So today while I was out and about I decided to take care of this once and for all. I bought some Rocktite concrete patch (I would have to buy another 25 lb before the project was complete), matched up some paint, and bought some assorted nails. The nails were because I figured if I were to hammer some nails into the opening at all sorts of different angles it would keep the repair from falling out as one big chunk. I have no idea if that is going to work or not, but what it looks like is to the right there. There are about twenty nails driven into the hole at all sorts of angles, I can make out eight of them in the picture there. And once I had the nails in all I had left to do was fill in the hole.

The repair after that was pretty straightforward. All there was to do was put layer after layer of the patch into the hole, taking care to not do more than three-quarters of an inch or so to each layer -this type of stuff has a tendency to crack as it cures if it is too thick. I was scared as hell that I wasn’t going to be able to pull this off after I started to put the first layer in. It was difficult to get the stuff to stay in the hole and it kept falling out. I made a terrible mess out of the floor before realizing that the easiest way to approach it was to wait fifteen minutes after mixing each batch -right until it was nearly set- to apply it to the hole. I was leaving myself only two minutes or so to get it in, but I already have experience in that (Hoy-O! I’ll be here all week!) To the right you can see what it looked like after I had all the patch in but before it was sanded and painted. I encourage you to look at this one full size and marvel at just how bad it looks.

Finally this is what it looks like after having been sanded and painted. I have no idea why this picture came out so red, it doesn’t look like that in person. This hasn’t been cleaned up yet either, so you can still see a lot of the patch around the floor. It also isn’t completely dry (the patch or the paint) so you can tell where the repair was made. Because the adobe walls in the house are not smooth -multiple textures, but also different repairs have left a lot of scarring- I didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying for perfection here. The idea was to get it sealed up before the rest of the mud leaked out. For the amount of time I put into it I think it looks pretty good. I’m sure I could have gotten smooth as a bowling ball if I was willing to put a couple hours into sanding it, but that would also require something more than the little orbital sander I have and that is just way too much time and effort.

Incidentally, at the same time as this repair I was also working on another repair of exactly the same type but one that involved a corner near our restroom. That one did not go nearly as well as this one did. I had to basically rebuild the bottom 12 inches of the wall with concrete patch which Im sure will hold just fine, but the trouble was in trying to square off the corner. Hard as hell. But again, the primary objective is structural integrity, not vanity -or so I tell myself so that I won’t just sob myself to sleep tonight.

ST.com: “So, Ryan, what brings about the sudden talk of a reunion/farewell concert?”

Ryan: You’ll never get me lucky charms!!! [Ryan runs to the next room and hides behind the sofa]

ST.com: “Donnie, there is speculation that this concert may be more about the money than the music. What do you say to that?”
Donnie: “Well no shit. We haven’t put out a record, hell even a single song since, well, ever really. We just looked at this as a quick way to score a huge sack of cash.”

ST.com: “Regarding the lack of any studio albums… Some critics have argued that DBS doesn’t qualify as a “band” since they have never released any music. Would one of you card to respond?”
Ryan: “I’ll respond to that.” [he pauses for 20-30 seconds] “They’re magically delicious!” [he again retreats to the other room and hides behind the sofa]
Donnie:“If I may… DBS has never been about the music, we have always been about a clever name creating false recognition -really just straight ripping off another group. When we came up with the name back in ‘98 or ‘99 we knew that we would never have to write a song to sell out stadiums, and to date we haven’t.”

ST.com:”Haven’t written a song or haven’t sold out a stadium?”
Donnie:“We’re here to talk about the future, not the past.”

ST.com:”Donnie, much has been made of your highly publicized battle with mediocrity. The critics say that there’s no way a second-rate guitarist can propel this band to stardom. How do you respond to that?”
Donnie:“Perhaps one second-rate guitarist can’t, but we have two [Burgess motions to the sofa in the other room; Ryan quickly ducks behind it]! And if two isn’t enough we will add another one… and another… We will just keep adding second-rate musicians until the group is so big people have to take notice, it worked for Earth, Wind & Fire.”

ST.com:”Your answers are so crass, it seems you’re not too concerned with offending or alienating people…”
Donnie:“Look, we’re not here to talk about music, we’re here to talk about reuniting long enough to grab that huge sack of cash and run. If you ask questions on that subject I could certainly give you a more polished answer.”

ST.com:”Fair enough. What do you plan to do with the huge sack of cash?”
Ryan:“I’m going to use my share to buy a small island of the coast of Tanzania… I’ll build a huge castle with a mote, pitfalls, secret passages, booby traps… Then me lucky charms will finally be safe!”
Donnie:Lottery tickets. Quickest investment on the planet. I’m going to put all my money into the powerball.

…
Stay tuned to Shadowtwin.com for this interview in its entirety and updates on the proposed July 2014 DBS reunion/farewell concert.

Starting around the time I was twelve or thirteen, the Greyhound trip became a part of my summer and Christmas vacation rituals. The odd thing about it was that I seemed to be the only person on the bus just because it was cheap and my parents were poor/cheap. Hell, I once sat next to the owner of the company for a 10 hour run from L.A. to Phoenix –at least he said that he was the owner of the company; he just liked to ride the bus from time to time to check up on the service. His credibility remains a bit suspect in my mind since one would assume the owner of such a large company would be able to afford to buy matching shoes. I personally would also assume that the owner of such a company would make a better choice in travel wine than grape flavored Mad Dog 20/20 -of course I was young and had a lot to learn about life. This wasn’t the only time I met someone so powerful on a bus though, also included in the list of people I met on the Greyhound bus was the CEO of NBC television studios, and again one would assume that someone with such a high profile, well paying job would care enough about hygiene to grab a shower once a month or so.

I met a couple of famous people on the bus as well. I met Oprah once, on the bus between Portland, OR and Denver. This was back in 1988 or say, way before I knew who Oprah was so I didn’t really have a way to verify the validity of her claim, of course based solely on the pattern of less than forthright individuals I did meet on the Greyhound I am going to guess that this wasn’t really the queen of television. There was one person I met on the bus that I am still not entirely sure of. I met someone who claimed to be Terry Jacks in L.A. one time. This one still seems plausible to me since he was such a minor celebrity in the 70s that I could certainly believe he may be travelling by bus in the 80s (I had no idea who he was when he told me. He mentioned the song seasons in the sun which I vaguely remembered having heard, but I remained rather unimpressed. I bet the guy gets that a lot).

The other thing you find out about people that ride the Greyhound is that there seem to be more than an average number of certifiable nutjobs riding the bus. Say if you were to round up 100 people at random, you could probably paint them into two groups –using a very broad brush- of around 99 people who were “normal” and just one who was just batshit insane; he’d be the guy off to the side arguing with his brown bag about whether Oswald acted alone or if the Gnomes on the grassy knoll were covert KGB operatives. Once you get on the bus that equation shifts to the point that you get about a 50/50 blend of normal people and people that you realistically fear might eat your spleen if the voices in their head will it and you happen to fall asleep at the wrong time. Unfortunately it is difficult to judge which category people fall into by looks alone. A handy bit of advice I can pass on from experience though is that while you might think that sitting next to the guy in the three-piece suit is going to guarantee a sane companion, it is usually exactly the opposite. The guy in the three-piece suit is probably the CEO of some huge corporation who is going to be yelling into his phone the whole trip (and mind you this was well before the era of cell phones, this guy will just be yelling into a regular old phone that he happens to carry in his backpack). In general I found it best to just try to find anyone that looked more scared than me, and let me tell you that was a very small group.

One summer I was going to have to make the trip on Greyhound from Roseburg, OR to Weableau, MO to visit my mom. This would probably be about a 30 hour drive if you were to make it in your car, but on a Greyhound, after one takes layovers and bus changes into account, it takes a couple hours longer than 2 days. The bus ride itself wasn’t going to be a problem, hell I was at an age that I felt a measure of independence when riding the bus on my own, but what was going to be a problem was my parents’ inability to understand that value of a dollar in a bus station. Bus stations may have some vending machines in them, but very few have restaurants. The sandwich that you can buy out of a vending machine really doesn’t taste too bad, but it is horribly overpriced. Even back in the late 80s I remember paying 5 bucks for a turkey sandwich, but there was nothing close enough to walk to, so I didn’t really have a choice.

For reasons that I still can’t quite figure out, my parents had it in their heads that twenty dollars was enough to cover meals on a bus ride. This had been pretty true when the ride was going from Arizona to Oregon when the trip was about a day, but when the travel time doubled the meal allowance did not. So on my trip to Missouri I ran out of money by the time we got to Denver with still about 14 hours remaining on my trip. I had some change in my pocket but certainly not enough to buy anything solid to eat. By the time I got to Kansas City, MO (incidentally I only found out once I arrived in Kansas City, MO that all of the sports teams were from Missouri not Kansas, it was like a whole geography lesson during my summer vacation) I was pretty damn thirsty too. But even back then the bus station vending machines wanted a dollar to buy a soda, so stuck in Kansas City for a 3 hour layover, I had to find another way.

I was standing out in front of the bus station smoking a cigarette while looking down the street and I saw a 7-11 sign. It didn’t look like it was that far away, but this was back in the day when I wasn’t able to so simply find out so much about depth perception, so I was about to learn a valuable lesson in spatial relation. Judging by the size of the sign, I though surely that it wouldn’t be more than a three or four minute walk…

The year was 1988 and I had recently decided that I was a rebel. No longer was I going to be oppressed by “the man” (in the same way that “the man” has been oppressing the young, white man for so long), I was going to lash out against the system by not showering as often as they would like (though truth be told I actually did shower, but I tried my best to look like I didn’t) and wearing shoddy clothing -This was the era of glam rock, but also the prime of bands such as Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax. While my more mainstream Glam rock self wanted to pretty myself up, my more central, Metal self wanted to keep it to torn up jeans and a t-shirt. The compromise was to try to look as homeless as possible; ripped up jeans, faded out shirt, hair intentionally done to look like it hadn’t been washed or combed in days… (Thankfully pictures of me from that era are not known to exist.) So I stepped off the bus out into the city streets as it were.

Growing up in rural Oregon doesn’t lend itself to cultural diversity. Which is to say that in 1988, at the age of 14, my only real experience with people who weren’t white was limited to what I had seen on that show COPS, and to a lesser extent that show Diff’rent Strokes. I wasn’t racist, but if one watches COPS enough, one will develop a pretty deep fear of black people with tattoos and gold teeth, well, them and any white person with a mullet (which is why I never like Billy Ray Cyrus; I always thought it would be only a matter of time before he went all trailer park. But now that he is whoring out his own daughter the trailer park in him is really coming out). I still don’t think these preconceived notions were far off base, and they were certainly very real to me at the ripe old age of 14.

I was a bit scared as I was walking because of the sounds I was hearing. While I was used to maybe hearing dogs barking or the occasional sound of one of the neighbors running a chainsaw, I was not used to hearing so many people yelling and screaming at each other in the streets, though I could never see who was screaming –to my ear it was just a bunch of disembodied voices coming from somewhere just out of sight. Doors were slamming, alarms were sounding, gunshots were ringing out.. I’m pretty sure a fair amount of this was being created by my mind –some sounds misheard, some amplified, others outright invented-, but some of it was probably real too. In fact it was all I could do to not turn around and run screaming and crying back to the bus station. I had to remind myself that I was 14 –an adult- and it was my right to walk this street to get a soda at that 7-11, though with every step it grew a bit more difficult to convince myself.

I had probably made it about half of the way to the store when my absolute worst fear began to materialize around me. Somehow, and rather suddenly, I found myself surrounded by the four scariest looking guys I had ever seen in my life. Four very large, very tattooed, black men had somehow managed to surround me within a matter of what seemed like a fraction of a second. Because of my previous viewing of COPS, and the number of gold teeth this group had, I was relatively sure I was going to die at any second. None of them had made any action at this point that I would deem as threatening, well, aside from getting tattooed and mouths full of gold teeth, but that wasn’t entirely their fault. Nonetheless, I was scared as hell. They were walking along surrounding me like points on a compass until the one in front of me turned and asked “what are you doing walking out here all alone?”

Now I had seen enough after school specials to know that the first thing you should do in a potential kidnapping situation is to make the aggressor believe that someone is expecting you back rather immediately so that their chances of getting away before the police arrive is slim –not that these guys really looked like they were going to take the police all too seriously anyway-. So, summoning all the expertise and cunning I had at my disposal, I came up with the following line: “I’m on a bus to my mom’s house in Weableau, stuck here on a layover. I just need a drink.” Do you see what I did there? I managed to convey that I was travelling alone and wasn’t expected anywhere for several hours in one very short sentence, never before had I been such a master of brevity.

“Well, it’s not safe for you to be out here all alone,” Said the biggest, scariest one, “you could get hurt.”

Incidentally, that was exactly the same thing I was thinking at that very moment. And while I couldn’t be sure whether or not he had meant that as a veiled threat, that was what I took it as.

“You should come with us to see the Father.”

The four of them were still surrounding me as they began leading me to see this Father guy. I made my last attempt at a protest by saying, “I just need a drink and then I’ll go right back to the bus station.” But the plea fell on deaf ears, as they continued on towards wherever it was they were taking me.

Never in my life had I been as scared as I was in that moment. I wanted to turn and run away, but I really didn’t know if I was with these men by choice or not and I didn’t want to find out that I wasn’t in a brutal way, so I walked with them. With each step I was coming up with new curses for my parents, I mean seriously, twenty bucks for two days food and drink, come on. If they would have given me a couple more bucks I wouldn’t be on the streets in Kansas City, surrounded by four very large men, being led ever further from the main road down a series of alleyways that, all of a sudden, made me realize that I was about to die. I had seen a lot of movies, and I knew that if they took you this deep into the alley it was to rob and kill you before throwing your body in the dumpster. My life began to flash before my eyes, of course I was young enough that it only took a few seconds, which was good because currently we stopped next to a large, sliding metal door.

“Here we are.” Said the largest of them, and come to think of it, I think he may be the only one who said anything during the entire ordeal.

I looked at the abandoned building and my mind started replaying all the mob films I had seen in my young life. Obviously in Kansas City the mob boss was called “The Father” and they had brought me here so that The Father could end my young life for the crime of trespassing on his streets. It was remote enough that they could probably just leave my body right there and it wouldn’t be discovered for days, not that it really mattered since, as previously mentioned, I had already told the guys that no one would come looking for me for a while anyway.

One of them grabbed the large door and slid it open. I was expecting it to make a sound like in horror movies; a grating, possibly almost squealing sound that pierced your ears and filled you with a sense of dread and foreboding, instead it was silent. The silence was even more disconcerting for, in my mind, that meant that it was used regularly. Of course that meant that they led kids back here all the time to kill them and dump their bodies into the streets. The Father was one ruthless bastard!

The building looked like a warehouse from the outside. It was a red brick building with no windows on the ground floor and only the large metal door as a visible entrance. It appeared to be four stories tall with windows every fifteen feet or so on the three upper floors. Some of the windows had the glass broken out while others had bars covering them but appeared to be open air. One step inside changed my previous assessment as instead of being a large, open, warehouse space, the first floor was actually one long corridor leading straight to what appeared to be a service elevator in the back with a bunch of rooms off to either side. My group stopped and turned to the first door on the right. One of them knocked on the door, and it slowly opened.

The man who appeared in the doorway was rather diminutive; perhaps 5’7” and very thin with some of the most striking eyes I have ever seen in my life. While I can’t remember a lot about this man, I can remember those eyes with clarity. As I live and breathe, the man had silver eyes. They looked like just like the picture here. This was long before people regularly wore colored contacts for vanity, and to this day I don’t know if he was or not, but this diminutive man, with his calm face and these serene, silver eyes scared me so deeply that I will certainly never forget it. He had a smile on his face as he looked at me, “My child,” he said, “what brings you here?” And while I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want to be there and ask if I could just go, my voice wasn’t working. It was the big guy with me that eventually said, “We found him wandering the street looking for a drink.” It was at that moment that I realized that they probably thought I was an alcoholic since I had earlier said that I was looking for a drink, but the reality was I only used the term drink because I didn’t know if Missouri was of the “pop” or “soda” group and in such cases it’s usually easier to just say drink… Unless, of course, you happen to be talking to people who will automatically assume you mean liquor.

“It is not safe for you on the street.” He said.

“I need to catch the bus to Humansville,” I said, my voice returning for the first time since this all started.

“You should wait here, it is safe here.” He said, as he took my hand and led me back towards the elevator, all the while being followed by the four men who had initially brought me here. Once inside the elevator, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small key. He put the key into a small lock on the elevator panel and turned it, then pushed the 3 button. In a few seconds we stopped on the third floor. He turned the key and took it back out of the panel, then turned and led me to a small room near the end of the hallway. There was a single, barred window in the corner. There was a small cot with a military blanket on it next to the window and a small bedside table with a phone on it. The phone had no buttons. “You should wait here.” He said as he closed the door and left.

I went to the window and shook the bars, they were solid. Although from the third floor I wouldn’t really have been able to make the jump if they hadn’t been. So I sat on the cot just staring at the phone. What the hell is the point of a phone with no buttons? Obviously this was an intercom, if I was to pick it up I would only get the creepy father guy. I sat in silence, staring at the phone. No one had ever said that I was being detained, but I didn’t want to pick the phone up to ask. It took me quite some time before I was able to. When I finally did the question came out in syllables, “um, am.. am.. am I.. can.. can I leave?” When I asked the question the father laughed a soft laugh, “of course you may leave, there are stairs at the end of the hallway.” Which was all I needed to hear. I bolted for the door and ran straight down the stairs and out of the building. I didn’t know where I was, but I could see the same 7-11 sign that had landed me here over the rooftops. I ran towards it until I got back on the street with the bus station. I didn’t slow down or turn around until I was back safely in the station.

I’m still not really sure who that guy was or what the hell was going on in that building. The logical part of my brain says he was just a religious leader who was reforming inner-city youth, while the irrational part of my brain thinks of the Heaven’s Gate cult. Either way, I never left the bus station during a layover again.

It wasn’t even a lack of replayability that killed Diablo II either, what it came down to was screen resolution. The first game had a max resolution of 640×480, the second one -only several years after release and the release of the expansion- finally maxed out at 800×600. That was pretty good for the year 2000, but by 2005 very few monitors were running resolution that small, and certainly no gamers were using them. That, at least in my mind, is what killed the game. It pushed me off to try Guild Wars at any rate, and it seems the majority of the Diablo II community also sought different games to fill the void.

Then, as all Diablo II players know, while we were eagerly awaiting the release of Diablo III, there was a highly publicized resignation party at Blizzard North that basically amounted to everyone who had ever worked on the Diablo franchise was gone. Some of them went on to form Flagship Studios, which I was counting on to carry the torch of the Diablo franchise, but the group fucked up in a big way in my opinion. How did they fuck up? Hellgate:London.

I want to be clear that I don’t think the game Hellgate:London was a fuckup, instead I think everything surrounding the games publicity and release absolutely doomed it to fail. I had been following the group at Flagship since they left Blizzard and I was eager to see what new titles they were going to put out. They were talented without a doubt, and I am sure that the entire Diablo community would have been eager to see what they released. The problem with Hellgate was that no one, not even the fansite community, was quite sure what to make of it. It looked like a futuristic, sci-fi, first person shooter, but was trying to incorporate the fantasy elements from a dungeons and dragons type world. Rather than bringing together fans of the FPS and fantasy it seemed to alienate them both. That is how I perceive it at any rate. But that wasn’t even the real problem. The real problem was that they rushed the game to release by Halloween 2007 despite the fact that the interface was clunky as hell and there were tons of bugs. And with, as near as I can tell, zero advertising. Why they rushed it to release at that point probably comes down to money; not having a product for a few years can scare off your investors, but unfortunately pushing out a shoddy product will scare off your clients.

Flagship had also been working on a game called Mythos at the time which never made it to release before the company folded. This is why I think Hellgate:London was such a bad idea. These guys were legends for the characters, bestiary and lore of the Diablo series, but rather than embrace that and play into it by trying to release a game that was similar to it, they tried to play away from it. Perhaps they just wanted to show that they weren’t a one-trick pony, but, as I’m sure they discovered, fantasy nerds are fiercely loyal to the genre.

I continued to check back on the Mythos website over the next couple of years as I toiled away playing World of Warcraft, always hoping to see it nearing release. Instead the site just started throwing a not found error a couple years back and I more or less gave up on it. Gave up until yesterday when I happened to type Mythos in my address bar and was taken to a site where a Mythos game is going to be release by Red Bana -a name I remember for infecting some of my old pc’s with malware. This, I was sure, wasn’t the work of the Flagship crew, so I started looking around to see what became of them. I finally found them at Runic Games, having just released a game called Torchlight, which I immediately downloaded.

This is the game they should have released in 2007. The game is much like the first Diablo, being set in a single town with a dungeon beneath that you must quest and fight to the bottom of. The gameplay is quite similar to Diablo, and the skill and attribute point system is also quite similar. There are three playable classes to the game currently, which as I’m sure you could guess are a strong man archetype, a nimble, ranged attack archetype, and a pure casting archetype. There are four different difficulty levels -though only three are really playable since the easiest could probably be completed by a developmentally challenged two year old. There is even a Hardcore setting (death is forever) although since the game is strictly played offline it hardly matters since you could just restore a saved game from before he died and he would live on. At any rate, this game has kept my attention for the past couple of days, and with a sticker price of only $19.95 and a download size of only 411mb (10 minutes on high speed) I suggest that you Go buy it if you haven’t done so already. There is also a two hour free trial if you aren’t sold by the following screenshots (click through to see them in much higher resolution):

I don’t mean to pick out Kate Moss specifically here, as this seems to be the way the entire industry has shifted. Although when I use the word “industry”, I’m not sure what exactly that is referring to. The magazine editors could choose to hire models that didn’t look like they were about two days postmortem if they chose to, and I don’t see that any make-up manufacturers are going to get better results from using painted corpses to showcase their products than using attractive women. So what gives? Who is paying to put these malnourished women on billboards and magazine covers, thus shifting our perception of beauty to include women that appear so unhealthy .. Indeed, to even exclude women who do seem healthy. Does our perception of beauty, as a people, now exclude anyone with even the hint of a figure?

Just for fun I dug around and found a picture of Bettie Page for comparison. I warn you that if you click to see this one at full size it is certainly not safe for work. Bettie Page was popular at the same time as Marilyn Monroe, however she was more of an every woman than Marilyn. Bettie was in many of the beach movies throughout the 60s, and lent her image to countless posters that were surely on young mens’ bedroom walls throughout the 60s and 70s. Bettie was a much thicker girl than the women who would play her role in the movies nowadays. While the picture I have chosen does make her look like she certainly has her share of ribcage, I chose this one specifically because of the other thing it shows off that no model would dare to let anyone see nowadays: Hips. This girl has a genuine hourglass form, in fact if her arms were down in this photo I think she would have nailed the shape exactly. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I am probably not the only person on the planet that thinks that the second picture here is far sexier than the first. Doesn’t sexy imply beautiful? In my mind it is possible to be beautiful without being sexy, but it is not possible to be sexy without being beautiful.

And now just to prove that I am being objective about the subject (so much as I can be), and not letting the fact that I can see Bettie Page’s NO-NO’s sway my judgment. I offer up these two photos of Jenna Fischer from The Office. I should note that, for reasons unknown, I think Jenna Fischer is without a doubt the most beautiful woman on television. I wanted to point out, however, that I think that she looks far more beautiful in the picture on the left than she does in the one on the right. Why? I gots no idea. Is it the curly hair? The wedding ring? The fact that she looks so intelligent and matronly in the photo on the left? There certainly isn’t anything wrong with the picture on the right, mind you, I just think that the one on the left is far more beautiful.. Despite the additional layers of clothing. Damn Jenna Fischer is hot!

I have included this picture of Kate Moss just to be fair to the girl. She really is quite pretty in her own right, and she really takes a lot of heat for the entire emaciated supermodel community. She looks pretty good in this picture, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that she is hiding the worst of her bony frame. I still don’t see what could be so appealing about a woman with no shape whatsoever though. When I look at this picture for anything more than a quick glance, her lack of anything resembling a feminine shape is a bit disturbing. Without hips and a waist she kind of just looks like a long-haired little boy. Come to think of it, she kind of looks like one of the chick’s from that band Hanson. Oh damn, those were little boys weren’t they?

Whoa. I just figured this out. Now that the priests are getting in trouble for molesting altar boys they are turning to women, but the women must look as much like little boys as possible. That must be it, because as Sherlock Holmes said, “…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth…”

This conspiracy runs deep…

The treadmill has been a source of a lot of my excuses over the last couple of months. I have found so many reasons not to use it that even I can hardly believe them anymore. I have finally gotten myself into something of a routine on it though; I have been using it every day for the last couple of weeks. I do a combination of running and walking with my top speed being 6mph and my bottom speed being 3.3mph. I like to do a minimum of 20 minutes, which generally falls between 1.25 and 1.75 miles depending on how sturdy my legs are that day. The problem is that I seem to be stopping just when I am really starting to sweat and my legs have gone through the sharp pains that they generally feel for the first few minutes I am on the thing. I attribute this to boredom. The other day I happened to be watching Dreamcatcher while I was just laying in my bedroom and it occurred to me that if I were to just watch it on the treadmill it would keep the mind occupied so that I might be able to get a few extra minutes in. And it worked perfectly; I was on the treadmill for 40 minutes while watching the end of that movie. And that is when the idea hit me.

Here you see what the treadmill looks like after having installed an 18.5″ color TV on it. This was necessary (or so I tell myself) so that I would be able to plug headphones into the TV so that it wouldn’t have to be so unbearably loud to hear over the noise of the cheap treadmill. This way I can walk on it when I get home from work at 2am without bothering the wife -and since installing it, I have done that each night-. The TV is actually bigger than what I wanted; ideally it would have been a 13″ TV, but I couldn’t find a 13″ TV for the same price as this because all the ones in that size either have a built in DVD player or they are AC/DC operation -for use in cars- which drives the price right the heck up. I actually ended up only paying $148 for this Sanyo after having an argument with a CSR at Wal-Mart (the short version is that they had it mistagged at $148, it should have been $178. I was planning to pay $178, but wanted to let them know that they had them mislabeled. When I told the woman, “The sign on these actually says $148. .” the CSR turned to the cashier and said, “Don’t give him that price. We don’t know who marked them.” And that, folks, really, really pissed me off. She was implying that I had labeled the thing myself. At that point I was going to make that bitch give me the advertised price if I had to call the fucking department of weights and measures out there. But after 20 minutes of staring at the big sign they had on the shelf that said “$148″ -and trust me, I have been in retail for nearly 20 years, I verified the UPC on this before I even considered bringing to their attention- she gave it to me for that price.).

Of course to my knowledge no one makes a mount specifically for mounting a television to a treadmill, so I had to fabricate something. I used a couple pieces of 1″ wide 1/16″ thick steel. I drilled holes in it that would line up with the wall mount bracket holes on the back of the TV and then drilled holes top of the treadmill to attach the tips of the steel to. The idea is that the television isn’t actually touching the treadmill; instead the steel is holding it an inch or so above the control board you see there, with the steel providing a little bit of flex so that the TV isn’t being mercilessly knocked around every time your foot lands on the tread; picture one of those playground toys where you sit on an animal and rock back and forth on a spring, that’s pretty much the same thing, only the steel is a bit more rigid than the spring so it doesn’t just go flopping all over the place. It is working great so far, but I’ll have to monitor it for a while to make sure that nothing falls out or breaks over time (early fear is that the plastic that it is mounted to near the top of the treadmill will weaken and break from the repeated stress of the TV moving back and forth. Time will tell.)

As much a fan as I am of tooting my own horn, I didn’t write this just to bloviate over my own keen, MacGyver-esque ingenuity. I wrote this because what you see on the right made me chuckle a bit once I had it all set up. I just split the signal coming from the coaxial cable right before it gets to the 42″ TV you see there, that way if I use the VCR, DVD player, or Satellite it will display on both TV’s. It makes sense to me, seeing as the whole reason I did this was to be able to wear headphones while I was exercising, thus making it less obtrusive to the wife and pets, but when viewed in this photo it looks like something straight from the department of redundancy department. And while it doesn’t look like it, that is exactly the same thing on both televisions. The one on the treadmill is tilted slightly back, which reduces the brightness just a bit, but I also have the brightness and contrast turned way down on it because I am always watching it in the dark and I find that it hurts my eyes if I don’t. Which really eliminates the last of the excuses I had regarding this thing, so now I am using it at least once a day, and have been doing two 20-30 minute shots per day when I am off at work. With luck my waistline will start to show it … eventually…

I have watched some pretty bad movies lately as a direct result.

To be fair I have also found a couple that were pretty good. Interstate 60 for instance was a great movie that I had never heard of and would never have seen were it not for the fact that Netflix recommended it to me. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon was another title that they recommended that I thought was excellent. Occasionally they are bound to hit a bit wide of the mark. Such was the case with Bubba Ho-Tep.

Bubba Ho-Tep was another of the Netflix recommendations. As is generally the case with the recommendations, I don’t like to read anything about the movies they recommend before I watch them. Being totally unaware of where the plot is going keeps me from trying to guess the ending (which I’m sure my wife will tell you is an annoyance that I have trouble shaking). So I went into this movie knowing nothing except what you see in the picture to the right there: It somehow involved Elvis.

I know from spending hours watching the history channel that “Ho-Tep” came at the end of the names of some of the Egyptian Pharaohs. While I wasn’t entirely sure whether that was a name or a title (still don’t know really) I was relatively sure that it was being used in the latter context in the film. When the movie opened up on what appeared to be Elvis in his 60’s in a retirement home, I was a little thrown. I had been expecting this to be some sort of a bio-pic about the life of Elvis or something. Boy was I ever wrong. The reality was far worse.

I’m going to spoil the plot now.

Evidently, according to the film, the real Elvis had traded places with an Elvis impersonator sometime prior to the famous death of the king in 1977. The real Elvis was still living as an Elvis impersonator, but had accidentally burnt up the only proof he had of that on a barbeque grill at his trailer park (seriously). So the real Elvis was now wasting away in a backwater retirement home. Everything in the movie was very anachronistic though, this was supposedly at least a couple decades after Elvis’ death -clearly set in the 1980s or more current- but the lights, beds, radiators, doorknobs, bedpans, and, well just about everything electrical inside the retirement home looked more like what you would expect to see in the 1940s than the 1980s. That’s really beside the point though.

While he is in the retirement home, Elvis happens to meet John F. Kennedy. Kennedy is now a black man. Evidently after the shots rang out from the school book depository that day in Dallas, Kennedy’s brain managed to survive the ordeal (although anyone who has ever seen the Zapruder film could clearly see that a great deal of his brain matter got splattered all over the back of the convertible. In fact Jackie O was said to be trying to scrape it up off of the trunk in the later frames) but for security reasons the secret service had put his brain into a black man… ‘Cause no one would think to look there. No shit, This is really in the movie.

Now that we have both Elvis and JFK on the lam in a retirement home somewhere in Jerkwater, what do they do with the film? Do they tell the stories that led up to them eventually being put into the home? Do they try to quell rumors about the alleged conspiracies that surround both of their untimely deaths? Nope. They fight a Mummy.

Yes, that’s right. A mummy. An Egyptian mummy that at one point actually uses a toilet inside the retirement home and scratches graffiti -in hieroglyph of course- on the walls. The mummy was evidently being transported by bus between a couple of towns when it somehow got lost (in a bus accident I think it was). But for some reason that they never even bothered to try to explain, this mummy was not wrapped up in the typical strips of cloth you have come to expect from mummies, he was dressed up as a cowboy! Because when I think Egyptian mummy, I immediately think of ceremonial silver and gold belt buckles that say “Bubba”, don’t you? As I say, they didn’t even try to explain this part. But they do say that he eats people’s souls…

What becomes of these legendary figures in American history as they battle it out with the boot-scootin’ bad-ass from Beni Suef? Well you’ll just have to watch the movie to find that out, won’t you…

But the odds of you actually watching it are bad enough that I should just go ahead and tell you that JFK dies in the fight, but Elvis manages to kill defeat the mummy. And I just saved you the 90 minutes of your life that you would have wanted back if you had watched it. You’re welcome.

Oddly the power supply is the one thing that I have never replaced in a pc. I say oddly because I have replaced pretty much everything else, even the cpu, but the power supply is the one part that I have never actually pulled out of the case and changed. Well, I have never changed a motherboard either, but IMO the motherboard and case are the PC, so if you plan on changing one of them you may as well just move to a new box/motherboard combo and call it a new pc.

I bought a new Rosewill power supply unit. This one is 500 watts, so only a very slight upgrade from the previous one, but being a better name, I expected the quality of this to be far superior to the one that had been in the tower in the first place. There was also a less important concern with aesthetics; this one has two blue LED fans to match the case as well as the wrapped cables you see in the picture here. The lines wrapped around the ribbons glow under the lights in the case also. So with the wrapped cables eliminating most of the wire clutter in the tower and the additional glow of the striped cables the whole setup looks far better than it did before. If I were to base the relative quality of the product on weight alone (certainly not the best measure of quality) this one is far superior to the supply it was replacing. The listed weight on this is 5.2 lbs and it certainly feels like it. The old psu, while 480 watts, so only nominally smaller in output, barely weighed 1.5lbs.

My only real concern with the new power supply was with the cables. There were so many different letters in the descriptions -SATA, MOLEX, ATS, EPX,- it had me a bit frightened. Most concerning though was whether a 24pin connector was the same as a 20+4pin connector. I mean, if its the same thing then why are there separate listings for 24pin and 20+4 pin? Is the 20+4pin an older version that was later incorporated as standard into motherboards until eventually they dropped the confusing +4pin descriptor? Thankfully I never had to learn since it all worked when I hooked it up.

In addition to cleaning up the inside of the case by wrapping all the power cables, the inside was further reduced of clutter by being able to directly plug in the hard drive and dvd drives, which had been run through a 4-pin converter on the old power supply but could be directly hooked up with the (SATA?) cables the new psu came with. I only took one picture of it after I got it put back together and then stuck it back beside and behind my wife’s desk (this is our third pc right now, so for backup and occasional internet use only) before I found that the picture didn’t turn out, so until I feel the urge to slide it back out you’ll just have to take my word that it looks considerably better.

But the reason for this post is that I began to wonder -after seeing how easy it was to replace the power supply- if the industry intentionally uses so many acronyms and abbreviations for the cables and plugs on the inside of pcs to try to intimidate the average Joe into thinking that they are difficult to work on. Or perhaps the enthusiasts that build their own machines perpetuate the use of the jargon to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than they really are? At any rate, each new project I work on with regards to pcs makes me realize that they are extremely simple to work on and I’m not sure why I find that surprising anymore.

At some point during the movie, the main character is watching a young lady through her bedroom window (here I use the term “young lady” relatively; she was supposed to be around 15 years old for the story of the film, though I can’t figure out which actress it was, so I can’t find her true age) and it appears as though we are going to get to see her topless. I turned to my wife and said, “Ooh, I think we get to see her tits!” And the wife said something like “She’s too young for you to be looking at them.” To which I replied, “This movie came out in 1994, she’s at least 30 now.” Game, Set, Match. Right? Well, it turns out that the wife thinks that just because she was (or was supposedly) underage at the time the movie was made it makes it perverted to look at her naked -despite the fact that she has obviously passed the age of consent in the mean time…

Leave it to a woman to come up with some crazy shit like that.

Which leads me to the sideways logic and its application to pedophilia. For the purposes of this example I am going to have to make a lot of suppositions. I know that the situation could never present itself exactly as I will describe it, but nothing in life ever does. I want to try to separate this down to its barest form to try to determine exactly where the moral boundary is, where the legal boundary is, and whether the moral and legal boundaries even intersect. This is purely hypothetical, of course, and the only question I am concerned about is the end question, not how or why we arrive there…

A family lives in a house with two small children. Unbeknown to anyone, there are cameras hidden in the bedrooms of the children. The cameras run to a DVR somewhere that records thousands of hours of footage, but it is never viewed by anyone. The children live in the same house until they are in their 30s, at which point they discover the DVR. The video contains a lot of footage of each of them totally naked, dressing, undressing, etc. Knowing there is a market for such material, they decide to sell the video. Is this wrong?

Legally, of course, this is wrong. Distribution of naked images of children is a crime. The legal theory, however, is that it is exploitation of the children, and in our scenario there has been no such exploitation, as the photos were never seen by human eyes until the children were fully grown, they were never made to pose for the photos, and they themselves are the ones that are distributing them. So while it is legally wrong, it seems that the basis of the laws that make it wrong do not take the welfare of the children into consideration at all. But illegal is illegal, and distribution of this would be against the law.

How about morals? Is it morally wrong for them to distribute this? I am asking if it is morally wrong for them to distribute it here, not whether it is morally wrong for someone to look at it. Obviously it is morally wrong to look at photos of naked children, but is it morally wrong for them to sell them? If it is morally wrong to sell the photos, is it morally wrong to give them away?

Personally I think it is definitely immoral and illegal to look at the photos. However I can’t really get my head wrapped around how it could be immoral or illegal for them to sell them. I am absolutely sure they would get convicted (if caught) of distributing the photos of naked children, but I just can’t imagine a jury convicting someone for selling photos of themselves.

What do you think?