wildyams

Fucking Steve nailed me :(

Thanks to Mr. Nuts for this very useful link, I went and pre-registered for the National Do Not Call List that adds your telephone number to a list that telemarketers are FORBIDDEN from calling. Man, you would think everyone would want to sign up for this lol. Sign up here

By the way, check out this photo of Koga on his site while you're at it lol

I use both PCs and Macs, and while I know they both have their uses, I'm definitely more of a Mac guy, so I get excited about Mac-related news items like this one about a guy who wants to try to make some lower-end Macs that are upgradable (which the iMac and eMac are not). The cool thing is he's not interested in doing it to make it into a big business, he's just doing it cause he likes Macs and thinks it would be beneficial to Mac users out there. I agree with him.

In addition to that nifty little tidbit, check out this USB George Foreman iGrill, that you plug into your computer, and based on what food you tell the computer you are cooking with it, it will know how long to cook it for, and provide recipe suggestions and stuff like that. Pretty keen, huh? :-)

The Lakers beat the Mavericks (the team with the NBA's best record) in Dallas last night, so that means that the Lakers are now 41-5 in their last 46 meetings with the Mavericks, and the Mavs have still not won a game against the Lakers in LA since 1990. I'm not really sure who I want the Lakers to play in the first round at this point. I think LA will beat whoever they play, and will win it again, even if they have to face the toughest teams to get there (they've done it the last two years). On one hand, I want LA to play the Kings so they can get them out in the first round cause the Queens and their fans are just annoying as hell. On the other hand, the Spurs are soft as tissue paper and since LA went 0-4 against them this regular season it would be nice to put them back in their place right off the bat. Then you have the Mavericks who have Mark Cuban and Nick Van Exel running their mouths, with Van Exel saying the Lakers will lose in the first round this year, so it would be sweet to turn the tables on him and send him off to Cancun where he normally spends late April, May and June. Its beginning to look like the Mavs are gonna tumble to the third seed and LA may get the 6th seed, and if that happens then LA will have to beat the Mavs, Kings and Spurs to get to the Finals again this year. I say, that is fine with me. To be the best you gotta beat the best, and the Lakers can face any challenge. Bring it on :-)

By my calculations the playoffs start on April 18th, by the way.

I knew all about the proposed PATRIOT II Act that got leaked back when that happened a couple months ago, but since it was written in legalese, it was close to 100 pages long and I'm a lazy ass, I never read it, I just figured any sequel to the PATRIOT Act had to be bad. I've never wished I was more wrong. I just read this summary by Matt Welch, and oh my god is this proposed legislature scary. Please, I don't care who you are, go read this thing!

Check out some of the highlights that this is proposing:
* Revoking US Citizenship
* Deportation of Legal Permanent Residents
* Forcing citizens to submit their DNA to a massive database
* Allowing wiretaps and spying on email and internet usage of ANYONE without a warrant
* Legalizing secret arrests (arresting someone without providing any information to anyone about why they were arrested)
* Providing businesses that violate privacy agreements immunity if they rat out their customers
* Granting immunity to police officers who conduct illegal searches if they were "following orders"
* Rolling back restrictions on local law enforcement from spying on citizens
* The Death Penalty being used as punishment for 15 new crimes

Like I said, if reading this and hearing what some members of our government have in store for us does not give you cold sweats, then you're either far braver than I am or you're in denial. Weapons of Mass Distraction indeed!

I should be in bed, but fuck it, I was in bed most of today. After last night feeling a little under the weather (kind of that 'onset of a cold' type feeling), I felt a lot better today, but I still just hung around and took it easy till tonight when my good friend Grover came over and we went to see "Spun" after eating a quick bite at Greenblatts. Man, lemme tell you, even though I've never done any kind of drugs, let alone amphetamines, watching "Spun" made me feel like a junkie. That is one of the most hyper, and visually foul and raw films I've ever seen. But I really liked it. I gotta say, really I like any movie that makes movie stars look horribly unglamourous, and this movie has that in spades: just about everyone has really bad teeth and dark circles around the eyes or acne, and just about all of them do something really awful on camera. Its not at all like "Requiem for a Dream", in that it does not try to make a really overtly strong anti-drug statement. Instead its a lot more comical, and lets the anti-drug message get across just by looking at these people who are doing it and living their fucked up lives. Anyway, check it out, its definitely interesting, if nothing else, and in my opinion its yet another movie where Brittany Murphy seems perfectly cast as a cracked-out skeeze (I have a suspicion she's drawing on some personal experience when I see her in these types of roles).

Anyway, after that, we went to North for a drink (which of course I didn't have). Lemme tell you about North, if you've never been: North is like the prototypical "Hollywood bar". Its got the low lights and the chic setting with all the anorexic "beautiful people" and the pseudo-hip DJ spinning crap mixed with stuff that's supposed to be ironic and funny (tonight's choice was "We Will Rock You" by Queen). Anyway, these types of place are definitely not my thing as I just look at everyone and think "are there any real people in here, or is everyone a cliched stereotype?" Luckily it was just one drink, then Grover and I came back here where we had a long, fantastic conversation about "life and shit", to quote Little Junior Brown. Grover and I decided we need to be hanging out more often, as we seem to have a really good time when we do. Anyway, what with Daylight Savings and all, its even later than it should be, so I'm off to bed.

Like I'm really surprised, but evidently back in the 1930s a Canadian inventor came up with a special carburettor that would have allowed cars to go 200 miles on a single tank of gas (this was tested and proven true with a Ford V8 car back in 1933). However, the patented device never was produced commercially because the oil industry feared it would cause its collapse, so the inventor was bought off and given a sweet job in exchange for never doing anything with his invention. Well here it is 70 years later and some stray plans the inventor left in a toolbox have been found by someone who is now planning to build it. I'll leave it up to your imagination to decide what things would have been like if this invention had been in existence for the last 70 years...

Just a few minor adjustments to the blog for you. You'll notice that I'm no longer posting as 'will' cause that's boring, and am now instead posting as 'Yams' cause that's just brimming with excitement. Also, underneath each entry I went for the whole 'crap' theme instead of the ordinary Movable Type 'posted by' and 'comments' format. Keen, huh?

Ok, I guess I've left that hilarious image of Mateen Cleaves with his head in his hand after the Lakers eliminated the Queens from last year's playoffs sit up on my blog long enough. It will no doubt be making a re-appearance when the Lakers eliminate the Queens from the playoffs this year too lol.

Ok, since Steve-o hates it when I blog about the Lakers, I'll talk about something else :-)

Man, for a week that started off a bit slow at work, it sure ended on a pretty frantic tear. Its not often that I basically don't get a lunch break cause I'm on such a tight deadline, but today was one of those days. So I took my lunch break at about, oh, 4:30 or so, and it was REALLY short lol. Because of confidentiality blah blah blah, I can't say what my project was, but the irony is that its something I doubt I'd have ever heard of if I wasn't working on it (we get a lot of those, totally nondescript, forgettable films that never got any kind of hype or anything, probably more of those than the big ones actually). Anyway, the nature of the job is that a screwup on a crappy movie nobody's ever heard of and nobody will buy will end up being as big a mistake as a screwup on the biggest movie of the year, so the pressure is always on, regardless of what the project is.

Ok, enough glimpsing into what my job's like. I doubt anyone cares anyway lol. Its Friday night and I'm beat. I'm gonna relax, eat some pizza and watch some bad movies or play Diablo or something. Enjoy the weekend :-)

In the garage of my apartment building, up until recently they had a big trash dumpster that people obviously threw all their trash in. Recently, however, the building came under new ownership and that trash dumpster is now no longer there (I'm not sure why, its just not there anymore). Tonight when I was walking past where it used to be I noticed a note taped up by the ownership telling people to not throw their trash in the empty space on the floor where the dumpster used to be. There is a dumpster about maybe 10 feet from the old one, and inside a large trash closet type thing that collects all the trash from the trash chutes in the building, and the note said to throw your trash there instead. It just really irked me that people actually need to be told not to throw trash on the floor of their own garage just because the trash can that used to be there isn't there anymore. Sometimes its really embarrasing to be a person, you know?

Is it a bad sign when every Monday you catch yourself thinking "Man I wish the weekends were longer"? I read an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times today about how much we Americans over-work ourselves. The piece said that we work on average about nine more weeks a year than Western Europeans (14 more weeks a year than Norweigans do), and that we work considerably more hours a week now than we did 30 years ago. Why is it we all feel the need to kill ourselves working all these hours to buy a whole bunch of crap we don't need? Anyway, to read the article you'll need a NY Times login, but you should have that anyway cause its free and comes in very handy (at least, for me it does lol).

Thanks to Koga, I downloaded Safari Beta 2 for my Mac tonight. I gotta say, I'm definitely impressed. Tabbed browsing with no popups - what could be better? Oh wait, I know: if they made Safari for the PC lol

Just a general note about taxes and whatnot for you who might care about this. I put myself down as zero exemptions so that they'll take out more than I owe, so that I'll get money back come tax time. The result of this is that it goes towards paying off what I owe in back taxes from when I was an indpedent contractor a couple years back, and that I don't have to bother with coming up with cash all at once. This year, for whatever reason, I never got a W-2 from my company (I gotta check into that still), and I didn't really even think about it till a couple weeks ago, then I kept forgetting to ask for it. So I figured fuck it, I'm not gonna owe anything anyway, why stress, I'll just get an extension. Getting an extension is pretty easy, you just call their number, input what you thought your taxes owed would be and what you thought you paid (even without a W-2, I had my last pay stub from last year so this wasn't that hard to figure), then they say here's your confirmation number and voila, I've got an extension. California's state taxes are even easier cause they automatically give everyone an extension anyway. Of course, in both cases, if you owe any cash, you still have to pay that by today, but since I don't, I'm in the clear :-)

So here, lets sort it out:

The Lakers won tonight. The Twolves won tonight. The Blazers lost tonight.

As a result, the Lakers will play Minnesota in the first round this year, the first time ever these teams have met in the playoffs, and will match what are considered to be this year's two leading MVP candidates against each other (Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett). Game 1 of that series will be on Sunday at 12:30.

Because the Blazers lost, they will open in Dallas, while the Suns will open as the 8th seed in San Antonio against the Spurs, and the Jazz as the 7th seed will travel to Sacramento to begin that series. If the Lakers win their series against Minnesota, they'll play the winner of the San Antonio-Phoenix series in Round Two, while the winners of the Portland-Dallas and Sacramento-Utah series will face off. The winners of those two series will face each other in the Western Conference Finals. This year every round will be a 7 game series.

I personally was hoping the Lakers would get the Mavs in the first round so they could beat the #3 seed, then the #2 seed, then the #1 seed to get to the Finals, but Minnesota should be cool too. After 3 years of only seeing the Blazers, Kings and Spurs (and Phoenix once 3 years ago) in the Western Conference playoffs, I am just glad to see ANYONE else lol.

Predictions:
Lakers in 4
Dallas in 6
Sacramento in 5
San Antonio in 4

PS - I didn't mention the Eastern Conference cause they suck so bad they are totally irrelevant.

PPS - Congrats to Kobe on being the third Laker to average more than 30 points per game for a season (only Jerry West and Elgin Baylor had done it before).

According to this article, there is a device in existence which will turn any carbon-based material into "high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing." Read that again: ANY CARBON-BASED MATERIAL. To illustrate what this means, here's a quote for you: "If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water." Pretty crazy, huh?

Ok, one day into the playoffs and I was already wrong about my first round predictions lol. I had the Spurs winning their opening round series in 4, but since they lost Game One on a last minute miraculous off balance banked-in three pointer (in overtime, no less) by Stephon Marbury, the Spurs are already down 0-1, so there won't be a sweep. That's fine with me, because the winner of that series will play the Lakers in the next round (assuming the Lakers beat Minnesota), so I want that series to be as long as possible.

Speaking of the Lakers, they THOROUGHLY dominated the Timberwolves today to take a 1-0 lead in that series and steal home court advantage away from Minnesota (which had it for the first time ever). You gotta feel bad for the Timberwolves, who have been eliminated in the first round 6 straight seasons, and who never had home court advantage, and then this year when they finally get it they get the three time champion Lakers in the first round. But as sad as that may be for them and their fans, I still think the Lakers will sweep them (as predicted). LA today won by 19 points, and that's on the road in Minnesota, where the Timberwolves had the league's second best home record this year.

It should be clear to everyone, as it has been to me, that the regular season doesn't mean anything when it comes to the Lakers. LA was 3 games under .500 on the road in the regular season, but that doesn't matter now. LA got off to a horrible start this year, but that doesn't matter now. The Lakers put everyone on notice today: the champs are here and they're not going away. Get ready for the 4th straight title :-)

So last night after the Laker game I went over to my Dad's house for dinner. We had fish, potatoes and salad, and when I was looking at the salad dressing I remember thinking it might be a little old, cause it was 1000 Island, and I'm the only one there who ever has that. But I smelled it, and it smelled ok, and it tasted ok so I figured it was fine. However, when I got home last night, I was spending some time in the bathroom where things were "running smoothly" as my good friend Benjacob Sprenke used to say lol. I went to sleep, and got up this morning feeling like I was on the verge of throwing up, and or having some problems with the other end, so after spending a while in the bathroom with a garbage bag there just in case I needed to puke, I decided to call into work today, rather than go and risk making a lot of trips back and forth to the bathroom. Well, I never did end up throwing up today, but I definitely felt pretty nauseated all day, and didn't eat much as a result. I'm doing better though, so I'm going into work tomorrow.

In the basketball world today, the Spurs and Queens won, which is bad news for the Lakers, but really I think the Lakers are gonna win regardless of what the other teams do. Tomorrow LA looks to take Game 2 in their series with Minnesota, and if they do win that second game, then look for the sweep cause Games 3 and 4 are here in LA :-)

Well the Lakers dropped Game 2 up in Minnesota tonight (their first loss in the first round of the playoffs since 2000), and really just got hammered. What a difference a game makes, I guess. Its hard to beat a team when they shoot the way the TWolves did tonight. Give them credit for coming out with a ton of intensity, and gotta fault the Lakers for never really matching it. Oh well, move on to Game 3 here in LA on Thursday. That Laker crowd better be up for that game, cause the Lakers will really need to win both the games in LA to ensure that they can make it to the next round. After the way the Lakers looked in Game 1, I really thought they were gonna look like that for the rest of the series, but the way this season went I should have known better. Great one night, terrible the next, the Lakers looked god-awful tonight. They better figure it out quick.

A lot of people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize there's this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example. Show ya what I mean. Suppose you're thinking about a... plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate of shrimp," out of the blue. No explanation. No point in looking for one, either. It's all part of the Cosmic Unconsciousness.

You do a lotta... acid, Miller? Back in the hippie days?

I'll give you another instance. You know the way everybody's into weirdness right now? Books in all the supermarkets about Bermuda Triangles? UFOs? How the Mayans invented television? That kinda thing?

I don't read them books.

Well, the way I see it, it's exactly the same. There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine. People get so hung up on specifics, they miss seeing the whole thing. Take South America, for example. In South America, thousands of people go missing every year. Nobody knows where they go -- they just, like, disappear. But if you think about it for a minute, you realize something. There had to be a time when there was no people, right?

Yeah. I guess.

Well, where did all these people come from? Hmmm? I'll tell you where. The future. Where did all these people disappear to? Hmmm?

The past?

That's right! And how did they get there?

How the fuck should I know?

Flying saucers. Which are really?... Yeah, you got it. Time machines. I think a lot about this kind of stuff. I do my best thinking on the bus. That's how come I don't drive, see?

You don't even know how to drive.

I don't wanna know how. I don't wanna learn. See? The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.

The Lakers for most of the game tonight looked like they could not have cared less. They did not look like they started to try until there were maybe 5 minutes left in the third quarter. And even then, even with that little effort, the Lakers had great shots to win the game when the refs basically did everything but gift-wrap it for them in the overtime, and even with Kevin Garnett fouling out immediately in overtime the Lakers still could not step up. It was almost like once Garnett fouled out the Lakers figured they had it in the bag, and quit playing again, and that was in overtime. An absolutely appalling display by the Lakers. The lazy attitude has caught up with them. When you're doing handstands on the edge of a cliff, its just a matter of time before you fall off.

Do I think the Lakers are done? No. I still think they'll win this series. As usually happens with them, they get pushed to the brink, and then when it looks like all is lost, they come through. But tonight they deserved to lose, and that's the truth. They keep playing like this, and they're gonna deserve to be on vacation in a week or so.

And so, here we come to the question of who exactly was in the Brat Pack? Certainly there were core members, right? I mean, Molly Ringworm is like the epicenter of the Brat Pack, right? And Rob Lowe, and Ally Sheedy, and Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson, and Andrew McCarthy were in it, right? I know, most people would say the Brat Pack was basically the cast of St. Elmo's Fire, but then that begs the question: is Demi Moore in the Brat Pack? Or if you would go with the cast of The Breakfast Club instead, then is Anthony Michael Hall? I would say yes to Anthony Michael Hall, and no to Demi Moore, but that's just me. See, then we come to some other people that are definitely in question. People like Robert Downey Jr. I mean, he was in Less Than Zero, Weird Science and Back To School. Or how bout Kevin Bacon? He was in Quicksilver and Footloose. What about Keifer Sutherland? He was in the Young Guns movies, and Stand By Me, and The Lost Boys. Would Charlie Sheen be considered in the Brat Pack? What about John Cusack? What about Joan Cusack? What about James Spader? You see how confusing this all is? Really, who are the TRUE members of the Brat Pack?

Leave it to me to always ask the hard-hitting questions :-)

So Steve-o, Riggs and myself all went out to Magic Mountain today (I took a personal day from work cause I'm cool like that). Nobody else could get the day off or the cash together, so it was just the 3 of us. Magic Mountain's hours today were from 10-6, so we woke up at about 10:15, took our sweet ass time getting going and arrived at the park at about noon. We headed right over to X cause Dave had been told it was fan-fucking-tastic. Well, it didn't look like there were many people in line (cause there weren't), and it was a Monday after all, so the park was totally empty, so we figured get that one out of the way first and get on to all the other rides none of us had done before.

So much for that.

The amusement park people, sorry, the X-TREEM PARK people (as they kept reminding us it was an X-TREEM PARK all day on the damn loudspeakers), apparently figured with the small crowd to only run one car at a time. Here was the problem: it only took 28 people per car, and one complete cycle from one group of people getting on, till the next group of people getting on took 6 and a half minutes (we know, cause in the tedium we started timing it). So at this rate you get 258 people per hour riding the damn thing (they were kind enough to post the "ride specs" on a wall for everyone to see while we were waiting in line, and those specs said "accomodates 1360 people per hour, so that must mean with all the cars running or something). Ok, now think about how long a line at an amusement park would look like with only 258 people in it, especially after it gets divided up into all the little separate lines and with all the maze-like switchbacks and whatnot. That wouldn't look like a whole lot of people right? Well there must have been maybe some six or seven hundred people ahead of us, and naturally they do their best to disguise how long the line is by having it go under tunnels and around corners and whatnot, so from where we entered the line it looked like it was a very short line (which by amusement park standards it was), but in reality we were waiting there almost all fucking day. The way the ride set up was 7 rows of 4 people, with the real machine part of the coaster in the middle, and pairs of seats on either side of it, so everyone had to go on in pairs. As a result, us sitting there about 10 feet from the ride, with only 10 people in front of us, meant that we had to wait 33 minutes before we could even get on the damn thing! This may seem like a lot of overanalysis and nitpicking, but when you're standing there waiting around for almost 3 hours with almost no people in front of you, you start to question what the hell is going on. On top of this, they were really hell bent on this whole "Xtreme" thing, with a stupid sign over the coaster that said "Xperience the Xtreme" and they were playing like 6 year old techno music (which as Riggs pointed out was still better than Garth Brooks or something), but evidently they only had the rights to 3 songs, cause that was all they played. Over and over. For 3 hours. Ack!

Anyway, we did that ride, and it was good (not the smoothest ride in the world, but still pretty good), then we figured we'd maybe only have time for one more ride considering the way they were running the park, but as it turned out virtually the entire population of the park was backed up on that ride, because NOTHING else had any kind of line at all. For the rest of the day we breezed right on to everything else, with our longest wait from that point being maybe 5 minutes. Virtually every other ride took longer to walk through all the empty line markers than it did to stand and wait for your turn.

As we were walking around the park, we noticed how often they were trying to embed in our brains that this was an XTREEM PARK and not an amusement park, and how the rides were XTREEM, and this became a source of amusement for us, as we pointed out how extreme the prices of the food were ($10 for a burger, fries and a coke, or $4 for water, or $7 for a coke with a souvenir cup which had, and I quote "an XTREEM value of refills for only 99 cents!"). Surprisingly the bathrooms were free, but then again they rivalled the one Renton had to use at the beginning of Trainspotting, so I guess you get what you pay for.

All in all it was a good day, but we were all pretty beat by the time 4:30 rolled around, so we called it a day and went back to Dave's house and hung out and chatted about how much I dislike kids till it was time for us all to go our separate ways. It was good weekend, all in all. I know that cause I'm actually not annoyed with the fact that I gotta go back to work tomorrow. Laker game tomorrow, lets hope they can grab that 3-2 lead :-)

Lets give the boys a hand :-)

The Lakers won by 30 tonight, so needless to say I am completely psyched. What a great all around effort by the team tonight. All 5 starters scored in double figures, with Fish, Kobe and Shaq all getting at least 24 points. The TWolves competed a bit in the first half, but LA closed the half on a big run and led by 10 at the break. But in the second half it was all LA. They destroyed the TWolves from the start of the 3rd quarter and it never got closer than 14 I think (and that was brief). It was around a 20 point lead almost the whole second half. Lemme tell you, I couldn't be happier :-)

Work today was pretty good. Not too busy, not too slow. A nice way to come off of a 3 day weekend. Kinda nice that there's only 3 days left till the weekend again. My imood says it all, I'm pretty elated right now :-)