ago, but it all runs together, and I don't remember when it was. I remember it well, but I don't remember when. Funny how memory does that; how you can't remember the specifics beyond an event itself. But I heard Floyd on the radio today, and Danimal loved Pink Floyd, so I figured I'd throw "Eclipse" up as a title for the post.

Tonight was karaoke night, and I contemplated singing a Pink Floyd song, but I wasn't entirely sure whether that would be apropos, so I didn't. This is to say nothing of the fact that "Wish You Were Here" would have made half of the bar cry in volumes that would have drowned the city, much like the rain yesterday. Also, I think that Roger Waters-era Pink Floyd is done best by a pair of singers (at least where karaoke is concerned) with one singing falsetto. I probably won't be able to find anyone to sing with me on that one, sort of like how Danimal was the Chef to my Eric Cartman when I would sing Cartman's version of Styx's "Come Sail Away".

My vacation has been greenlit and it starts Tuesday after next. I'm very excited. I'm oddly looking forward to spending a day in Omaha, somewhere in middle-America. The last time I was in Omaha, I was thirteen years old, and my family's Ford Explorer broke down for some odd reason, and we spent four of the longest hours of my life in that city (only called a "city" by Nebraska standards, because we know better, out here in civilization).

Okay, here's an example of how much Omaha sucked: We're stuck in town and so I go to the local comic book store, and that day they're having a signing by one of the great comic book writers (no, not Alan Moore, since I didn't say the great comic book writer). I see this in the window, and I'm like, "Holy shit," so I go in, and there's like four people in the store, including the owner, who's behind the counter, and the writer, who has a table in front of him, and nobody asking him for his autograph. So Neil and I strike up a conversation, and we end up talking at length about how America, by and large, is a very cool place to drive around, but Nebraska is like this void in the universe where culture just ceases to exist, like the inverse of the Field of Dreams. If You Build It... Yeah, it's fuckin' Nebraska.

The shop owner, with five people in the store, said it was a pretty busy day.

So, in honor of Neil, I'm going to Lebanon, Kansas on my way back, and I'm going to see the geographic center of the contiguous United States of America, because no one else ever did.

Totally getting off the subject, Bioshock for the Xbox 360 is a great game. Okay, it's great for the first three or so hours, which is how far I've gotten in it. The level design isn't the best I've ever seen, but the art direction is absolutely fucking amazing, and the story unfolds in much the same manner as Monolith's F.E.A.R., in that you can completely miss out on the plot if you don't just sit down and listen to some tape recordings now and again. Skipping those basically turns the game into your standard shooter, which I'm sure the Halo crowd will enjoy for the next thirty days or so, but the fact is that the game essentially takes place in a deep-sea version of Galt's Gulch.

No, seriously, I'm about to get all literary, here. It's a videogame that deals with objectivism. It's not nearly as heavy-handed as Ayn Rand ever got, nor does it repeatedly refer to any of the main characters as slender (yes, that's a crack at Ayn Rand's lack of adjectives with regard to Dagny Taggart), but the art direction, particularly in the opening fifteen or so minutes of the game, is very reminiscent of the covers of the Signet Fiction versions of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, with one of the background characters essentially taking the role of John Galt.

I can't really make any judgments as to how much of the game is derivative of Ayn Rand's writings, given that I haven't played through the game in its entirety, nor was I ever able to make it through Atlas Shrugged (since I made a deal with the book and said, "Ayn Rand, if you call Dagny Taggart slender one more time, I'm going to throw this book out the window, and so she did, and so I did), but I've been seeing some distinct parallels to objectivism in general withe regard to the establishment of ... whatever the undersea city's name is.

It really is a very good game, though. If I were to break it down to its component parts, I'm sure there's a little bit of Fallout, some Max Payne, a whole lot of Deus Ex, and more than a bit of F.E.A.R., none of which are less than stellar games. At no point does Bioshock necessarily steal from these games, but it certainly lifts gameplay concepts with the promise of enhancing the genre and thereby paying homage to the originals.

Seriously. It's a game that's worth the sixty dollars. It's rare that I'd ever say such a thing, but it's true. The last game I liked this much for the 360 was probably Dead Rising, and its only flaw was that it was the hardest game I've ever played in my life. Dead Rising, though, wouldn't have been enough for me to want a 360 of my own. Bioshock very nearly is. Another few games like this, and Microsoft might get $350 of mine. Of course, they've had eighteen months, and this is two games that I've truly adored, for a system that costs more than my yearly car-insurance bill.

Anyway, I've found my write-up on the opening band for the last Small Shiny Things show I went to, so hopefully I'll get that up before I go on vacation.

Oh, shit, I got sidetracked. So, anyway, Omaha, somewhere in middle-America: One of my regulars at work told me that he'd been there recently, and that they have a really good zoo and a surprisingly good jazz scene. Now, I don't know much about jazz, but I know i totally dug the Ken Burns documentary, so I could totally go for a night in Omaha for that. This is to say nothing of the fact that the city apparently also has a movie theater that, like the Normal Theater downstate, shows nothing but classic films. A few days ago, they were running The Wild Bunch, which pissed me off to no end, since I really would have liked to have seen that.

Anyway, I have to be at work in five hours, so I'm going to go. Hopefully I'll have a bit more to report on on several subjects before I leave for vacation.

Happy birthday, Danimal.


AIM: therbmcc71

Lecture 03: Orbiter Sub-System Design

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 some reading, as well, because you never know when there's going to be a pop quiz, and I found out something pretty interesting:

The space shuttle always takes off from Cape Canaveral. Okay, everyone knows that. However, it doesn't necessarily always land there, as sometimes weather or other factors make it so that the space shuttle will land at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Fine, whatever, that's not terribly shocking. To get the shuttle from California to Florida, it has to be blown on the back of a specially configured Boeing 747-100. It's been this way for almost thirty years.

But here's the kicker: That 747, when flying from California to Florida, gets 125 feet per gallon.


AIM: therbmcc71

Hot, Hot, Hot

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 re-reading it, and I still went, "What...?" Enjoy:

I’m a stakeholder in the Wal-Mart chain. Their four Wal-Mart store in my area, over the past five years I have seen the quality of the merchandise dementias. The customer service at Wal-Mart is disappointing, it’s like the employee have not been train in customer relations. The stores always crowded with mechanic and junky looking. As I stated I’m a stakeholder, but if I do not have to go in a Wal-Mart store I do not; I go to a Target store first. The customer service is better and the quality of the merchandise is much better.

And then here's a couple of five-star reviews for the first Left Behind book. This first one's by Ted M. "Ted", and it's a doozy, as can only be written by someone who would be hailed by Sean Hannity as a member of the intellectual elite:

I am not normally a reader of novels. I mostly read fact books and books of that nature.
I have never really liked books like that. I have even read many and had trouble paying attention to them.

This book is different. It is the very firs novel I read from cover to cover in less than 3 days.

It is the incredible Christian story of the Rapture and the chronicle of how God will take all of his true followers to heaven before the last days to spare them from the horrible things that will happen.

There are more books in this series and it is one of the bestselling Christian series of all time.

This book gives an important message that the last days are approaching and that Jesus Christ is returning soon.

And here's my favorite review of all time, for the same book. Also (clearly) five stars:

I just dun finished this here book. Now I'll tell all ya fellas that I aint too much on book learnin or readin words but I was goshdanged by this here book. It's just like I always dun knew it was gonna be. The Lord Jesus God gonna come down here on this Earth and be a whuppin up on all those people that aint right like christians. That includes all the dirty muslins and the stoopid aytheists (can't never be spellerin that word correct-like). Anyways I only hope the Lord God Jesus's repersentive on Earth, George W. Bush, can a get this here 'pocalypse a comin soon enough. Theez damn books are a goshdamn sight better than a watchin Jerry Springer or beatin up ma kids like I usually be doin'. One of them stoopid revewers said this here book was a ritten at a sixth grader level. Well thats a bunch of spit and possum vittles. I dint even finish the fourth grade and I'm a readin it just fine. Ima just hopin somebody gonna make nifty cartoon out this here book. YEEEEEHAAAAWWWWW!!!! PRAISE JESUS!!!!!

I tell ya, I live for this shit. This is the kind of idiocy I just don't find in the world I live in. Okay, granted, the last one's probably a fake, and a very good one at that, but with regard to the first two entries, I can totally see these posters' mothers pulling a Chinatown and eventually confessing, "She's my daughter AND my sister!!!"

AIM: therbmcc71

Don't Stop Me Now

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

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

Over and Out

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 priests who will say that the child is the devil; and even then, they have to at least perform an exorcism or two before they can give up hope.

Anyway, I just got home from karaoke, and I'm watching the Nancy Grace show, despite the fact that I know Nancy Grace is the most abhorrent show on television; as believing half of the shit that the anchor of that show (generally Nancy Grace) says is tantamount to lobotomizing oneself with a spoon, watching six hours of Fox News Network, and then reading a Bill O'Reilly book. Anyway, I'm watching this broad substitute for Nancy Grace, and she does the job exceptionally well, except for the fact that she's a brunette, and her teeth aren't as blindingly white, and she's got Bret Hart on as a guest commentator.

Now, Bret Hart is a legend. I just have to say that. I've never liked the guy much, but I do recognize his prominence as a wrestler, as I will ultimately recognize Peyton Manning, despite the fact that he robbed my Bears of a Superbowl victory. Regardless, Bret Hart's been out of the game for a couple of years, and he certainly has no reason to defend Vince McMahon, and so he goes on the show to be some sort of voice of reason...

If there's one thing the Nancy Grace show frowns upon, it's reason. They prefer to jump to the simplest possible conclusion, or the second-simplest, if that one will provide better ratings than the simplest conclusion. Nancy Grace is a big fan of finding guilt where the authorities have not yet determined reasonable expectation for guilt to exist, almost as though she's the world's biggest fan of Occam's Razor. The problem is, the world doesn't necessarily exist like this.

Take the Benoit case for example: Guy kills his wife and kid, then kills himself. Steroids are found in his home, along with painkillers and other drugs, all of which the local sheriff whatever spokesman said were legitimately prescribed (this is Tuesday, mind you). Now, the Nancy Grace show hears the word "steroids" and immediately assumes they're being taken by Chris Benoit, without considering the fact that Benoit's kid had Fragile X Syndrome, which is a form of autism, one of the side-effects is an extremely low degree of muscle mass. We're not talking about "oh, the kid's a little underweight," we're talking about something along the lines of the kid beyond beyond the Nicole Richie degree of being thin. The kid's gone past being gaunt.

Okay, so I'm not trying to excuse Chris Benoit's actions; I'm just trying to understand them. So, if this big, beefy professional wrestler had a kid who needed constant attention and wasn't ever going to be a normal kid, never going to be a normal adult, who was going to require constant attention for the remainder of his life, the wrestler's going to think, "What the fuck happened?" Again, I don't excuse the guy. He certainly had enough of an opportunity to find some sort of support network (although I understand it's very difficult to find a support network for Fragile X), but he didn't want to be a spokesman for the syndrome, according to something I found on WWE's website. And I can partially understand his desire to keep his private life private, but I still have to think that he was in a unique position to be a hero to a lot of wrestling fans who might have children or other relatives with Fragile X or other forms of autism.

Two or three days after the discovery of the bodies of Benoit and his family, the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy announced that they have been able to reverse the effects of Fragile X in mice. Maybe if the news had come out a week sooner, if it was the stress of his son's condition that caused Chris Benoit to kill his family and himself, maybe Benoit would have found the strength to hold on for a while longer. Granted, it's going to be years before this discovery hits human trials, but it's hope for a lot of people.

And if it wasn't his son's condition that drove Benoit to do it, maybe it was the drugs; and I'm not talking about steroids, here, because nothing in this case screams, "'Roid Rage!!!" No, the Bibles at the bedsides of the victims doesn't shout, "Yeah, I'm fuckin' batshit insane;" it's more along the lines of an act of contrition. Furthermore, these guys get knocked over the top rope every week, get body-slammed, suplexed, clotheslined, powerbombed, you name it. They're in a lot of pain after every match. If you think wrestling is fake, you're wrong. The wrestling is real; the outcome of the match is predetermined, but the wrestling is real. So maybe the guy was on a bad cocktail of pain-killing drugs.

Now, I don't know if they have one or several or none at all, but I would hope that the WWE would take this opportunity to enlist at least one, if not a permanent staff, of psychiatrists to keep track of these guys. Granted, the WWE probably isn't liable for Benoit's actions, but it's really in the best interest of the company to make sure that their employees are as sound of mind as they are of body.

I just find this whole situation tremendously sad for all parties. I find it sad for the extended family of Chris Benoit and his wife; I find it sad for the WWE corporation, because they're being burned at the stake right now, as much as Chris Benoit is; I find it sad for the fans who have taken down their posters of Chris Benoit because he's rotting in Hell as we speak; but I find it sad, most of all, for Daniel Benoit, whose only sin was being born with an unusual X-chromosome.

Anyway, back to Bret Hart. I'm not a fan, generally. Never have been. But the thing that drives me absolutely batshit insane about the Nancy Grace show is that any time that someone starts to make sense of a situation, particularly when that bit of sense runs against whatever sensationalistic angle the show happens to be running with, they cut the person off as soon as humanly possible, despite the fact that the commentator might actually be a legitimate source of actual information. So Bret Hart, wrestling legend, was pretty much limited to about thirty or so seconds of comment before being cut off for either a commercial or some schmuck who thinks this is all the result of 'Roid Rage.

Bret Hart, today, you are my hero. I only wish there were any channels out there that were actually devoted to finding truth, rather than just getting ratings. I loved the way they said under Bret Hart's name, "Close friend of Chris Benoit," when everything I've read said that Chris Benoit really didn't have any close friends. Clearly, being a fellow Canadian and professional wrestler is close enough for Headline News to deem "close friendship."

So, in closing, fuck you, Nancy Grace Show. Fuck you, your substitute hosts, your producers, your sponsors, and anyone at the corporate level involved with keeping your show alive.


On a lighter note, I wholeheartedly recommend dropping ninety-nine cents on the Chris Cornell cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." It is as good as you'd think it is, just from reading that sentence.

AIM: therbmcc71