Category Archives: Entertainment

Olympics; Puppy

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

There is not a lot to say about the news these days. There is the Repuclican National Convention going on in New York City, the 2004 Olympics going on in Athens, of which the American public can watch about 10% of, and that is only when there is an American competitor actually fares well in said event. While it would be nice to actually watch the competition in the Olympic games, it loses something in the chopped up, American highlight type shit that you get to watch here in the states. Considering that none of the events play live on our National Networks, I would rather just not watch it at all.

A friend told me, recently, that they have live streaming video coming from the Olympic games. I am not sure if that is true or not, what I am sure of is that I am crutched by a 56k internet connection and not likely to watch every fifth frame of a video while still considering it “live”. Isn’t that supposed to be some of the glory of the Olympics? You see the people (from any random country) who perform their chosen sport the best? Our media, in the U.S.A., obscures that by only showing events where the U.S.A. athletes perform well, then they fill the time by telling stories of the “hard up-bringing” that the athletes had to overcome to achieve their Olympic dreams. Sure, that does make for a great movie, but what I want to see is the competition.

If the American gymnast totally fucks up, breaks a leg or something, I want to see, at the very least, the medal winners’ performances. This (the Olympic games) is the only venue where people from all countries can compete against each other on an equal footing. Yet, once the U.S.A. is out of the running, the media just seems to shift to a personal story of tragedy that left that particular person without a Mother and Father, which, in turn, made him/her want to compete in the Olympics. I swear that the media is using some formula similar to this…

Yet, my bitch today is not even related to the Olympics. More related to something that I noticed, and tested a few times, regarding computer opponents in actual games.

It is Tuesday, August 31, 2004

I was stopped just as I started yesterday’s bitching, by a puppy (well, full-grown dog that is smaller than the average full-grown dog of it’s breed). That would be our puppy Zelda, who was so angered/whiny when big brother dog went for a walk with mom that I finally just caved in and followed behind them. I originally had hopes of catching up to them before we reached the park, but there was an issue with the fact that Zelda was so excited and jumpy that it was difficult to get the harness on to her.

If you are not a dog owner, especially the owner of rather large dogs, you really need to know about the harness before you do get a dog. The normal way that idiots (most dog owners) walk their large dogs is to use a ‘choke chain’ (I linked there to an article about the disabilities that such collars could cause for a good reason). A ‘Choke Chain’ could be used to great effect by an experienced dog trainer, yet the device is regulary used by any jack-ass who has a dog.

There actually are ways to train a dog on your own, ways that do not involve asphyxiation and broken necks. The easiest way is through positive reinforcement, you know a simple little treat you give the puppy when it does the vocal command. It is not an exact science, nor is it immediate, but it does teach the dog that rewards will be given for performing certain tasks. As time goes on the rewards get smaller, no longer a chewy treat, just a little tummy rub or the such, but the dog will still respond to the vocal command and perform the task.

The unfortunate thing is that any person, who can show a photo ID, can get a pet. That is if they try to get them from a rescue shelter, there aren’t any laws governing who can take a puppy or kitten that they find three houses over. While cats come out of the womb pretty much ‘litter box broken’, it takes some time for a puppy to realize that it is supposed to do the majority of its bathroom duties outside. The little puppy might not understand that you left the pile of Newspapers in the corner so that he would ‘do his business’ on it, but if you show the dog the place that he did pee, then put him on the newspapers, he/she will soon learn that the papers are there for their peeing purposes. After a bit of time, say two weeks if you have a puppy that was just weaned, those papers will get so close to the door that the only time there will be pee anywhere but on the papers is when the dog gets a bit too excited.

Once the dog is ‘house-broken’, a process which could take between a couple of weeks and a couple of years, depending on your level of interaction with him/her, the rest is easy. There is no need for a ‘Choke Chain’, all you need is “Mr. Newspaper”. At least 80-90% of the time, you never have to swing ‘Mr. Newspaper’, you just have to roll it up and look at the puppy. Sure fear tactics are bad and everything, but would you rather all but kill your new puppy with a choke chain, or have it fear a rolled up newspaper?

My/Our dogs are far from perfect, Warlock will chase anything that makes a reflection, while Zelda will bark at any other dog that gets near Warlock. We try to teach them using the command/treat method, and while neither one of them is perfect about following the commands, and neither one would be trusted in a room alone with a child, they are pretty obedient dogs. There has NEVER been a ‘Choke Chain’ on either of these dogs (well, once when Warlock was young, but it lasted only a day or two). We do love our dogs, hell, they are basically our children, there is no way that I would try to strangle a human, why would I do it to a canine?

We (my wife and I) are doing this with larger breed dogs. Warlock has to weigh 60 pounds or so, while Zelda is a very fierce 35 or so pounds. I think that absolute obedience might be impossible, at the very least it is only possible through an obedience school that knows how to correctly use a ‘Choke Chain’. We are not going to be using the ‘Choke Chain’ though, since they have these Harnesses that you can buy pretty cheap.

You just have to remember that you do outweigh the dog by at least a hundred pounds. You certainly don’t have to choke the dog to get obedience, and if you do you don’t deserve to have a pet…Or a child, for that matter.

Lucky

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

Now for a movie review of sorts. The name of the film is Lucky. The only way that I can think of to do this without a ton of spoilers is with the following sentence:

A writer overcomes writer’s block through unusual means.

To say anything else would really take away from the viewing experience. That would hardly be a review, so I must elaborate. By elaborating I am going to go into spoilers galore mode, be warned.

The only reason that I feel compelled to do a review of this movie at all is that all of the reviews that I have read over at Rotten Tomatoes seem to have missed a couple of key events that really change the meaning of the movie. That doesn’t make them wrong or myself right, but it does make a hell of a lot of what happens in the film just impossible. I will get into all that as this spoiler-riddled, review-type-thing continues.

The movie starts with a long, quite introspective, narrative by the main character Millard Mudd (Michael Emanuel). Over the first five minutes or so of the movie, the camera slowly goes through the beer can jungle that is Millard’s home. It continues on as the already drunken Millard realizes that he is out of beer and goes to buy some more. The fact that he takes one beer from the six pack, then forgets the rest of them still sitting on the roof of the car, and continues to drive home is absolute proof of his inebriation. It is no surprise, as the camera shows more and more blurred road-markers, the car veering into the wrong lane and the such, that the drive ends in tragedy. Millard has run over a small dog, but, more importantly, the cans of beer break when the fly off of the top of his car!

Millard, being a good samaritan (which is slang for covering his ass), took the dog home to try to nurse it back to health. The dog was in a pretty bad way, there was not really any way it could actually have been alive if the (really bad, joke-shop style) guts were hanging out. Our hero, Millard, continued to try though. He tried everything Beer and….Well that was about it.

This is the point where all of the reviewers seemed to have missed the point. It is my belief, my strong belief, that the dog was actually dead when he took it to the back yard to bury it. The happy puppy didn’t wake up, no, it was dead as a stone. Millard’s mind, however, was getting stronger.

For the next half an hour or so the movie switches between scenes where the talking dog (David Reivers) is funneling ideas to Millard, and other scenes where Millard is having fantasies about Misty (Piper Cochrane). This is, in my mind, the second clue that the dog wasn’t even there. Later in the movie they make a point of telling you about the girl who works at the liquor store, what days she works, what time she works, what car she drives, where she lives…Yet, it is the ‘dog’ that forces Millard to go out. Millard then meets the ‘real life’ Misty.

Now, here is where it is going to get just a little bit confusing, I will try to keep it on course as best I can. When Millard first meets ‘Misty’, the dog tells him to tell her that she has a nice dog. Misty doesn’t even look down…I don’t think our Millard had a dog with him at all when he first met ‘Misty’. I also don’t believe that Millard and Misty had any sort of a relationship, excepting the possibility that he did the necrophilia thing on her corpse (or perhaps a bit of consensual sex before she realized that she was never going to walk out alive). As the movie played, Millard got more and more vicious with his ‘fantasies’, to the point that it showed ‘Misty’ hanging dead from a rafter; I don’t think that was a dream at all.

There was one scene where his weird fantasy was being shown in normal focus, normal light, and with the ‘Misty’ character laying tied to the bed. The dialogue seemed almost joking, as she asked him what he was going to do to her. The fact that she specifically asked him not to disfigure her face can only bolster my case that there was no dog. In that ‘dream sequence’ it was only Millard and Misty, no one else could have heard about the plea to not damage her face. No one else could have heard ‘Misty’ tell Millard to take a tooth as a trophy, yet, both things did happen. Her face was disfigured and a tooth was taken.

Now there is the issue of the other people that died at Millard’s hand. He killed them all, the dead dog was not involved.

I am relatively sure that Millard killed the lot of them. One of the driving reasons for this assumption is that a twelve-pound, Terrier-mixed, dog could not drag a human body around, much less dig a hole to bury that body in. Add that to the fact that the voice of the dog seemed to come out of Millard’s mouth at least once, and the fact that Millard took over the killing duties. I think it is a case closed, though I am still a bit weirded out by the necrophilia.

When Millard goes out to stalk some women later, it kind of cheapens the experience. It has been him all along. There was never a dog feeding him information. It was always his own mind in turmoil. Possibly the death of the dog just whet his thirst for killing, who knows, but, for the sake of this arguement, the dog died when he initially hit it with the car. Everything that happened after that point was only in his mind.

Hell, even my wife knew that. Millard cracked into some sort of schizophrenia and started taking out the locals. Not so far-fetched when you look at it that way. Had he worked at a post office, we would have a word for him, since he didn’t, we just call him a bad, bad man.

Olympic basketball

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Once again a quick look through regular blogs and the news didn’t give me much hope for a rant today, yet, I did happen to scrape up something that is not related to current political conditions. As luck would have it, that little gem seemed to be buried under a lot of internet news, not that I visit any international sites so perhaps it was a pretty prominent feature there. Hell, for all I know even FOX news did a feature on the U.S. Men’s Olympic Basketball team dropping the ball, so to speak, on a tradition.

I did mention, after the first U.S. loss in the competition, that I would like to see them lose a bit more. The only reason that I wanted to see that was to prove that collegiate athletes are much better for this type of competition than professional athletes. Every other country is exhibiting something called ‘Team Play’. That is a concept that is pretty much lost on most of your NBA players. Sure, back in the early ’90’s Michael Jordan and the original ‘Dream Team’ was kicking ass all over the world. I don’t recall all of the players that were on the team, but that was in the era where the Stockton/Malone type pick-and-roll was used quite religiously. Not to mention the fact that they were simply out to prove that the term ‘professional’ was appropriate when they were described as such.

The losers players that went to the Olympics this year (please, no angry mails about calling them losers. By defenition, if you lose more games than you win you are a loser), never exhibited anything approaching team play. Beyond that, they have blamed everything from the referees to the ‘weird Olympic court’ for their failures. Dear Random Fluctuations of Time and Space, man, snap out of it! The ‘All about me’ attitude of the top-notch NBA players has made it so that they can not come together as a team, not even once every four years, to show the dominance of the U.S. Basketball team. The humorous ‘but’ about that statement is that a lot of players in the NBA defend their home country now, and seem to do it fabulously. That is, the U.S. is putting up guys who (combined) make more annually than the Gross National Product of a lot of countries, yet they lose to teams that are basically playing for a place to stay while they play. If that nation has a player in the NBA, the player will represent his country, and hand the U.S. their ASS. Funny how a superstar on a team of unheard of people can bring them together, and elevate team play, while five superstars can’t seem to pull their heads out of their collective ass long enough to try to represent their own contry.

Now to the quotes that really made me start to bitch about this tonight. I am not going to link any of them since I have seen them all on multiple news sites.

US coach Larry Brown ripped referees for forcing US center Tim Duncan, a San Antonio teammate of Ginobili, to the bench early for fouling out.
“I’m proud of my team. They played hard under some difficult circumstances. It’s difficult when Duncan is on the bench every game,” Brown said. “I’ve never seen him foul out in 19 minutes in our league.”

Mmm. Hmm. In our league they also allow players to carry the ball for three steps after the last dribble without calling it travelling. They allow Shaquille O’Neal to use his ass as a bulldozer, to push two or three guys out of his way to get to the hoop, which is the only way he can score, and that is not charging. If you have a memorable name, you can get away with murder in the NBA and will rarely be called for fouls. The fact that they call the fouls in the Olympics can only bolster my position on thinking that it is far more suited for collegiate athletes.

“It hurts,” US center Amare Stoudamire said. “Everyone knows we have the youngest team here. We’re going to come back for that gold medal. You can count on it.”

I am not sure if they are, by average, the youngest team there. What I can say is that, hands down, they are the most arrogant team there. Arrogance does not equate to success though, as evidenced by the current U.S. team. Also, if you want to talk about extremes of the Olympic Basketball teams, the U.S. team makes more money than probably the rest of the teams put together (not counting the NBA players who play for their home countries, for pride, you see).

That might not be possible after their golden flop, but the US team was set up for failure when a dozen top stars rejected Olympic overtures. Iverson had a message for them – get yourselves into USA uniforms for the 2008 Bejing Games.

Okay, so I am supposed to feel sorry for our team because some of the athletes chose not to attend? I’m sorry, that is not going to happen. How many guys that you played ball with in High School are in the NBA? The Colleges select the top 5 percent of athletes that make it through high school. The NBA then takes the top 2 percent (or so) of athletes that make it through college. Haven’t we weeded out a bit of the riff-raff by that point? The NBA even sends a lot of guys packing every year since they don’t perform well. I bet any random team from any random college could also take out our Olympic team.

“We need to understand that even if we’re not fighting for the gold medal, we still represent our country and fight like it was a gold medal game,” Iverson said. “It’s important to make the people back home proud of us.”

Okay, I guess I lost you at HELLO. Any collegiate team that we could have sent to the Olympics would have brought home the Gold. The lackluster play of a bunch of superstars has tarnished the name of the USA in international play. The U.S. would be better served if you just drove your Porsche to watch the game, played by players who actually give a damn about wins and losses, and, more importantly, about the success of the USA in international competition. I do understand that you need some time off, but come on man, I work 306 days a year…full time…That is working, throwing around boxes that weigh around 80 pounds each. I do it six days a week without a break, save my one-week annual vacation. I can’t even try to feel sorry for you.

The first collection of NBA talent since 1992 not to claim Olympic gold, the Americans fired a dismal 42 percent from the field, closing a US dynasty that produced 12 gold medals and a 109-2 record before Athens.

So that is what you have destroyed. Not only your personal reputation, but the reputation of the USA for the last fifty years. I hope you guys are all sitting pretty, in your million dollar houses, when you realize that you could not beat a college team from Argentina.

Fucking Losers Good game.

Pogo games; PC issues at work

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

So it seems that I am letting silly little games get in the way of my (supposedly) daily rant again. The game that I have been playing at some length recently is a a new Pogo.com game called Canasta. It is, I understand, a game that little old ladies have been playing for a long time, as my mother says that her mother used to play it, but with actual cards as opposed to a monitor and a mouse. The game is laden with weird rules (some of which are listed on that page are not totally accurate to the pogo version I am playing), but then most card games are, aren’t they? The quickest way I can think to give you an idea of how the game works is to say that it is like Gin, only you play two full decks -with wildcards.

I have been using the ‘Practice with Robots’ option on the game while I have been learning the rules. I am getting pretty good at smacking the crap out of the computer, but I am pretty sure that any woman over the age of sixty could hand me my ass, with a side order of mashed potatoes, if I actually tried to play agains another person.

If you have never played any games over there at Pogo, I really suggest you try a couple. Most of the games are free for play, though there will be a 45 second intermission every five minutes or so if you have not actually paid to become a ‘club pogo’ member. It is not all just card and board games either. It is either owned or sponsered by EA, and as such has some of their golf, basketball, football and such simulations there. There are also a couple of racing games, trivia, sports trivia, hell there are a lot of little games over there and you will certainly find one to your liking. Some of the games do require that you have a subscription to the service, I am not sure if Canasta is one of them, but I already have a subscription so play it I shall.

When Pogo first announced their subscritption service I thought I would just go ahead and quit playing their games entirely. In fact, there was a period of almost a year where neither myself or my wife really played many games there. I think the reason that I ended up paying for the subscription was that they had upgraded their old game ‘Word Whomp’ with one called ‘Word Whomp Whackdown’, but it was subscription only. Someone in one of the rooms gave me a 3 day guest pass, which gives you subscriber status for a few days, and I found that many other of the games were worth playing as well. With an annual membership fee of $29.00 U.S., it seemed silly not to do it.

For less than the price I paid for ‘Hoyle card games’ some years ago, I got the whole site, every game, multiplayer when necessary or possible at no extra cost. Of course there aren’t a lot of people out there who would admit to being ‘Cribbage dorks’, but cribbage would have actually cost me money per month through other sites and, though it is one of the free ones through Pogo, has a really nifty rating system and chat room and stuff.

Dear Random Fluctuations of Time and Space, I am starting to sound like a 3am infomercial for POGO.

• On to the crap about the computer problems at work!

Well, the little thingy that was broken has been fixed. It turns out that the little thingy was not the problem though. Tom, the guy who fixed the part for us in the first place, came over today to assist me in checking the wire from the pc to the register. By “assist” I mean that he had the tester and I didn’t and that was the next thing that we checked. The signal went through perfectly, thus the entire 120 feet of line was good, as well as the connectors. At this point I was pretty sure that the problem was in the circuit board in the register but, to be sure, we checked the rest of the variables as well.

Using a separate device through the communications port on the back of the pc, we were able to say, without a doubt, that it worked. The only other pc-based problem that would even be possible would be that the db-25 to db-9 convertor was not functioning correctly. Since we actually had a spare laying around, we tried it out with the other one. I don’t know what the odds are on one burning out while connected to the pc, while the other simultaneously blows out while sitting in a box, but I would say that those odds are pretty low.

At this point, Tom didn’t really have any new ideas. I checked a couple of other things after he left. First, I plugged the archaic db-25 to db-9 convertor into our hand-held system to make sure it would upload, which it did. I then used that same cable to plug the rj-45 from the register into the pc…Nothing…I even tried swapping the register interface to the other serial port, still nothing. At this point I know that the cable is good, I know that the pc port works, I know that the cables in the back room all work, what is left? It has to be the board in the register itself.

There has been an NEC technician down here to look at some problems we have been having with the registers over the last few days, he mentioned that there may be a problem with the main circuit board of the cash register that is making it so that the scanned items do not actually ring up on the register. He also mentioned that these were the oldest registers in the area, and while they are only eight or so years old, I guess that is kind of right. The fact that they are several years old should not keep them from functioning though. Sure you can get a new pc for 500, but when you are looking for a cash register, with a scale and scanner, go ahead and add a zero to that number. If the crap product that a company sells can not even perform the tasks for which it was purchased, for at least ten years or so, then the merchandise is just crap…Hell, they had been using the previous registers since the early ’70’s, and they still work perfectly!

Perhaps the store is going to start looking a lot more like an Old-West mercantile in the future, there is no way that the owners are going to pour a lot more money into technology that they don’t understand, especially when the out-of-pocket cost of the repairs is rapidly approaching the out-of-pocket for the purchase in the first place.

I know that no electronic device can go on forever without a bit of help. But when you have an old register still plugged in up front, and another in the storage room, that have both been going strong for thirty-some years, while the ones you bought in the late ’90’s are crapping out less than ten years later…I guess it is true of everything when they say, “Well, they just don’t build them like they used to.”

Every single circuit that you add to a system is going to make it both weaker and more likely to break. A Cash Register is something that really needs to be built pretty solidly, since it is going to get hammered on by everyone from here to Jesus and back. When the nerd shows up to say that, yes, the power surge a couple of weeks ago caused the problem, I am going to ask him why the 30 year old registers in the store can take that surge, while the much more expensive, newer, better, registers can not. I wonder what the response will be to that question….

PC issues; Yeti sports

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

A screwy work schedule and some other miscellaneous personal stuff has kept me from wrting anything here for the last few days. A quick look at my site statistics shows that both of my readers already know that, so let us assume that I added this last bit of information for later reference, like when I am an extremely successful professional selling my system for a “low, low, price” on obscure tv channels in the dead of the night/morning. At which point someone might want to buzz through the old archives to see what I had said in the past. However unlikely, I am going to go with that, so sue me.

• Work sucks, as usual. Life sucks, as usual. Possibly the reason that I have not felt compelled to type about it here is that it is all the norm. Were I in a position where work on your average day was enjoyable, you know the type of job that you actually look forward to going to, hell, even the type of job that you don’t contemplate slitting your wrists every morning before you go, maybe if I had that type of a job I would be able to write a lot of good anecdotes on some days, then bitch on others. Problem is I never have a good day, EVER.

The day in question, that being today, had this as my problem:
The PC in the back-room will no longer communicate with the cash register. A quick search of cables and other such paraphernalia that make this happen revealed that there was one of the connectors that was totally fucked. The particular item that was fucked is this guy right here. Note that this particular connector got really fucked a couple of years ago in a lightning storm that burnt out both the PC and the master cash register. I told the bosses at the time that the part needed to be replaced, but, after replacing the cable itself the problem seemed to be fixed. I told them that using the part could result in further damage, as the pins no longer had anything to insulate between them, and I didn’t have any idea how many of the wires had power going through them and how many didn’t.

The boss then said, “Does it work right now?” A question to which I had to answer YES, since it was working at that moment. He then said, “it is fixed then.” That was the end of the discussion. No matter how many times I tried to bring up the possibility of future problems he would not listen. It was working, therefore nothing was wrong.

Fast forward a couple of years. The part that is in question did completely short out. According to the guy who built a duplicate of the part, some of the wires had gotten so hot that they had fused together. Now it is possible that either the communications port in the PC is also burnt out (which really isn’t that big a deal) or the rs232 port into the cash register is burnt out, that would be a pretty big deal, they don’t use your average pc components on these type of cash registers, and they certainly don’t sell just the parts. You have to pay for the part and the installation as a package deal. If it is just a simple PC com port problem I can probably fix it in two minutes for a cost of about a dollar. If it is a problem in the register itself, the tech can likely fix it in two minutes, for a cost of about 500 dollars. One must keep in mind that these techs are getting paid an hourly wage for the time that they spend in the car on the way over, as well as charging a trip fee, then charging (way too much) for the replacement part and installation. It is practically extortion.

There still is the possibility that only the data cable got fried in the process so I will reserve judgement for a later date. I will just bring up the key points once again. 1) I told them that this part needed to be replaced or there might be future problems. 2) Once the thing was working again, even though a part was broken, I was told it was fixed, not to waste my time on it. 3) Now that it has come to be that something did definitely go wrong with the system, and all signs point to a short in the device that I told them to replace a couple of years ago. 4) It is all my fault for not fixing it in the first place.

• So I have been playing a lot more of the damn Yeti Game of late. The major reason for this was the addition of the Yeti Pentathalon. Yes, you have to do all five of the Yeti sports in succession. I assumed that this would make it so that one runaway high score wouldn’t lead the world, since that score would have to be factored in with the scores of the four other events. This has held mostly true so far, though there are a couple of scores that just seem a bit too high to have been achieved in a single session by a single person. Still I must assume that it is all legit.

The problem is that I never really thought about the possibility that the opposite would be true. That is, I never have a good game in all five events. On the occasions when I really kick ass in one event I will invariably bomb in another. Thus I am just as likely to make it to the leaderboard if I try to play one and hope for a great game as I am if I try to do all the events and pray for pretty good games. Which all amounts to a hill of 1’s and 0’s when you think about it. I am not going to get an award if I reach the leaderboard, well, unless you count the fact that I will think that wasting fifty or more hours of my life to see my initials on a leaderboard is an award. My god, now I remember why I gave up Asteroids.

Olympic basketball; My friend George

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well the good news is that I saw George in the store today buying a bottle of Port wine. He was pretty drunk when I saw him, which is good since alcohol may be a depressant, but that seems to be the only way to deal with pain. I will cite my neck injury as proof of this; The ibuprofin didn’t really help, the muscle relaxers didn’t really help, the alcohol made it possible to sleep. That is not to say that the pain killers don’t work, just that they may not work in the same way. It is a known fact that alcohol pretty much numbs your brain, whether the pain killers can do that as effectively is probably based on the person and not some formula. I will say that when I was taking the Flexoril (muscle relaxant) it did make the pain subside, yet, if I actually moved the pain would come back. With alcohol it works acrosss the board. Maybe your head is on fire, you don’t care, you can’t feel it, good stuff, liquor, maybe they should use it more often for medicinal purposes. I know I do, and on a daily basis.

• So I have not been paying any attention to the Olympics this year. You may ask yourself why, but likely you don’t care that I am not following them, since you are not following them either. I must admit, though, that I found it pretty humorous that our basketball team got their ass handed to them. Not unexpected, mind you, just humorous. The USA may have some of the best athletes in the world, but when you think about it they are only the best athletes because the conditions allow it. Why is it that the runners from Kenya seem to win every marathon ever? They spend all of their lives running from damn near everything you can think of. They have certainly earned their place as the fastest nation on the planet. I am sure that they do toil and train to get better, but I am equally as sure that if you were to grab a random guy in Kenya, and a random guy in New York, and make them race 26 miles, the guy from Kenya would certainly win. The guy from New York might not even finish, what with his heart exploding about six miles in…

That was a bit off topic, but still, people who happen to live in the USA always get a hand up when it comes to athletic competitions. Well, I suppose it is possible that the jocks that can’t put a noun and a verb together could possibly make it through an average high school English course, but once they are in college (on scholarship) they are getting a lot of preferential treatment. Free passes on exams and the such, just based on the millions of dollars that a college can make on a T.V. deal if they put a good team on the floor. The colleges do sometimes expose the little leaches, usually when the media gets wind of what’s going on, then the NCAA will go ahead and place sanctions against the team for a couple of years. No one really believes that the corruption is going away, but we take the sanctions as an act to show that cheating is not tolerated…However misguided…

The net result of all of the preferential treatment is that we get some more athletes through college and onto professional sporting fields. The fact that they can not read or write seems to take a backseat to the fact that they CAN run, jump, throw, or just be really big for the sake of being big. Hell, ask probably half of the professional athletes in the USA to define a ‘metaphor’ and they would say that they don’t know what a ‘meta’ is for.

This is the crap These are the people that we send to represent our country in the Olympic games, a bunch of whining babies that were the star of the team back when they were playing high school sports in Alaska, then got babied through college since they were the “next big thing”. Then they end up on profesional teams (now I am talking about basketball exclusively) where they are treated in a different way than the rest of the guys who are on the same ‘team’.

You end up with a ton of over-paid, un-educated fools that think they are better than Jesus. Sure the dunk might look great on a poster, but there has to be someone there to pass you the ball to make the dunk. Since the Olympic team we send over now is comprised of a bunch of guys that already think they are better than Jesus, they never really pass. The U.S. basketball team got their ass handed to them, the most likely reason for that is ego. The U.S. has a team that is made up of a bunch of people expecting the other guys to wipe their ass after they shit. The rest of the world is using teams that play as a ‘TEAM’, and they will hand the U.S. its ass over and over again until the U.S. team realizes that it is not a dunk show, it is a game, the team with the most points when time runs out will be the winner. The U.S. guys need to start asking themselves whether they want to be the winner, or the team with the best ‘poster dunk’.

The only reason that I even mentioned the U.S. basketball at the Olympics was because I saw a quote, from Allen Iverson, of all people, that said;

“They play the game the way it’s supposed to be played,” Iverson said. “It’s not about athletics. That’s the game the way Karl Malone and John Stockton play it. It’s good for kids to see how the game is supposed to be played.”

Okay, so even Iverson understands that they need to play as a team. Why didn’t he mention that prior to the game? My best guess is that it would have required him to pull his head out of his ass. Playing the game in the Olympics is not the same as playing it at home; You have to guard everybody, as these are the best five guys that a nation can put on the floor. Every other nation’s team seems to understand that, yet, our athletes think it is going to be a highlight reel. The USA “Dream Team” has won every overall competition since they started to allow professional athletes, don’t you think that is some sort of hype that everyone has on their blackboard?

I really hope that we fall short of the medal in the basketball competition, I hope that only because it will make the athletes try a bit harder next time around. Sure it may be something to write in your diary when you kick the ass of the highest played player in the world, but how do you feel when you lose to a team that doesn’t get paid at all, and therefore plays for thd love of the game? When you can kick the ass of a team that plays for heart., not money., You will be about equal to where I was in grade school, where our team could take all comers. No one ever made a poster out of it, none of us went on to the NBA, but I will guarantee you that we played better, as a team, than the hacks players that we sent to Athens this year.

Audio equipment; Phimosis

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well as my legion of fan (no those weren’t supposed to be plural) might have noticed, I did take a couple of days off from typing this page up. No reason why really. I didn’t feel like typing, no one ever reads it anyway, kind of like farting in the wind… there is just no payoff. Though I have no plans to close down the site, as It is very theraputic for me to write something down that is annoying me, I don’t think I am likely to try to keep making a new post every day. I am not going to set to stone a schedule whereby I will make new posts, as that loses the point of bitching about stuff that is irritating me, what I will do is say that I am likely only going to have, at most, five posts a week. The days that they might occur are going to be a surprise even to me, so I guess it will actually be 100% true that I am typing this for my own benefit from this point forward.

• Something that I want to mention today, as it may be too late tomorrow, is a brief conversation that I had with a regular customer where I work.

The man’s name is George, I consider him a friend even though I do not know him all that well. We have been talking, at length, about all sorts of weird shit ever since I started working at the store. He is quite a friendly, helpful man, but he has a lot of medical problems. I have visited his home several times, even knocked back a cocktail or two while there, and I suppose that, by definition, that would make us friends, though had that never have happened I would still think of him as a friend.

George loaned me his little truck (chevy s10? maybe) a few times to do errands that needed doing. Much like with the local “cat lady”, his only reward was for me to sit with him in his home and talk. Mind you, he is a bit of an Audiophile, and that took a bit away from my apprehensions about visiting his home. The guy has every album you could ever think of on vinyl, 8-track, cassette and CD. There is no place in his house that you can stand without hearing the song that is playing coming from multiple speakers, and sounding totally awesome. That being said, his audio system cost probably in excess of $20,000 U.S. dollars. That system is also installed in a house that likely cost him a lot less than that when he bought it twenty-five years ago. I don’t know why audio is his passion, but it is.

I really started trying to fuck with him with the stuff that I brought over (cd’s I mean). As far as the retail cd’s go, he could tell me every time that they were a retail cd, while he could tell me every time that one was an mp3. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. Just for fun, I brought over an old garage recording that I had made back when I was in a band. He instantly knew that it was not only a “garage effort”, but a very poor one at that. Being pissed off at that point, I ripped “Metallica’s” song “one” to mp3 to see if he could hear the difference between the two. What really shocked me was that, on his system, I could tell the difference between the two. I think that the studio recordings have a lot more sound on them than you can hear on your average, cheap-ass media player. If nothing else, George proved that point to me.

This guy, George, has had a lot of shit happen to him over his life. Possibly the worst thing (at least in my mind) was the Phimosis.

The thing about “phimosis” is that if you are circumcised you never have to fear it. If, however, you are not circumcised, it will be a constant threat to the penis. George had the phimosis problem as a child, but it was never discovered. By the time he was in his late 30’s/early 40’s, he had to have his penis amputated as it was so covered in virus that it could not be saved. I suppose I should note that phimosis, in and of itself, is not life-threatening. When, however, it is let to stay on a body for thirty years, infections can occur. The phimosis kept him from being able to clear up some, I can’t remember the story all that clearly, but it was genital warts, I think. Without the ability for the glans of the penis to be free of disease, the infection spread into his testicles. He had, at that point, two options; 1) Die. 2) Amputate your penis and testicles.

But wait, it gets worse. The guy then had a couple of strokes, which have left his back and legs in constant pain, the kind of pain that even the best drugs can not sate. He said to me today that, “If you (that being me) could take away the pain, I would be forever in your debt.” After that, it got spooky.

George said to me, and I will quote, “You are a very kind and loving man. Not just a man, but a kind and loving human being. When they find me tomorrow, please make sure that the note on my chest still says ‘too much pain’.”

He did go on to say that he figured his children would simply bury him in the back yard so that they would be able to continue collecting his disability and retirement checks from where he worked. So is that human nature? If it is I want right the hell out of this “race”.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole story is that I will likely be the first person to enter his home after he dies. I really don’t think that he was joking today, I think this might be it for him. I don’t know what I could do to stop him from it: he already has every drug in the hospital in his system.

Here’s to hoping that George wakes up again tomorrow.

Kobe lawsuit

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I am going to start off with the thick of it, if I get to any random thoughts I might post them below. Time will tell.

The news item in question today is Bryant Accuser Sues, Seeks Monetary Damages

I spent a hell of a long time going through my old posts looking for my mention of this case (which is all my fault, since my archives are about four months out of date.) and I did find it. I must say that it kind of tickled my little, tickly parts when I found that it was saying basically the same thing that I thought it had said. I will quote just one paragraph on this update, if you want to see the whole thing I wrote (which was all about Richard Simmons getting sued for slapping a burly Harley salesman), you can read it Here.

The part from this particular rant that I wanted you to see is the following paragraph, indented for ease of view;

The sad truth is that so many of the cases involving celebrities are utter bull-shit that it is hard to pick through them and find the one in a hundred that is real. Take the trial of Kobe Bryant for instance. Did he have sex with that girl, yes. Was it consentual sex? There are only two people in the entire world that know the truth. I personally believe that it was consentual when it happened, then the girl realized that if it was not consentual she would be able to file a civil suit against him and get a boat- load of money. I feel a little bit more strongly about this case (though I am not actively following it) than I do about others because the woman in question turned in the panties that she had been wearing that night, and they had sperm from three separate persons in them. I am not sure if that was allowed to be entered into evidence in the case, also I guess it would be possible to rape a slut, but that really seems to take away from the credibility when she is screaming rape.

That almost seems prophetic, considering this line in the news today that;

The case took a serious turn against the prosecution when the judge in the criminal case ruled last month that the woman’s sexual history just before and hours after she said Bryant raped her could be presented at the trial. The defense’s theory is that she had consensual sex just hours after she said Bryant raped her, which could explain injuries the prosecution said she sustained. The woman has denied the defense claim.

Well, I have only known one woman that was raped ( I mean actually raped, not like a “date-rape”, which is just a bad a crime, but often never spoken of ). The woman, that I personally knew, who was raped didn’t run out and have consensual sex with the next half-a-dozen guys that she saw. Instead, she cried into my arms for a good six hours afterwards, that was when her friends and myself persuaded her to go to the police. There might be a woman out there who is gonna go fuck anything that moves after she has been raped, but that is going to be a tough position to defend.

The girl in this case is going to have to fight a really uphill battle both in the criminal and civil courts. She is going to have to explain how she has the semen from 3 different men in her underwear. Now, I am certainly not a pundit when it comes to court proceedings, but when you have to sift through your own panties to find DNA from the guy that raped you I think your case is pretty feeble. How did the other semen get there? Was it consensual sex with everyone except Kobe? Why did she have sex with a couple of other guys on the way to the police to report rape?

Don’t get me wrong, if he raped her he should be prosecuted. The thing is that the accuser can’t even keep her story straight about the rape, while the accused knows just how it went down.

The most damning piece of evidence in the whole story is this:

Usually, crime victims wait until the end of a criminal trial before suing in civil court, unless the statute of limitations is running out. “That’s not the case here,” attorney and former Denver prosecutor Craig Silverman said.
The civil lawsuit could be used by the defense to buttress an argument that she was only interested in getting money from the multimillionaire basketball player.

That is totally what happened. If you want to sue someone for rape you should keep it in your pants for a day or two on either side of the accusation.

Blue Moon; the Cubs

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well I had no intention of writing anything today. I decided that in the spirit of getting off my ass “once in a blue moon” I would go ahead and do it even though I really didn’t want to. Speaking of blue moons, I was googling a bit earlier to see if I could find some really great definition of the term; for instance, had I found that the first recorded occurance of what people called a “blue moon” happened to be the second full moon in a month, and there happened to be a catastrophic event (volcanic eruption for instance) that actually blocked the reflection so much that the moon appeared to be a subdued color, possibly blue, through volcanic ash, that would have been something that I could have really understood and expected. Unfortunately, if that information exists on the internet it is not in me to find it. There have been so many songs written with the words “blue moon” in them that a search results in only the top few items for the day followed by a ton of old song lyrics. I would probably take the time to sift through all of the riff-raff to try to find the ultimate answer were I not crutched by a 56k modem. Even at that, when most of the things that I am able to find regarding the “blue moon” are coming from sites like Slashdot, the self-proclaimed “News for Nerds” website, I suppose that I really shouldn’t find it surprising that the discussion over there is about how the blue moon is Not all that rare, considering that they do occur about once every three years, which is about the same as the frequency of sexual encounters for the people who post at Slashdot (autoeroticism and Real Dolls being excluded).

• I have been a pretty faithful Chicago Cubs fan for most of my life. It was not like I really wanted to be a Cubs fan, it was more like it was forced onto me. When I was growing up in Oregon we didn’t have a baseball team, what we did have was a WGN station on our local cable. Any baseball that I watched was always the Cubs against someone else, and the commentary was always leaning towards the Cubs. Hell, it was Harry Caray doing the play-by-play, if you don’t know what he sounded like, or his passion for the Cubs, you simply need to watch any Saturday Night Live show from the last two decades, he (Harry Caray) is likely the most impersonated person who ever lived, except, possibly ELVIS.

I grew up watching the Cubs, and I likely will die with a Cubs jersey in my closet. I do root fot the Diamondbacks now that I am in Arizona, but I don’t seem to have the same passion for the D’backs that I have always had for the Cubs. When Harry Caray died several years ago, I thought it was akin to Blasphome that they were going to have someone else sing the song in the seventh inning stretch. I know that we must move on when someone dies, but come on…That was what Harry Caray did so horribly that none of us will ever forget him. I just googled “ozzy take me out to the ballgame” and got a lot of results for it. You could hear his rendition of that song, even see the video, if you happened to be registered through some of the sites. Of course the registration turn-around time seems to take well over an hour and I don’t have it in me to sign up and then try to follow this train of thought on another day. If you do happen to get the audio of Ozzy singing the song just keep in mind that it is the most realistic cover of Harry’s singing ever. Neither of them seem to know the words, they both seem to be really drunk while singing, they get great crowd response. I think Ozzy really nailed it!

While still on the subject of the Cubs, I guess I should mention that they acquired Nomar Garciaparra today. I don’t really have a solid opinion on Nomar, mostly because he doesn’t play for the Cubs, wait, he does now. I know that the Boston faithful are pretty pissed off at the loss of him, that alone should make me think that he is going to be “the one” to turn the Cubs around…Yet, I can still remember the Cubs trading away all of their good players over the years in the hope to get better hitting, when the hitting was great the pitching sucked. It works vice-versa as well. The Cubs, evidently, haven’t put a really good team on the field since 1907, that is a damn long time. Will the addition of Nomar be enough to push them to the top? NO.

The five year plan for the Cubs, in my mind, runs as such: They currently have pretty solid pitching, but no hitting, so they get a gold-glover who can hit. They finish just out of the wildcard this year. Next year they bolster their hitting with another guy, maybe second base, and still finish just a bit behind. The next year they will trade one of their dominant pitchers for a quality guy to play third base. The following year they finish last in the division, one of the marquee pitchers is injured and gets traded, the aging in/outfield is pretty pissed that the team has all but given up on them, so they don’t really even try. No one really wants to play for the Cubs (the ‘lovable losers’) so they aren’t able to sign their draft picks for a couple of years. Then, in about 2007, they are going to have a few really good pitchers, they will nurse them for a year or two, you know, until they are really good, then they will trade them for aged, has-been position players. This will be the cycle for the next, well, eternity really, for my Cubs if someone doesn’t step in and say NO. Although I do hope that they prove me wrong, I have a bet going that the Cubs will be the first team to ever win the world series exactly 100 years after their last title…That is a bet that you can’t make in most western sports, and I want my damn dollar!

Harry Potter and Diablo

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

There was nothing posted yesterday. I guess you have grown used to me making a half-assed excuse why not by now that I am sort of obligated to throw one out. Here it is in a nutshell. My Parent’s-in-law have washed their hands of me since I stood up to them while we were on vacation. Neither myself or my wife have spoken to them since. My brother-in-law has had an open invitation to use our guest bedroom if he ever wanted to escape the parents, mostly due to the fact that they would not sign the necessary paperwork to allow him to take certain college courses -thus making him a grunt, despite the fact that he is very bright and could have done whatever he wanted if he had the education-. I am not sure about all of the exact details regarding why he chose yesterday to walk out on his parents, but he did, and I am not the type of person to turn my back on family.

It really is pretty poor timing for this all to happen. The in-laws have thought that I was the spawn of Satan since the day that I actually lashed out at them last week. I am sure that, in their eyes, it will seem to be a pretty convenient time for their son to go ahead and move out. My take on that is that without my wife to bitch at they focused all of their bitching on their son, who was the only one in their house that had a job at the time. I don’t mean to pretend that I know the thoughts of any of my wife’s family, that is just my best estimation of why it all went down like it did when it did. And, as I said, I am not the kind of person to turn my back on family.

The majority of last night, after I got home from work, was spent with my wife, brother-in-law, and myself discussing what had happened that actually pushed him straight over the edge. That is something that I am not going to post here since 1) I only have one side of the story, and 2) that would be airing a bit too much of the family laundry. I have no problem with talking about my life on this page, even my wife’s when I feel the urge, I do not want to try to speak for people that I don’t know all that well…Even if I have already formed an opinion that will not change unless the second coming of Christ proves that everything I believe is wrong…That seems doubtfull, but still I must have limitations to how many people I offend.

• This morning I read a bit more of the Fourth Harry Potter book. I must say that Rowling has been progressing pretty well with the whole trying to make the book a bit more readable for adults. I am not entirely sure if that was her intention but it certainly should be. The series started out talking about a little eleven year old kid, which was certainly adored by all of the little eleven year old kids of the world, but by the time the fourth book came out those little eleven year old kids would have been what, 16? 17? It is certainly seeming a lot more complex than the other novels thus far. I hope that in this one she just doesn’t fuck the whole thing up by writing a great story and kind of doing the ending in a hurry to get another check (at least that seems to be what she had done with the previous novels; the endings didn’t make sense, stuff was left out or ignored). Of course everyone in the universe has said that the books really start to get interesting in the third/fourth book so I think I will probably be pretty happy with it, maybe this will be the first time that she doesn’t fuck the ending up so badly that you wish you had never read it at all.

• I played a bit more of the DiabloII today. It was not really that I wanted to, more like the draw of an addict. I must say that I was a bit surprised with the outcome of the session. I was playing through the river of flames and into Diablo’s lair (I forget the name) and I really didn’t have any problems along the way. Hephasto the armorer went down without ever using a potion, I was able to take care of multiple blood maggots by using the Jade Tan Do on weapon switch. The only place I reall had a problem was when I cracked the first seal. The Venom-Lord looking guy (infector of souls?) killed me a couple of times before I even got in a swing, hell before I was even able to use a potion. It took a lot of artful reatreat to get my mercenary to pull them and kill them one at a time, but after a half an hour I had managed to get back my body.

I thought I was going to be in for a real rough time after that. I usually only ever have problems with “Lord de Seis” after all. When I cracked the left seals and didn’t even have to drop a potion I began to wonder. Then when I cracked the top seal to release “Lord de Seis” I was able to dispatch him and his group easily. I even killed Diablo himself without much of a problem, though I did have to go back to town once to re-belt on potions. Why was it that one of the little pit-lord/venom-lord scumbags can cause so many problems while the prime evil himself goes down faster than an intern in the White House? Was there an intentional change made to make that particular Boss harder or was it that 62 fire resistance just wasn’t enough to sustain the first blast from the guy and all his minions? Questions that will likely never be answered…

The character that I am now playing is a Paladin at level 27. Unfortunately I don’t have any gear that I can twink to him until he gets to level 45. I am not going to spend a lot of time trying to level him in act 5, I do hate doing the same board repeatedly, so I assume I will be about level 30 by the time I get to nightmare. With a bit of luck (of which I have none, unless you count the bad kind) I might find a Goldskin or Vipermagi armor along the way. That or I will still be wearing the same cracked quilted armor I have gotten by on so far…As far as you know…