Category Archives: Entertainment

Site stats; ALCS

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My infrequent posting pattern continues, some may even say that it is becoming the norm. I dunno, I would like to think that there were pressing, real-life issues that kept me from posting, but no, nothing like that at all. You see I got caught up in another one of those silly Club Pogo challenges. The challenges are little more than a digital pissing contest, but I just can’t stand the thought of failing at any challenge that I begin. The problem with that is that I often start challenges (in life as well as that game site) that involve games/things that I am not very good at, or at least not familiar enough with to try.

This time, the game ‘Dominoes’ was the source of my problems over the last few days. It turns out that there is a use to them beyond just lining them up and knocking them down. Which is good, I suppose, as I always wondered why they went to all the trouble of putting numbers on them if their only purpose was to be stood on end and knocked over. Actually, I have played dominoes in the past, used to be passable at it, but the version that they offer on that website doesn’t use the same rules that I played by. In fact, a quick look at Dominoes.com shows that there are at least 68 different domino games. Of course I know how to play exactly one of them, which was very different than the online version that I was offered as a challenge.

If I were able to take the hours that I spent trying to win those 65 games and funnel them into a good cause, I likely would have gotten a lot more Diablo playing done. I did win the 65 games in the challenge, albeit only an hour before the expiration of the challenge. Considering that they give you seven full days to do each challenge I would say that I cut it pretty close.

• While perusing my site statistics today I noticed a couple of interesting search strings that resulted in hits. Those particular searches were for ‘free sixteen porn picture’ and ‘watch free little girl porn’ (both without quotations, of course). I will readily admit that I changed the title of my page to say, “Still Porn Free”, as a ruse to see if I could get a few hits just because it had the words free and porn in it. I never had any idea that it would result in pedophiles clicking through to my page. Curiosity drove me to do a Yahoo search for those exact strings and I found the reason why.

When I ran a search for the first string (free sixteen porn picture), I was indeed near the top of the list. What is worse is that the quote about the first fifteen words of the header, then quote a little snippet from somewhere on the page that contained one of the search terms. The actual part from my page that was quoted said, “I know that it really did sound fresh, but I was also about sixteen, and I didn’t really know anything about anything …”. Now I was talking about a writer at that point, yet I could see how that particular line could be taken out of context. So Mr. (or Ms.) pedophile was thinking that it was a child getting fresh with someone…I can accept that, a simple misunderstanding.

The second search string really has me baffled. I did searches on Yahoo and Google for ‘watch free little girl porn’, and my site does indeed come up. Unfortunately, for porn seekers, the ‘watch’ in question is a wristwatch. It is even stated in the little description of the site that Mr. (or Ms.) pedophile clicked through to get to my page. What I wonder is, did they really think that ‘Armitron’ and ‘Rolex’ were code words for child porn? I don’t know, I think that said person was just clicking through every link looking for a picture of a naked child, and man that is sick.

I have been trying to get my father’s side of the family to let me put a directory, on this site, that has all of the photos and history we can find about our ancestors. I thought that it would be a great way to get names and photos out to try to find some other branches of the family tree. One of my Aunts had misgivings about posting that on the internet, and I wondered why. Now I know. The last thing that you ever want to think about is the possibility that there is some sicko, somewhere, looking at an old, black and white photo of your mother bathing you in the sink…And jerking off…That is just wrong.

• In sports news, what the hell is going on in baseball?

I grew up in Oregon, and as such we didn’t have a local baseball team to root for. What we did have was a WGN station on our local cable service. I became a Cubs fan, since that was what we had. When I moved to Arizona, and shortly after the Diamondbacks became a franchise, I rooted for them as well. The Diamondbacks did win a world series in my lifetime, while I still somehow doubt that the Cubs ever will. Last year it was a possibility that the Cubs and the Red Sox could have met in the World Series, but no one ever really thought that was going to happen since Boston has the curse of the Bambino and Chicago has the curse of the goat (sorry for the sparse info link there, gotta get back to the game).

Unless the Red Sox find a way to fuck up a seven run lead in the seventh inning, they will be the first baseball team to ever come back from being down 3-0 and win the series. Of course the Yankees and Redsox are only playing the ALCS and the winner must go on to play the winner of the NLCS series, but I would venture to say that whoever wins this game will win it all (which is not much of a venture statistically).

This all meshes nicely with my theory that the Cubs are going to be the first professional sports team to go exactly a century between championships. Look for them to be on the first platform in 2007, go Cubbies! This talk is a bit premature, as the game is still on. Probably in the seventh inning stretch judging by the sounds of it. Still, happy thoughts.

The problem with baseball, as everyone except pretty die-hard Yankee fans know, is that there is absolutely no equality in the game. Every other major sport puts limitations on how much you can spend to make the ‘ultimate team’. The Lakers (in the NBA) have done a great job of winning within those constraints, as did the previous San Francisco and Dallas dynasties (in the NFL) of years past. I don’t follow hockey closely enough to make a reference there, but it seems that the teams are basically pretty evenly matched (within reason).

The Yankee’s are able to buy every ‘free-agent’, every year, and give them more money than anyone else ever could. I do understand that the Yankees also make the most money, but come on. The Yankees will regularly have half of the top 10 highest players on their team, while the worst teams will have a couple of decent players, but no one that really stands out. It is not because the shitty teams don’t want to win, not that they don’t want to be competitive, it is just that the Yankees have more money. Speaking of that, You have to have a bit of respect for Curt Schilling who chose to go to the Red Sox to try to dethrone the Yankees in the American League, after having beat the Yankees in the World Series with the Diamondbacks. That is a hatred/desire to dethrone a team that I have yet to see in any athlete.

Seriously, though, I am going to go watch the end of this game…I think we may be seeing history here…

Strange dream; Team America: World Police; The System Has Failed

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I took a few days off around the website in case you haven’t noticed. Again the problem was just an utter lack of anything to say, I won’t let that little fact stop me today!

If anyone out there is into dream analysis, here’s one for you. In this dream I am standing in front of a shopping center in the town where I grew up. There is an ambulance parked nearby. Next to me (in the same general area anyway) are two paramedics and a young kid that I don’t recognize. After a few moments a black Chevelle with blacked out windows comes around the corner, the passenger window comes down, a rifle comes out and fires three shots, about a half a second apart. The Chevelle speeds away.

The three shots seem to have hit their intended targets. The two paramedics are both very obviously dead; each having been hit in the head and missing a great deal of the skull. The kid that I don’t recognize is hit also, but in the chest. He is breathing but barely. I can’t be certain what the bullet actually hit, but in my best estimation it looks like it probably missed his heart, I think he had a collapsed lung though, as he was coughing up blood.

My shouts for help go unanswered, the shopping center is deserted. In fact I don’t think there is a single car in the lot with the exception of the ambulance. I remove the stretcher from the back of the ambulance and put the kid onto it. I manage to get the stretcher into the back of the ambulance but I can not figure out how to secure the kid to the stretcher, or how to keep the stretcher from rolling/sliding. After a minute or so of trying to figure it out I decide it is better to bang him up a bit on the way to the hospital than to let him die while I am fucking with the straps.

I have never seen the driver’s seat of an ambulance but in my dream there are so many switches that it puts me in mind of a jet. All I want to do is start it and go, which I figure out quickly enough. The second I am on the road in front of the shopping center though there are cars backed up going both ways with no way to get around them. I start messing with the switches hoping to find the siren or the lights, and eventually find the one for the lights, yet the cars don’t seem to see them, as they don’t make way for me to pass. I do eventually find the siren (bear with me I know this is weird), it is a hand crank on passenger side of the cabin. In order to use the siren I have to put the ambulance in park, move to the passenger seat and crank it. I do this and the cars immediately all make their way to the side of the road, but by the time I am back in the driver’s seat the noise has faded and the cars are all back in front of me.

Through experimentation I am able to figure out that if I give the thing a good crank, five revolutions or so, I am able to get back to the driver’s seat and make it a couple of car lengths before I am boxed in again. A couple of dozen times of doing that and I make it to a cross street that I take towards the hospital (in my dream the location of the hospital is actually the location of the court, but that is another story). The four streets that surround the hospital are all one way, I was of course on the wrong street and had to make my way all the way around the thing to reach the entrance. When I come to a stop at the emergency entrance I crank the siren once more and a bunch of people rush out of the hospital. When I open the back of the ambulance to get the kid out, he is just sitting there on the stretcher with no sign of an injury at all. As I stare around confused, looking back and forth between the kid and the doctors, the black Chevelle pulls up behind the ambulance. I duck to the ground instinctively, but when the doors open the two paramedics from the shopping center get out. Suddenly a police car appears, I am in handcuffs, the hospital (which is in the location of the courthouse in the actual town layout) has turned into the police station and I am in a room being questioned about stealing the ambulance when the dream ends.

So what does that all mean?

•With the Megadeth concert being only two weeks away, I finally decided I had better go ahead and buy the new cd. The System Has Failed is the latest release, which I have just listened to twice. I have a couple of comments about it. First, they sure did go back to their roots as far as speed and power. I am not sure if it could hold a candle to ‘Rust in Piece’, but it is certainly on par with ‘Countdown to Extinction’. The second thing of note is that a lot of the lyrics are pretty sub par for Megadeth. The songs make sense (as much as a song can) but they just don’t seem to be of the same caliber as most of the older stuff. I suppose one can only write about so many great poems beforing running out of brilliant stories to tell.

One other thing that I took away from listening to it, I don’t think that Dave Mustaine thinks much of George W. Bush, or the situation in Iraq. That much is never actually said, but it is kind of implied. Even the albums cover art depicts someone, who looks an awful lot like dubya, paying off Vic the judge. The first song on the album, ‘Blackmail the Universe’, starts with air force one getting shot down and the president being detained by terrorists. One of the quotes in the song is, “I red, white and blew it.” That is a great line…

• The wife and I went out to take in a movie today. It was the first movie that I have seen on opening weekend since the original theatrical release of E.T. So what movie was so compelling as to make me see it on opening weekend, a movie so powerful to break a 22 year run of never seeing a movie on opening weekend? Well Team America: World Police, of course.

This is one of those movies that is certainly not for everyone. If you like it, you really like it, if you don’t like it, you actively hate it. A quick look at the reviews on RottenTomatoes will certainly evidence that. I am of the camp that really, really liked the movie. If you have yet to see it, I have only this to ask, “Jesus titty-fucking Christ!”, why not?

Now I am going to talk a little bit about the movie, not a review, more a list of things that I did/didn’t like about it. That means that there will be some spoilers. Of course this movie is pretty hard to spoil, I could likely read the entire script to you verbatim and you would still be blown away by it. That all being said, away I go.

First off, the movie took me completely by surprise. I had seen only one trailer for it ever. I mean there was only one t.v. commercial that I ever saw advertising the film, and that was a couple of months ago. All that I was able to gather from that was that it was done with marionettes, and that the minds that created ‘South Park’ were behind it. That was not a lot to go on. That was all that I knew about the movie when my butt hit the seat at the theatre (where we arrived a half an hour in advance, only to find that even at show start there were only about 20 people there).

To start with a few very specific examples of what I didn’t like about the movie. 1) There is a puking scene that goes on WAY longer than it needs to. The guy threw up, we get it, move on. It was not all that funny to just watch a marionette spit out pea soup for a minute and a half. 2) There is a quite unnecessary little song that the evil mastermind (Kim Jong Il?) sings, should have been on the cutting room floor, and likely would have been were it not for the childish humor in stereotyping the speech of all Asians by making all the ‘L’s sound like ‘R’s. The movie would have been better off without it. 3) There is just a lot of profanity for the sake of profanity. I know that they are Lampooning other movies and the such, but no one really ever says Fuck that often…Not even me and I am a potty-mouth. 4) The ‘running joke’ about the main character sucking ‘Spotswoods’ dick had lost most of its steam by the time that it actually happened. While I did find it a bit humorous, I don’t think it was actually necessary. I am sure that there are a few issues that I am overlooking, but I want to get on to the good stuff, so I will leave that all for a later date.

What I liked about the movie, now that is a tough one. I would probably have to list at least half of the movie to get all of that across. I will try to just list a few extreme laugh out loud (xlol) moments.

Xlol moment 1: This one is covering two scenes, the destruction in both Paris and Cairo. I was laughing so hard because that is just the way the rest of the world seems to look at the U.S.A., Destroying every precious, ageless monument, yet declaring victory after leaving the country in ruin.

Xlol moment 2: The twangy, country-western style song that Trey is singing while the main character makes up his mind about going to fight for his freedom. The song ends with something close to “Freedom isn’t free, it costs a buck-o-five”. I may have been the only one in the theatre laughing, but that one really tickled me. Take that all you country-western artsists that write songs about freedom, yet would never ‘slip on your boots’ to fight for it!

Xlol moment 3: The first time the team started to roll out of Mt. Rushmore, when they first started to sing “America, America” in a pretty dignified tone, then followed that with the hammering, “America, Fuck Yeah!” on our way to save the mother-fucking world, Fuck Yeah! Or however it actually goes, I damn near pissed myself with laughter. I think that was mostly because it reminded me a lot of the song from the old G.I. Joe cartoon themesong at least I thought it did right until I just listened to the g.i.joe theme again, not even close. Still, that was really, really funny when they broke that song out.

Xlol moment 4: There were a lot of times during this film that I laughed out loud, that is quite unusual for me as I try to never be noticed, ever. After the first half hour or so of the movie I was able to contain my laughter for the most part, and as such the fourth xlol moment was in the credits. There are the two separate sets of credits, the ‘team america’ credits (which appear to be in steel with rivets) and after that the actual, normal credits roll. During the first credits, while the ‘America, Fuck yeah!’ song is playing, they start throwing out random terms. Like, “the internet, Fuck Yeah!”. There are a lot of them that I didn’t actually hear, but one of the last ones was, “Slavery, Fuck Yeah!”. I nearly split my gut with laughter, while I guess my wife didn’t hear it at all.

Jesus titty-fucking Christ, that is the funniest movie of all time. Well the funniest movie in this century. Then again, this century is only four years old…The funniest movie counting the last two centuries then…But, I guess they didn’t have movies before then, so I guess it really must be the funniest movie of all time.

As far as the fact that the characters are just marionettes, it really only comes up when they really want you to see it. The first ‘fight scene’ illustrates that, but I am pretty sure that it is done on purpose. In the latter part of the movie, the marionettes do some hand to hand fighting that looks, at the very least, as realistic as most of the crap that Hollywood has to offer. Also, and unlike Hollywood prodcutions, with one exception, when the people are dead, they are dead. Having no head, splitting your torso in half, these things will keep you down for a while. No one in this movie gets slapped and then ignored for the duration.

I guess I better stop now, if I don’t I will likely go on forever. Just go watch the damn movie!

Commercials; Government; Writing

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Today’s post brings good and bad news. The good news is that I don’t have any desire to talk about John Saul, or books at all for that matter, today. The bad news is that I did yesterday, and while I completely forgot to post it, I am just gonna throw it on the bottom of this page since I have all but run out of issues to tackle.

Let that be a lesson to all of you who are thinking about starting your own website, especially if you are palanning to try to put up news with your own opinion or snark, don’t start in an election year! For the first six or eight months that I was doing this site I could easily find some news item to go off about, yet now it is all politics. Actually it really isn’t so much about politics as it is about which candidate says what about the other, and which one made the most weird faces in the last debate. Is that what politics has come to?

I was watching some show on TVLand the other day, possibly MacGyver, and they showed an old commercial (That is one of the things that TvLand is famous for, they air old commercials for lots of products, I can remember seeing a Parkay margarine commercial from the ’70s and a Shake-n-Bake commercial from around the same era. They are really pretty nostalgic to look back at.), when an old, black and white commercial came on the screen. The only thing in the entire commercial was a picture of rain falling on a random street, with a voice-over saying something like, “It may rain this November Eleventh. If it rains, get wet. It is that important.” (again that is not actually a quote but the best I can recall and I can’t find that commercial anywhere on their website, or anywhere else on the internet for that matter). The screen then flashed up a ‘Vote for ___’ logo. I don’t remember the exact candidate, nor do I know the year the commercial was released, so it is difficult for me to try to find the damn thing. At any rate, I think you will see the point here. Political advertising used to be about spreading the name of the political candidate, now it seems to be about conveying the worst ‘half-truths’ about the opponent.

I am certainly not a political pundit, but I do know a bit or two about us grunts that actually work for a living. Not a damn one of ‘us grunts’ really care what the presidential candidates were doing in the early ’70s. ‘Us grunts’ would like to see the war in Iraq ended with the fewest possible casualties on all sides, but that is not all that we think about. ‘Us grunts’ are also a bit concerned about a couple of policies. You see, most of ‘us grunts’ weren’t born horribly rich (George W.), most of ‘us grunts’ didn’t marry horribly rich (John Kerry), most of ‘us grunts’ don’t give a damn about taxes for the richest 1% of the population, hell most of ‘us grunts’ don’t give a damn about taxes on the top 20% of the population. ‘Us grunts’ are looking for a bit of substance in the presidential claims about policies that actually involve ‘us grunts’.

Health Care is a really big ‘for instance’. ‘Us grunts’ don’t really have a lot of options; Making too much money to get free health care, yet not making quite enough money to actually afford the care that we do have. Despite that, laws are being passed to keep us from trying to obtain medicine at lower prices, ‘us grunts’ don’t care for that at all.

Another thing that ‘us grunts’ just can’t seem to understand is why buying a huge, gas-guzzling SUV can get you a tax break. It seems like the price of gas has been going up awfully fast lately, ‘us grunts’ are looking for the most fuel effecient automobile that our meager income can buy. Of course ‘us grunts’ might be able to afford those huge, gas-guzzling SUV’s were it not for the fact that minimum wage is at its lowest point in thirty years (adjusted for inflation), yet I doubt that ‘us grunts’ would buy them anyway… Why waste a precious resource that is already nearly drained?

I would really, really like to care about which candidate has better hair, which candidate did what in the ’70s, which candidate’s daughters have been arrested on the most drug charges, but I just can’t. There is more at stake here than just a figure-head for our country. There are lobbyists, albeit on both sides of the coin, that are willing to give millions or billions of dollars to whoever comes out of this thing as the leader. I have had almost four years to watch what one of them did with that power, now I would like to see anyone else in his position, to see what that power might bring. Damn me for being partisan.

PostScript: I know that the term ‘us grunts’ is not grammatically correct, but nothing else I ever write is either. I used the term ‘us grunts’ only because it starts with two letters that are important to me.

First off, and much to the great relief of everyone here I’m sure, I am not written off of the christmas card list of the friend who sent me the John Saul novel that I have been bitching about so much. In fact, said friend also has his own copy of the novel and was not able to make it through the first few chapters before he realized that he had basically read it in other Saul books. That means, at the very least, that anyone who reads and is also capable of retaining knowledge will know that Saul just keeps recycling the same story. The only explanation for this (why people still buy the books I mean) is that I think a lot of the readers are adolescent and just looking for a quick read with an easy to follow story.

My mother also read this book, my copy in fact, while my wife and I were on vacation, and she thought that it was pretty good, yet, it also seemed oddly familiar. I am now beginning to think that the way Saul is able to have continued success (31 novels worth) is that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about anything he has written. You certainly can’t walk away from the book with a fear of any one person or thing, within a couple of days you wouldn’t be able to name any of the main characters even if threatened with torture. I guess I should just call his work ‘disposable fiction’. Then again, all of the Saul that I personally own is in hardcover, and while I never paid cover price for any of it it is still far too expensive to simply throw away, yet that is what your mind tries to do with it.

If anyone other than John Saul were to send a John Saul novel to a publisher in the hopes of getting it printed they would likely be laughed right out the door. Mind you, that could be said for a lot of authors today. In fact if you start looking at the novels that are called ‘classic’, there are very few authors that have more than one in that category.

Interesting thought, that. Perhaps all of the authors that we consider great today only ever had one good novel, while the rest was mindless dribble, or at least very derivitive of their initial work. That is an unimaginable idea however, since most of the great authors of the past never made a single cent off of their work. I suppose that it would be really great to know that your story has outlasted you, but they never knew; It takes a century or so to see if the story can transcend to that status.

I seem to remember that Edgar Allan Poe (take this test, its fun) died penniless, in a gutter, none of his work ever made him a penny. Yet, some of Poe’s stories are required reading a hundred and fifty years later. On that same note, I somehow doubt that any John Saul will be ‘required reading’ in the year 2154, I could be wrong. (if you happen to be in the year 2154, and are reading this, and John Saul is required reading, please shoot me an email so that I will know that I was in error.)

When I was in my teens, even into my early twenties, I thought that my writing was going to change the world. Of course I have since sobered to the reality that I am likely never going to get a single word put to print before I die. I am not capable of writing with correct grammar, nor do my ideas do more than stem off of the fiction that I have read. The few, truly original, ideas that I have had work well in my head but do not seem to do well when put to paper (computer screen in this case). I do enjoy writing, my friends and family enjoy reading what I have written, yet I don’t seem to have that ‘it’ that is going to make me rise above every other guy in the world who tries to write anything. My ‘fan base’ could be counted on one hand, my grammar is horrible, at this point I am just hoping that someone within the family tries to get the hundreds of short stories in my file cabinet put onto paper someday. The one thing that I do have is really screwed up dreams, that is where the short stories come from. I never have a dream long enough to work itself into a novel though, and that means that what I write is just as forgettable as every other book you have read in the last few years.

As if that is not enough, I just went to the bathroom to find out that I have been wearing my underwear inside-out all day! Life Sucks!

John Saul

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I awoke this morning at about 6:30, which is far earlier than I really wanted to get up on my one day off, but was not able to get back to sleep. We recently put up a thick curtain over the south-facing window in the bedroom, which a street light was shining through to keep us awake, but have only a blind over the west facing window. Long story short it was bright as noontime in the bedroom by then, I find it difficult to sleep when it is light out. Thus I am groggy and feel like crap in general. I did manage to finish the book that I was reading, however I am not sure if it is a contributing factor in my current mood.

John Saul’s Black Creek Crossing was the book that I finished reading this morning. For me to criticize an author’s writing is much like being the one legged man in an ass kicking contest, but I am not going to let that stop me this time. There will be some spoilers in this, keep that in mind if you ever plan to read it.

I have read a lot of Saul’s work, mostly in my late teens/early twenties, and one thing that I can say for them is that they read pretty well. The flow is usually pretty good, due in part to the fact that you know what is going to happen long before it ever does. His descriptions of places and people work pretty well also; quick enough to not bore you but complete enough that you can recognize places or characters by name. The prose itself is straigt forward and not cluttered with a lot big words for the sole purpose of showing off his vocabulary. With the exception of the overly dramatic prologue, and other such examples littered throughout the book, there is not a lot to complain about in the writing. Saul certainly isn’t Dickens, but he can get the story across in a pretty fluid way, in my opinion anyway.

Now just to note a few of the major problems with the book. The story about the teenager being picked on and getting revenge on his/her tormentors is certainly in at least half of all of Saul’s books. The “horrible things happened in the house in the past, and they happen to the new family that moves in also” premise has been done to death, by Saul. Most all of his books start with a family moving into a house, then something within the house or the community making the new occupants relive the old horror. The family that moves at the beginning of this book at least includes both a mother and a father, often in his books it is just the mother and a single child. Of course the father in this story is an abusive, incestuous alcoholic, so not much of a stretch to not consider him a father.

I am not going to go into any more of the similarities between this book and others that he has written, if you have read any of his other work you already know, if you haven’t it would take only the first chapter of any of his work to see it. He writes what sells, more power to him.

one of the issues that I really had with the book was with the demeanor the main character (Angel)’s parents. The father (Marty) was being portrayed as a very abusive and controlling man. There were at least a couple of occasion where you were led to believe that he was being physically abusive to his wife, albeit offscreen. This physical abuse, as well as most of the verbal abuse, was happening while he was drunk, which was most of the time. In one scene he actually raised a beer bottle with the intent to hit his wife with it. Yet, for some reason, there are several times when the wife (Myra) yells at him and he cowers like a little puppy. That is not the behavior of any of the abusive alcoholics I have ever known, it also made me certain that the father was no threat for the duration of the book (which was bad since he was the only variable I hadn’t explained within the first twenty-five pages).

Now, just to nit-pick. The novel is 358 pages long, that is including the prologue and epilogue. There are 47 chapters, that means that the average chapter (including the prologe and epilogue) is just about seven pages long. Many of the chapters are less than four pages long, and one would have been less than one page were it not for the white space for the chapter heading and the blank space at the end. Throwing all copyright and fair use laws to the wind, I will quote chapter 46 for you right here:

SETH BAKER CAME AROUND THE BEND IN THE ROAD and saw the house that stood at Black Creek Crossing looming against the night sky. Even though there were lights on, the house had a look of terrible foreboding about it, and as he made his way across the lawn, part of him wanted to turn away and go somewhere else.
But there was nowhere else to go.

Not after what had happened in his house.

As he approached the front door, the awful sense of foreboding grew stronger, and he paused at the door, which was standing wide open, and listened.

A silence seemed to emanate from the house, a silence that felt as if it was about to swallow him up. Once again he wanted nothing more than to turn away, to leave whatever was inside the house undiscovered, and again he knew he could not. Steeling himself, he stepped over the threshold into the living room.

The television was still on, but somehow even its droning didn’t dispel the strange sense of silence that imbued the house.

Knowing he didn’t want to see whatever it was that lay beyond the living room, but knowing there was no alternative, he moved deeper into the house.

He found Angel at the bottom of the stairs, staring at the bodies of her parents, who were lying on the floor-her father on top of her mother-in a pool of their own blood. Myra Sullivan’s eyes were open, and as he looked down at her, Seth had the uneasy feeling that she was looking back at him. Turning away, he looked at Angel. “It happened at my house too,” he said softly.

Angel gazed at him, and for a second Seth wasn’t sure she even saw him. A moment later, though, she spoke, her voice hollow:

“I know what we have to do.”

Seth said nothing and when she led him out of the house, he silently followed.

They crossed the lawn to the road, and instead of turning right, toward the trail that would lead them to the cabin hidden in the cliff, Angel turned left.

Once again, Seth followed….

That is punctuated exactly as it is in the book. I am not very good at sight typing though, so I may have a misspelled word in it. The strange capitalization at the beginning is also just like it was in the book. For some reason the first line of text in every chapter was all in caps. Why? I got no idea. This was the shortest chapter in the book, but not by much. There were several chapters that were just a bit longer than this one, and many of them did basically the same as this one; it doesn’t tell you anything at all. This particular passage isn’t really necessary in the book at all, why emphasize it by calling it a chapter?

The little passage here does illustrate the overly dramatic thing I was talking about though. The fact that he separates a couple of lines into their own paragraphs, most notably “But there was nowhere else to go.” and “Not after what had happened in his house.”

It kind of puts me in mind of the writing I did while I was in my teens, of course the lines set that way gave me goosebumps when I read them back to myself, in reality they don’t seem to have that effect at all, or perhaps they do but only for a much younger reader.

To end this before (hopefully) the friend who bought the book for me and got it autographed takes me off of his christmas list, I will just say that it is a John Saul novel. If you have never read anything by Saul, Black Creek Crossing is a pretty good example of his writing. It has been a long time since I have read the other books that he wrote, and they honestly blend together in your mind since they are all so similar, but I do believe that you should read at least one of his novels. Saul doesn’t seem to posess the unlimited imagination of someone like Stephen King, but the one story that he has been telling (over and over again) over the course of his career is worth a look.

Were I to pick one of Saul’s novels to recommend, this one probably wouldn’t be it. If pressed I would probably recommend Black Lightning even though the reader reviews just shred it. Black Lightning is a serial killer story though, and I think a lot of the reviewers were serial killer buffs. At any rate, Black Lightning was one of only a couple of Saul’s works that I didn’t know the ending of within the first twenty-five pages, in fact I recall still being guessing until near the end.

• Nothing else of note to speak of today. Tune in next time to see if I am indeed removed from my friend’s christmas card list.

Song Remakes

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I had absolutely no intention of putting anything up here today. Nothing on my mind, just thought I would go ahead and take care of a couple of Pogo.com challenges. Not a lot on my plate for bitching tonight, or so I thought.

I have previously bitched (at some length) about the fact that I really hate it when bands remake (cover) songs, yet I never really thought that I would get as angry about it as I am right now.

Some of the songs that get remade later, ‘Smokin in the Boy’s Room’ for instance, stayed true to the song, while beefing it up a bit for the ears of the people who would listen to it a couple of decades later. Sure, Motley Crue took a few liberties and changed little things about the song, but the song remained the same, though the names had changed. That is the same thing that has happened with every fifties classic that I can even think of. It is almost like there are only four actual songs (I mean only four songs that have ever existed, and everyone is ripping them off) and everyone tries to spin them in their own way…

I truly believe that most of the remakes are coming from a band trying to pay homage to their roots; It is what they grew up on, it is what they played while they were alone in the garage, it is a kind of a ‘thank you’ to whatever band made the song that made them, in turn, go ahead and form a band. If that is the way that it happens/happened, they should really try to pay a bit of respect to the source material itself. I will mention Metallica’a cover of the old song ‘turn the page’, Metallica nailed that one right on the head (even though I don’t really care for what metallica has become), and brought an old song back to life. There are times when a remake can introduce new fans to old music, but, not only are they few and far between, they also require a bit of talent. Unfortunately, I seem to be more talented (at the guitar anyway) than about 80% of the hacks (I mean bands) that do their best to totally destroy the song that they are trying to ‘cover’.

I suppose that I am being a little bit more bitter than usual (at least I hope I am being more bitter than usual) because of the remake/cover of just one song. The band Nonpoint tried to do the old Phil Collins classic; “in the air tonight”, and they tried to make it a power-chord-laden, Old Metallica song. The thing is that the song was not written that way. The silence that follows all of the verses was done intentionally to set the mood. The original song is powerful for its silence, for its lyrics, for the fact that you don’t want to listen to it without someone next to you, or at least someone else in the house. The song is very dark, very morose, and impossible to listen to without someone holding you… Unless, of course, you have listened to that horrible cover of the song. Trying to turn this particular song into some sort of a speedy, punk-rock type of song is just so, so wrong. The song was what it was, and it is still played on classic radio stations all over the country. If you really want to try to make a name for yourself, why not try to remake some old ‘Beatles’ or ‘Zepplin’ songs?

John Saul; Watches

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Well, Yesterday’s post actually resulted in two emails. While I would like to think that it was all a result of myself writing better, or perhaps more controversial, things, that is certainly not the case. Both of the emails were asking me the same question: If you don’t really like John Saul, why have you read so many of his novels?

I expected this question to come from Flux at the BlackChampagne website when I originally wrote the message to him. When he didn’t actually ask the question, I kind of gave up on looking for an excuse to give him. Then, when two people emailed the question that Flux never asked, I was forced to start to try to come up with a reason why. I have found that reason, basically put, I don’t know.

The year was roughly 1991, I was riding with my oldest brother from Oregon to Arizona. Speed limits at the time still being in the 55mph range on much of the road, while being 65mph on others, it was taking us a while to get there. The only tape that we had in the car, at least the only one that I would agree to listen to, was Europe: The Final Countdown. That was what we listened to for about 20 hours of driving time and it really, really, really got old.

My mother, while we were at her home in Arizona, offered us a book-on-tape version of Saul’s first novel “Suffer the Children”. Being that myself and my brother would rather die than to listen to that godawful ‘Europe’ music again, we took it and plugged it in as we were leaving Phoenix. The strange thing is that I am not able to find anywhere on the official John Saul website that there was ever a ‘book on tape’ version of that story…ever… I know that this was the story that I listened to, and I know that it really did sound fresh, but I was also about sixteen, and I didn’t really know anything about anything. Of course that knowledge (the knowledge that you never knew anything in your teens) really only starts to come to you much, much later.

Probably about four years after the previous incident, I realized that I actually wanted to read the works of Saul. It was certainly not an ‘epiphany’, or anything of that sort. I just happened to check out a book at the local library, by Saul, and read it. The book-on-tape versions of the books are either far better, or I have really low standards. At the time I was living with a dear friend, and we would kind of juggle the books to make sure that we were both able to read them before they had to go back to the library. It was during that period that I read every novel that Saul had ever written.

There are certain requisites one must reach before becoming a ‘good author’. Saul, in my opinion, did not meet a single one of those requisites. What Saul did do was keep me reading his books.

So, here we are, many years later. I have read every book that Saul had written, prior to the “blackstone chronicles”, of course I read that all as well. The thing is that some combination of age/experience in life tells you what is going to happen long before the question ever comes up. I, now, have an autographed copy of Saul’s latest novel. I will read it, every page. Not just for the story, but for the fact that a very dear friend bought it for me.

The other question, via email, was regarding the dual watch photos that I placed in yesterday’s update. The question was; “are you sure about the prices you attribute to each watch?”.

The answer is pretty simple, “NO”.

I have never bought a Rolex, ever, and I don’t plan to…

This person’s issue was with my saying that the ‘armitron’ was under a hundred dollars, while the Rolex was over a thousand… Well, it turns out that I chose the wrong ROLEX to pick on. The Armitron watch in the photo is still under a hundred dollars, the ROLEX watch is (prior to my previous beliefs) only about 800. Thank you for clearing that up. So that, the Rolex, watch will keep time only 8 times better than the three-dollar watch that you can get at the local 7-11. To follow that up, your average cheap-ass-watch can keep time, being off by only thousandths of a second, for years. The more expensive watches have to be repaired by ‘jewelers’, the name itself cost money.

Buy the cheap watch and there will be no need to negotiate later,.

Rolex Vs. Armitron; John Saul Vs. Stephen King

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First off, I just want to go ahead an mention that I only waited until the fourth day of the month to get around to changing the date on my watch. That might be a new record for me. My watch is very often a day off just because I am too lazy to change it. Not that I am necessarily too lazy to take the fraction of a second to actually change the date, more that my watch has a certain issue when I try to do it (or I have an issue with the watch, or both).

The thing about watches is that if you happen to be a man, and not a metrosexual type man, you only really need one. That being the case, you want to have one that is quite durable, yet that looks respectable enough to wear in semi-formal wear; A plastic digital watch doesn’t look very good when you are trying to dress nice. This leads to you (hopefully) having a watch that is much like mine (which is an Armitron. Of course the website does not let you actually browse through the designs, except by category with a representative picture of each, which makes that link all but useless.), for those on a budget, or a much more expensive one that is just as utilitarian (of course the link to Rolex is every bit as useless as it does the same “Flash Navigation” crap that makes it impossible to link to anything within the site.).

For your consideration, I offer the following two photos. I apologize for not being able to get them to the same size, but the Rolex got too blurry when I sized it down, as did the Armitron when I tried to size it up.

Now, I know for a fact that the Armitron is stainless steel, not just the back of it, but the band and everything else as well. I know that because it has been on my left wrist every single day for about three years. The Rolex appears to be damn near identical to the Armitron, so I am going to go ahead and assume that it is also made of stainless steel.

The stainless stell allows me to dip my hands into heavily bleached water without fear of damaging it, makes it quite easy to clean, and also gives it a simple silver and black look that you honestly could not get with your average Swatch. The fact that blood rinses neatly off of it is something that I really adore, but that may be just for people in my chosen profession.

I can wash the blood of of the watch once the day is over (much like washing your hands) and wear the same watch out to dinner in semi-formal wear. In fact, I am pretty sure that I was actually wearing this watch while I was at my Wedding. As for the fact that the Armitron watch in the photo is under a hundred dollars, while the rolex in the photo is over a thousand, I got nothing. Some People (idiots) will simply pay more for the name. I am glad that I am not one of them.

I have gone way, way off topic here, I will try to get it back into focus now. I don’t like to change the date on the watch because (on any watch that is a chronograph) you have to pull the winder (or what used to be a winder) out about half way to get to the part that changes the date alone. Nearly half of the times I try, I pull the damn thing out too far and end up messing the minute hand on the watch up. That is really not that big of a deal, but I do like to keep my watch as close as possible to three minutes ahead of actual time. I suppose that is yet another one of my weird obsessions, but it does pretty much gurantee that I am to work a minute or two early, and since I never leave work until at least five minutes after (as a precaution), I am guranteed to never arrive late or leave early.

• I sent an email to Flux over at BlackChampagne.com a couple of days ago. It was a pretty simple, short email, in which I just pretty much ripped on John Saul. Of course, as luck would have it, he went ahead and posted my email, then linked to my site. I am not opposed to that in any way, I mean you don’t really start typing on your own site if you aren’t looking to have people read it. Posting your thoughts in such a (potentially) public venue will make it so that a lot of people read it.

In case anyone out there actually reads both his site and my site, I want to make one point clear. I have read over 20 John Saul books, the most recent was the 6 book series called The Blackstone Chronicles (I do apologize for not linking to the amazon.com or other sellers of the books, but those reviews are pretty harsh…Albeit deservingly so). Most every book that Saul wrote I read before I had come out of my teen years. I read the “blackstone chronicles” only because I felt an obligation to read the rest of his work. I knew then, as I know now, that the ‘Blackstone Chronicles’ was a direct attempt to rip off the Green Mile serial series that Stephen King did.

I would likely not even be reading this latest Saul novel were it not for the fact that a friend took the time to buy a copy of the book (in hardcover) and got the author himself to autograph it, with my name in the message. It is not even formulaic crap, no, to call it formulaic would imply that he uses a formula. He doesn’t seem to use a formula at all, instead he just writes the same damn story, over and over again, changing names where necessary. But, that is why I actually quit reading Saul in the first place.

I don’t have it in me to bitch any more about this subject, but trust me, I stand behind my decision that Saul is not a real author.

Concerts

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The wife came through with the Megadeth Tickets I mentioned last time. We will be in the 16th row to the left of center stage. These tickets are not going to put us in quite the prime location that we got when we attened all of the concerts that she got tickets from at her work, but honestly being a bit away from center stage might just make it so that the high-frequency noises don’t hit me straight on and deafen me. Sixteen rows is also not that far back to be, I think that the little caged VIP area that we had at the other venue was just behind the 13th or 15th row, from that vantage point you can see (and certainly hear) everything perfectly.

This is, of course, all academic anyway. You can hear these type of concerts from a couple of blocks away (probably better on your ears that way also), and it is not like a band like Megadeth really has much of a stage show. The only reason that I can think of for going to see a concert is just for the energy of it. It may sound foolish, especially as I am now in my thirties, but you just can not mimic the energy of a live concert regardless of how loud your stereo happens to be.

One of the concerts that we saw, which really illustrates that fact was at the Cricket Pavilion (in the aforementioned VIP seating), with the bands Motorhead, Dio and Iron Maiden. While the concert was pretty lackluster until Iron Maiden hit the stage, after that it was pretty much chaos. There was one point during the concert where a guy jumped the rail from the upper level, charged into our little box (which was dead-center stage) and was trying to make it over the front rail to rush the stage. Security tackled him, knocked over our table and took him away. I am not entirely sure 1) Why they actually bother to put a table in these little boxes in the first place. 2) Why the security guy, one guards the entrance to each of the VIP boxes, didn’t catch him before he made it in. 3) Why they don’t stop selling you beer when you are as drunk as this guy was. What I am absolutely sure of is that there was an energy there, something that you felt, and while it might not make it through in your description of the event the next day, you still told everyone about it. It is certainly something that you really have to experience to understand.

Much on the same topic, you only have one life to live. Sure you could spend that life living inside a little box, eating healthy, excercising daily, not doing anything that is truly fun. When it comes down to it, though, do you really want to live forever? Go to the concerts, blow out your eardrums, you aren’t going to have a chance to do it again.

In yet more really loud, angry music talk, the local radio station 98KUPD, who were the first to offer tickets for the Megadeth show, have another show on the books as well. The radio station is billing it as the “Big Red Night of the Dead”, though that makes no sense, and neither of the artists are performing on the same night. The artist, the one that is not Megadeth, is playing the day before Megadeth at the same venue. There must be some sort of a bi-lateral partnership between the artist and the station though, as the station is being allowed to bill the show as such and is giving away cd’s all month to that end. If you are only going to see one show in your life, it should definitely be the that band.

The band in question is Marilyn Manson (the link is to tour dates). I really don’t like Marilyn Manson at all, yet I have to say that he is a great as a theatrical showman. I mentioned that in my May 23, 2004 post. I will just quote myself from that post to save myself from writing any more about it, and save you from reading it:

I was absolutely blown away by Marilyn Manson. I do not care for their music, but won’t turn it off if it is on the radio, it is just the kind of thing that I don’t actively hate, or like. His (their) theatrics really stole the show. To the point that I was a bit disappointed when I finally got to see Ozzy (for the first time in my life). Manson certainly took care to stage a show that would shock and entertain you for his full set. The rest of the bands, Ozzy included, just did their songs. I will give ozzy a bit of lee-way on this one, since he is no spring chicken, but the other bands, like Korn, couldn’t they have done something other than just play their songs?
Manson had choreographed marionettes (they were actually people behaving as such) that did things for his entire set. He had a little tiered stage kind of thing that they would climb. It is difficult to describe, but it was an experience. The other bands just played their songs. If you want to hear the song, you have the cd, the sound quality is going to be a lot better, just listen to the damn cd. Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, really sold me the experience. Even though I do not like Marilyn Manson, I would be more likely to buy tickets to his next concert than I would be to buy tickets for the next, say, Korn concert…Even though I like Korn a lot more than I like Manson.

That is why you have to buy a ticket and see the show. It is just that, a show, it is never going to be the same twice. While I can remember most of the songs that I have listened to repeatedly over the years, most of them don’t bring up images of a guy trying to stick a microphone into a marionette’s vagina. I doubt you will ever relate trying to stick a microphone into a marionette’s vagina to Marilyn Manson if you never watch the show. Hell that was also over a year ago so I am sure that the stage set has changed as much as the music has. Manson seems to be out to shock you, and it works. Much like a car wreck, you don’t really want to look, but at the same time you can’t look away. I wonder if P.T. Barnum might be a relative of Brian Hugh Warner (aka Marilyn Manson) I apologize for that link, but it was the best I could come up with.

That will be about all for today. I still don’t understand why I continue to defend people like Marilyn Manson and Howard Stern when I really don’t like them. I guess it all comes down to the belief that you are free to say/do what you want, and that liberty can not be bought or sold. I suppose that is why the politicians spend so much time and money trying to get into an office that really doesn’t pay all that well (in their eyes). This land is supposed to be about freedom, and if you are not free to let your children play in the streets then we need some gun laws. If you are not free to speak your mind in opposition of the idiot in office, then we need freedom of speech (without repercussion). If the press won’t talk about the idiocy of the actions of the current administration, then we need to do it ourselves and get rid of the riff-raff. A democracy is not run by one idiot with more money than brains, it is run by the power of the people…Now if the people would just vote…

Christmas lights; John Kerry, Concert tickets

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Yes, as the date clearly states, we are now officially in October. All site-related musings aside, time still seems to be moving at rather a rapid pace. The decorative Christmas lights that I put up on the house last year, and have been thinking of taking down every weekend, now seem to be less of a nuisance, as it now seems that I am just horribly well prepared, as opposed to horribly lazy, as they seemed just yesterday. The local radio stations are already talking about ‘shopping days before Christmas’, completely disreagarding the fact that it is still so unbearably hot that no one really ever leaves the house, unless forced. Of course that is sort of a trade off that one must make to live where I do; We have unusually warm winters, extremely hot summers, and the other two seasons seem to last about three days each. That is not an exaggeration either, last year there was one day that we were running the cooler (in the store) and the next morning it was the heater. So I am going to go ahead and blame the rapid passage of time on having only two seasons, regardless of the fact that winter goes about two months, while summer lasts the other ten.

Attempting to use the weather where you live as an excuse (like I just did) is a pretty poor argument. Everyone, everywhere, has different atmospheric conditions that they have to tolerate. While I really wish I would have made it to take care of the weeds in front of the house (and I mean once and for all, as opposed to using a weedeater every third weekend), at least I have the house, with the weeds in front of it, to bitch about. Practically half of the state of Florida is in ruins, and I am bitching about it being to hot to shoot a bit of RoundUp on them. I suppose that is why there are benfits and drawbacks to living in any environment. And those weeds had better watch out, I may just get off my lazy duff and take care of them next year!

• Now that the small talk about the weather is out of the way… I want to mention briefly that I may have completely underestimated John Kerry’s performance in the first presidential debate. All of the surveys that have been released so far show Kerry winning the debate handily. I would agree with that point, Kerry did win the thing, hands down, in my eyes, but I was actually disappointed in both his, and President Bush’s, handling of the questions. The entire debate seemed to be more of a press conference, each man responded to the question that they were given, but neither were ever allowed to actually ask direct questions of the other.

I may not be much of a pundit on politics, but I do know how to debate. When you do not allow the persons in the debate to ask each other specific questions related to the subject, the persons are not debating -they are ranting- much as I am now. The key to finding out someone’s stance on anything is to not listen to the stuff that they have prepared and memorized over time, you need to see what they say when they don’t have any more notes. While neither candidiate came in with notes, they surely knew the points that they wanted to make, and had likely practiced saying them in front of a mirror. I am not even sure that what I witnessed last night could be called a debate, at least not in the literal term of the word. Bush did his best to spin everything into his (obviously pre-rehearsed) ‘War on Terror’ shtick, while Kerry did his best to have good hair and answer questions that were never asked.

Am I the only person in the whole of the ‘United States of America’ that wants to see what the actual people, the ones that we are actually going to vote for on the second of November, actually think? I sure hope that there are a lot more people like me, people who are disappointed by the fact that the debate was no more than a staged media circus. Even though I really want Kerry to win this election (or even Nader, hell anyone but Bush) I still think that the people are getting the short end of the stick when the debate is all but staged. What the American people need is factual information, not rhetoric. Yet, It seems that facts are no longer the driving factor when we are letting the ‘Leader of the free world’ send our children to war.

• Now to really make you all drool.

It is hard to have a bad day, even though mine was horrible, when you come home to find the following email:

If I bought tickets to this would you be able to work early on Saturday or get the day off so you could go??

The link is now dead, but the concert in question is Megadeth at the Dodge Theatre (in the Phoenix area). If you know anything about me at all, hell, even you know nothing about me at all, you should know that I kind of Worship Megadeth. There is no force in the world strong enough to keep me from making it to see a new Megadeth show, well, I guess death would qualify, but I don’t think that death is really a force. You should all now just bow before me and hope/pray that your wife will ever be so cool as to offer you treats to such an event. Of course not all wives are built the same, so when I am watching Megadeth, you might be trimming hedges…which I would do, that is I would do it if I actually had a hedge to trim.
Not all wives are built the same, choose accordingly.

Diablo; Electricity in my life

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I had intentions of getting this thing written pretty early this morning, had and idea that I was going to go on about for however long it would take, then got sidetracked.

It was that damn Diablo again.

I realized that it had been quite a while since I logged any of my characters on, so decided I better do a quick once-in with each of the reamaining ones to make sure that they were not also lost. Of course, as it happens, I found that I had a Paladin that was on his way through the frozen part of act 5, so I figured I would give it a go for a few minutes. What happened, as it always seems to, is that I found the next zone before I found the waypoint. I then retraced my steps and explored out the zone until I did eventually find the waypoint. Thing is, I had already cleared the zone and had a map to the entrance of the next area, if I didn’t continue I would have to clear the whole zone again…

That type of logic kept me going through the ‘Frigid Highlands’, ‘Arreat Plateau’ and even into the ‘Crystalline Passage’, where I again found the next zone before I found the waypoint. Of course it would have been selfish of me to leave ANYA freezing down there when I was so close to the ‘Frozen River’, so I made the decision to free her. The ‘Frozen River’ was actually pretty easy, mind you I am on normal with this character. The thing that made me spend the better part of my day on this damn game was the first drop I got when I entered the ‘Frozen River’. It was not an amazing item, just the Tearhaunch Greaves, but I lost 18 out of 24 characters from my three accounts some time ago, as a result I don’t have anything remotely good that you can use prior to level 45 or so, and those boots were simply made for the Pally I was playing, problem was I couldn’t even pick them up.

For better or worse, I collect the gems and runes that I find along the way with all of the characters that I start. The better is that I always have the right gem/rune for whatever I am trying to do (not counting the higher level runes, as long as I have a Nef and a Lum I am happy). The worse is that I end up with all of my new characters being jammed full of the damn things. Makes me wonder how I did this in D2C, before they doubled the stash size. Anyway, I spent almost an hour clearing the inventories of my three most recent players of their gems/runes, upgrading them as necessary, and saving them to a brand new mule (who will likely get deleted in eight hours or so, making this whole point moot). Then I looked at the clock and saw that I had been playing/muling for almost four hours, at that point I simply saved, exited, and started to type this.

I hate that weird Diablo time warp.

• Fun With Electricity!

As I was laying in bed last night, unable to sleep after having a horrible day, my mind started wandering to weird events in my life that involved electricity. Well, to be fair, the events didn’t always need to involve electricity, but they always did. The results of such were usually not good, and as they streamed through my mind I thought it might make a good anecdotal thing to slap up here. Of course I don’t really know what my adoring fans want, since I never get emails to the positive or negative, so you will take it and you will like it. Or you could choose a different destination, but come on, other than my site, how many more sites are there on the internet?

I didn’t discover the mysterious power of electricity until I was seven or eight. I knew that flipping a switch was not what was making the light come out of the light overhead, but I had no idea what could be causing that to happen. I spent my youngest years, even until I was in the second or third grade, just wondering how it all worked -yet, not wondering enough to read a book on it. And, honestly, if I read a book that explained how the power was carried through little wires, even today, I would think it was a load of crap.

After my first year of school (first grade, as none of the children in my family went to pre-school or kindergarten) , the school that I attended, “Riverside Elementary”, was closed. I am not entirely sure why it was closed, the story that the children were told was that it was too close to ‘Garden Valley Boulevard’, which, through the years, had turned into more of a Freeway than a street. I still don’t know why Riverside closed down, what I do know is that half of the kids then got transferred to “Fir Grove Elementary”, while the other half was divided between “Sunny Slope” and “Rose”. I lost several of the friends that I had made in my first year of school through this change, but you must always trust that your parents’ always have your best interests at heart (even if you think that the best-interests are wrong, or, at best, misguided).

There were only two of my friends, in my grade, that also got transferred over to Fir Grove. Even with the number at 3, we were still only about 10% of that class. That makes you do weird things, things that you would not ever do if you were not being judged by a bunch of people that you didn’t know. So, finally, on to the fun with electricity.

The first, and most unbelievable, experience with electricity involved an electric fence. There was a field around “Fir Grove” that was surrounded by an average chain-link fence, yet instead of having military style razor wire at the top, it had an electric wire. Through the egging on of the other kids, five of us got brave enough to see what would happen if you actually touched the ‘live’ part of the fence. There ended up being a group of five of us, myself and a friend, as well as three guys from the new school that did it. No one actually wanted to touch the fence, so we decided that we would all hold hands as someone did, finally, a much braver kid than me, said he would do the touching. After that we filed in until I was the 3rd person in the chain. We all assumed that it was going to be an equal shock to all of us, turns out that we were wrong. For some reason, which I still don’t understand, the only one that got shocked was the kid that was at the very end of the line, furthest from the power. He looked like he was damn near dying, while none of the rest of us felt a thing. Once the lead kid let go of the wire, the kid at the end quit his spasm. Was it a staged event for our benifit? I dunno. What I do know is that the kid at the end of the line looked like he was having his bones removed through his ears, not a happy face, if that was acting, he should be up for an Oscar.

The next incident involving electricity was much more painful, for me anyway. An Aunt and Uncle of mine lived in a small trailer on the property of another Aunt. They told me that if I was going to open the door of the trailer that I needed to be standing on the milk crate that they used as a step to get inside. I did that each time I opened the door, never questioning why. Of course, being ten or eleven at the time, my memory lapsed just once when I reached for the doorknob.

The second I touched the knob the shock hit me. For some reason, not sure why, I was not able to let go of the knob. I was also not able to shout. I was just standing there jerking around like someone in the electric chair. I don’t know how long I was standing there with the electricity running through me, but it certainly felt like it was at least a good minute. Thankfully, my then Stepdad saw what was happening and reached out to pull me away, but he got shocked when he touched me. He lowered a shoulder and hit me linebacker style to knock me free of the knob, which hurt, but was nothing compared to the jolt I was getting from the trailer. To this day I don’t know how or why the outside of the trailer was electrified, and I still get a bit nervous every time I open the door on a mobile home.

There was a day in my early teens when I was riding my bicycle home from the Tenmile store (why it was called Tenmile may never be known; It was not ten miles from anything.), when I had to stop to relieve myself. This was in rural Oregon and there was hardly any traffic so it was a pretty common occurence. Even at that, I climbed down a small embankment to make sure that no one would see me. I started to water a tree (so to speak) at the bottom when I heard a car approaching from my left. As I turned to the left to make sure that I was not in the line of sight of the car my body, and thus the stream, followed. I had heard that it was not possible to be shocked by peeing on an electric fence, but I am here to tell you that it is possible, and it hurts! I didn’t even know that the tree was holding the electric wire, if you have ever seen a field surrounded by nothing but an electric wire you would understand what I mean. It is just a tiny little strand of metal, but it sure packed a punch. And much like with the trailer in the previous tale, it was not possible for me to move or stop peeing. It did only take a few seconds for my bladder to empty, but still, ouch. Electricity running through your penis is really not all that pleasant.

Now for one where no one gets hurt for a change. You have no doubt seen those Touch Lamps at one time or another. I always wondered how they work (of course as I just google up that link I found the answer, kind of disappointing really, I was hoping it really was magic). While at my then Girlfriend’s house one day, I was screwing with her touch lamp when I wondered what would happen if I touched the lamp, then she touched me. We tried it and it worked. For some reason though it will only work with two people. When we tried it with me touching the lamp, her touching me, then her dad touching her, it just didn’t work. Also, if I was touching the lamp when her little dog licked me it would also trigger the lamp. That was good for a lot of mindless fun, also I did win couple of bets where my buddies would not believe that it would work with more than one person.

In my late teens, myself and a few friends had the most ridiculous form of entertainment that you could imagine. We took an old electrical cord, -I think it came off of a toaster but that hardly matters- and stripped the ends of the wires. We would then take turns plugging it into the outlet, holding one bare end in our hand, then touching the inside of that elbow with the other wire. The electricity would cause the muscles to contract, it kind of looked like you were doing curls at high speed. Now I am sure that you are thinking, “what could possibly go wrong?” Well what went wrong is that one of the friends’, I can’t remember which one, muscles flexed so tightly that he was not able to pull the cord out of the crook of his arm. Strangely, well maybe not considering what we were doing, it took us a good thirty seconds to figure out that we could just unplug the damn thing. In that scenario all of my friends were smoking pot which kind of gave them an excuse for their stupidity. I was stone sober and did it as well, what does that say about me?

That is pretty much it for really memorable moments involving electricity. There are hundreds of other times that I have been shocked, usually while doing something that was at least a tad foolish. The rest of the times that I got shocked were all probably avoidable had I not been in a hurry, or had I thought things through a bit better. Things like getting shocked when changing a light bulb, something that would never happen if you just turn off the switch before you start, but then how do you know when the bulb is screwed in far enough? If you screw it in too tightly it is more likely to break when you try to remove it. There have been a couple of times when I have been changing the ballasts on fluorescent lights at work when someone turned the circuit back on, thus giving me a shock if I was actually touching the wire at the time. This could easily have been avoided if I had just put a piece of masking tape over the switch with something like “being repaired” written on it, but I never think of that until I am sitting on my ass with a weird buzzing going through me.

I have gotten better over the years. Hell a couple of years after I bought my house I actually bought an electrical tester to make sure that a particular circuit was off before I started fucking with it. The down side to having all the bad experiences is that now when I am working on anything electrical I practically shit my pants if someone touches me or I hear the slightest buzzing sound.

That is a bit odd also. Why is it that you can clearly hear the buzzing while you are being shocked but no one else can? Perhaps next time I am doing something foolish enough that I may get shocked I will go ahead and set up some sort of sensitive audio device to record it, just to see if it actually makes an audible sound. Then again if I were to spend that much time setting up the audio device it would seem I would be smart enough to just turn off the circuit first. In theory.