Tuesday, 12:33 a.m. (as I begin to type) October 25, 2004

Shoot everyone and then smoke some cigarettes

The jack o’lantern is fine, so far. Given that I work 3 p.m. to midnight, this is the last night it will be out before Hallowe’en itself, at least, in peak evening hours. I’ll probably put it out after I get home from work each night, but hardly anyone will see it.

Looking around my neighborhood, I seem to be the only one with a jack o’lantern at all, so I’m guessing this isn’t a big area for holiday festivities. Always a minor disappointment, but what can you do? I’m a surly malcontent on nearly every subject myself; I can hardly fault anyone else for being one.

I do enjoy holidays, though, in my own quiet way.

I broke the lid for my toilet tank today. Actually, the flush mechanism broke, and when I took the toilet tank lid off to check it out, and to manually jerk the little chain up so the toilet would flush, I set the lid down leaning against the wall. Naturally, the bathroom has fairly slick tile floors and the tank lid slid, hit the ground pretty hard, and broke into some pretty nice sized ceramic chunks.

I know it’s not really cost effective to make toilets out of stainless steel or aluminum, but you’d think there would be a cheap plastic that would work. Barring that, you’d think they could come up with SOMEthing less brittle than porcelain.

I want to point out, as I’m just plain nuts for detail, that when I type ‘took the toilet tank lid off to check it out’, well, it wasn’t anywhere NEAR that easy in real life. Like probably most of you, I let the top of my toilet tank turn into a clutter-catcher, and I had to clear off several accumulated cups and various other objects before I could take the tank lid off. And now, of course, I have no tank lid, so that’s one less clutter catcher… which is kind of aggravating.

I fixed the flush mechanism with some superglue… my landlord’s handyman replaced the whole thing about four months ago with the cheapest plastic apparatus he could find, and the flange running from the press-knob on the outside of the tank to the chain on the inside of the tank had just snapped clean off. As I say, that was an easy fix (although I doubt it will take anything like four months for it to break again, now that it’s done it once) but getting a replacement tank lid is kind of a puzzler. Sure, there’s at least one in every house, but walking into someone else’s bathroom and walking out with the porcelain tank lid under my arm strikes me as a challenge.

I’ll probably just tell my landlords about it and they’ll replace it, but I dislike annoying my landlords if I can avoid it. I have learned a few things in my life, and one of them is, your relationship with your landlord is one of those things that has a huge impact on the quality of your life, and that relationship is greatly enhanced by staying off his or her radar as much as possible. Landlords adore tenants that they know only as a signature on a check.

It’s been a boring, uneventful end of my weekend. I watched The Last Boy Scout, one of two good films Tony Scott has ever directed (the other one is Crimson Tide) and Out Of Sight, perhaps the only unpretentious throwaway thriller Steven Soderbergh has ever directed (and thus, in my opinion, probably his most effortlessly enjoyable film) again on video (I own copies of them both; I like them). I also trekked over to the little theater downtown and watched Team America: World Police this evening.

I could, I suppose, talk about any or all of those movies in some detail, but honestly, why bother? The Last Boy Scout is, honestly, junk, but it’s interestingly nihilistic junk with some intriguing 30’s style characters that isn’t meant to do anything but entertain you for 90 minutes or so… and I suppose that’s the same thing I like about Out Of Sight. Most of Soderbergh’s films are painfully pompous and pedantic, and even in this one Soderbergh just can’t make himself stop doing clever little stop motion shots and filling the screen with distracting, overly artsy camera work and shot angles… but, nonetheless, the movie is just a hard boiled crime story, and despite Soderbergh doing his best to make it unwatchable, it still works.

Thinking about it, I imagine another thing I like about both movies is that you don’t expect either Damon Wayans or Jennifer Lopez to be any good in a film these days, what with all the turkeys and overall bad press each has had recently... come to think of it, I'm hard pressed to remember the last worthwhile project Bruce Willis or George Clooney had. Yet I actually like Wayans and Lopez in these films, and it’s nice to like actors you would normally veer several blocks out of your way to avoid.

Or, at least, I enjoy it.

Team America… sigh… what can I say? It’s funny, sure, although it’s exactly the same kind of “now we can actually say bad words on TV and the big screen and get away with it so let’s do it a lot” type of humor that makes me sick of South Park so quickly. Watching stuff like this reminds me very quickly of riding a schoolbus, where every guy from about third grade on up constantly tried to out-vulgarize every other guy. Nowadays, I just find this sort of thing tiresome.

The marionette sex scene was pretty cool, though, and I enjoyed the ‘montage’ song, as well as the love song that was more about how badly Pearl Harbor sucked than anything else. These particular guys can be funny, but a lot of times, they’re just tedious.

The new version of Dawn Of The Dead comes out on DVD tomorrow. It never played here in the Ass End Of The Universe, so I’m slavering at the bit to see it… but it will have to wait until this Friday, as I’m very broke right now.

I’m always broke. For a while when I first moved in here I was good with my money, but then things started to get away from me, and now I’m in the same old rut, where I just throw more money away than I should, postponing bills until they absolutely have to be paid, and then, when I pay them, I’m broke again for another two weeks. I think what’s mostly done it was learning that my comic book collection in storage up north was gone for good; since then I’ve been chunking away a good part of every check trying to get some of the stuff back again. Even buying so called “reader’s copies” of the stuff I lost (which means, nothing like mint or near-mint condition, just intact enough to read), I’m paying an average of $3.50 per issue, and that shit is adding up. I think I’ve spent around $1,000 so far, and gotten… let me see… maybe 300 Silver Age issues back again. And there’s just no end to that mountain once you start climbing it. I hadn’t really thought that the collection I lost was all that valuable, but replacing it is a stone bitch.

I’m not even going to talk about how this guy I know up north promised me solemnly to ship those comics down to me like five years ago, and somehow, that just never happened, but, GEEZ, I wish I had those comics back again.

I’m supposed to be saving up for a new computer, too… ::sigh:: There’s just never enough money. A common bitch for everyone, and I’m aware that where I’m coming up short is very definitely on luxury items… my necessities are very cheap. Still… I need to get a better handle on my money.

You don’t get much help from the real world, though. I have discovered through painful experience that if you’re going to be paid on Friday, and you forget about a particular charge you put on your debit card when you check your balance on Wednesday and pull $20 out of your checking account then to get you through to the end of the week, inevitably, at some point on Thursday, that charge you forgot about will hit like a hand grenade, your checking account will go 34 cents negative, which will cause a $40 penalty to whack you across the nose and say ‘bad Brown Eyed Handsome Man, no biscuit!’… and suddenly, instead of being $30 positive when your direct deposit hits, you are $50 negative, and that’s $80 nobody is ever going to give you back.

Which, by the way, is precisely what happened to me on my last payday, which is one reason I’m so broke right now.

Having just typed a phrase where I had to use the word ‘cents’, and being in a fairly random mood, let me also state right here and now that the person who designed word processing software without a 'cents’ sign anywhere on the standard keyboard should be pistol whipped into unconsciousness in his or her driveway by a young Ray Liotta. I mean, what, we needed the ^ sign so goddam much, we had to leave out the cents sign? Please.

I should not buy myself any goodies this paycheck. I have to pay my rent out of this paycheck, and I also have to pay the utility bill, and that adds up to around $500, leaving me with maybe $140, if I’m really lucky (yes, I really do make piss poor money; please bear in mind, like most of you, I get paid every two weeks, so, yes, I really do make piss poor money, and here I am, spending $200 out of nearly every paycheck lately replacing comic books that were in somebody’s basement when a pipe broke two years after they were supposed to be safe with me again, grrrrrrrrr).

I should DEFINITELY not buy myself any goodies, because, well, I spent like $150 on assorted DVDs with my last paycheck, plus I tossed away $200 on comics, and in addition to all that, I paid one of the smaller bills (the water bill) and picked up some groceries and ordered myself a copy of A Criminal History Of Mankind from Amazon-dot-com. And I must have thrown money away on other stuff I can’t recall right now, too… well, yes, I believe I did spend like another $60 on books from Amazon I had momentarily forgotten about, because they showed up a while ago and I’ve already finished reading them. The latest box of comics from up north, and Criminal History, are still in the wind, however.

Okay, digging out my bank statement, I see I actually spent $179.21 at Wal-mart on DVDs and groceries since last payday, and $202.53, + $4.01 for foreign currency conversion adjustment, on comics books. That’s a total of $381.74, leaving $167.78 in the bank. I pulled out $100 to use for walking around cash (I’ve used up all but $20 of that, with three days left until the account re-charges) and then hit the remaining $67 with a $45 charge for Criminal History. So, yes, I am very nearly broke, and with the end of the month/first of the month coming up, bills will eat very nearly all of my next check…

Arggggh. Twenty five years since I went out on my own and I still can’t handle my money like a grown up.

One of the good things the mail brought today (along with a depressing number of overdue bills) was my voter registration card. What with one thing and another, I had idiotically kept putting off registering to vote since moving out here, and probably would have missed out altogether if I hadn’t read in the paper that the last day was two weeks ago, and it hadn’t been on a Monday, which is my day off. I walked over to the post office and mailed in a registration. Then, a week ago, I got a notice in the mail that a new law required me to supply additional documentation, so I sent off a copy of my utility bill, and I was actually wondering if I’d get to vote this year. Here in Florida, with Jeb Bush running the state in general, and a Bush/Cheney campaign staffer from 2000 who seems to be trying hard to out-weasel Katherine Harris overseeing the election process in specific, it strikes me as quite realistic to be afraid of disenfranchisement, given that I perhaps foolishly did not check the ‘Republican’ box on the form.

(It is foolish, you know. All of us who lean somewhat to the left should register as Republicans en masse. No, I’m serious, we should. Then we could all vote in the Republican primaries. Imagine how much good we could do simply by weeding the really SERIOUS loons, like Dubya, out at the primary level. In all honesty, wouldn’t the world necessarily HAVE to be a better place if John McCain were President now? Wouldn’t we all feel better if the worst case scenario was McCain being re-elected?)

(Honestly, this is a really remarkably good idea. Both parties re-draw electoral districts to make sure that their favored candidates get elected and re-elected as easily as possible. Imagine if Katherine Harris had been rewarded with a heavily Republican district… where a sizable segment of the registered Republicans were actually, you know, intelligent people who know damned well what a spoiled, unprincipled, utterly corrupt and not particularly bright little rich bitch she actually is? I’m likin’ this idea. Let’s all do it in 2008.)

Anyway, it was a relief to get my registration card in the mail today. I can’t vote early because the early voting districts are all in other towns and I don’t drive, but still, it’s comforting to know that I WILL be able to vote next Tuesday… and who knows, if some sort of thermodynamic miracle happens, my vote may actually be counted, too.

Speaking of the utterly unprincipled Katherine Harris, most of you will have been spared the despicably vicious, not to mention out and out moronic, attack ads she’s running against her current opponent, a woman named Jan Schneider. Harris’ ads rely on unflattering out of focus black and white pictures of Schneider, ominous background music, a lot of extremely vague accusations (Schneider has wants to raise taxes and socialize medicine, primarily), and frequent repetition of the word ‘liberal’, with very in focus, technicolor glamour shots of Harris coming in at the end.

So you don’t think I’m making up the ‘liberal’ thing, here’s a few excerpts from Harris’ re-election website:

I simply can’t continue my good work in Washington without help from my friends, like you. That’s why I’m writing you for a special emergency contribution of $25, $50, $100, $500, or even $1,000 or $2,000. Just follow this link to make your special contribution right now.
Your contribution today will help my re-election to Congress… and stop the Democrats from venting their anger for the legal and legitimate 2000 Presidential Election recount.
Again, I must be prepared for an onslaught of nasty attacks by liberal special interests and my Democrat challenger. The national Democrats have reserved one million dollars worth of air time for their negative ads in the Tampa television market alone.

Even worse, Joe Trippi has signed on as a special consultant with my opponent’s campaign! As you may remember, Trippi was the campaign manager of ultra-liberal Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, and served on the presidential campaigns of Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale, and Ted Kennedy.
The liberal hired guns have all been dispatched to Florida’s 13th district, and I’m in their sights.
I sincerely need your emergency contribution right now to demonstrate our strength to the Democrats, the media, and everyone who thinks I’ll go down without a fight.

I know I can count on your support for my very important race.

What you can’t see, because I’m too lazy to upload and do the code so you can see it, is two photos on the page. The first shows Katherine Harris beaming as she walks along in some parade next to some kind of military fighting vehicle with a gigantic machine gun (an M-50, I believe) mounted on it in the background. The other is a scare photo, showing Harris’ opponent Schneider smiling next to Hillary Clinton, with a caption saying “My opponent brings in liberals like Hillary Clinton to help against me!”

Now, I have a couple of comments here.

First, Katherine Harris is really, really rich. So are all of her friends. Katherine Harris begging for money from her constituents to run her campaign offends me nearly the same way as televangelists begging for money from their idiotic supporters. It would be bad enough if Katherine Harris simply used her money to buy a government office, and frankly, the fact that she was openly given a jerrymandered district to run in as a reward for her part in hijacking the 2000 election is sickening. But Harris is a typical rich conservative; she simply has no shame. She wants an office in Washington and she doesn’t want to spend any of her own money getting it; providing funds is what the peasants are good for. And after they pay for her attack ads, of course, she’ll be magnanimous enough to accept their votes.

That’s one thing I want to say. The second one is, nearly anyone who poses in front of military hardware they have never been trained to use and probably couldn’t tell one end from the other of isn’t someone I’m likely to vote for. In addition, anyone who tosses around the word ‘liberal’ as an insult and a scare tactic has pretty obviously lost my vote. Of course, Harris isn’t exactly original in her use of this tactic; the conservative movement has been so hugely successful over the last twenty years in controlling the media in our country that ‘liberal’ has become a vilification no politician, no matter how far to the left they may be, can ever let stand unchallenged.

Honestly, I wish to God John Kerry was ‘the most liberal man in Congress’, as I keep hearing the Bush attack ads call him… I’d be a lot happier voting for him if he was. Yet every time I hear a Bush attack ad talk about ‘John Kerry and the liberals in Congress’, I want to scream at the TV ‘FIND ME A GODDAM LIBERAL IN CONGRESS!’ I mean, honestly, apparently the new definition of ‘liberal’ is ‘anyone who runs against a Republican’.

I’m going to guess that being a liberal has something to do with raising taxes, and wanting to socialize… well… anything, I gather. As I dimly recall, being a liberal also once meant being in favor of unbalanced budgets and huge government deficits and a lot of unsupported spending, but apparently, those are now Republican virtues…

Given that there is not one single elective official anywhere in this country willing to admit in public to being a liberal, or, for that matter, an agnostic, I am starting to feel seriously unrepresented.

On the other hand, where am I going to move to? Let’s face it, I’m just weird. There isn’t anywhere in the world where someone I’d actually feel good about voting for could feasibly be elected.

Ah, I wish I had the luxury of voting for Nader again…

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they're not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that's all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I'm in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people's blogs, so this probably doesn't matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don't care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that's just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn't say I don't care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it's just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what's left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it's a self correcting problem.

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man