Save Me, TV!

I've been meaning to do this for weeks now, but I keep getting distracted. So back in May I did an upcoming fall TV preview, but now that I've had a whole summer to follow the news and watch some of the pilots, I can come up with a real fall TV schedule to follow.

Obviously it's just a rough guideline, as it usually only takes 2 weeks before the entire carefully mapped plan is shot to hell, but it's fun to try and guess which things will/won't suck.

Monday!
What to Watch:

• How I Met Your Mother (CBS 7:00-7:30) - Don't make me explain why again. Just do it. Many Moore is guest starring in the first episode!
• Aliens in America (CW 7:30-8:00) - I'm still incredibly doubtful about this show (incredibly) but I've had two different people tell me that it's way better than it should be. Since there's nothing else vying for it's timeslot it gets a watch for a while.
• Heroes (NBC 8:00-9:00) - Because it was the best new show last year that was not about Texas football, and it should hopefully acquit itself well in a second season (but will probably end up sucking).
• Journeyman (NBC 9:00-10:00) - I really doubt this will keep my interest beyond a couple of episodes, but the previewing stuff I've seen thus far makes it look at least solid. Filler, but well produced filler.

What to Tape:

• Chuck (NBC 7:00-8:00) - This actually looks good. Really good. Color me crazy shocked. It would get priority over basically anything, except it manages to conflict with my favorite show in the world, so sorry about that computer nerd - you're regulated to the VCR. I fully expect to get bored with Journeyman by week three and putting Chuck in its place, though.
• Samantha Who? (ABC 8:30-9:00) - I get conflicting reports, and the fact that the name has changed during the summer is a little worrying, but I'll follow Christina Applegate for a little while. It's on a very short leash, though, because I'm already booked solid for Mondays.

Also Rans:

• The Big Bang Theory - In a fall full of horrible new shows, this may well be the worst of the lot. So, so, so bad. Hopefully the pilot was just a fluke of horrible, but no. Watch out.
• K-Ville - I've heard good things, actually, but have not an ounce of desire to see this show. Feel free to use your own judgement there.

Tuesday!
What to Watch:

• Biggest Loser (NBC 7:00-8:00) - Okay, not that you should watch this, just that I am watching this. (Full disclosure, y'all. We have no secrets here.) It's such a ridiculous and inane show, but it's compelling in exactly that reality TV way that gets to me (see also: America's Next Top Model). Also it helps to be on a night when there's nothing else on.
• Reaper (CW 8:00-9:00) - After further consideration, I'm way more excited about this show than I was. It also helps that Fox burned all those extra episodes of The Loop over the summer and I developed a crush on Bret Harrison. After the announcement that they're kinda bringing back Dead Like Me next summer, I'm really big on all three "interacting with dead people" TV shows. Is that weird?

What to Tape: N/A

Also Rans:

• Cavemen - The only thing worth noting about this show is whether or not it will wrest the title of worst new show away from The Big Bang Theory or not. Ugh.
• Carpoolers - This one is sort of an enigma, because the pilot has some funny lines in it, and some vaguely nice chemistry among the cast. But the premise looks dumb and painfully stereotypical. Pass. Sorry Jerry O'Connell. Man, Sliders sure was a long time ago, wasn't it?
• Cane - I feel like I should watch this (first you get the sugar, then you get the power...) but all the previews have left me incredibly cold. I might tune in once or twice, just to make sure I'm not missing anything.
• House - I still don't get it. Every week it's the same goddamn thing. Namely - "You're risking a patient's life!"

Wednesday!
What to Watch:

• Pushing Daisies (ABC 7:00-8:00) - Still love, still want to watch so hard. And now I realize that I actually recognize almost the entire cast, but they're all just Hey It's That Guy types. Anyways, this even takes precedence over Tyra and ANTM, so you know I must be excited.
• Private Practice (ABC 8:00-9:00) - Damn you Kate Walsh! Always getting me sucked in. I have little doubt that this show will suck in short order, but I'm still giving it a shot. I should have my head examined.
• Dirty Sexy Money (ABC 9:00-10:00) - It's been far too long since I've been sucked in by a night-time crazy soap opera. Hopefully this will be good. Please be good.

What to Tape:

• America's Next Top Model (CW 7:00-8:00) - Despite being my top priority guilty pleasure, it gets delegated to taped status. Sorry show. Stay fabulous.

Also Rans:

• Kid Nation - I kinda want to watch it after all the controversy, but can't imagine it being good, even for the camp/child endangerment factors. Y'all let me know how it turns out, okay?
• Bionic Woman - I won't lie, the previews are actually pretty tempting. If the Private Practice sucks I'm going to be jumping ship here or to -
• Gossip Girl - who's preview seems to be nothing but trash, except it might be trashy in a good way. That "might" should be bolded, italicized, and in giant font, though.

Thursday!
What to Watch:

• Ugly Betty (ABC 7:00-8:00) - Good for America Ferrera and her Emmy win. A good show that I hope keeps up its momentum (Real quick aside on the Emmys: I wish that Michael Urie had been nominated for Supporting Actor, and really wish that Neil Patrick Harris had won it. Jeremy Piven? Pardon my language, but fuck that.)
• Grey's Anatomy (ABC 8:00-9:00) - Oh Grey's. You're hanging by a thread. Stray but a little, and your out like the bag of garbage in my kitchen that should have been tossed at least a week ago. Just so you know.
• Tim Gunn's Guide to Style (Bravo 9:00-10:00) - Until they finally get around to putting out Season 4 of Project Runway, I need to get my Tim Gunn fix somewhere.

What to Tape:

• Survivor: China (CBS 7:00-8:00) - Did anyone else watch last season? It was really, really good. How weird was that? I'm not sure if I'll religiously watch, but I'll at least keep in the loop on the show.
• The Office (NBC 8:00-8:30) - Second most anticipated show in my mind. Only getting taped because I'm not feeling the Scrubs lately so if I watch Grey's when it actually airs, I can avoid an additional half hour of TV watching. Plus, then I get to have The Office on tape to watch over and over again.

Also Rans:

• 30 Rock - Actually, everything else on this night is completely forgettable or returning, but I wanted to throw a little note in here to say that 30 Rock is super funny and if I wasn't already booked I would be pushing this show hard. As it is I'm really hoping this will be one of those shows you can catch on the internets so I won't have to miss it. Genuinely hilarious.

Friday!
What to Watch:

• Friday Night Lights (NBC 8:00-9:00) - I get twitchy with excitement for this show's return. I hate that it's on Fridays, since I never watch TV on Friday, but I love it enough that I'll make an exception.

What to Tape:

• Women's Murder Club (ABC 8:00-9:00) - Oh, you would schedule the only two interesting shows on Friday at the same time, wouldn't you? I'm weirdly looking forward to this one.

Also Rans:

• Moonlight - Vampire detective not named Angel, and not written by Joss Whedon. Epic Fail. Incidentally, the pilot sucks eggs.

Sunday!
What to Watch:

• The Simpsons (FOX 7:00-7:30) - It'll be on forever, I am powerless to its charms.
• King of the Hill (FOX 7:30-8:00) - Watching this show in syndication, it really holds up well over time. In lots ways, it's been stronger than The Simpsons over the past several seasons.
• Brothers and Sisters (ABC 9:00-10:00) - I've finally been won over by all the supporters, I'll at least give it a try. I've heard there is boykissing.

What to Tape: N/A

Also Rans:

• Desperate Housewives - Not even Nathan Fillion can bring me back. That really shouldn't be possible, but really, that's how over this show I am.
• Viva Laughlin - After all my hopes and anticipation, it's bad. Tragic bad. Let's all shed a single tear, and then move on.

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Now I go back over that list and realize that I'm totally screwed, as this new lame digital cable means that I can't tape one show and watch another at the same time. Man, Time Warner sucks so hard. Anyways, that's the gameplan. Follow along and see how wildly off my predictions are!

Office of Death

I was idly minding my own business on Monday afternoon, wading through various piles of mortgage documents at my desk, when suddenly everything in the office took on a strobe-light quality. All the lights, along with every electrical device, started rapidly flickering off and on. After verifying that I wasn't having a stroke or seizure and this was actually happening in the real world, I went sprinting around the office trying to unplug all the computers and monitors, since I vaguely remembered something from my computer science days about power surges being bad for computers.

That went on for about 3 minutes, non-stop. During that time, my boss patiently continued the phone conversation she was conducting at her desk, while I ran through the office like a frightened squirrel, unplugging things. Finally everything in the office shut down entirely for a couple of seconds and the backup generators came up. That gave us power to the lights in the office, but pretty much nothing else. Also, that meant that the air conditioning stopped blowing, so we could smell the unmistakable scent of an electrical fire.

After some additional frightened squirrel running on my part to verify that nothing in our office was currently aflame, we tried to decide on the best course of action at this point. I was all for bolting for the nearest exit and huddling in the parking lot until a burly fireman personally assured me that the threat of fire was gone. But my boss decided that instead of frightened huddling, we should stay in the office and contact everyone we were working with to let them know we had lost power, so they wouldn't think we had just stopped working because we're slackers. I was slightly against making conversational business calls while the office building around us was consumed in flames, but as I couldn't find any source of fire or smoke (just the hideous smell) and there was no fire alarm, I reluctantly agreed and grabbed the phone.

Around the start of the third call, the floor manager (who already thinks I'm crazy, btw) busted in my office to ask why the hell I was still in the office. I agreed and asked her indeed, what was I doing still there, but the irony was lost on her. Since she had to evacuate everyone from the floor before she got to leave, my little attempts at wit were directly affecting her chances of survival. She had no time for banter and almost flung me bodily from the room. My boss looked over at the two us and calmly held up one finger, like, hold on this call is almost over. The floor manager rolled her eyes so hard I worried that they'll fall from their sockets and she started rushing me down the hall.

We all made it to the ground floor by heading through the stairwell where the lights were still strobing (which made the walk down just a touch treacherous), and were told to hang around in the lobby until the fire department got there and could investigate where the fire was and why the alarms never went off.

My boss decided to screw waiting though, as we are busy people, and sent me off on the numerous errands that we could fill this unproductive standing-around-celebrating-our-escape-with-our-lives time with. I went to the bank to make some deposits (the boss had thoughtfully had me grab our outstanding checks as we fled the building for our lives) and regaled the teller with my harrowing story of near-fire-death. She was less than impressed for some reason (possibly because there was no smoke, or fire, and because I had fled the building based on a smell) which made me generally resentful for the rest of the transaction. At least she offered me a sucker from her jar of bank candy afterwards, which helped sooth my pain.

When I got back to the office, a really nice and cute fireman let me go back up to our floor, as they determined that there was no actual fire. One of the generators, or transformers, or something (he was really cute, it was hard to focus on the words) down in the basement had shorted out, and it had caused everything else to shut down. The smell came from the shorted out unit and just happened to propagate up to us because we have a dedicated air flow line to our floor from the basement.

We still only had backup power, though, for the remainder of the day, which meant absolutely no computers, or air conditioning, and if you wanted to go to the bathroom you had to do so with the lights strobing all around you. It was like peeing in a discotheque.

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And that's the story of how I almost (okay not even close) died in the office. I would have told the story earlier, but as luck would have it, yesterday right around 10 in the morning our corporate office had a catastrophic systems failure at the north branch, which completely cut all of our communication with the Internet, email, and information systems until about 6 this morning.

I swear, it's like my office is turning into the Temple of Doom over here. I expect the next time I head out of my office, a giant boulder of paperwork and discarded coffee mugs will start chasing me down the hallway.

Come to think of it, I really should have brought my fedora in to work.

A Worryingly Long List of Worries

I'm a little worried about the amount of stock I put in the win/loss ratio on my FreeCell stats page. That I can consistently keep it at 95% makes me inordinately proud. Tied to that - whenever I feel dumb, I take solace in the fact that I can complete an expert Minesweeper puzzle in 120 seconds. I'm pretty sure these are not healthy thoughts.

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While watching Varsity Blues on Saturday night, I was inordinately preoccupied with the fact that Jon Voight (the coach) was completely right in his thinking in terms of the game of football. I mean, the movie goes ahead and makes him racist and crazy and hell-bent on winning to the point of injuring his players, but his football was sound. What was the point of James Van Der Beek and his ridiculous plays? Man that was annoying.

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Oh, and I just analyzed the character motivations in a movie about high schoolers who were portrayed by actors with an average age of 25, and prominently featured Ali Larter in a whip cream bikini.
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Also, now I own a copy of Varsity Blues.

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I've been exercising regularly for about 9 days now, and I'm worried that my left arm is getting noticeably bigger than the right one. Which makes me want to just do more reps with the one hand to even things out, but then what if it's just all in my mind and then my right arm gets even bigger? I already have the sneaking suspicion that my right leg is longer than the left, pretty soon I'll be shuffling around in irregularly gaited circles.

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I've been actively considering a re-subscription to The World of Warcraft, ever since I did my financial analysis last week. While WoW is a soul-sucking life devourer, it's very cheap compared to most all other gaming comparables. On average, I spent 4 times more per month when not playing that game. But did I mention the life devouring?

There's just no good choice there.

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Even though my new car has been fixed (and for relatively very little money) every time I turn the key in the ignition I have a moment of complete blind fear that the car isn't going to start and I'm going to have to go through the whole ordeal of car rescue all over again. This is not good for my well-being or state of mind, and is sincerely detracting from the joy of owning an absolutely sweet car.

Is it possible to get an ulcer from owning something that is too awesome?

I'm breaching whole new levels of paranoia here.

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And now I worry that this list is getting too long, so I'll stop.

Because I Like to Talk About Books, Dammit

WARNING: The following post is about books. Not just books, science fiction books. It will probably be super boring. You have been warned.


So, it seems that I love any book from the science fiction section, right? I mean, whenever I babble on about a book it's usually something sci-fi like, right? Aliens and what have you. This is actually a misconception - I really only love well written science fiction. But I willingly wade through huge piles of sci-fi crap that I never mention in order to get to it.

There are plenty of different types of bad science fiction.

There is the poorly written stuff, which you usually see in your movie and video game tie-ins. The kind of stuff that relies on branding to sell, rather than story or any competency with the English language. (Your Warcrafts, your Star Treks, your *shudder* Halo tie-ins)

Then you've got your poorly framed stuff, where the universe makes no sense or contradicts itself, or there's too much deus ex machina/"A Wizard Did It" explanations, or over-exposition on the universe with no good character correlation... really there are tons of different ways that this comes up. But it boils down to not immersing the reader properly into your world. This is not always a vital component of science fiction, you can write a good book without explaining the universe you're in, but more and more I find this to be the big hitch in my enjoyment of a novel.

Separate but equal to that, you've got the authors who have a perfectly explained universe, but can't write a convincing character or conversation to save their life (or their book). This is a rarer form of bad, usually if someone has enough of a handle on a scenario to map out a whole unifying theory for the entire world they can also imagine realistic ways for people to act within it, but it's still common enough to put on the list.

The last category is the hardest to define and the most nebulous, but it mostly has to do with intent and storytelling. Why are you telling this story and more importantly why should I care? This is less of a science fiction issue than an overall fiction issue - if the reader doesn't care about the story, or isn't invested in the outcome, there's no reason to keep reading, even if it's perfectly constructed.

In my mind sci-fi has a layer added on to that - not only must the story be compelling, it should have some reason for this alternate setting. Which, I'll admit, is only a gripe of mine. You can have a traditional novel (say, murder mystery or detective novel) that is just set in some sci-fi setting, but in most all cases it comes off as annoying, pretentious, or unnecessarily confusing. (This is not a condemnation of those sorts of books as a whole, though. Turning a genre on its ear can be interesting in its own right. Just more often than not it plays out as a gimmick rather than a conscious plotting choice that has meaning to the novel.)

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Now that I've already written a full post complaining about bad science fiction, I get to the reason behind this whole line of thinking - I just finished a set of three novels by John Scalzi: Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. These are my precise definition of great science fiction.

It's a trilogy of sorts - each book is set in the same universe but would probably work equally well as stand-alone novels. They do share various characters and follow an over-arching plot, though, so where they really excel is in the sum of all three books taken together.

Each book manages to avoid all those pitfalls above:

- they're delightfully well-written,
- have a clear, concise, and uniform universe that is introduced as naturally as possible (only the slightest out of place chucks of clunky exposition),
- with honest-to-God unique characters who have realistic dialogue,
- and a clear sense of purpose and drive for each novel that sucks you into the story and keeps you engaged.

The storyline follows a future where humans expand out into the galaxy and find it teeming with life. Life that mostly wants to destroy humanity to keep all the available real estate to themselves. The humans decide to go with the flow and attempt to wipe out everyone else too and get to colonizing.

The first two books are military novels (borrowing brilliantly from the Heinlein school of writing in the most direct way possible) that follow the new super-human soldiers who act as the front line against all the alien races, while the third is mostly a political story that builds on the plots developed over the course of the first two books. So you get plenty of action and alien killing, plenty of pathos (as the universe is a very easy place to die in), and plenty of humor as all the protagonists keep a relatively happy and witty outlook in the face of all the horrors they're up against.

This does not sound groundbreaking in general, but it's just refreshing to find the formula done so well, and carried out through three full books. They immediately get a spot on my shelf right next to the Ender series as a go-to quick and fun read.

But the real reason I'm so up on these books is because they're so eminently accessible to just pick up and read. I wouldn't have a second thought recommending them to anyone, even if they aren't a science fiction fan per se. A lot of that comes from the writing style - each book has a keen sense of humor and drama without so much of the extra baggage that you so often see with hard science fiction.

See, I can love and dig into a book like Charles Stross' Accelerando, but I wouldn't dare send anyone near it that wasn't fully on board with pushing through a very difficult read in order to reap the rewards. You've got to focus and parse through not just the writing style, but the constant shifts in tone, time, and technology. Conversely, these books still tell a great story but do it without making it feel like work.

Relevant, helpful disclosure: I devoured these books. Read all three of them in a span of three days, getting though The Ghost Brigades and better than half of The Last Colony from noon to ten at night on the second day. And then reread Old Man's War a few days later so I could discuss it with someone who had just finished it.

The ease of the writing and the compelling way the story is paced make it a chore to put down the books, which is the last hallmark I need to recommend them universally as a great entry point to science fiction. Because, even within the ridiculously small subset of people who read for fun, I think there's a bias against science fiction. Most people compare the whole genre to broccoli - you like it or you don't. But the real comparison should be to a whole food group - you may not like broccoli, but there is surely something in the Fruits and Vegetables Section that you enjoy.

I may just be spouting nonsense (as usual), but whatever, I really, really enjoyed these books and urge anyone to try them out. Who knows, maybe you have latent geek tendencies just waiting to spring forth.

Hubris and Truck Revenge from Beyond the Grave

"So do you miss your truck?"
"Not in the slightest."
"Really? But you had it for 10 years."
"10 years without shocks and a broken windshield, 3 years without air conditioning, the last year with a busted radio. Don't miss it at all."

Yeah, I was accused of being unsentimental, but I had my fancy new car to soften the blow. And man, was it wonderful. Leather seats, air conditioning, quiet and smooth ride, the false sense of superiority that can only come with owning a luxury vehicle that eats gas the way I eat Pixi Sticks.

All the way up to Friday night when it refused to start up after dinner at Cheddars. And by 'refused to start' I mean 'became possessed by Satan'. Trying to start up the car led to weird electrical madnesses, like the unlocking mechanism going on the fritz and rapidly unlocking the doors over-and-over-and-over like a machine gun for minutes at a time and all the gauges on the dash flicking around like the car was having a seizure.

I do not put it past the Truck of Malfunction to have cursed me and my new car for tossing it to the side. Its revenge is both swift and terrible. Because for all its faults, it never once had a day when it didn't work, in 10 whole years. Here we're not a full month into ownership and already the new car has acquired a demon and won't drive me places. Arg.

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We track down a tow truck guy (thanks to the always delightful AT&T roadside service) who manages to get the car out of the Cheddars parking lot with an assist from Jordan, who did the steering and pushing (I was busy filling out forms and internally freaking out.). I am momentarily worried even more when the tow truck stalls in the middle of the street on the way back to my apartment, but thanks to some ingenuity by the truck owner (his, I swear to God, exact words: "You know, it's like Star Trek, you gotta get up and going a bit before you can jump to warp speed.") we make it home without dying.

Sadly, jumping the car when we get there does a whole lot of nothing. I pronounce my new car dead for the night, and make plans to enlist Devon for a serious car-fixing adventure the next day (because Devon is my go-to car fixer, as based on our previous experiences together).

I am firmly of the belief that it must just be a dead battery that is causing the trouble, and not just because I can't imagine the expense of something more dramatic when I don't even have my real license plates yet. I pull out my Box-o-Tools(TM), and we get to work on The Plan.

The Plan: Replace the Battery (consists of 4 Steps)
Step One: Remove the old battery
Step Two: Acquire a new battery
Step Three: Replace new battery in car
Step Four: Car explodes

Step One: Remove the old battery. Yeah, not so much. The negative cable that connects the battery to the car is completely fused to the battery and will not relinquish its hold. We use everything we can think of: Devon's Coke, WD-40, a hammer, all to no results. After about 45 minutes of futility and frantic calls to parents who may have more experience in the matter, it is again Devon who works it out - while she levers the connector upwards with a screwdriver, I wail on the side of it with a hammer after we've fully soaked the whole thing in a puddle of Coke. It pops off, and Step One is completed after I wrestle the battery out of its casing, nearly destroying my hands in the process ("How am I supposed to grab onto this thing?! It weighs 100 pounds and is nothing but sharp edges.").

As I expected Step One to be the easiest and shortest of the steps, I was a little daunted. We proceed on!

Step Two: We take the battery to the National Tire and Battery store, for a replacement. I insist on bringing the battery in to the store with us, as I feel that taking multiple trips back and forth would be folly. Again, wrestling with the battery nearly fells me. I make it to the counter, thump the battery on it and slump to the ground.

Quoth the Battery Technician: "Yeah, we don't stock that kind of battery. You should call around to other places."

I drag the battery back to the car - Devon now firmly believes I am insane, but still agrees to drive me around. After tracking down a place who swears they have one in stock, we make the long and arduous journey across the White Rock Lake to the secondary battery store. Again with the dragging of the old battery, I will no doubt die very soon. Once it's on the counter and I'm standing there sucking wind, the Checkout Guy looks at me a little funny and unfolds the little handles on top of the battery that I didn't notice and carts it to the back without the slightest issue.

I cry a little bit, but take the new battery in trade and head back to Devon's car. Step Two down.

Step Three: We get the battery into place without incident. But then we lose the nut to the negative terminal wire. After several minutes of searching, we do not find it and assume that the car has eaten it, as some sort of offering to the car gods. Plus, it turns out to not matter in the slightest, as the negative wire is so corroded that even if we had the nut, it wouldn't be able to tighten at all. Luckily the battery terminal is roughly the same size as the old version (naturally), so it appears that the car might still work without excessive yet sensible tightening.

Step Four: Turn on the car, and surprisingly nothing blows up. It's a miracle and yet again Devon has saved my automobile. She's very good at that.

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Which is where the story still stands. I need to get the faulty wire replaced (it's not tight enough, and thus is prone to not starting until I root around under the hood with a screwdriver, the constant threat of electrocution just over my head like so much low hanging fruit), but mechanics that I trust enough to repair my largest financial holding in the world are tough to come by. I have an appointment scheduled for Thursday morning and hopefully the car will not explode, or die in the middle of traffic on the highway, or once again become possessed by a demon and try to unlock me to death until then.

Anyways, so that was my holiday weekend (excluding the crapload of movies that I went to see (see sidebar)). How was yours?

The Puppet Master

Did you hear that? It's the sound of a long-term crush evaporating into a cloud of dust.



Bye Elijah. We sure had some fun times though, right? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all those LotR movies? Or that time I bought your horrible coming-of-age movie with Mandy Moore because it was on sale at Blockbuster for $3? And that other movie where you were supposedly Rosario Dawson's girlfriend*?

I hope one day that I can get over this (How the break-up went in my mind: "We're through! Whenever I close my eyes, all I see is The Puppet Master!"), or that you were at least paid extremely well for those 150 seconds of airtime. (Let's go crazy, indeed.)

I have to go now.

(*Note: yes, now I see the error, boyfriend not girlfriend, but really let's not kid ourselves - in that relationship you all know who would be the boy.)

Over Involvement in Networking

I have been horribly misinformed about the nature of all these social networking sites. Everyone has always said that MySpace is the gross one, Friendster is the old one no one uses anymore, and Facebook is the cool, sensible one.

I'll give you those first two points. Most people take their MySpace page as a chance to unleash the unholy spawn of garish html and every ugly .gif file they've ever seen, cross it with automatically playing background music and stupid polls along the lines of "what type of Carebear would you mostly likely marry if required", and then shake it until you can't read any of the information displayed. It's like the whole place is run by 14 year-olds with ADHD and Aspergers. Which is probably closer to the truth than I'm comfortable with.

And the number of people I know who use Friendster can not only can be counted on one hand, if I somehow managed to lose three fingers from that hand in some sort of cooking or fireworks related mishap, I could still do it.

But Jesus people, Facebook is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen. Now, granted, I just joined up with this place yesterday - I already felt bad enough about not updating a blog and a MySpace page, I didn't need the additional guilt of a third page that I ignore. But on cursory examination, is there any purpose to this place beyond stalking everyone you already know?

I think it's mostly just that little running tally of every single movement of every one your friends that is throwing me off. Why on Earth am I informed of every change in mood, every change of picture, and friending of everyone I know? Not only am I suddenly stalking all these people, I'm doing it without even meaning to. And if you actually wanted to stalk someone? Sweet lord, it's a round-the-clock Internet stakeout that takes absolutely no effort at all.

Plus, everybody can see everything I'm doing! This isn't good for my paranoia.

There are some nice things - the picture sharing is amazing, and the resultant image tagging is a very nice use of meta-level data that I think is the next logical front of the Internet. The lack of excessive customization gets rid of the horribly juvenile feel of the MySpace. And the grouping and tracking system is well done, if a little hard to navigate.

But seriously, I can't get over the stalking bit. Maybe it's just something that you get used to over time. Everyone else eased their way into the pool, whilst I just dove in headfirst hours after everyone else.

For now, though? Cree-py.

The Mighty Resurgence of Claire Danes

Lately, as a public service I try to keep my movie reviews over there on the sidebar, so to not completely bore my readers out of their minds with my incoherent thoughts on every damn movie that has the misfortune to flash before my eyes.

That said, I loved Stardust so much that it gets its own full post. It's such a delightful, funny, and infectiously happy movie that I fully demand that everyone I know go see it. (And quickly, as based off of it's first weekend gross I don't expect it to be around in the theatres much longer).

A bare bones review to get you started, as the publicity for it has been so bad there's a good chance you've never even heard of it:

It's your traditional fairy tale turned on its ear (everyone and their brother immediately brings up The Princess Bride, but it's not really a good frame of reference). It's based off the Neil Gaiman novel, and it really shows throughout. A quick character rundown, which fills in the entire plot for you:

Claire Danes is awesome (and lets her hair do most of the emoting for her) as a star that has fallen to Earth, whom everyone wants a piece of. Michelle Pfeiffer digs right into her juicy role as the wicked witch who specifically wants the star's heart (which is apparently tasty, and allows for a kind of immortality). And Charlie Cox (who is an unknown, but is also crazy hot) is the bumblingly earnest young man (a part that is always at the center of Neil Gaiman's stories) who is pitted against all the forces of evil. You also throw in Robert De Niro, stealing the entire damn movie as a misunderstood pirate captain, along with another 15 or so additional colorful characters (and Ian McKellen narrating the whole thing!), just as icing on the cake.

It's pretty standard fare as far as fantasy movies go, but all the stock pieces stack up to one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen in ages. Plenty of humor, decent special effects, and some of the sappiest love story bits possible (which really are the best kind). Recommended so hard.

A full review follows below, but it's a bit more spoilerish, so I would ask that you refrain from reading ahead until you've gone and seen it (as you had better be doing right now).

I always enjoy a Neil Gaiman twist on a traditional story, and in this case I am fully on board with his take on a fairy tale. The love storyline is a bit rushed at first, but Danes and Cox make it work. There's a little line near the end about how 'love can look surprisingly a lot like loathing' or similar that is a nicely worded nod to that. And actually, the writing throughout is pretty uniformly well done - there is nothing so effective to me as some dry British writing.

It also helps that I am a complete sap, and will go "Awwwww" at anything cute, so that when Claire Danes actually falls in love and starts shining, I practically melted in my seat.

Also, I know I said it before, but I am completely smitten with Tristan, the main character. I mean, look at the hotness:

Again, this is probably telling more about me than the movie, but how can you not love him?

Entirely out of left field: Robert De Niro's role is completely unexpected, and really, really hilarious. I know it's mostly just playing against type, but it adds some welcome comic relief and really helps the tone of the movie even itself out. It also really helps advance the plot without too much deus ex machina. (Okay maybe a little too much.) But really, I'll take any excuse to put a transvestite pirate captain who catches lightning in a bottle and moonlights as a hairdresser into a movie, so really there's no way to go wrong there.

Overall, it's a wonderful movie, although I think it overreaches a bit with the number of characters it tries to keep up with. But that's hardly a criticism, more like an abundance of riches. You follow along with Tristan and the star, then you've got the witch and her sisters, add in all the prince-brothers, and then the pirate crew, oh and Ricky Gervais in his lovely little cameo, plus the gypsy witch and the mother... you see where I'm going with this. Even though it's 2 hours long, I'm not sure if everyone was necessary to the plot.

Anyways that's just nit-picking, it's a great, great movie that makes me smile just thinking about it. I consider it required viewing for anyone who doesn't hate joy.

You don't hate joy, do you? Go see it.

How I Met the Weekend

I don't have a damn thing to talk about today. Instead, I'm going to go outside and play with my new car for the rest of the weekend.

(One quick note: IT IS SO AWESOME)

Y'all have fun in my absence.

---------------------------

Bonus Content: Please enjoy this clip from Family Guy below. It's practically the only potential scene of How I Met Your Mother that could make me enjoy the show any more than I already do.

The Waiting

Summarily presented by the three cups of chocolate infused coffee that I've consumed this morning, I give you the list of things that one can do while impatiently waiting for their auto loan to fund so they can take possession of their new car and finally free themselves from their un-airconditioned iron and steel coffin that was once a truck of malfunction:

• Obsessively check the status page on your web application every ten minutes, waiting for the condition of "Funding" to change to "Funded".
• Try to actually do your job.
• Fail at doing your job by inserting as many Freudian slips as possible in a business setting. ("So you'll take possession of the car -- I mean house, sorry - on the 14th, and you'll be driving in -- wait, moving in -- by the 15th... Cars. What? Nothing.")
• Call the loan department of the bank to make sure the check has been sent out.
• Call the loan department back again, just to make sure that the check is going directly to the dealership.
• Call the loan department one more time, to double check that they have the address of the dealership transcribed correctly.
• Check the status page again.
• Call the dealer (again), let them know to give you a call as soon as they have the check to arrange a pickup time.
• Awkwardly acknowledge that, yes, we have had this conversation a few times before.
• Drive to lunch in your metal oven, constantly cursing, wondering how you have managed to go something like 10 years in this truck without committing suicide, or melting into a puddle of flesh.
• Have 20 minute long internal debate on whether or not driving the equivalent of a sweat box the majority of your life has contributed to your overall thinness.
• Decide that you don't care.
• Eat some chicken nuggets.
• Promise yourself that you won't eat anything in the new car.
• Ever.
• Drive back to work, hit a pothole and feel as if your teeth are going to rattle out of your skull.
• Do a little dance in acknowledgement that this will not be a problem in your new car.
• Apologize to the truck for rubbing the fact that it's getting replaced in its face.
• Check the status page again.
• Cry.
• Go look at the pictures online of your new car.
• Delight in the sunroof.
• Wish that there were more pictures of the interior.
• Have second thoughts about going into such massive debt in order to be able to drive to and from work in relative luxury.
• Go outside for 20 seconds to remind yourself exactly why an air conditioned car is worth the debt.
• Try to decide if you should carry over your stuffed animal that currently sits on the dashboard of the truck to the new car.
• Internal debate on whether stuffed animal in a car is childish or whimsical. Or gay.
• Probably gay.
• Wonder if someone would really try to hate crime a new car, just because it has a gay stuffed animal in the window.
• Go back and look at the pictures again, maybe the color of the car is too vibrant. (Might also be a consideration re: The Gay.)
• Do a RBG color comparison of the pictures of the new car versus a picture of your old truck to determine exactly how much brighter a red the new car is. (Answer: 87 additional points in the red scale, 10 on the green, 12 on the blue).
• Wonder what the hell that even means, and why you did it. Question sanity.
• Wikipedia the car's make, read up on the illustrious history of the brand.
• Get distracted by clicking wiki links, end up at the etymology page on the word euhemeristic.
• Again question sanity.
• Shrug.
• Check the status page again...

You All Knew It was Coming - Epic Potter Post

Mm, Internet. Tastes so good.

The seclusion was successful (totally unspoiled to the end), so I can't complain too much about 4 days without email. It was even vaguely liberating... but I don't plan on doing it again anytime soon.

I picked up the book first thing Saturday morning (pre-orders are for fools, yo. Target had enough copies to build a fort) and by 6:00 that afternoon I was done, stopping my reading only to get an additional Dr Pepper or go to the bathroom.

My full, crazy, and rambling review is below the cut (and chock-full of so many spoilers that your brain will explode). In general though: Tons of love. A brilliant end to the series that managed to be touching and awesome and ridiculous all at the same time. My hat goes off to Rowling, along with my full apologies for ever thinking that she couldn't pull the ending off without messing something up.

Okay, complete thoughts below. Seriously, don't click until you've read the book.


Firstly - check out my track record on predictions! I give myself 10 out of 17, allowing for a little leeway on exact wording. And check out the Snape line! Hot, right? I'm so impressed with myself, even if it was pretty obvious.

Anyways.

So I can properly gush in a second, let me get my annoyances out of the way first:

Lupin & Tonks, both dead?! Offscreen? No. No, no, fuck no. I was pretty sure Lupin was a goner from the second that he named Harry godfather (I mean come on, foreshadowing) but Tonks was just overkill. She got maybe one line in the whole book, never did a single thing, and then *boom* dead. That was really the only part of the entire book that I can't get behind.
My poor dead, Lupin. Nevar 4get!

Other, lesser annoyances:

• The ridiculous ret-con of Harry's invisibility cloak. Yeah, it makes you completely invisible, except when Moody's eye can see through it, when the Marauder's Map can still track you, and Mrs. Norris can sniff you out. *eyeroll*
• Halfway through the book, Hermione being all "Oh, I've never done a memory charm," when she's already sent her parents to Australia with completely new identities, not remembering they've ever had child. In-book continuity, much?
• Jesus Christ, that epilogue. That was the worst, worst, worst thing in the world. Fanfiction-y in a way that almost hurt. Let's not tell me what happened to Luna, or what Harry and Hermione decided to do after school. No, let's have Harry use his children as insane memorial devices. No pressure, child who is named after the two greatest heroes of the wizard world in the last 100 years. Gross. (Also - Scorpius? To borrow an apt line from the 90's - Gag me with a spoon.)

And really that's it, in terms of annoyances. Let the gushing commence!

• Neville! No, really, Neville! Takes over for Harry when there's no Harry in Hogwarts (with Luna and Ginny as his Ron and Hermione, respectively), gets the holy crap beat out of him, leads the revolution, and then kills Nagini by pulling the sword of Gryffindor out of the Sorting Hat, while his head is goddamn on fire. Sweet zombie Jesus, the wait was worth the payoff. I *heart* Neville so much. And he's the Herbology professor!
  
• Luna! Fulfilled my prediction down to the exact letter - "continues to be awesome." I'm not saying that you're a bad person if you don't love her, except that you totally are. Her speech at Dobby's funeral was the most perfect thing in the world...
  
• ...except for the epitaph that Harry put on his tombstone. Seriously, nothing in Harry Potter has ever made me cry (not Cedric, not Dumbledore, not even Sirius), but that entire Dobby scene had me weeping like a child. He dug the grave himself! And they gave him clothes! Christ, I'm misting up right now. I cannot believe it, I never even liked his character all that much.
  
• Just pretty much everything in the book once they make it back to Hogwarts (the Lupins excepted obviously): The teachers just going off (McGonaggal leading a charging pack of desks down the hall!), all the students (Oliver Wood!) coming back to kick some ass, Kreacher and the house-elf revolution, Percy and his reunion, Ron and Hermione and their wild make outs when he defends elf rights...the list could go on forever.
  
• She gets her own bullet point: Molly Weasley and her NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH! Just delightful. Quite possibly the only thing that could have been as satisfying as Neville finishing her off. And since Neville already got his moment, I'll easily give this one to her. Kick Ass.

Various other bits that aren't gushing, but things that I really liked:

• Lupin and his early-book breakdown. As I've said a million times in the past, I think Lupin is the most interesting and tragic figure in this whole mess of a universe. Check it: as a child, he becomes a werewolf and is totally shunned. He gets a break and gets into Hogwarts and gets four true friends. So he's happy for roughly 7 years. Almost immediately afterwards, has three of those friends killed and the fourth sentenced to life in prison for killing and betraying the others. Spends the rest of his life hating him and living again shunned by the world. 15 years later finds that 4th friend was innocent and is reunited with him... only to have him die less than a year later in a brand new war against the same foe.
  
  I mean, the guy is basically the living embodiment of the grief of the first war. And suddenly he starts going through it all again in the second war. After he loses Sirius, he is forced underground to work with the werewolves, and he's even more persecuted than before. Even his love interest is almost impossible for him, since he already knows what the potential costs of the war are.
  
  While they are waiting for everyone to come back to The Burrow after the early Death Eater attack, you get that he is finally losing it, and rightfully so. Then you get his complete breakdown with the announcement of the son. It was all incredibly well handled and truthful and in-character. Vicious, but real stuff.
  
  Then of course she goes and kills him and breaks my heart, but whatever. He got to come back with James, Lily, and Sirius in Harry's March to Death. That was at least comforting, since he's all reunited with them and whatnot.
  
  But really, doesn't his life just make you want to cry? Rowling really worked him over, I think harder than anyone.
  
• Man, Dumbledore is stone cold, isn't he? I mean, "Go ahead and betray Harry's departure date. I don't care if people die." All while all the while telling Snape "Why don't you whine some more about being a double agent, ya pansy! Just remember you're doing it for Lily and do your damn job." Top it off with "Oh yeah, so I totally knew Harry has to die to get rid of Voldemort, I'm aiming a human weapon right now so how's about you get off my back about it" and suddenly I'm less confident that Michael Gambon's crazy angry Dumbledore from the movies isn't so far from the mark. Harsh, yet awesome.
  
  (Aside, I love that Rowling was able to get in her usual 'Chapter where Dumbledore explains everything' even though he's already dead.)
  
• And just so I address it, the Snape thing was nicely drawn. That's a good use of foreshadowing for once, and his whole storyline is understandable, if not necessarily sympathetic. To a degree you just want to shake him and be all "She picked someone else, man, pull yourself together," but at the same time it's very 'Awww' too.
  
• While the early middle of the book did tend to drag, (we wander the countryside and don't have a clue what we're doing) I really liked the level of desperation that it started painting, and it carried well through the rest of the book. I always find tone to be the hardest part for Rowling to manage (you go from drama to comedy so fast most of the time it's hard to keep the curve) but she nailed it nicely in this one.
  
• And on that note, the Deathly Hallows business + Dumbledore and Grindlewald backstory should have been far too much extra stuff for the book to handle. And yet, I really think it fit together so well, I can't find anything to complain about. Maybe it's just the euphoria of the initial ending of it all, but I'm really impressed with the whole book.

Jesus, I'll stop there for now. Really I could just go on for days.

Final Words: A great series. Not literary, not groundbreaking, but great in its own right. I don't think I could be more pleased.

(Eww. What's with all this love? I feel kind of dirty.)
(I can't end on that. Seriously: Fuck that epilogue.)
(Okay, that's better.)

Harry Potter and The People Who Are Giving Me A Goddamn Aneurysm

We're still 3 good days out from the release of the last Harry Potter book, and already there are so many spoilers out in the world that I've had to enact my doomsday scenario earlier than expected. I was spoiled for book six with approximately 100 pages left in my first read through, and the horror still haunts me. This will not happen again. Even if it means that I become one of those unibomber-type hermits for the next 6 days.

If you're trying to reach me by email, you'll fail, since that was how I got hit last time. Ditto for message boards and blogs. In fact, I've cut all of the Internet out of my life altogether. The only way I'm able to post this guy is through the ingenious use of my history bar, and after this I'm not opening a browser until I've finished the book unless required by my job or God.

I'm actively considering a ban on text messages also, just to be entirely safe, but think that might be a little overboard. At the same time, though, I'm not overly concerned with what people think. It's all good fun, and I've put an intense number of man hours reading the books, discussing them, dissecting them, and watching movies full of horrible child actors based on them. Yeah, I'm ridiculously over-invested but the release of the last book is only going to happen once. Bring on the isolation, I say. I can stand to look (be) crazy for a week to satisfy my fandom urges.

For now my obsession can fuel me the way the regular Internet usually does.

------------------------------

Now for the fun part that makes me look as foolish as possible: Predictions!

(Crazy tons of spoilers for everything up to the last book to follow)

I'm always so, so wrong about these things:

• For OoTP, I was 0 for 8 on predictions, including my sincere expectation that Prof. McGonaggal was going to turn out evil, despite how much I loved her. I also picked Dumbledore going down in this one.
• For HBP, it was 1 for 10, and the only right thing I had was Prof. Snape teaching Defence. Things I missed: who the big death would be (I had odds on Hagrid), Draco's plot (which makes me wince, since I predicted the exact opposite of what happened), and even who Harry would date (I know! How obvious was that? I'm so bad at this!)

Anyways, since it's the last book and all, I going to go with the full-on rundown, and then I'll come back on Sunday and be nice and chagrined about how off I was.

Predictions (going from Most Boring to Most Interesting)

• Voldemort dies. (Obviously.)
• Nothing of interest will happen to the Dursleys (since I couldn't care less either way. Although I wouldn't mind some cosmic justice for Dudley).
• Ron and Hermione will survive, and ride off into the sunset together. Although I wouldn't put it past Rowling to take the Buffy sort of route and somehow horribly disfigure Ron (a la Xander and the worst scene in television history).
• Also, Hermione and her House Elf Liberation Front better play some sort of significant role in the plot, or I will be bitter at all the wasted space that storyline took up.
• Filch will bite it, probably defending the school, after finally being able to cast a spell.
• Peter Pettigrew will die saving Harry from Fenir with his silver hand, thus completing his story arc. Also, I'd just like to say thank you to JK Rowling again for not having him kill Lupin in the same manner. Because that was my greatest fear in life from the end of the 4th book until she debunked that particularly convincing theory. I love Lupin so much.
• Draco will survive, and I suppose turn good. Frankly, I want Harry to kill him and be done with it (I see no redeeming characteristics about the boy) but I'd be shocked if that's the route she takes.
• Hagrid - Dammit, I'm going to say that he dies, despite the evidence to the contrary. Have you noticed that I don't like Hagrid? I think Rowling has put enough effort into Grawp that she could bump off Hagrid to make Harry's plight that much worse and still have a giant around to help the good cause.
• In a similar vein, Norbit the dragon will make a dramatic return to help Harry (because I've seen the book cover and I like the idea).
• Snape will die helping Harry kill Voldemort, turning out to be a secret quadruple agent working on the good side. This is also against my wishes, since I think Snape ultimately being evil straight through would be bad ass, if completely illogical.
• (Aside: I really like the theory that Snape was in love with Lily, and her death was the ultimate reason he turned from the dark side. It fits how Dumbledore was convinced of his innocence, what with him being so full of that ree-dik-U-lous obsession with love.)
• Most of the Weasleys will make it through, but I assume Percy will get smoked pretty early on. I'm saying right now, she had best not mess with Fred & George, although I have my fears. Those little throwaway lines about the Prewitts in book 5 sound like doom for F&G to me. But I'm easily spooked.
• Ginny will continue to kick a lot of ass, but I'm very much on the fence about her survival. I think I'll go with Lives.
• Characters who are not allowed to die and must only have good things happen to them: Luna, Neville, and Lupin. You don't touch my favorites, dammit. Neville gets revenge on Bellatrix, but doesn't kill her, and goes on to teach Herbology at the school. Lupin and Tonks get to live happily ever after, since he's already the most tragic character in the whole story and deserves something good. Luna continues to be awesome. That's it, I will brook no discussion at all. LA LA LA, I'm not listening!
• Harry kills Voldemort, and lives. And I really hope that the book ends with something that parallels the first book - someone toasting Harry as "The Boy Who Lived." (The alternative is just wicked depressing)

Whew! Can you tell I'm obsessed? Don't worry, I'm sure I'll take down the list in shame before the weekend is up.

Also, omigosh, isn't it all so exciting?

Good Lord, I'm such a dork.

Cars (not the Pixar kind)

I need a new car. Badly. The Truck of Malfunction (TOM) will always hold a special place in my heart (specifically the place reserved for things that barely work and feel like a circle of hell when you sit in them during the summer in Dallas) but I want to move on.

I had a similar spell once before (I want to say it was back before Christmas, maybe? God, I have no sense of the passing of time anymore.) and I had rationalized it out perfectly. I picked out the car(a sensible and economical Used Jetta) that fit into my mind and didn't make me hyperventilate thinking about the debt. Then two days before I was ready to go pick the car up, I ended up with several unexpected big bills, got spooked, and scrapped the plans entirely.

Since then I've never been able to get the rationalization back to where I was able to commit to more than $5,000 of debt without spontaneously combusting in a parking lot somewhere. Lately, though, with summer back in force, my raise finally kicking in, and my apartment move complete, rationalization has been easy to come by.

So easy, in fact, that now we've swung all the way across the manic-depressive scale and I have to keep talking myself off the ledge of buying something completely outlandish. Because I'm usually so conservative and have to justify every little thing, there's never been too much of a chance that I'll go nuts and blow all my credit in one fell swoop. With the small pile of excess cash I have sitting around though, I am so close to being able to talk myself into something extravagant.

This is the downside to rationalization. When you get as proficient as I am at convincing yourself of things, it's a slippery slope to rationalizing purchasing your dream car, based on the fact that you've put in your dues by driving around a TOM for nigh on to 8 years now, during which time never less than half of it's expected features were malfunctioning.

In my addled brain, I am due, dammit.

The battle wages constantly in my mind now, but I've yet to fall on either side of the fence. No matter what, I have two weeks more weeks to mull it over (I have put an embargo on any purchases before the 31st) but more and more I feel like I'm going to fall on the side of outlandish. I've never put much stock in fancy car ownership, but now that I'm seriously considering it, it's a heady and seductive thing. I mean, have you seen the look of a Jaguar? Just try and tell me it's not worth crippling financial debt to get to own one of those.

In any case, though, in 14 short days I'll actually own a car that has air conditioning. Isn't that just the neatest thing in the world?

Jackass Training for Jackasses

I took the weekend off from exercising for reasons that are less than stellar. (Primarily: "Because I don't feel like it.") So when I got home from work yesterday I did a double session of weight lifting to start making up the difference. I made it all the way through my upper body stuff and then went on to legs and abs. This was not the most brilliant of plans, but I figured it wouldn't have too many negative effects since I didn't have much else to do that night but lie on the couch.

Immediately after finishing, while lying in a crumpled heap on the floor about to pass out, I realized that I still needed to go to Blockbuster and Target that night. Frnak's last movie was due, we had no laundry detergent, and I had not a single clean pair of underwear, socks, or towels anywhere in the house. I dragged myself up off the ground, mopped up the puddle of sweat that I left on the floor, and made my way to the stores.

Understand that this should not have been some sort of super-human undertaking. Both stores are within half a mile of my apartment, it's not like I was trekking across the state to get these errands done. Unfortunately, I was seriously wiped out and just barely made it into the Blockbuster before I misjudged my spatial relation to the Apply For Work at Blockbuster! station, and ran directly into its chair.

This was not your standard fare "distraction, glancing-blow, get-embarrassed-and-keep-walking" sort of crash. No, this was more of a "Dick Van Dyke, sprawling-over-furniture" fall. It caught me directly in the midsection and the resulting momentum sent me flailing forward, taking the chair with me. As I fell the wind was knocked out of me, but otherwise I was just fine. That is, until my knee got caught between the leg of the chair and the side of the station. So when I twisted in order to catch my fall, my knee decided not to twist with me.

It was ugly, painful, and embarrassing, but I survived (mostly because there were very few people around to witness it). By the time I finished picking out my movie and got out of the store, my sore knee was almost limp-free. I considered scrapping the Target run, (usually falling down that early in a trip is a sign that only many more bad things will happen) but I really needed to do laundry, lest I have a lot to explain at work the next day. I pressed on.

Naturally, as I got out of my truck in the next parking lot, I took one step and my knee collapsed on me. I fell directly forward, this time into one of those shopping cart return spaces, smacking my other knee against the aluminum frame, as hard as possible while under my own power.

"Just awesome," I thought while wincing through the intense pain.

I recovered myself and started to head into the store as fast as possible, trying to mask my now incredibly awkward limp as much as I could, now that it was both of my legs. By the time I was halfway through the parking lot, though, I gave up the charade and went with the limp, as it eased the pain immensely.

Sadly, my timing was off. Unobserved by me, at literally the exact same time, there was an old man walking parallel to me about 8 feet to my right. The man had a cane and was walking with a pronounced limp, incredibly similar to my own. As I said, I was entirely unaware of this, until the Target employee at the door gave me the absolutely darkest look I've received in months. I did a little double-take and looked around, trying to find the source of his disdain, only then finally seeing the old man who was entering the store at the same time. He was staring at me with the most profound look of disappointment.

I wanted to stop time at that second, pull them to the side, and plead my case, closing statement to a jury style. I would explain to them that I was not some kind of wildly insensitive mimicking asshole. That I had just somehow managed to injure not just one, but both of my knees in the last 10 minutes in the most spectacular and embarrassing ways possible. That it was a coincidence of epic proportions that we happened to both be walking in the same store at the same time. Usually I'm a nice, upstanding boy. I would make them understand. They would have to understand, and would laugh at the coincidence.

As I raised a finger and opened my mouth to start the denials, the old man shook his head and walked into the store. I turned back to try the employee, but he had already wandered off towards some other employees collecting carts in the lot, no doubt to implore them to "check out the jackass with the fake limp."

And just like that, I would always be remembered as the guy who mocked an injured old man in the Target parking lot. For, I dunno, laughs I guess.

This is just one of the reasons I should not be let outdoors, people.

Today's Language Lesson

Chauvinism does not necessarily have anything to do with gender. Misogyny does.

chau·vin·ism [shoh-vuh-niz-uhm] –noun
1. zealous and aggressive patriotism or blind enthusiasm for military glory.
2. biased devotion to any group, attitude, or cause.

mi·sog·y·ny [mi-soj-uh-nee] –noun
1. hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women.










Doo-dee-doo-doo.

(Courtesy of Becky, who keeps me linguistically honest.)

Independence (from Cholesterol) Day

"Is two pounds of hamburger enough? I only have one pound of sausage and one pound of boudain - that's just four pounds of meat total."

"You do understand that you're the only person eating, right?"

"Well yeah. ...So, four pounds is enough?"

-----------------------

I don't remember when it became a tradition, but for the past several Fourth of July Holidays, rather than going out and visiting family and friends, getting drunk, watching fireworks, or whatever other publicly endorsed forms of celebration most people engage in, I just eat. A lot.

Which, come to think about it, since this is America - The Land of the Double Cheeseburger, this may in fact be an acceptable undertaking for a country celebration. Until we get to the point where I'm having the above conversation in the Meats Aisle of the grocery store. When I say that I eat a lot, it's an understatement simply because the truth of the matter is frankly horrifying.

What I did this weekend:

1. Arrive at Grocery Store
2. Acquire Shopping Cart
3. Wander down Aisle #1
4. Place anything that looks remotely good in your cart
5. Repeat steps #3 & #4 for every aisle in the store
6. Check out

The only limitation on the above steps is that the total cost should not exceed $100.00. For a single person's meal. For one (albeit very long) day.

I ended up with: the aforementioned two pounds of hamburger, a pound of sausage, a pound of boudain, chips (var. types), Oreos, soft drinks, guacamole, dip, salsa, ice cream, fresh cherries, beef jerky, canned fruit, baked beans, multiple types of bread, condiments, onions, tomatoes, frozen appetizers, and candy (var. types).

But wait. Things that I forgot to pick up and will need to find before Wednesday: french fries, cheese (var. types), potato salad, crab salad, and pie (var. types). Also, I'm considering picking up a steak for dinner, just for completeness's sake.

See, now it looks like an overstatement. But no, I will actually eat all of that, or as much of it as possibly before I reach the point where I am unable to move under my own power. Basically my day will boil down to nothing but eating from 11:00am to 11:00pm. Usually this is accompanied by a Law & Order marathon on TNT, or perhaps the whole Lord of the Rings Trilogy on DVD. It's my one day of pure gluttony/sloth in the whole year. Pretty much just imagine that scene from Return of the Jedi with Jabba the Hutt, except fewer scantily clad women and more Jerry Orbach.

Usually it's quite the undertaking anyway, but this year is especially damning considering that I have been pretty much cholesterol free for 3 months. With the proposed level of fat intake, I firmly plan on stroking out right around 8:00 that night, just as the fireworks begin. But it will be entirely worth it, as there are very few things as fulfilling as purely hedonistic eating. If you never hear from me again, assume that I died doing the thing I loved most in the world - slamming down some pie.

Happy 4th of July everyone!

Bitter in Advance

Guys, I am in the worst mood today. All it took was my iPod freezing up first thing this morning, and now I'm useless for the rest of the day. All morning long, people have been doing stupid or annoying thing all around me, and I feel justified getting more and more angry. In fact, I just yelled at a telemarketer (who completely deserved it, just to be clear) and felt profoundly more bitter when I hung up. This is not a good state of affairs.

By the time the commute home comes around, I'll probably be at the point where I road rage someone right off a bridge or something.

In order to stave off the waves of bitterness, I present you a book meme. Because I like making other people suffer along with my boring eccentricities. (via 50 Books)

Five most recent books you've bought for yourself:

1. Penny Arcade Vol 4: Birds are Weird, Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik
2. Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy, David Sedaris (so I can finally return Devon's copy)
3. Different Seasons, Stephen King
4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (preorder, natch.)
5. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

Five books you've most recently given other people:

1. Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets, Carole Walter
2. The Joiner King, Troy Denning
3. Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell
4. Invitiation to the Game, Monica Hughes
5. Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds

Five most recent books you've loaned other people, and their status:

1. Shalimar the Clown: A Novel, Salman Rushdie (still on loan from being on loan to me from the library)
2. Harry Potter and The Sorceror's Stone, J.K. Rowling (still on loan)
3. A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham (returned)
4. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris (returned)
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (returned)

Last five books you looked at on Amazon/Chapters/Powell's/etc.:

1. Specimen Days: A Novel by Michael Cunningham
2. The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell
3. Grand & Humble by Brent Hartinger
4. The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon
5. The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Top five books on your "to read" pile:

1. Century Rain, Alastair Reynolds (I will finish you yet, dammit)
2. Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
4. Glasshouse, Charles Stross
5. Old Man's War, John Scalzi

Bottom five books on your "to read" pile:

1. Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
2. Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson
3. Empire, Orson Scott Card
4. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson
5. A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar

Mm, all that talk of books now has me at least 22% less likely to kill someone on my way home. Books really do enrich your life.

As a Way of Unestablishing My Movie Credentials

Ever look over at that Watch sidebar and think "Sweet damn, this boy has the worst taste in film I have ever seen!"?

In order to help you prove that delightfully worded supposition, allow me to provide you with some hard evidence to back it up.

I give you the list of all of AFI's Top 100 American Films that I have actually seen, along with a brief explanation that verifies why I should never be allowed to criticize film. To make it even more fair, I'm only including movies I have seen in their entirety (e.g. no 2001: A Space Odyssey, since although I've probably seen the entire thing through various clips over the ages, I've never sat and watched it straight through) and can still remember the majority of (no The French Connection, because while I've seen it (twice) before, I couldn't tell you a bit about it, except for the car chase.

Prepare to be entirely underwhelmed

• #2 The Godfather - Barely makes the list, since it's basically a haze in my mind. I still retain the rough shape of the movie though, even if I could barely stay awake for the required 3 hours of difficult to understand accents.
• #10 The Wizard of Oz - Gets points for reminding me of my childhood, but seriously, I can never sit through this movie anymore; it both bores and bugs the crap out of me now.
• #13 Star Wars - Yes! One that I liked and have seen enough times to quote from memory. Take that, legitimate film critics! (I bet they haven't even read the Expanded Universe novels either, the Philistines.)
• #14 Psycho - Fine, it's a classic. And pretty cool actually. I still lose points for probably not fully grasping it's importance, though.
• #17 The Graduate - Jesus, I hated this movie. And pretty much every character it contained too.
• #24 E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial - I refuse to watch this ever again, after it made me cry like a little girl when I was around 9 years old. Stupid movie.
• #25 To Kill a Mockingbird - Had to watch it for school, I prefer the book approximately 1,000 times more.
• #30 Apocalypse Now - Was forced to watch this by Jim, who had to watch it for school. And by "forced," I mean "was over in his dorm drinking when he was watching it and didn't want to wander across campus drunk." I'm pretty sure the only way I survived this movie without dying of boredom was my blood alcohol content.
• #34 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Quite possibly my least favorite Disney movie ever. Nothing happens!
• #40 The Sound of Music - Okay, I will not hate on this movie. As ridiculous as a movie about escaping from Nazi's though music and pushy stage-parenting is, it still holds a place in my heart.
• #50 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Now that's what I'm talking about. Finally we agree on something.
• #55 North by Northwest - I think I watched this with Devon? Isn't this the one where they climbed down the face of Mt. Rushmore? Maybe I shouldn't have counted this one. Still, if it's what I think it is, I really didn't like it.
• #68 Unforgiven - Another good one. Pretty much the only Western I've ever liked.
• #71 Saving Private Ryan - The first half hour is pretty sweet, in an utterly horrifying sort of way. Other than that, blah.
• #72 The Shawshank Redemption - No gripe, would probably top my own list of best movies ever, too. I have yet to successfully see this playing on cable and not watch it all the way through.
• #74 The Silence of the Lambs - Oh man, two in a row. Another of my best movies ever. Maybe my cred can be salvaged.
• #76 Forrest Gump - Wait, there it goes. My distaste for this movie is a physical thing, with the potential to move large objects. Emotionally manipulative junk.
• #81 Spartacus - I enjoy it on an entirely campy level, which I'm pretty sure is the opposite of what this list is going for.
• #83 Titanic - And here's where we reach a conundrum: Do I admit that I really like this movie and incur the wrath of a populace that hates everything that Celine Dion has ever touched, or try and retain some street cred and continue my trend of hating all movies on the list? I think I'll just refrain from saying anything here.
• #89 The Sixth Sense - Was good the first time I saw it. Gets worse on every repeat viewing.
• #92 Goodfellas - A good movie that is basically twice as long as it needs to be for me to like it.
• #94 Pulp Fiction - As much as my brother will disown me for saying it, I totally don't get this movie. It's okay, but I would never watch it on purpose.
• #99 Toy Story - At least we end on an agreeable note. Awesome movie.

So I have seen 23 of the 100 best movies ever, and I only liked 8 of them. And just one in the top 39. I'm not sure which is more damning - the fact that I've not seen even a fourth of them, or that I hate the ones I have seen.

Either way, feel free to completely discount my movie opinions from now to eternity.

(You are also free to tell me exactly how wrong I am in the comments. Or to berate me for never seeing It's a Wonderful Life. You'll still never convince me to watch it. I turned it one one time, and some old man was hitting a kid in the ear! It was horrifying.)

Power Through the Pain

Tired of constantly bemoaning the fact that I couldn't even walk up the 18 steps required to reach my front door without getting winded, I decided to take back up the idea of exercising. Specifically, exercise through weight lifting. Because, see, there was a brief period of my life(June 2001-September 2002) in which I was totally awesome at: 1) picking up heavy things and 2) having gigantic arms. I vaguely remembered it being pretty cool.

Sadly I forgot about the fact that it goddamn hurts to start lifting weights. Instead, I was all rose-colored glasses, chock full of enthusiasm, "getting in shape is awesome!", et al.

Good lord, what was I thinking? Enthusiasm is both dangerous and wildly overrated. I picked up a couple of sets of dumbbells from our local sports emporium over the weekend and started back up like I had never stopped. This was stupid on so many levels that it's hard to properly describe without the use of ridiculously large fonts. Even when I was in remotely good shape, just easing in to a normal routine is a pain and a half. Picking up a mid level set of weights and going through your old routine out of the blue is like joining an NFL team on opening day because you used to play pick-up flag football on the weekends 10 years ago.

Since then I have spent better than 5 days in monumental agony from ever part of my body, with the exception of maybe my scalp and ears. Arms, legs, chest, even my neck, you name it, it hurts. After the round of lunges I completed on Tuesday, based on the amount of pain caused by just sitting down, I firmly believe that my ass will be the most spectacular thing in the world when I get done. Otherwise there is no possible way that this pain could be worth it.

And see, that's how they get you. Now I have to continue on with this ridiculous regimen, since if I don't it will have been not only a huge waste of time, it's a huge waste of pain. It will have been an entire week of moaning every time I took a step, falling into chairs rather than sitting down, and wincing like a gunshot victim each time I reached for a piece of paper, all for exactly nothing. I'm way too narcissistic to admit that large of a tactical error. Plus, when you add in the fact that I tend to have a self-worth that is directly tied to the size of my biceps, you can almost guarantee that, short of the destruction of a tendon or similar, I will not stop until I reach crazy buff guy status again.

This is exactly why people think that guys who go to the gym have no brains. Because, seriously: makes no sense whatsoever, causes wild amounts of pain, physical cues the exact opposite of the intended result, yet I keep on going.

It's a sickness, I tell you.

...

...

...

But man, just check out my arms!

June Showers

Even though I don't own the condo I'm living in, I take a weird sort of pride in the place. It's a combination of it's age and quirkiness, I think, along with the fact that I'm renting it directly form a landlord, rather than from an apartment complex.

So when I find that the floors tend to slant even more than I realized, I don't get annoyed and call maintenance, I find it adds character to the place and take my own precautions. And when I turn around and run into the wall in the bathroom, I don't get mad at the incompetent placement of the toilet, I chuckle at how charming and unique the layout is. Faced with faulty wiring, I would probably praise the rustic nature of my new home, but luckily it hasn't come to that yet.

For now all my annoyances are minor and are far outweighed by knowing that when you walk in the door to my house, your first thought isn't "What low-rent hell have I gotten myself into now?"

The fact that the thought is probably "Why am I sliding downhill in the living room?" is irrelevant to me.

In the spirit of appreciating what you have, I try my best to take care of things on my own and not get the landlord involved in minor inconveniences. Whereas two months ago I felt justified calling my apartment complex with righteous indignation because the florescent light in my kitchen had burned out after only 3 years of constant use, I am far more likely to tackle gigantic home improvement projects by myself now. Despite knowing absolutely nothing about even the basics of, say, circuit breakers, or how one goes about 'grounding' a live wire, I still like to go it alone. Usually, though, I'm far more concerned with other pressing issues, like whether it's an "Allen" wrench or an "Alan" wrench, and exactly who this Allen/Alan guy was in the first place. But in any case, it's become almost a matter of principle that I don't go for help.

When minor annoyance #23, the shower head is shorter than I am and sprays practically no water, finally became to much to bear, I went out and found a replacement fixture and decided that I would install it myself that same afternoon.

Extracting the old shower head proved to be a very simple process of unscrewing a single bolt, and I felt pretty good about my chances of completing the project without physically injuring myself or flooding anything. However, when I attempted to attach the new head, the connecting pipe proved to be 2 inches too long for the existing fixture mounted to the wall. I was a bit stymied at first, but ultimately decided that all I needed to do was use a hacksaw to saw off the excess pipe from the new piece and everything would work out fine. Necessity being the mother of invention and other similar trite platitudes, et cetera, et cetera.

Sadly, I do not own a hacksaw. Or a saw for that matter. I systematically went through the house and found that the only sharp edge I owned was a set of steak knives that I had bought over 3 years ago. These were a set of 5 plastic-handled knives that I had picked up on clearance at Walmart, chosen primarily because they came with their own wooden block for storage, and at the time I hadn't had anywhere else to keep utensils. Also, the fact that the whole set cost $3.99 was appealing to my broke self at the time. These knives were not serrated and I doubted they held a sharp edge at all. Knowing that I had never cut myself with them despite my innate clumsiness, it seemed almost impossible that these guys held any stronger cutting power than a butter knife or pair of safety scissors.

I still tried using them, though, as I hated to throw in the towel on my first real home improvement project so quickly. I worked for a full half-hour at the plastic pipe, sawing back and forth with varying degrees of fervor, often pretending that I was playing a particularly cheap violin, before finally declaring it a lost cause. 30 minutes of work had left a cut that barely qualified for the term. "Depression" might have been a more accurate word, in more than one sense.

Thinking that there may be other, less brute-force/round-peg-square-hole sort of solutions to my problem, I went to the nearby home improvement mega-store and explained my problem to a sales clerk there. He returned in short order with a smug look and a 37 cent pipe extender that would take care of the whole issue without use of a single tool. Never mind my initial request to be pointed in the direction of the hacksaw department.

Suitably chastised, I went home and applied his solution in under 2 minutes. The extender fit easily to the pipe, and similarly to the shower head. When I turned the water on a steady stream of water came out, at the proper height and pressure. I was vindicated by my domination of sheer will over plumbing, but was sad that it took professional guidance towards a piece of equipment that cost less than a pack of gum to achieve it.

The next day, I woke up and took my first shower with proper water pressure in a month, still slightly stinging over my not-quite-moral victory. I appreciated the strength of the water and the fact that I didn't need to bend at the waist to rinse my hair, but that wasted half-hour flailing at a plastic tube with the dullest knife in the world still irked me. As petty as it was, I really wished someone else hadn't been the one to solve the problem for me so easily.

As it was, I probably should have been a bit more specific in my wish. As I finished the final rinse of my hair, the pipe extender, so graciously provided to me by the smirking clerk, snapped in half. Causing the new shower head to come smacking down into the back of my head, and sending a wild spray of water that soaked the entire bathroom before I could recover from the blow long enough to get the water turned off.

It's a hollow victory, to be sure. Actually, thinking about it, it's not so much a victory at all but a complete and utter defeat. Still, I feel...better. So someday when I do get the shower to work (we are back to the old, wildly inferior shower head until I come up with a working solution) it will be all my own doing, and I can proudly proclaim my handiness and plumbing mastery for all the world to see.

How I Spent My Weekend

This is my nephew, Elijah. He is awesome and 5 days old. Also, he's very tiny. He tends to sneeze a lot. I held him for upwards of 20 minutes, and didn't break him at all.

I now feel older than the earth.

That is all.

Notice of Construction

Update (6/7/07): Total blog overhaul complete. Let me know if you see anything broken or out of place.

Hear What I'm Sayin'?

On Sunday night I had my usual 3 month ear treatment for my allergies, as is common for all people who are chronically and unendingly sick for no apparent reason. It's just a quick flush of my ears to keep them from swelling too much because of whatever allergy du jour I am suffering from.

It's nothing big, takes maybe an hour all told, but does require me to lie on the couch with my head perfectly sideways for two long stretches of time. This is not so much a hardship, seeing as that's how I spend the majority of my weekends anyway. Usually my reasoning for doing so is less defined, like "oh, I was out late last night (until 11:00!)," or "I have to go to work in a couple of days, I really should conserve my strength." Now that I had a genuine excuse, lying on the couch was an excellent, guilt-free chance at laziness.

The problem I had though, was that the treatment leaves me deaf for the duration, since while the medicine is acting my ear is totally closed off. This made watching TV an issue, as the speaking component tends to add a lot to the pretty, pretty pictures that are flashing by. And closed captioning was out of the question; since my head was at a 90 degree angle to the TV and I don't possess the mental wherewithal to read vertically.

So what is a person to do? In my case, I decided to watch the latest movie in our Blockbuster queue in complete silence, and just fill in the dialogue in my head as it went along. You would think this would be difficult, especially seeing as it was a movie I had never seen before. Until I tell you the title of the movie (The Hitcher) and you realize that if anything, the actual dialogue in the movie probably would have detracted from the overall experience.

(Note: Wildly Extensive, All Encompassing SPOILERS are upcoming for the entire film. On the bizarre chance that you actually care for a single second about the plot behind this movie and have not yet experience the (wrong-kind-of) horror of it firsthand, I would recommend skipping this post entirely. And also seriously reevaluating your priorities in life.)

Y'all, deeply and truly - there has never been a more painfully telegraphed movie since the age of silent films. I didn't hear a single word any of the cast members said, but I bet I could give you just as good a synopsis as anyone who was unfortunate enough to see and hear the whole thing without the hindrance (aid?) of ear medication.

And okay, I know that people always say that movies should "show, not tell" in order to get their message across, but at some point you reach the overkill stage. And in this movie, I'm pretty sure we reached that stage approximately 20 minutes in, when we were treated to our 5th close up of Sean Bean's face looking as menacing as possible. And then again in the 21st minute when we got our 42nd close up of Sophia Bush looking scared.

I suppose I could have potentially gotten a little confused when the protagonists stole a cop car and started what seemed to be a multi-state high speed chase (with helicopter!). But the movie helpfully cleared all that up when it had Sean Bean kill every police officer and destroy every police car (and almost the helicopter!) involved, without so much as blinking.

And then for good measure, killed off the main character hot guy (In the most awesome and ridiculous way possible. Seriously, that was the best part of the movie by a mile.). At that point, I rapidly lost interest.

Without the particular brand of attention grabbing that only a cute guy can provide, I got intensely bored and tried to take on the near insurmountable task of misinterpreting the most obvious movie ever, with the remaining 15 minutes. Was there any way Sophia Bush could be interpreted as the villain and Sean Bean the tragic anti-hero, arrested for the wrong crime, a la Harrison Ford in The Fugitive? This was my new quest and I attempted it with every fiber of my being.

Sadly, I think I failed. Primarily because immediately after my vow, Sean Bean totally ripped some guy's throat out, shot another policeman in the head, and then did the same to a third. Shortly afterwards I thought I might make a go of it when, for some unknown reason, Sophia Bush stole the last remaining policeman's gun, leaving him helpless and trapped in a crashed car to die, and released Sean Bean from the back of a locked police vehicle to finish the job for her. But in the end, even when she smoked him with a goddamn shotgun, I still didn't feel like I came anywhere near my goal. I mean, her death count was only 1. I'm pretty sure at final count Sean had at least 14, two of which were kids and one in which he literally ripped a guy in half.

Sadly, no one wins with this abomination of a movie.

On the plus side though, with or without sound, I can recommend that no one ever, ever, ever again watch this movie.

I'm glad I could be of service.

Oh, and hey, now my ears are super clear.