It Just Works

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 my PC's iTunes. I'm currently watching my friend Scott play Burnout Revenge (which I would italicize, if only I could find the icons and such for it, as I think that's a cookie thing that I don't have set up in Safari yet). Whoops, I said the S-word, which further illuminates things for those in the know, so I'll just make it plain:

I bought an iBook.

It's tremendously nice in every respect I've found for it so far, with the exception of Marble Blast Gold and Nanosaur, which I immediately threw into the Trash Can. Yes, I'm back to using trash cans; no more recycle bins of the Evil Empire. I'm also getting a crash course in Mac OS X, which I've used for about ten minutes in my entire life, five of which were spent playing with GarageBand, and the other five were spent trying to figure out how to boot up GarageBand. The screen on this thing (the 12" model, mind you) is absolutely gorgeous, and I've been spending some time enjoying the DVD-viewing program. Unfortunately, the DVD that I'm watching is a pan-and-scan version of King Arthur which I never took back to Hollywood Video after buying it last week.

I suppose Keira Knightley is probably just as hot in pan-and-scan as she is in widescreen, though. Sadly, I'm about twenty minutes into the movie, having paused it several times to either complain about its lack of quality or to extoll the power of Macintosh to Scott, who isn't quite fascinated by it, but has granted it a certain level of approval; shocking, given that his entire computing life consists of playing games, which is actually pretty much what I was doing with my computer, explaining my general absence from my blog in these months since buying World of Warcraft, but I haven't seen Keira Knightley once, and that was the whole reason for buying the DVD in the first place. Thankfully, I can't really play games on this computer, so I have to be somewhat productive. I suppose I'll be productive until such time as I start watching Pirates of the Caribbean one of these days and find myself unable to stop. The new trailer for Keira Knightley's new movie Domino is up at the Apple site, but I've only watched it once because I object to Tony Scott's photographing Keira Knightley (who I can not refer to as either 'Keira' or 'Knightley', as that would take away from her hotness, with her Brandi Chastain-like pornstar name) in some sort of piss-yellow

I have to say that Burnout Revenge, the fourth game in the Burnout series, is absolutely phenomenal. Sure, it's probably way too easy to succeed in the game, but I've never been a fan of games that I can't beat (Metroid Prime, for example, which once made me throw my controller down in anger and utter profanities for at least two minutes, using the words, "goddamn piece of shit monkeyfuck programmer bastards!" as a sort of refrain). The crash mode in Burnout Revenge is as good as it's ever been, which is saying a lot, because the crash mode was always the most enjoyable part for me, since it doesn't involve racing or quick reactions as it does a methodical thinking process about collisions, movement, inertia and mass. To put it more simply, it's a matter of driving a car very fast into traffic, shunting that traffic into another lane and repeating the process in an attempt to take out as many cars on the road as possible before your own car is destroyed in one of these collisions. To use a sports analogy, it's akin to taking out the dividers between bowling lanes and seeing how many lanes' worth of pins you can take out with one ball (yes, I know you're saying to yourself right now, "But bowling isn't a sport..." but you get my point). To use a movie analogy, it's like Charles De Mar saying, "Go that way very, very fast... if something gets in your way, turn," but without the whole part about turning.

I think my writing might be better on this machine, or maybe it's because I've actually got something to talk about, beyond those Elf Slapping bastards on Bloodhoof, who I will continue to reference until such time as this blog ranks above theirs in a Google search for such. I have no such wishes for the neat folks in Flying Cows of Doom, because they've got an obscenely cool guild name, which has almost made me accept their invitations for membership.

Well. Time for me to go back to my iChat and see what the old-school Fubar boys are up to. Catch you cats on the flipside.

AIM: therbmcc71

She Hangs Brightly

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 in the sky but a couple of stars and Mars, which was also shining considerably brighter than normal. It's easily the coolest performance I've seen from the sky in a long time.

I've been getting an absurdly large number of searches for my site, and I think that this all tracks back to the Elf Slappers and how they seem to have taken offense to my referring to them (rather accurately, in my expert opinion) as, "a bunch of fucking tools." Their sheer asshattery reminds me a great deal of those people in the Horde who kneel at the appearance of that Aprifex bastard, retarded pally fuck that he is.

I was hoping to get 21 Singles by the Jesus & Mary Chain off of iTunes, but the album is for some odd reason is priced out on a per-song basis only, so the 21-song album is $20.79, which made me say, "Fuck you, Jesus & Mary Chain. Fuck you as though you were an Elf Slapper being pwned by a gnome rogue who would end up sodomizing and otherwise defiling your corpse in a manner that is strangely not unfamiliar to you." Yes, all of that just because they want me to pay more for a digital download than to go out and buy it at Borders.

Also tempting on iTunes tonight is the soundtrack to Elizabethtown, which features Elton John, Tom Petty, Lindsey Buckingham, and a bunch of people I'd probably never listen to if they weren't on the soundtrack to a Cameron Crowe film, but will no doubt begin touting the works of within a few weeks, only to regret having ever bought anything by them ten years later (read: Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Mother Love Bone). I suppose I should just be thankful I never got into Freheit.

Anyway, I think I'm going to get an iBook one of these weeks, because I can't seem to get any work done while I'm sitting in front of my computer. The only reason I'm not playing World of Warcraft right now is because I'm currently downloading the Advent Children bootleg, which will likely still be downloading when I get home from work in about twelve hours. But I need a laptop for going out and typing on, and preferably something that I can't play games on. That said, I need a Mac, because, to a Macintosh, games are anathema; something that the Mac points to and says, "What the fuck is that?" unless it's a Myst game, because everybody loves slide-shows. Since I wouldn't be able to play games, it's the perfect laptop for me, and it's got an absurdly long battery life, which would earn me the scorn and contempt of Pantera Bread employees and customers as I type up some work while checking to see if what I'm downloading is sufficient quality for archiving, because I'm very particular about my pornography.

The Nintendo Revolution controller was unveiled this week, and it looks like a remote control. Sure, it's definitely got some possibilities, but it really needs a killer-app for me to ... well, I'm going to buy the system anyway, because I'm a Nintendo fanboy. I'm hoping for some really interesting games out of it, though, like that surgery game for the DS that may or may not ever come to America. But if the system is built for fucking Wario Ware games, I think the best use for the controller might be for throwing at the television in hopes of breaking it and never having to play another fucking rhythm game or "swat the flies off of Wario's face" type of game ever again, as they are retarded. If I want to play fucking Whack A Mole, I'll go down to Showbiz Pizza, or whatever it's called these days.

Finally watched The Aviator, which I bought about a month ago, and I have to say I very nearly vehemently hated it. Sure, Howard Hughes was an interesting guy, but I think about forty minutes of the nearly three-hour film were spent watching Howard Hughes wash his hands. After the first couple of times, I was like, "Yeah, I get it, he's a germophobe," and then every time after that I was like, "Okay, fast-forward, here we go."

Finally, Keira Knightley's on the cover of the new issue of Esquire. For those of you who don't know, Esquire is the best magazine on earth for men who have found that reading Maxim earns you looks of derision, and reading Playboy earns looks of contempt. The very name, Esquire, just says to people, "I am the type of man who wears cufflinks," and they leave you alone to your magazine, despite the photo of a scantily-clad Keira Knightley on the cover, the mention of which makes me wonder if her parents, like those of soccer player Brandy Chastain, knew that they were giving their daughter a name fit for a pornstar.

Yeah, there's really no focus to any of this, so I'm just going to go now. If you are an Elf Slapper, please feel free to alt-tab back into the game and run back to your corpse before the gnome starts playing tag-team with a night-elf, because -not only will it cost a great deal to repair your armor- but you're going to have that much more humiliation to live down. Which reminds me, a search for Elf Slappers on Google places me third! MSN places me second (though, who ever uses MSN, anyway?), with the guild's official site nowhere to be seen. I mean, I feel sorry for these guys. How would you feel if you were searching for yourself on a website and got beat out by Christian Book Prices, 7 Day Free Russian Translation, and some guy named Umgawa who thinks your bourgeois cadre is a bunch of fucking tools.


AIM: therbmcc71

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

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 behind me.
  
• o2. How much cash do you have on you?: Seventy-six dollars and change, almost all of which will be needed to fill my gas tank.
• o3. What's a word that rhymes with "TEST"? Chest. Yeah, you knew I was going to go there.
  
• o4. Favorite plant?: The Caterpillar factory over on 31.
• o5. Who is the 4th person on your missed call list on your cell phone? Work.
• o6. What is your main ring tone on your phone?: Um, it sounds like a phone. You know, I actually used to like "Fur Elise" until people who don't even know who Beethoven is started using it as cell phone rings.
  
• o7. What shirt are you wearing?: A very nice olive green polo.
• o8. Do you "label" yourself, could you?: I suppose I could, but that would be silly, because everyone else does that for me.
• o9. Name brand of your shoes currently wearing?: Skechers.
• 1o. Bright or Dark Room?: Poorly lit, but fairly bright.
• 11. What do you think about the person who took this survey before you?: I really don't.
• 12. Ever "spilled the beans"?: Not as often as I "cut the cheese." Yeah, you knew I was going to go there. Let me tell ya, folks: The dick jokes are on the way.
• 13. What were you doing at midnight last night?: Probably playing World of Warcraft, like I do almost every night. That's a silly question.
• 14. What did your last text message you recieved on your cell phone say: "God help me, they're taking me to a Sox game."
• 15. Do you ever click on "Pop Ups" or Banners?: Not unless it's advertising an extremely good price on something I particularly want but will not end up buying.
• 16. What's a saying that you say a lot? I can't think of any, but I know that I occasionally morph into a middle-aged Jewish man on occasion.
• 17. Who told you they loved you last?: I couldn't tell you. It's not a secret; I just have no idea. It's not something that comes up very often.
  
• 18. Last furry thing you touched?: Huh-huh.... Just kidding. It was actually my friend Scott's fat cat, which we have taken to calling Yokozuna.
  
• 19. How many hours a week do you work?: 35-ish.
• 2o. How many rolls of film do you need to get developed? None. This question is a joke, isn't it? They knew this survey would eventually get around to me.
  
• 21. Favorite age you have been so far?: I can't really think of any that I enjoyed more than another.
  
• 22. Your worst enemy?: Really don't have any..
• 23. What is your current desktop picture?: The one seen at the bottom of this post, but much larger.
  
• 24. What was the last thing you said to someone?: "I have to go home and re-spec my hunter," or something along those lines.
  
• 25. If you had to choose between a million dollars or to forget a past mistake, what would you choose?: That kind of money would probably buy my way out of the Bozo Bucket hell I've been in for the last several years.

The game's done patching, I'm sorry, I lied about the dick jokes, but here's my desktop picture, Impression, soleil levant by Claude Monet.


AIM: therbmcc71

The World At Large

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 administration is trying its damnedest to prove even them wrong.

I used to like the song "Dust in the Wind" until one day I sat down with my guitar, started playing it, and somewhere along the line, completely without noticing what hellworthy sin I was committing, I started playing "Silent Lucidity" by Queensryche, a song I've never liked, and it pretty much wrecked "Dust in the Wind" for me. One song's similarity ends up destroying the masterpiece, sort of like how "She Will Be Loved" makes me hate everything that Maroon 5 has ever done ... and will ever do. Okay, it's a bad example, because there's no masterpiece, there, but I just like taking jabs at Maroon 5.

Speaking of dust in the wind, Sunday was the fifteenth anniversary of the Plainfield tornado, which destroyed Plainfield high school, my geometry teacher's house, and the local video store, blowing the porno section on to my high school's football field. No, seriously, one of my friends recovered a copy of Splendor in the Ass from the forty-yard line. Yes, it's funny because it's true. Also true is the fact that my high school's homecoming game was against Plainfield, and the unofficial slogan was apparently, "Blow 'em away, they're used to it." Cruel and heartless, certainly, but there is nothing on this earth more cruel and heartless than a motivated teenage student body. The other big one that year was noting how the name of the town was so very apropos, as Plainfield had been reduced to being a plain field.

And, if your sense of humor is anywhere near as dark as my own, it's funny... because it's true.

Little something I failed to mention in my last post: I met Wizzo at work earlier in the week. While this may sound to the uninitiated like a repeat of the Urinator Incident from a showing of Speed 2 at my first movie theater, Wizzo was actually the resident magician on the Bozo Show. Now, this is a big event for me, seeing how the Bozo Show inspired one of the great and famous fuck-ups of my life, when I single-handedly managed to cause the end of my relationship with one of my girlfriends because I was inspired to call her Bozo Bucket Number Six. I relayed to Wizzo the story of how I happened to do such a thing and he immediately responded that it was a stupid move on my part. A few minutes later, he said it was clever, though, and the girl should give me another chance.

So there you have it. I have a celebrity endorsing me.

EDIT: Okay, so while screwing around on my guitar and listening to Nina Gordon (who is currently putting together a new album with Bob Rock), I came up with another couple of songs that are exactly the same: "18 & Life" by Skid Row can segue directly into "Listen To Your Heart" by Roxette (as Nina Gordon did at the end of her live recording of "18 & Life"), but even that can go directly into "Because the Night", whether you're listening to the original Patti Smith version or the 10,000 Maniacs version, though I might add that it's a Springsteen song through and through, regardless. In any case, I never really liked the Skid Row song or pretty much anything by Roxette, but if it's played by Nina Gordon, then it's gotta be good.

Why? Because chicks with guitars drive me wild.

Double-EDIT: Might I also add that the chord progression for "18 & Life" and the other songs is exactly the same as the progression for "Tonight and the Rest of My Life", possibly explaining why it seemed so easy for Nina Gordon to play it. Of course, then again, this is Nina Gordon we're talking about, so just see the above comment about chicks with guitars and you'll see why it is that I find it impossible for her to do anything wrong.


AIM: therbmcc71

Float On

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 first three episodes and about the last five, and absolutely nothing in between. This is not quite as bad as the fact that I completely missed the third and fourth seasons of the show, along with the entire sixth season of Buffy. Yes, I'm a dedicated fan.

I've been playing copious amounts of World of Warcraft, which really keeps me from noticing my lack of a social life. In any case, the Alliance blows, and they're all a bunch of wannabe-Lord of the Rings knockoffs, with names like Frohdoh and Legggolas and Gimmleee. Strangely enough, I haven't seen a knockoff of Arwen yet, but that's probably because Liv Tyler pretty much managed to destroy Arwen more thoroughly than any Ringwraith could have ever done. The Horde is where it's at, yo. Oh, and might I add that the Elf Slappers guild is a bunch of fucking tools.

Due to my lack of social life, I really have nothing else for you today. So there.


AIM: therbmcc71

Fall To Pieces

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 sky-blue eyes that are flecked with the copper of a new penny and once accidentally dyed her hair purple, which I thought was outstanding. She's the benchmark against which all other benchmarks are measured; a theoretical limit, if you will, like absolute zero or the speed of light, where no matter what we do to try and get close to it in a laboratory, the scientists just laugh at the results and say, "Nope."

And she's smarter than I am by leaps and bounds, able to explain the difference between the Hindu gods Ganesha, Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu without stopping to ask why you're asking, listen to Bob Seger's greatest hits, and then follow that up with watching half a season of Buffy.

Unfortunately, she's got standards higher than my own, and so I'm shit outta luck.


AIM: therbmcc71