Just to make my life complete, I get here to post this, check the last page, and find no comment threads. Yay.

C'mon, SquawkBox lame-o's... I'm PAYING you guys for this shit now... let's get it together.

Raining in Baltimore

This one is going to ramble senselessly. You have been so advised.

September’s on the run like a routed Confederate division. I reiterate… I honestly do not know where the time goes.

My one Counting Crows CD (August and Everything After) is scratched to shit, and the last track, “A Murder of One”, won’t play all the way through to the end. This makes me sad.

Paul owns the other three, although one of them, “Recovering the Satellites”, was a birthday present from me several years ago. Still.

My computer gave me a few days off from making disturbing growling, grinding noises… I was hoping it had healed itself. (The first time I flicked it on to complete silence, though, I thought it had finally just died… then the monitor lit up and I realized ‘wow, that’s how a computer is supposed to sound… how weird’). But now it’s business as usual.

At Paul’s urging, I gave the latest Harry Potter movie a try. I managed to get through, I think, fifteen minutes of the obnoxious shit before I had to give up on it. Every single thing about it was predictable. They’d set up a situation and I would instantly see how this situation had to resolve itself, and then it would happen, exactly as I’d realized it must. Harry has to be quiet and not ruin his ogre-uncle’s party.. and there’s a fancy cake. So, somehow, something is going to happen to keep Harry from being able to keep quiet, regardless of how contrived or completely ridiculous it is, and, oh yeah, that cake’s going to hit someone in the face, too. And, sure enough, some fucking goblin-elf thing shows up, and it can’t be a quiet goblin-elf or one with any kind of impulse control, oh no. It has to be a loud, annoying goblin-elf thing, that, for various really contrived and idiotic reasons, ends up dumping the cake on someone’s head in a manner that gets Harry blamed for it.

None of which was funny, or entertaining, or even mildly interesting, it was all just tedious, with bad dialogue and one dimensional characters who were always, at any given moment, just stupid or inept enough to let the plot keep going through its turgid, utterly predictable paces.

I realized fairly early on that pretty much every scene was simply a set up for yet another couple of ‘oh isn’t that CUUUUUUTE’ special effects or magical gimmicks, like the elf-goblin, or the floating cake, or the flying car, or the birds who deliver the mail over in Magicland, or the idiotic teleporting from the fireplace, which still makes absolutely no sense to me. (Some dickhead asking me at the start of the DVD if I ‘brought my flue powder’ didn’t put me in a better mood. Oh, yes, all you Harry Potter fans are SO FUCKING COOL, because you know what flue powder is, right? Dumbasses.)

Anyway, when they got to the point where everyone was going to teleport out of the fireplace, to various places that all end in ‘Alley’, and are made out of words that actually end in ‘ally’, (awwwwww… isn’t that CUTE? Isn’t that just ADORABLE?) like Digon Alley and wherever the hell the other place Harry ended up was, I realized ‘oh, Harry is going to screw this up and go somewhere else’. Which he did. And let me tell you something, any kind of magic system where you teleport to someplace you don’t intend to simply by mispronouncing a word is not a magic system that anyone is going to be using generation after generation. Eventually every mage in the world is going to end up at the bottom of the ocean or somewhere in the upper atmosphere or just, you know, in a fireplace that has an actual FIRE in it. I mean, you slur a particular phrase just once and BAM! you’re on the opposite side of the sun from Earth sucking vacuum and thinking “Gosh, Spayshe Alley is awfully goddam COLD today”. And I want to see you pronounce the word correctly to get your ass out of there again when you’re coughing up frozen blood. In space, no one can hear your lungs explode, you dimwit sorcerer.

So I watched it for maybe five more minutes, long enough to see that despite the fact that Harry teleported himself to some place where everyone dressed in a vaguely sinister fashion, nothing actually happened, because some guy I didn’t know from the last movie (who most likely had a really idiotic ‘cutesy’ name, because everyone in these things has an idiotic ‘cutesy’ name) came along and rescued him. And then The Most Obnoxious Little Girl In The World showed up (I got that vibe off her in about four seconds) and I had to bail.

Let’s see, what else… I checked out this season’s Survivor Thursday, after giving a complete miss to last season’s. The main reason I didn’t even bother with last season’s (after mildly enjoying the year before’s, which I only watched because that deeply weird teacher from Tampa, Jan Gentry, was on it) was that the gimmick was dividing the tribes up by gender. This simply repulsed me. I don’t know why, but when you segregate by gender, I’m usually annoyed, at least, when you do it in an entertainment setting. I like the way the two different genders mix it up. I like the tension. Put a bunch of guys together, put a bunch of girls together, and what happens? The worst of our shared human consciousness emerges. Survivor, like most reality shows, is designed to bring out the worst in us anyway, as a spectator sport, so adding in gender segregation didn’t attract me at all. I want boys and girls together, not testosterone and estrogen poisoning.

Anyway, Survivor looks like it will be interesting this season… so far there isn’t anyone I really loathe yet, which certainly wasn’t true of the previous season I watched (I despised the used car salesman who eventually won from the moment I laid eyes on his smarmy grin for the first time). But I didn’t’ really want to talk about Survivor, I only brought it up because the first ep was 90 minutes long, so, bored, I tuned around and wound up watching the last half hour of ABC’s Ultimate Makeover, or whatever the hell it is… you know, that show where they find some grungy little troll somewhere and give them a lot of plastic surgery and the help of various stylists and dressers and send them to a gym and then, pow, a year later, they show them to their friends and family again and everyone is like “Oh, you’re BEAUTIFUL”.

This is a truly vile show.

I don’t know. I think the thing I found most staggeringly horrible about this show was how positively and benevolently they presented its staggeringly shallow and evil premise. I mean, you have these plastic surgeons and these style experts and absolutely every single one of them is staring all big eyed and earnest into the camera, giving off these wise Yoda vibes, as they say the most reprehensible shit you can imagine. “yes, yes, people will love you if you’re beautiful, and they will ONLY love you if you’re beautiful, so don’t wear what you want to wear, hit the gym, let us put these plastic things under your chin and over your cheeks, let us tuck your tummy and lift your boobs up, and always, always, all your life, remember, ONLY APPEARANCE MATTERS. It doesn’t matter how you behave, it doesn’t matter if you’re nice or kind of sweet, the only thing that is important is WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE. How you dress. How firm your tits are. How flat your stomach is. How high your cheekbones are. Where your hairline is.

Now, the one guy they had on this show, I admit, the pics they showed of him when they started this, he was a homely little troll. Yes, he was. And apparently, he really had this thing for a co-worker named Ann (gee, I don’t know what that’s like) so he submitted his application to this monstrously evil show and was thrilled when they picked him, and yes, I have to admit, he looked like a god (a short god, but still) when they were done completely rebuilding his face, giving him a fake hairline that he will have to ‘re-apply the glue on every two weeks’ for the rest of his life, and sending him off to a gym (with trainers to show him what to do and make him do it) to get him into decent shape.

But, holy shit… if Ann goes for him now, how’s he going to feel? Does he WANT someone that shallow? And it would be poetic justice if some real hottie jumped on him, because, while Ann was cute, she definitely wasn’t in his (artificial, I grant you) league when he got back.

Other than the wicked, vile, filthy superficiality of the series’ premise, the other thing that got me was just how futile this all is. I mean, sure, these people get a lot of expensive plastic surgery for nothing, but a great deal of the final result you see on the TV show… the ‘big reveal’ when their friends and family see them again after a year… is a result of expensive styling and training, just like movie actors go through. The thousand dollar hairstyle and dye job that the two women got before they did their big reveal… they aren’t going to be able to afford that again. And once that tummy tuck starts to sag a little, it’s not like they can have another one done. And the guy on the show better pray he never wants his real face back, because he can’t afford to have anyone take all that shit back OUT again. And, oh yeah, here’s a shock… if you go to the gym and work out for a year, guess what? You’ll have a better body and members of the opposite sex will like you more! Gee, well, I didn’t know that.

I suspect that six months after their big reveal, these people are finding that their ‘total makeover’ really didn’t do all that much for them… although, I suppose, if they got laid by people they really wanted to get laid by, it would have been worth the year of torment they put up with for it.

I guess.

What else, what else… I was productive yesterday. I rolled up all the money from Paul’s various change jars. For years, Paul had just been throwing all the change from his pockets into a couple of jars. A few weeks ago I sorted it all out, putting the pennies in one jar, the dimes in another, etc, etc. Yesterday, I sat down and rolled it all up, after making a trip to the bank for penny wrappers (and the last $20 in my savings account). The grand total? $64 in pennies, dimes, and nickels. (I didn’t roll the quarters. We probably have another ten dollars in quarters, but we spend that easily enough on laundry.) Paul wants to use it to renew his horticultural supplies, plus go see a movie next week on his day off, which I guess is cool… it’s his money.

On the way back from the bank, I stopped off at the local pawnshop with a backpack full of surplus videotapes and DVDs. I can now state definitively that the age of the videotape is officially over… pawnshops will no longer take videotapes. All they wanted was the DVDs, and as always, they gave me a sound economic raping for them. I won’t say how much they were actually worth, or how much I left with, but, well, let’s just say I walked out with less than $20, and one of the things I gave up was the third season of The Sopranos on DVD. Gosh, it’s always good to feel like you’ve been gangbanged at the pawn shop.

Grrr. I finally got tired of my random CD selector skipping over “Anna Begins” constantly (I put the fucking disc in half an hour ago and “Anna Begins” hasn’t come up yet) so I just stopped “Sullivan Street” (nice song, whose words I simply cannot figure out at all) and started “Anna Begins” on my own. Goddam CD selector. Goddam random setting. Things should do what I want, instantly.

On the email front, Hartmut has sent me a few nice notes, Nate sent me one about his father dying, which sucks for him and I feel bad for him (I won’t know if my father dies, nor have I been allowed to much care, but I do feel bad for Nate) and Scott Shepherd sent me a nice long one rambling about a lot of stuff. His daughter is doing really well, given the sucky situation she’s in, so that’s good.

However, as always, a few people who owe me email still stubbornly refuse to write, and as always, that aggravates the shit out of me. What, you people think I write you for my HEALTH? I’m crying out for attention here! SO PAY ME SOME!!

Or, you know, just hit that PayPal link and pay me cash instead. I’m easy.

Okay. Just for the sake of the experiment, I clicked on the ‘forward’ button (after “Anna Begins” ended) to see how long it would take the random selector to bring up “Rain King”. SEVEN FUCKING TIMES. I was going to have to sit through seven more tracks (including “Omaha”, “Ghost Train”, and another repetition of “Sullivan Street”) before “Rain King” came up. This goddam computer simply does not know (or does not care) what I want to listen to.

Can you believe I’m this smart, this funny, and this damn good looking and still no one wants to give me a job or fuck me? God knows I can’t.

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:

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:

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.