Category Archives: Uncategorized

And ganked from Sinboy’s journal…

Posted on by
8

Republican senator calls for nuking Syria in church, everyone laughs and claps.

Where do these people come from? I don’t know what’s more insane–the fact that there are still people who think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or the fact that there are legislators who think those weapons were secretly buried in Syria, or the fact that in this day and age a man can go to church and call for an unprovoked nuclear attack on another country and get cheered for it.

Guys, not to be the bearer of bad tidings, but:

Back to posting again…

Posted on by
32

…after a rough couple of weeks in which Shelly and I were very, very, very sick in rapid succession. All manner of nastiness, misery, vomiting, and so forth, which resulted in the two of us missing movies with the Smoosh and camping with smoocherie…suck!

Shelly is an angel, though, and even put up with me whining and throwing up a lot. 🙂 phyrra is also an angel, and called often to check up on us. She and nihilus even came over to keep us company, which was very sweet.

And to watch Lexx, which I still don’t know how I feel about.

In any event, all better now, so without further ado (from femetal via phyrra and khepra)

Banned Books, with snarky comments Clicky-clicky, you KNOW you want to…

Relaxing with friends, and big giant space bugs…

Posted on by
8

Shelly and I spent part of the weekend last weekend with phyrra and nihilus, with Shelly and phyrra doing girl stuff while nihilus and I geeking out on laptops. The girl stuff involved hair dye, with very cool results:

Afterward, they subjected us to many hours of the TV series LEXX, which is, if you’re not familiar with it, a show about a sex slave, a dweeb, and a dead guy as they journey through the universe on a gigantic bug-like living spaceship that destroys planets and eats people. It features lots of brains and body parts, people being sawn in half, and the most gratuitous shower scenes outside of anime. I still haven’t quite decided how I feel about the show.

Prejudice is expensive

Posted on by
28

Last week, I was on-site with a client of mine I haven’t seen in quite some time. My client was complaining to me that she and her husband are planning to move, and the two of them can’t afford a house that’s even as good as the one they’re living in now. They’ve lived in their current house for quite a number of years, but a combination of changing property values and the recent Florida hurricanes, which have made insurance for houses near the coast impossible to obtain at any price, have created a situation where they can’t really get much from their house and moving into a new house of similar size, age, and condition will cost them three times more than their current house is costing them.

The reason they’re moving? They’ve discovered that one of their neighbors down the street runs a porn Web site. It’s “disgusting,” she says, to have to live in the same neighborhood with one of those kinds of people, and “who wants to live in that kind of environment?”

Now, what’s interesting about that, aside from its inherent silliness (“that kind of environment”? What, is he shooting porn flicks in the middle of the street?) is the way I responded emotionally to it–my opinion o fthis particular client as a person immediately dropped through the floor, melted its way through the Earth’s crust, and now sits at the center of the planet’s molten core, where it can’t get any lower unless the earth is swallowed up by the sun. I responded exactly as if she said they’re moving because there are Negroes living in the neighborhood, and “who wants to live in that kind of environment?”

What she probably doesn’t realize, though, is that there’s no neighborhood she can possibly move into where her neighbors aren’t doing things behind closed doors that she disapproves of. The other thing she doesn’t seem to grasp is that the proclivities of her neighbors really don’t have anything to do with her at all, and are None Of Her Business.

It’s all about the marketing

Posted on by
6

So, it would appear that there are so many people taking Prozac in Great Britain that it’s actually ending up in the water supply, as sewer treatment facilities aren’t set up to remove pharmaceuticals from wastewater.

Now, other people may see a problem there, but I see it as an opportunity. Rather than spending lots of money changing all the wastewater treatment facilities, what’s needed is just a different attitude–a different outlook on the situation. All they really need to do is convince the public that psychoactive drugs in the water supply are a feature, not a bug!

A good way to start, I think, would be with some creative pro-psychoactive slogans. Something like “I’m Xany for Xanax,” perhaps. With enough positive spin, people might start expecting–hell, demanding–antidepressants in their water.

And why stop at water? Just think of the marketing possibilities here! “Hey kids, are you bummed out because Mom is pressuring you to clean your room? Stressed over homework? Disappointed about the prom? Try new Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Plus. The “Plus” is Prozac!”

Anyway, just thinkin’.

Randomness at a grocery store, and the suckitude of life

Posted on by
10

At the grocery store this evening, between the frozen aisle and the canned goods, two women bumped into each other and started talking about a mutual acquaintance. “Has So-and so gotten married yet?” “No, she’s still not married.” “Really? That’s too bad.” “Yeah, i don’t know what it is. She has to find a husband some time.” “Maybe she’s just too picky.”

Dear God, I didn’t know there was anyone left like that in the world–not for real. Seriously. I thought that was something you’d only find on bad TV sitcoms. This is 2004, not 1904, right? Women do have value that doesn’t derive from their husbands, right?

Later, at the checkout line, the cashier looks at me and says “You know what’s interesting? All these countries that don’t like the USA, and say bad things about America, when something happens to them, who do they turn to? We give everyone in the world handouts and they still don’t like us. Like Russia. And why doesn’t Canada have its own army?”

The Universe of Suck Department: This weekend, Shelly and I were supposed to go to Atlanta with nihilus and phyrra so we could look at apartments, then from there up to Nashville to pick up their car. And as it turns out, next weekend I’ll be in Miami Beach with a client instead. Suck, suck, suck.

Yes, boys and girls, there really is something worse than reality TV

Posted on by
12

So last week, Shelly and I were over at M & S’s house, where we were treated to the Star Wars Holiday Special, first aired in November 1978 and never shown since. This movie is arguably the worst thing ever to be shown on network television–worse than Big Brother, worse than Barney, worse than the Super Mario Brothers TV show, worse than Starsky & Hutch and Hee-Haw combined.

The show, which was produced by George Lucas, is so awful that Lucas himself said if he had the time and money, he would “track down every copy of the show out there and smash it to bits with a hammer.” The premise: Han is trying to take Chewbacca home to visit his family for the Wookie holiday of “Life Day,” and gets sidetracked along the way dealing with Imperials and (in an animated sequence worse than the classic Hanna-Barbera saturday morning cartons, Boba Fett).

The show is done as a variety act, with long and mnd-destroying scenes of life on the Wookie homeworld (including a fifteen-minute-long conversation between Chewbacca’s wife and his son, in Wookie, with no subtitles), a transvestite Harvey Korman doing a Julia-Childs-esque cooking show about roast Bantha meat, Luke Skywalker with bleached hair and so much makeup he might as well be a transvestite, and, incredibly, Carrie Fisher trying to sing.

Yes, you read that right. Carrie Fisher, right in the beginning of her long slide into drug addiction, makes an appearance, glassy-eyed and so completely blitzed out of her mind that she can barely walk, and sings.

There’s a lot of singing here. Jefferson Airplane sings in a “Wookie Entertainment” scene. Bea Arthur sings in a bar, with footage spliced in from the original cantina in the movie–and they couldn’t afford to rebuild the entire cantina set as it was in the movie, so the design of the cantina keeps changing and parts of the cantina jump around every time the camera angle changes. (Why is she singing? Because the Imperials have closed down the bar. We know this because a bunch of stormtroopers are watching a film of the bar as part of a “moral education lesson.”)Diane Carol appears as a hologram inside some sort of gadget that Chewy’s father owns, which as near as I can tell is the futuristic version of a Playboy centerfold, and she sings.

And Han meets Boba Fett, on a planet which is for some unexplained reason entirely covered in six feet of red pasta sauce.

There’s enough material in the movie for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, stretched out to fill two hours that feel more like twelve. The show just goes on and on and on, and every time you think it can’t get any more dreadful, it does.

We definitely need to find a copy on DVD.

(Potentially) happy news…

Posted on by
12

So. three days ago, I get an email from an editor of PC Player magazine–they’re doing an article on geek wear, they want to feature the Villain Tees Web site, and could I please send him high-resolution press-ready CMYK TIFF images of the geek-related shirts on the site?

The Villain Tees ordering system has been b0rken for months, in part because I had to switch to a new screen printer and a new ordering system and I didn’t have the energy to fix it.

Fixed now; the ordering system is back online, the new screen printer is actually giving me a better price than my former screen printer was, and it’s ready to go. Be interesting to see if the magazine article actually drives people to the site…