Go Away, Piss Off, Die

So, I don't know, I've been a mite cranky and burned out at work. I've also been talking to myself a lot (only mostly at work). And while I'm not completely crazy yet, I've been taking my lighter out of my pocket and, sure, burning my boss in effigy. In my mind. Because I don't want to upset my office mates. So there's that. Not crazy. Yet.

And another so: Time to take more time off. Yes, boys and girls, it's a patented Raindog Vacation: a sudden 5 days of doin' nothin'. Time to watch DVDs, maybe drink some, play games, and irritate myself by not doing more useful things. More on this later. Just wanted to share the good news.

Oh, and I did get a yearly raise. Like 5.xx%, but with a few months retroactive, so there's a "little somethin' extra" in my paycheck tomorrow and I didn't even have to Look The Other Way for it.

Speaking of corrupt longshoremen, just finished watching The Wire season 2 and it pretty much kicked ass. I thought the first season was very good, but the second season was very good with a side of delicious crabcakes. In a way, it's an anti-Hollywood show--part police procedural, highly character/actor driven, and with very good (and realistic) scripts. There's really no big names (or lead actors even) to hang the series on and not a ton of action. But man there's a lot of great characters/actors and some very smart storytelling and directing. One of the guys behind this series (writer? creator?) is the same guy who did Homicide, which is pretty obvious, and not just because The Wire is set in Baltimore as well.

The first season is all about trying to make a case against a druglord in the projects, and it's actually cool that the second season (featuring the Russian mob and Baltimore stevedores) doesn't forget about the "bad guys" from the first season and we get a lot of what's going on with them in the wake of that case. And despite the fact that there's literally ~30 important characters in the second season, I never got confused once. And, as anyone who knows me can attest, I get easily confused. And distracted by shiny things.

HBO is becoming like beer to me. You have to ask yourself: Is there anything it can't do?

Next up is Deadwood season 2. I can only hope it's as cocksucking as the first season.

yes, I can still type. I just choose not to most of the time

Here's a little sunshine for you first thing in the morning:

So I go to bed at like 10:00 tonight. After only a few minutes of lying there I realize that there is not a chance in hell I am going to fall asleep, since all I can do is think about work. So what do I do?

I go downstairs and start working., of course. (Yes, I am an imbecile)

Now I am about to try to go back upstairs and try to go to sleep again, but somehow I just know I will be lying there thinking about work. Again.

If only I could find my hammer.

Now for the good news. Misreal, I know you had some technical difficulties on Saturday, but, wonderful savant (go ahead and insert your preferred adjective in front of that last word) that I am, I actually have your lost post here, in all of it's original glory:

There is a new, well, semi-new, Grant Morrison series, SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY. He takes seven minor DC heroes and recreates them. The only one I had even heard of before was Zatanna, and that is only because she has a Batman connection.

Each issue also uses five different artists, and none of the seven heroescharacters interact, even though their stories are connected and they are working together without knowing it. As usual Morrison is the most imaginative, and potentially completely insane, comic writer out there, but for a change he seems to be reigning in some of his dafter (he's British, so I can totally say that) impulses for the sake of the story.

The first two volumes are out already. Misreall suggests you check them out.

I much prefer this early draft to the final edit. Its seems much more vivacious and eager. This post has it's entire future ahead of it. Little does it know of the rough road it faces ahead. Lets all bow our head in silence for a moment to honor the poor, doomed post.

...

...

And on to much less important (interesting? stupid? need another adjective here) news - I have finished re-reading Cryptonomicum, and I think I am about to start re-reading The Baroque Cycle, but I am not sure. I might actually remember it too well at this point, was it just last summer that I read it or was it the summer before that?

huh. I have no idea. I really am an old man now.

On that note: off to bed!

A Culmination of Geek

So Saturday night, me (lower left, the one in the dress) and 39 of my closest friends raided The Molten Core, during which I:

1) Got my epic staff

2) Killed Ragnaros, the big final boss

You'll have to trust me when I say that this is something of a geek apex of achievement in World of Warcraft, though I am perhaps the 23,482nd person to do it.

That is all.

On Monday, I'll be posting about beer, baseball, women, and wrestling sharks.

Wow, this is what happens if I work on Saturday

So I was going to write this whole thing about how you should read the new Grant Morrison series SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY, and how he is less insane that usual with this one, and that it acutally makes sense.

But I deleted the post.

Twice.

After publishing it.

Twice.

I should go home.

Other ADT Security Bot Possibilities

While ol' Ed (see post below) would be pretty friggin' cool to have out in the front yard, it did have both a charming (when directed at others) and annoying (when directed at its owner) tendency to be a bit trigger-happy. So here are a few other possibilities:


Robocop

Pros: Can hold conversations, is cheap to feed, and mothers like him. Can probably fix your car and deliver clever one-liners the second he's done changing your oil.

Cons: Holds conversations in a creepy mono-tone voice, his sense of humor sucks, and will freak out girlfriends when they stumble into the bathroom and he's in there with his visor off. Will probably arrest you at some point.




Dalek

Pros: Efficient, ruthless, can easily take care of clogged toilets. Can probably do the vacuuming, too.

Cons: Noisy with a very limited vocabulary. The extremely high geek factor would result in having to stack nerd bodies in the garage like cordwood. Couldn't catch people in my basement or in my attic space. Would probably steal girlfriends (really, though, just to look at the design of it, a dalek looks like the perfect female companion).



Chopping Mall-Bots

Pros: Silent, deadly killers. Clever and amusing deaths. Good conversation pieces.

Cons: Clever and amusing deaths that I'd have to clean up. Tendency to kill anything young and nubile. Would always be wandering away to local malls.



Eva Unit-01

Pros: House would be very safe. Best status symbol ever and, to rub it in, could order it to destroy every minivan and Corvette it sees.

Cons: $500,000 electric bills. Tendency to eat the neighbor's massive sentient entities when it gets hungry--which wouldn't be so bad except that it's a noisy chewer. At 200 feet high, I'd have to deal with a lot of people pointing at it and milling. I hate milling. After around the 22nd burglar it caught, Misreall would get shot, EM would turn out to be an evil clone, and I'd be wandering around saying, "Wha'?" every 2 minutes until the world exploded.


Robbie the Robot

Pros: None

Cons: Hahahaha, c'mon. The only bright spot would be shooting it through the head the first time it woke me up at 3am flailing around because it heard a train outside, and even then I'd have to figure out a way to drag it out to the curb.

A Deal Too Stupid To Pass Up?

So a Mormon-looking guy dropped by the house last night who turned out to be not so much Mormon as harmless ADT guy working undercover as a Mormon. His name was Dana, and he had a deal for me.

ADT will install a security system (see above) in my place for free as long as I let them post a PROTECTED BY ADT sign in my yard, or perhaps attached to a blimp overhead, or perhaps help up by a homeless guy who'd sit on the curb. They were a little fuzzy on this point. I seem to recall that this would be a 36-month thing. In any case, several thoughts occur:

1) It's a scam. Now, I'm not the paranoid type--hey, fuck you!--but I've equated "free" with "we're going to screw you" since joining some music club thing when I was 12. Several threatening letters and 5 copies of Rush's 2112 later and I'd learned my lesson for upwards to a few months. But there's been a lot of reinforcement of this lesson over the years and now I'm as likely to say, "Let me think about it" as I am, "Ohmygod gimme gimme gimme!" It's about 50/50.

I don't think it's a scam, though. They're providing me the service and installation for free, and nothing more tangible than that. The kid, who had a depressing lack of slime or flop sweat, said they offer it to a few houses in areas where they plan to canvass. So whatever.

2) I really don't need it, knock on wood. I've left my garage door open all day several times and never lock the door on it, and nothing's ever gone missing. I don't worry about getting robbed except when the Homeowner's Fantasies kick in (usually around lunch, for some reason), and even then it's usually fire, not burglars, who are out to ruin my day. Oddly, in these fantasies it's the fire that's wearing a Hamburglar suit and not the actual burglars, but that's neither here nor there. [Paranoia fun fact: ADT, if I refuse their service, will totally clean my place out. "No one says 'no' to us, no one!" the boss will say.]

3) I'll probably set the damn thing off all the time, what with my late-night games of Ninja Infiltration. Although the challenge might be exciting!

4) On the other hand it's free--assuming there are no bad strings, in which case fergit it--and I'd have someone other than myself to blame if someone broke in and stole my precious collection of old paperbacks and soy sauce packets.

There are social aspecs of the whole thing which are kind of irritating, too, but I have a few things to do and the totally awesome Photoshop above wasted the best 10 minutes of my morning.

What say you guys? I have "a few weeks" to think it over.

This Week Makes Me Tired

I woke up at 4am and couldn't go back to sleep, so ended up watching Scrubs on DVD--making me realize, of course and once again, that I am very boring and clearly lacking essential sassocity and Vitamin Fun in my diet. But then living in a sit-com would probably be even more exhausting than my current finals' week, crappy weather, procrastinating lifestyle. That, and I wouldn't be cast in Scrubs. No, I'd be a really stupid white guy from a 70s (80s?) sit-com like Sanford & Son or The Jeffersons.

If my life were The Jeffersons song, it would have been called "Movin' on sideways."

(It's been a long, long time since I've been so tired at work that I've actually nodded off for a few seconds.)

New Candidate for the Strangest Double Feature of All Time - 2006 version

So this weekend I visited the beautiful and charming home of RainDog. In addition to celebrating a colorful folk festival (filled with sombreros, drunken, racist frat boys and ten year old techno jams), drinking (somewhat less than normal, because now we are old), and complaining about everyone other than ourselves, EM, and Tom Waits (love you, Tom, call me) we watched movies.
On Saturday we ended up watching a really cracktastic double feature of A History of Violence (the best movie of last year) and Wallace and Gromit : the Curse of the Wererabbit. If we hadn't taken a judiciously timed break it would have been an even more brain-destroying triple feature that included the last Final Fantasy movie.
I can only assume that RainDog and myself have now, collectively and together, watched so many movies, of so many kinds, that now everything goes with everything else. We have, perhaps, reached such a perfect and disinterested state of viewing that all films are all other films and nothing is, in fact everything.
Call me Hollywood, I have some advice.

Well-Mannered Content

I think it is well past time to behave myself in a manner more befitting a gentleman. Therefore I post to the internet on this fine Friday whilst wearing spats and with my monocle firmly screwed into my eye, sipping casually on a lashing of ginger beer.

Everything is most salubrious! Certainly the old bean isn't what it was from back in my salad days, and the rest of me could use a spot of oil in the joints, but I dare say I'm a good many years from the sanatorium, what?

The one thing that has been troubling me is the damnable weeds in my front yard! They're mating like savages! I fear I'm going to have to take some kind of instrument to them, though I don't want to dirty my spoons. On a related note, still no word on when I can expect my mother to secure me a manservant.

Unfortunately, I have to leave my current reminiscing at this juncture, as it is time to toil for my tea, as the lads in accounting say. (Do not worry re: weeds. It's not as bad as all that, and I'm sure the matter will resolve itself to the satisfaction of all.)

Geekdom: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

They're reporting that Lucasarts is now going to release the original Star Wars (screen cap, above) on DVD. I couldn't care less, and neither should anyone else. How even the most rabid fanboy could care at this point boggles my mind, what with Lucas' constant stream of bullshit about his original/pure/holy vision(s). Sure, I loved the movies when I was a kid and understood that the prequils could never match the originals as seen when I was, like, 7, but Lucas himself is such a clueless whore that I'd like him to be launched into the sun at taxpayer expense, for the good of Art and Humanity.

It's Either TMI or Listen to Me Bitch About My Job

More proof that biology hates me and that I lose more and more sense of shame as I get older.

Regarding the latter, I fully expect to wake up on the weekends sometime in the future and, noticing that it's a nice day outside, just walk outside in my underwear and socks, Hostess Cup Cake in one hand, beer in the other, all the while leisurely patroling my lawn for day-ruining communists and waving at horrified passers-by. Oh, and when I'm down to just the beer, I'll scratch at my crotch, occaisionally excavating my belly button for lost treasure.

So, to carry us back to the present, my balls ache. Not my testicles, you damn prudes: My Balls. The reason they ache is because yesterday I ordered a pizza with pepperoni and jalepenos on it, and such is the nature of my decrepit and broken-down (and, yes, horribly abused) body that I now know with 95% certainty that when I eat spicey food there will be a reckoning. In my balls. Sure, my balls' cranky neighbor--Mr. Asshole--might complain, too, but we're not talking about him, we're talking about the part of the body we actually like, not the one who's frankly kind of an embarrassment to everyone.

Anyway, I certainly don't remember having this problem when I was younger. And I will say that jalepenos seem to cause this reaction more than other run-of-the-mill spicey foods. But I still have to eat them, dammit, because I'm also old enough To Take Responsibility For My Actions. The pleasure I get from eating the food is still worth any potential crotch coddling (balls balming? testicle tranquilizing?) that I might have to engage in the next day.

I know that the time is coming where I'll have to forgo these foods completely, I'm sure. But for now, I'm still willing to amuse myself at the expense of my body.

I'm pretty sure this makes me more foolish than principled.

reason no. 3,423,781 why I could never be Japanese

The link is here, but really, the picture says it all.

Sitting on the bus

So last night I left work without my laptop and (more importantly) my book. Since I have an hour long train ride I bought a magazine. For the ride home the magazone worked admirably well at entertaining me. But this morning Iwas completely unable to concentrate on it.

More proof that I am stupider in the morning.