wildyams

So on a spur of a moment (and because of a last minute request) I accompanied my friend Jen to Vegas for New Years. She's a high roller out there so she got comped rooms and food and all that, so she said if I drove she'd get all that other stuff. Sounded good to me, what with having no other plans for New Years and all, so off we went. I did ok, I only lost about $100 (Jen wasn't so lucky), and I got to see some drunk fools on New Year's Eve and some sharks at the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay. Below are some pictures for your enjoyment, so enjoy them, dammit!

Something to write home about	The Strip at night
Downtown Vegas at New Years Midnight	Typical: 40 minutes later and everyone is back to gambling
That says it all: a football full of beer, a camcorder and a funny hat	Just another idiot tourist
A Shark at Mandalay Bay	More Sharks

The perfect end to a perfect trip

This is so up John's alley it's almost scary.

What do you get when you take Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller acting in a movie alongside William Shatner and Rip Torn; with a plot that apparently mirrors "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo" and is from the creator of "Terry Tate, Office Linebacker"?

The answer: "Dodgeball: The Movie"

That title alone I'm sure would get Mr. Bell to make an opening day appearance, but when you factor in the rest of it, I wouldn't be surprised if he camped in line outside the theater in sub-zero temperatures for a few hours for tickets and good seats

It probably goes without saying, but I'm sure I'll be there opening weekend as well when it comes out this summer.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Austin, Texas to visit my sister, my Mom and her side of the family, as week 3 of my vacation rolls on. Today everyone else was back at work (hey gang), but I'm still off till this time next week. I have to say, I'm not too happy about the Terror Level being set at "High" right now as I get ready to fly somewhere, but mainly my worries for myself are mostly about long lines at the airport as opposed to my plane being hi-jacked, as it is not a cross-contiental flight. While in Texas I'm staying at a hotel and will be using a rental car so I don't place too much of a burden on everyone out there having to put me up or cart me around everywhere. My hotel has high speed internet access, so I am taking my Dad's laptop with me, and as such you may see an entry or two while I'm out there (no pictures though, you'll have to wait till next week for those). So anyway, that's all I've got to say for now, I need to get packed and get to bed so I can get up early for my flight. Hope everyone out there is doing well

I got up today at about 9:30 and got myself together, grabbed my bags and headed to the airport. Amazingly (or maybe not) there was gridlock traffic on the way to the airport. I figured, wrongly, that mid-morning on a workday that there wouldn't be a whole lot of people on the road, but apparently that's a bad assumption for L.A. It has now gotten to the point where the only time you can legitimately expect light traffic is in the middle of the night (and that includes weekends). Anyway, it was "high" on the Terror Alert thingie, so that meant tons of cops, and them checking cars as they tried to get to the terminals. Me, I parked in long term parking and rode the tram in. I used a computer kiosk to check in (took about 20 seconds), and got in the security-check line (which wasn't too bad). I had to open up all my stuff and take my shoes off to get past the metal detectors, but that's to be expected. Once past that I got some McDonald's (at about twice what it costs elsewhere) and then boarded the plane. It wasn't a bad flight, maybe a half hour late, but not too bad at all. When I got in my Mom picked me up and took me to the hotel where Johnetta, my sister works. Johnetta was at work till 11 tonight, so my Mom and I went and got dinner, then brought something back for Johnetta. While Johnetta ate, we all talked and had a nice time and good conversation. After that my Mom brought me here to my hotel room and she went home. I didn't get a rental car today, but I plan to pick one up tomorrow. Anyway, that was my day, and now I'm off to bed.

Having spent most of the last week or two in hotels, I have to say the one thing I miss most about not being at my apartment is my pay cable channels. In the times when I'm in the room (as I am now), I have to watch all the usual cable stuff, and it fucking blows. Both in Vegas and here the one pay channel was HBO, which is ok, but with pay cable channels it only really works if you've got tons of them, cause any single pay channel usually has nothing but shit on, so you need the extra-wide variety so you can find the gems out there to watch (like "Bio-Dome" or "Swept Away" ). Anyway, so since Bryant Gumble's Wide World of Sports or something is on HBO, I flipped around to see what else was on and came across an edited-for-TV version of "Chasing Amy" and it is fucking hilarious! I love a movie that is heavily centered around "dick and fart jokes" and all kinds of sexual scenarios be edited for TV. I just got through watching them edit to hell the whole ode-to-Jaws cunnilingus injury scene, and couldn't help but laugh:

"Shouldn't you say 'take her down' or at least modify the term 'hump' with something like 'fist'?"

Pure comedy. Anyway, I'm off to get lunch. Laettner :-)

One thing I've noticed about Texas, which I don't really see in California, is state pride. Everywhere you go here, people have bumper stickers saying something about Texas, or billboards, or T shirts or whatever. In addition to the ever famous "Don't Mess With Texas" crap you always see or hear about, I saw a lot of "Fuck Y'all, I'm From Texas" stuff today. Also, when I went to school in Colorado, I don't remember seeing much (or any) real pro-Colorado stuff there, and I don't really remember seeing much of that stuff except in tourist shops or at the airport really anywhere. So what is the big deal with all the pro-Texas sentiment? I mean, I've been here enough times, so you would think I'd understand it by now, but no, I don't. Maybe it's just not my kind of place or something. I guess it's ok, but it's just kinda drab out here. It's flat everywhere, for one thing, so the scenery isn't really striking, and the foliage is pretty standard trees and bushes. So what's the big deal?

Another thing I've noticed (and this really bugs me) is for every highway they have this thing that runs directly parallel on both sides of it called an "access road". What is the point of these things? I mean, if you want to be on the highway, then just get on the damn highway. Why drive on a road that just parallels it everywhere? I'm told you can drive pretty much all over the state right next to various highways on these access roads (also known as "frontage" for some unknown reason).

The most irritating thing about driving around Austin, however, is the distinct lack of any kind of road signs. My Mom said she's noticed it too, and thinks that maybe all the college kids stole them; but literally unless you know where you're going already (because you know the area), you won't know you need to be in the left hand lane to get to the highway until you are at the light you need to turn left at. The sign that says "Interstate 35 South" will be right next to that green turn arrow, and there is no indication anywhere before that. There are also very little street signs anywhere telling you what street you are on, and what street you are crossing. Thankfully for most of my trip I've been with people who live in the area and who know where they are going, cause otherwise I would be more lost than I am normally.

Just a quick entry then I'm off to bed. Tomorrow I have to get up early to go to my Grandmother's 89th birthday, and then go straight from there to the airport. The last two days I've spent hanging out with my Mom and sister and aunt and grandmother, checking out my Mom's bistro she has with my aunt, and going to dinner, going to see a comedy act/magic show, watching a few movies and helping my relatives out with their various computer related issues. I can't believe it is Friday night, and I can't believe I'll be back at work in a few days. It's been a great vacation so far though, I really needed the break. Tomorrow some travelling, then I'm gonna just sit on my ass Sunday and get ready to re-enter the rat race. At least it's gonna be good to see everyone again

I'm back in California now, and wow how awesome to be home. Nothing like sitting in gridlock on my way home from the airport at 8 pm on a Saturday Even though my Grandmother's 89th birthday was on Thursday, we had a big party for her today over at my cousin Jarrett's house (he lives there with his wife and children, so it's not just his house, but whatever). Anyway, as is always the case whenever there is any kind of family gathering with my Mom's side of the family out there in Texas, it was an unbelievable amount of people today (since almost her whole side of the family lives in Texas and are all only about 3 hours away from each other by car, or maybe 4 or 5 if you were taking access roads). Because I'm the weird one who lives something like 2,000 miles away and only gets out there ever few years, it is always a little overwhelming catching up with about 30 family members all at once As overwhelming as it was though, it really was great to see everyone again and to see what everyone has been up to, and see how many kids everyone has now. I had to leave the party after a couple hours so I could make my plane, and that kinda sucked, having to leave everyone mid-party, but I made my plane reservations 4 months ago, and they decided to have the party within the last couple weeks. What are you gonna do? My flight home was pretty uneventful, and my ride home from the airport was uneventful except for me wondering why traffic was bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic at 8 pm on a Saturday (who are all these people?!). So I'm back, yahoo, and tomorrow I'll have some pics for you, so there you go.

As promised, here are a couple pics from my trip to Texas. Just like the Vegas pics from last week, these are for your enjoyment, so full enjoyment is mandatory. Don't look at them if you find this unsatisfactory.

The view from my motel room	The view from my mom's back porch
A table at the Oasis (a restaurant)	My Mom's dog, Hero
A room at my sister's hotel that caught fire	Ahhh... Queso.

I just got spammed quite badly here on my blog today. For those who are unfamiliar with how one gets spammed on a blog, basically someone or some program comes along and posts things in comments which basically amount to messages advertising a bunch of products or websites, like you see in spam emails. Anyway, I got about 50-100 of them or so, so I had to go through and delete them all. This is not an easy process with Movable Type (which I use to make my blog), as you must do each comment one by one and deleting each comment requires going to the main editing menu (which loads that page off the server), clicking on the comment (which loads that page off the server), clicking 'Delete' (which pops up a page saying 'Are you sure you want to delete this comment?'), clicking 'Yes Delete It' (which then loads the page of the entry that was spammed off the server), and then clicking the link to go back to the main editing menu to start the process all over again. Not a whole lot of fun to do that 50 times or more, you know? Anyway, supposedly the next version of Movable Type (which I plan to upgrade to when it is available) is going to include comment registration, so anyone who regularly makes comments, get ready for that, and I apologize in advance. You'll probably have to register your email address and have me approve it, which is a big pain in the ass, but believe me it will save me a lot of hassle in the future.

As you may remember, almost a full year ago I said in this entry that I had found a cheap, small car that really appealed to me, but that they were not available in North America yet. Well recently on the lot at work I've seen a couple different small cars that they must be using for a shoot, and the Smart car I mentioned in that entry is one of them (the Nissan Hypermini is another one I've seen parked on the lot). Today as we were dining on the fine cuisine at the Backlot Cafe, someone drove the Smart I'd seen (which turns out is the 'fortwo' model) up and parked it right in front. We chatted about it briefly, but it made me wonder if these cars were either available in the US now, or if they would be soon, so I went to their website to see. Well, it turns out there is good news and bad news. The good news is that they are available right now in North America (they began selling them in Mexico in August of 2003), so now if I was really dedicated I could go down to Mexico and buy one and then drive it home (at least I think I can, I would have to check to see if they are street legal here in the US, of course). The bad news, however, is that even though they are slated to be sold here in the US starting sometime in 2006, they will only be selling (get this) an SUV model! What the hell? Check this out from their FAQ on their site:

In 2004 the new four-seater smart forfour will be launched and a SUV version will be produced in the Brazilian facility, Juiz de Fora, start of 2006. This unique smart vehicle, developed for the American market, will go on sale in the United States in 2006.

Will the whole model range of smart cars be available in the USA?
We plan to launch a variant of the smart forfour onto the US-American market in 2006. However we are not planning to introduce the current model range (smart city-coupÈ, cabrio, crossblade, roadster, roadster-coupÈ) and smart forfour there. Decisions will be reached concerning each specific vehicle in relation to the US launch of future smart models which could be available on the market after 2006.

Great, so there aren't even any plans to release the small models that I would want, and instead we Americans will get just the new trendy SUV answer to the Mini Cooper. How excited I am to hear this

I'm over housesitting at my Dad's place right now and will be here till Tuesday morning. I was going to go to see "Monster" with Rebecca tonight, but she had plans, so instead I went to dinner with Dave and Jen. Tomorrow they're gonna go to see "Monster" with Rebecca and I (at least that's what we agreed on tonight). Dave, Jen and I all went to Hamburger Hamlet for dinner, and it was tasty as it always is. Since Cookie will want to know, I got "Those Potatoes" and the Mini Cheeseburgers, while Dave and Jen also had the Mini Cheeseburgers and French Onion Soup. We had a talk about children and parenthood and my extreme aversion/fear of both It's been a pretty uneventful week, my first week back, except for me now being over at my Dad's place. On Monday the Halo Crew from our last FragFest is all gonna come over so we can have another LAN Party and all kill each other in cyberspace, so that should be fun. Anyway, I'm off to bed now, then back to work in the morning.

Today after work I was supposed to meet with Dave, Jen and Rebecca and go to see "Monster". I first went to Rebecca's place and picked her up at about 7:30 and told her the movie was at 10, and then we went to Dave and Jen's to meet them and go to dinner. We couldn't figure out where to go that wouldn't be too packed considering it was Friday night, but eventually we decided on Pie N' Burger. We got their usual delicious burgers, fries and shakes (Rebecca didn't have dinner, just apple pie), and watched a little bit of the Lakers-Queens game on the TV there. LA was missing Shaq, Kobe, Karl Malone and Horace Grant tonight, and were playing up in Sacramento against the Queens who have the best record in the NBA, so needless to say the Lakers were huge underdogs. From what we saw of the game, they played pretty good, except for the start of the 3rd quarter where they fell behind by 20 and never recovered. Oh well, you can't win em all. After eating we decided not to go see "Monster" because we were all so tired, so instead we went back to Dave's for a bit and hung out, then I took Rebecca home and came back here to my Dad's, and now I'm gonna go to bed.

Did you ever see Creepshow? It was a horror movie made up of about 5 short stories all tied together with a comic book theme. Anyway, one of the stories was called "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" and starred Stephen King. It was about a guy who finds a meteor leaking some strange liquid, and when he gets some on him, it turns out to be some kind of super miracle grow stuff that begins growing green weeds on him and on everything he touches. It's a pretty depressing story while trying to be humorous, and in the end, overgrown with these weeds the guy kills himself. Why bring this up? Because I'm reading a book right now which made me think of something else that is an awful lot like those weeds. The book is No Logo and the revelations in it about the growth of advertising and its ever-intrusive nature reminded me of those weeds. I was reading about how advertising has made its way into our schools, and two stories really jumped out at me. Have a gander at these:

I'm up early today cause I went to bed really early last night, but I'll get to that in a bit. I just wanted to write a recap of the last almost week or so since I haven't really said anything lately about what all I've been doing (which isn't much, and nobody but me will really care, but someday I can read back on this and remember it). Last weekend I housesat at my Dad's, and it was great up there as it always is. His place is awesome up on top of that hill, and it is just fun to stay in such a nice place as opposed to my POS appartment here in Hollywood. While up there I finally did get to go see Monster with Rebecca, and we both agreed that it was quite good. The makeup on Charlize Theron wasn't that distracting (Fletch would say she splurged and spent 99 cents on a set of novelty teeth), but other than the fake teeth she just looked like how she probably looks without all the glamour makeup on. My only real problem with the movie is that it may have been a bit sympathetic to someone who was executed for being a serial killer, telling the story from her point of view, but it doesn't make her out to be a hero, or try to make it seem like she was right or anything. I'll leave it up to you to decide.

I hate the Superbowl. I hate anything where the advertising has clearly stolen the spotlight from the thing it was supposed to be leeching off of, and the Superbowl is the most clear case of this probably anywhere. People who never watch football turn out and tune in in droves for the fucking commercials on Superbowl Sunday. I'm not a football fan anyway, so I don't mind missing the game to avoid the commercials (the only one I've watched in the last 4 years or more was three years ago when the Giants were in it, since that was my team growing up and still technically is my team, although I don't really watch enough football anymore to qualify as a "fan" I'm sure). Tonight on my way home I was thinking it might be funny (in a really stupid way) to have an "I'm not watching the Superbowl Party", except of course that no one else would want to attend, and what would you do at something like that anyway? I wasn't really going to do something like that, it was just a fleeting thought, but I thought it was ironic then when I got home to find I'd been invited to a Superbowl Party. I haven't gone to one of these in a couple years, and really would love to avoid them for the rest of my life, except that I do love to see all my friends, of course. So I'm faced with a dilemma: go and be social with all my good buddies in spite of the commercial-worshipping, or stay home and prevent myself from being irritated at all the excitement surrounding a bunch of advertisements at the expense of seeing everyone. Any suggestions? Keep in mind that I consider advertising to be one of the most evil things in existence. For instance, if you really hate George Bush, imagine going to a Superbowl party if all they ran during the commercial breaks were pro-Bush ads and everyone else there was really excited about seeing all the new pro-Bush commercials (or anti-Bush ads if you're a real hardcore conservative). Would you still go just cause all your friends were gonna be there?

Last night I went to bed early again (that's like 3 nights in a row for me), but was awakened at about 2 am when the power went out (what woke me up was all the smoke detectors beeping). The power was only out for about 2 or 3 minutes, and when it came back on it was rather loud. My apartment doesn't have a doorbell, so I bought one you plug into the wall for about $15 from Home Depot a couple years ago, and whenever you plug it in it goes off, so that went off when the power came back on; as did all my computers. I got up to reset my alarm clocks and log my computers in and go back to bed when I realized that the power outage evidently screwed up one of my computers. See, I have three computers: a PC, a Mac, and a very very old Mac (valued at maybe $10) whose sole purpose was to act as a router and split my internet access between the other two computers. Anyway, any time there is a power outage I always have to reboot that computer and reconfigure my internet settings. This time, however, when I restarted it I just got the old Mac icon of a floppy disk with a flashing question mark in it, which basically means (from what I remember) that it can't find a disk to boot off of. Oh well, I guess that's pretty much the end of that computer, so now I'm gonna have to go buy a typical router for my computers (any suggestions on what to buy?). The plus side is that it will probably use less power, but the downside is that it will probably make me more succeptible to virus/worm/trojan horse attacks, as a Mac running System 7 (or something like that) made for a good shield against all that kinda stuff. C'est la vie I guess.

I stumbled across this today and didn't really know what to make of it.

Taking the cue from John's post about wrapping text around a picture, I thought I might try that today with a couple pics I took this week of the Hulk at work (as you can see he's a lazy shit who doesn't do a whole lot of work). I've had a nice relazing weekend so far. Friday I came home from work and just relaxed and watched a little bit on the making of Alien 3 from the Quadrilogy (the featurettes are really top-notch, by the way). But I went to bed early cause I was pretty tired (I don't know what the deal was this week, I went to bed early 4 nights in a row, I think). Yesterday I got up before lunch and called Dave to see if he and Jen wanted to get something and to see if they wanted to go to Frys with me to get a router. They were both in the mood to come get food at Greenblats anyway, so they drove out and we went there for lunch (we all had sandwiches and mac n' cheese, Cookie). Afterwards Jen drove back to Pasadena and I drove Dave over to Frys cause Dave needed a new card for one of his computers (it was having trouble finding a hard drive he bought). I picked up my router using a gift certificate my Mom got me for Xmas and then we went back to Dave's place. Jen had gone to see her Mom, and when she got back from that we all hung out and watched the Laker game for a bit (Kobe and Rick Fox had been activated off the Injured List and we wanted to see them play). At halftime we went to Crown City for dinner (I had a burger, Dave had tacos and Jen had a salad). After dinner we went back to their place and caught the end of the game, then went to go see Lost in Translation (which they hadn't seen, and which I had been badly wanting to see for the second time). Anyway, after that I dropped them off and came back home where I installed my router and surfed the web and watched TV till I got tired (which was actually late for the first time in almost a week), then I went to bed. And today I've done a whole lot of nothing and am enjoying the hell out of it.

And now for The Stinkers nominees:

What with the Golden Globe Awards last night and the Oscar nominees soon to be announced, you can smell it in the air: it's awards time again! Naturally being Mr. Terrible, I'm going to focus most on the nominees for both the Razzies and The Stinkers. We'll start with The Razzies nominees:

Sticking with the best of/worst of in movies this year, I wanted to list what I thought my most and least favorite movies from this past year were. The only problem was trying to remember everything I had seen this year, so I consulted a list of most (if not all) of the movies that came out this year. I pasted the list into an Excel document and then eliminated all the movies that I hadn't seen (there were a few I couldn't tell from just the title if I'd seen them or not, so I looked them up in most cases; but if there was one or two that I truly couldn't remember then they probably weren't worth me listing anyway). I found that apparently I had seen about 40 movies that were released last year, and I figured I'd just give each film a numerical value based on how much I liked the movie and also how much I wanted to see the movie again. My scale pretty much works like this:

It's a good thing I have the MT Blacklist installed cause I just got spammed 590 times and the Blacklist blocked them all! Seeing that spam activity made me decide it was time to upgrade MT to the newest version (2.661) and to get the newest Blacklist. Too bad there isn't that kind of protection against all kinds of spam

The Oscar nominees were announced today, and I thought I would just put down what I hope wins (see below in bold). Keep in mind this is not what I think will win, necessarily, just what I hope wins. Also keep in mind that in many of these categories I don't fully understand exactly what would make one movie better than the next, and in those cases I just picked which movie I liked the best out of the nominees. For the Best Supporting Actress category, I only saw one of the movies that the person was nominated for, and I didn't really have any concrete feelings one way or another about her performance. Ok, here you go:

I saw this link on Daypop a couple days ago, but it was down due to too many people visiting their site, so I forgot about it until I saw it on Koga's blog and tried again, and this time it was up and working so I figured I would fill it out too and see all the states I'd been to:

visited 20 states (39%)
create your own visited states map or write about it on the open travel guide

Neat huh?

No, the name of this entry is not a reference to the hilariously bad HBO series from the 80's The Hitchhiker. It refers to a radio program by Orson Welles from 1941 or so. Anyway, when I was a kid my Dad got a bunch of tapes of some old radio shows that he liked when he was growing up: Abbott and Costello, The Shadow, stuff like that; and we would listen to them in the car, particularly when we went on long road trips and such. For me my favorite was always this Orson Welles suspense show called "The Hitchhiker". It's about a man who is driving from New York to California and he keeps seeing this same hitchhiker everywhere on his drive out. I remember it as being quite chilling when I was younger, and I must have listened to that thing dozens of times as a kid. Anyway, thanks to the internet, I decided to look it up and see if a) there was any info on it, and b) if there was any way I could download it and listen to it. Well it turned out there was a lot of info on it, and there were even quite a few places to buy a CD with it or virtually any other old radio show on them. Finding a place to download it was rather difficult and took a lot of searching, but eventually I found a Windows Media Player version and so I downloaded that. The only problems with that was that there was a superfluous 5-10 minutes before and after the program of people (including Orson Welles) talking about it, and that I can't play a wma file on my Mac (which is where the rest of my music files are located). Luckily I found a demo version of some program to convert a wma file to an mp3 file, then I transferred that file to my Mac. I then used iTunes to convert that to an aiff file. I then opened that aiff file in SoundEdit and trimmed the intro and aftermath away so that I could be left with just the program itself (just under 24 minutes total), and I then converted it back to an mp3 file and added it to my iTunes library under the artist Orson Welles (who else). Now I realize that it's almost guaranteed that nobody but me will care about any part of this entry because I doubt anyone else out there ever heard this broadcast, but on the off chance that anyone else out there heard it and liked it, then maybe they can download the wma file and listen to it and enjoy it like I did.

Thanks to Boing Boing and Daypop, I came across this awesome website that allowed me to put some old school arcade games (and Simon) on my website. Check em out:

Simon


Space Invaders


Tetris


Pac-Man


Asteroids