Category Archives: Entertainment

Job frustrations; Megadeth

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Another day has come and passed. I am certainly in much better spirits today than I was yesterday, what that amounts to really isn’t much. I did receive yet another bitching session at work, but this time it was in a much more tolerable way. It was in a calm, firm voice that I was bitched at. This makes it more of a conversation than a bitching, which meant that I was able to get a few words in, in the same calm, firm voice. No one died, no one was injured, and I think we both were able to understand each others position when it was spoken about instead of being shouted about. I guess I am probably still a useless piece of shit, but I at least got to get in a word or two, and even surprise the boss when he found that I had not actually been wandering aimlessly the day before, but completing a task that he had assigned me earlier in the week. Of course none of that means that I am any less useless, but it was a day of relative calm that I absolutely needed.

The strange thing about what happened yesterday is that I got too angry to drink. Not really, I did imbibe a few of the frothy nectars, but not as much as normal; I was too angry to get drunk. This was certainly an unprecedented event around here. This fact was evidenced by my wife’s statement that she was pretty sure I was going to quit my job, which she told someone that she works with. She based that assumption on the fact that I said that I was going to quit, and I said it when I was sober and in a very matter-of-fact tone. This didn’t actually happen today, and with luck it won’t happen for a while. As for yesterday, that was exactly what I felt and I guess it was pretty obvious.

If I can make it through tomorrow without actually walking away from the job I will have all of Sunday to take care of things around the house and kind of cool down. I do hope that happens. I haven’t actually had to look for a job in about a decade and do not look forward to the thought of it. There have been dozens of people who have come into the store over the years and told me to look them up if I ever need a job, I am not sure how sincere they were, and hopefully I won’t have to find out in the immediate future. Enough about that.
• Megadeth’s new song “Die Dead Enough” hit the air in Phoenix a few days ago. I have been reluctant to make any mention of the single since I had only been able to hear it over really crappy radio reception. I heard the song today, in my car -which has way better reception than the pseudo radio I have in the room with my pc- and all I have to say about it is that it kicks unholy ass! The drummer is going ballistic with the triplets and quintuplets on the bass drums, the guitar is rocking in a way that Megadeth has not matched since their “Rust In Peace” album, it is fast, hard and in your face. It is, in a word, MEGADETH.

I guess that when Mustaine got injured he started to realize that he threw a few albums out there just to get the money. Then he had the time to listen to what Metallica is calling music these days, added to the fact that he is listening to the same radio station that I do, Phoenix-based and it never plays anything off of Metallica’s last few albums, or any of Megadeth’s for that matter. I guess it hit him that he needed to really hit hard with his next album. I do hope that it is as heavy as the first single would indicate, it has been a long time since I have had a cervical injury and it would be way cooler if it happened when I saw MEGADETH returning to their former glory.

When I used to visit Megadeth’s website frequently the address was www.megadethcyberarmy.com, which is no longer an address at all. The site that was called “Megadeth.com” was nothing more than a fansite. I guess the buzz about Megadeth kind of died when Mustaine got his injury, also Megadeth either sued the guy who was running Megadeth.com (which seems really unlikely since it was the best fan site I have ever seen, even to this day), or just gave him a job (the webmaster of Megadeth.com, I mean). Whatever happened, Megadeth.com seems to be the official Megadeth site. Which sucks for me.

It was just one little thing that I had in my life, but it was important to me. I was the first ever moderator of the “Official Megadeth Chat”, which was through the now dead megadethcyberarmy website. For a simple man, like me, that was power. I suppose that I should be happy with the fact that I was the first, but with the old site gone, as well as the java chat that I was in charge of, how would I even go about trying to prove it? I suppose that I just kind of gave up hope at some point. That point would have been long after I wasted a lot of time to create This. I had no idea how to make the images pre-load at the time, I also had to crop the sound from cds that I actually had and save them in some weird ass format to work with java-enabled browsers at the time. I bet you can download the whole thing and see all thirty different images being displayed in less than thirty seconds on a current broadband connection.

I guess I am a bit less into Megadeth than I was in the past, but when Megadeth is making actual songs that kick ass, while Metallica is making drippy folk songs, I guess I have to hope/choose that Megadeth is going to lay something heavy on us. Right?

Diablo; Huge hot dog; writing

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I had every intention of having a new post on Monday, but then we decided to go out to dinner and I lost the interest to write anything. Yesterday I would have posted but there was a DOS attack at the server that made it so that I was not able to check my email or view my site, not to mention killing any hopes of getting an ftp connection. So I said screw it and played some DiabloII instead.

Funny thing, DiabloII, it is just so comforting to play. I think it is sort of the way that people really long for their favorite foods from childhood when they are really starving, something familiar and comforting. Just like DiabloII. What could be more comforting than beating the ass of the most powerful beings that Hell can come up with? Nothing, damn right.

Of course I have been playing on a newer character for some time now and as I lost most of my characters to inactivity some time ago I am having to go virtually untwinked. The gear that I still do have is all of the must be level 50 or more to use variety so it doesn’t really help much on a new player. I did twink the guy an amulet (can’t remember the name, +1 to skills is basically its only real attribute), and a belt (nightsmoke maybe? 10 to all resistances), of course these are just worthless crap that I would gladly give up in favor of better resistance or a bit of life leech. I also gave him a Spirit Shroud armor that he can’t use, and likely never will since I will be into nightmare by the time he can actually wear it and it has not resistances, so it will be all but useless.

So why do I like to play this damn game again? I suppose it has been challenging to play with inferior equipment, but challenging just means frustrating. I can see why people like to get turboed past all this crap. I still have a few characters that I can take in and walk all over hell Baal, yet I have another character that gets killed in one hit by your garden variety Venom Lord. I don’t know if they actually made the resistances matter more when they put out the patch, but it sure seems like it. The first time I played the game, which was pre-LOD, I beat Diablo with almost no resistances and most all of my skill points wasted in the Thorns aura. Now I can’t even get to Diablo with 30ish resistances across the board. Hell, if it weren’t for my mercenary firing cold arrow I likely would never be able to kill a group larger than two people.

• Now on to disgusting food stories. Of course Las Vegas is famous for a lot of things, gambling, hookers, the fabled UNLV basketball team…But what they really should be getting a lot more credit for is the most disgusting hot dogs on the planet. Now I now that the ingredients that go into hot dogs should be enough to keep me from ever eating them in the first place, in fact I saw a special on PBS about how they were made when I was 15 or so and didn’t eat one for at least five or six years after. Just something about it being a dull grey paste before the coloring is added, ewwww.

Anyway, the Westward Ho casino in Vegas advertises a 3/4lb. hot dog for 1.49 and I figured I would give it a go. I did go the extra 59 cents to get them to add chili thinking that I would never be able to eat that much hot dog by itself. Boy was I ever right. The hot dog is served on a paper plate, my best guess is that the plate was of the 10 3/4in. size. The bun covers the plate from edge to edge, while the hot dog sticks out of the bun and off of the plate by about 2inches on each side. When you add to that the fact that the hot dog is about the same size as a half dollar you will get an idea of how big the thing really is. The worst part is that without the chili I would likely have taken about one bite and thrown the whole thing away. It was just so salty, it didn’t taste like a grilled stadium frank or anything of that nature, it tasted like a boiled salt lick. I guess salt is about the cheapest spice you can get your hands on and likely the only one they used judging by taste.

I did manage to eat the entire bun, all of the chili, and maybe half of the hot dog. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been expecting gourmet cuisine when paying two bucks for 3/4 of a pound of food, but I will know in the future that if the price of an entree seems ridiculously low that likely means that the quality of the entree is likely also ridiculously low. This could also be just because I am really sensitive to the taste of salt, there were dozens of other people there eating these horrendous things with nothing on them but ketchup and mustard, perhaps these people had taken in a few more cocktails than I had? In short, Westward Ho hot dog, do it once for the novelty, never eat another hot dog as long as you live.

Let’s see. I have talked about video games and huge weiners, what more must I do to attract the middle aged nerd demographic?

• In other news, I have just surpassed the $1 mark on my Amazon associates account. Of course all of the purchases were made either by my wife or myself so I am not entirely sure if that is a good thing. Hell, I’m not even entirely sure if that is a legal thing. I just figured that if I am going to buy something off of Amazon and someone is going to get a bit of money for the transaction it might as well be me. Prior to having this page I always clicked through BlackChampagne for all of my Amazon purposes. It is not like I am actually trying to make money with this site though, if that was the case it would be nothing but hardcore porn, probably have a lot of scumware and that sort of thing. This is just my little soapbox from which to say whatever I want.

Funny how it has changed. I started this site with every intention of typing all of my short stories onto it, with the hopes that people would read and enjoy them. Then I actually read some of my short stories with fresh eyes…All that just went right out the window. I do still enjoy writing the Arthur Witles stories, and people do still email me to tell me how much they enjoyed them. I think this is simply because we just don’t expect nearly as much from a story that is meant to be humorous as we do from a ‘real’ story.

I really should sit down someday and start to type up a few more of the Witles stories. As I wrote more of them I expanded on the little nuances of his character, as well as the Dr. Ampere character, and found that it was probably more enjoyable for me to write than it ever could be for anyone to read. I think the thing that makes that possible is that since it is a humorous story a lot of really absurd stuff happens, not impossible, just extremely unlikely. With paramaters like that it is really easy to surprise the reader, even make them laugh in a way that I would probably never be able to do if I were trying to cause the same emotion with a more by the book approach.

Isn’t it strange how it can take someone so long to realize the actual limits of their ability? I have a file cabinet full of absolute crap that I have written which will never see the light of day. From the time I was in my early teens until the mid twenties I really believed that I was going to be a writer, I really believed that I was going to get a novel published, I really believed that I was a pretty good writer. I have now kind of sobered up to the fact that I am likely never going to see a book in print, if I do it will likely be with my paying all of the costs of publishing for the sole purpose of gifting it to friends and family. I suppose that is a sort of pessimistic view of it, but it seems to be the most realistic. All that being said, when is the last time you saw an author that really came into success before they were in their mid thirties? So maybe I should just scrap everything that I have done previously and start with a clean slate. I had a really bizarre dream a few months ago that would make a great premise for a novel, the problem is that I don’t think I would be able to make it anything better than mediocre, and mediocre doesn’t meet the mark when you are competing against established authors.

When it comes right down to it, I will never know if my writing is any good unless I try. I know that my grammar is far from perfect, but as for my ability to tell a story how will I know unless I actually complete something and test the waters? If I do try, and ultimately fail, it will at least be something to be handed down from generation to generation, that is what I have to tell myself for motivation to at least try…

Space technology fails; Harry Potter game

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I just don’t know what the world is coming to, what when a site as prominent as mine can post the wrong date and leave it up for two days without anyone emailing to bitch about it. I would have expected more from you. Of course, the “you” in that statement is mostly me at this point, and I didn’t even notice the mistake until just now when I was adding the page to the daily archives. I will hold myself to a higher standard in the future, or not, depending on my mood.

• Something that I have been hoping to write about for a week now still has not seemed to happen. I am talking about that multi-billion dollar device that is now in orbit around Saturn, and the spectacular images I was expecting it to be sending back to earth. After a week in orbit this is the best it can do? I have seen better images of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I was expecting images more like those that are being sent back by the Hubble Telescope, which, while beautiful, are hard as hell to find a hard link to, I have linked to a half a dozen so far but the links just never work when I try to click them. If you really want to see some unbelievable images of space just do a quick yahoo image search for Hubble Telescope, simply amazing.

Shouldn’t technology have advanced at least some since the ’60s when we first started shooting crap at the moon? How is it possible that something that was sent into space only six or seven years ago can be sending back images that look like they were done on a Spirograph? Sure they have to travel millions of miles and the such, but come on! If we were going to spend billions of dollars on the technology to get this thing all the way to Saturn, don’t you think we could have gone the extra couple of bucks to get a color camera? I could take a close-up photo of the grain pattern in a block of wood and come up with images as good or better than what is coming back from Saturn.

I am just a bit disappointed with the results so far, that’s all. Perhaps it will be like what happened with the initial launch of the Hubble Telescope and there will be some minor problem that can be repaired to make the images more vibrant. I sure do hope so, I have been waiting to see these images ever since I heard of the launch all those years ago. Not that I am a space-nerd so much, just that the images captured in space can be so far out of the ordinary that they really seem to be more a fine work of art than something happening randomly…The current photos are also art I guess, just art done by blind people with only one crayon.

• Today was the first day of the new grocery ditributor era at work. The truck showed up an hour and a half early, which is a major plus, as the old distributor always showed up late, or later, if at all. The only problem with that is that I was just stepping out of the shower when I got the call. I do hate to make their drivers wait. I got there as quickly as I could and the two of us had finished unloading the merchandise in about thirty minutes. That is about how long it always takes, unless the load was particularly large or small. It didn’t seem so different at all.

Then something strange happened.

The guy gets off of the truck, comes onto the landing, and starts helping me check in all of the perishable items one at a time. This was something that the other company Never did. The new company requires it. I love that all the way around. There was a mispick (just like it sounds, wrong item) in the frozen and a short (just like it sounds, not there) in the dairy, and he gave us an immediate credit for them. He went further to give us the immediate credit for a bag of dog food that was torn and a case of condensed milk that had been damaged. Wow.

Here is how that last paragraph would have gone down with the old company. The driver leaves the second the stuff is off the truck. I find the short in the dairy section and call it in. The boss finds the mispick in the frozen section and calls it in. We put the damaged dog food and condensed milk off to the side and call that in. I write down everything that is wrong on a piece of paper along with case costs and item codes. The next week we should have a credit for the short, but often didn’t and would have to call again. The mispick and damaged items would be returned, though no paperwork ever changed hands (which is why we had to keep a running tally of it all), and within three weeks or a month the store would get a credit for it.

Being a small business it is difficult to keep track of all of this in the first place, but even worse is having the money already paid and having to wait for them to issue a credit. It often took three or four phone calls over the course of a month to get the money back. The system protects them as well since a case of cheese can easily cost $70 and if it is there it will have been checked in by one of their guys and one of ours, hard to dispute that. When you factor in that it only took the two of us about five minutes to check in all the perishable items and find the mistakes I just don’t know why the other company never did it.

One thing that was a bit irritating about the new company is that they had some of the profit margins all out of whack on the invoices. I should mention that the old company did not even tell you the unit cost on the invoice, let alone a suggested retail price or profit margin, so this was a small inconvenience. One that is also easily overcome with the boss figuring out what he wants to sell it for and me typing upc’s into the computer and changing retails. I am going to consult the company tomorrow to see if they can send us shelf tags of the items that we change the retail on, if they can’t I can still print our old tags out for the items, but, I think it would look a bit tacky to have two sets of tags going.

I am sure that talk of this is monumentally boring so I will move on.

• I have mentioned my newfound interest in Harry Potter in a couple of recent posts. The wife bought the first PC game based on the novels about a week ago. I started to play it on Sunday and had reached the final battle on Monday. It is a kids game, so I wasn’t expecting much, which is why I was so sorely disappointed.

I am about to do battle with the final “boss” in the game and I am missing half of the things that can be found along the way. To be fair, to myself, there were a few places that I was pretty sure that I needed to go, but the linear gameplay makes it so that if you go the wrong way first you can never go back the other way. If I were to play it through again (I say again as if I have ever beaten it) I am sure that I would be able to find more of those damn little cards that you are supposed to be collecting.

The thing that I really hate about the game is Quidditch. I am not horrible at games like F-Zero, I can do pretty well in flying simulation type games, but this Quidditch just kicks my ass. I think the biggest reason for that is the controls are on the keyboard and my old pc joystick won’t connect to either of the computers that we currently have. If you had the speed up/slow down buttons as well as all four direction keys on one of those it would be pretty easy I think. Even after having set the motion keys to “WASD”, like the old pc games I used to play, it still took me a lot longer than I would like to admit to win the damn matches. Mind you, they won’t let the other guys win, they will just wait forever if you don’t win.

Beyond that, the game is pretty fun for what it is. It is cute in places, makes you think a little bit, and could probably be completed perfectly by any six year old in the entire world. Let those little bastards try the original PitFall with an old Atari controller and we will see how good they really are. Of course they are releasing all of those old games for the hand held gaming systems now, but I doubt that any of those kids will ever be able to top my best of flipping the counter 4 times on Asteroids before my mom made me stop to come and eat a sandwich.

Howard Stern held to different standards of decency than senators; Harry Potter

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Skipped yesterday’s post, blah blah, no one noticed, blah blah, no reason why, blah blah.

The truth is that I spent a bit of time first emailing a couple of people that I had not in some time, second, I was getting prepared for this years Vegas Vacation by playing a bit of video poker on Pogo.com. I suppose neither of those things should be more important than what I am doing here, but wait, I am doing this site for my own enjoyment, so if I would enjoy doing something else more..Doesn’t that mean that I was obligated to not write anything here? I would have enjoyed it far less than the video poker, that would have made it seem like, well, work to do a post yesterday. That was never my intention.

• One quick thing from the news that is just irritating me. So the vice president says Fuck Off on the Senate floor, albeit after the session had ended, isn’t that wrong on at least some level?

I have defended Howard Stern, even though I do not like him and never listen to his show, on at least a couple of occasions. Here are the ones that I could quickly find; Exhibit A, Exhibit B I am sure that I defended him on at least one other occasion, but as I do not maintain my archives as well as I should I just can’t seem to find it. I have always defended Howard Stern’s freedom of speech based on the fact that no one actually Had to listen to what he was saying. If you don’t like what any person is saying on the radio you can certainly change the station or turn it off completely (which pretty much summarizes how I tolerate Rush Limbaugh). The only people who don’t seem to understand that logic are the stuffy, by-the-book people that we throw into congress (which means old, white men for the most part, that is why Limbaugh can get away with calling Black people cancer, his peers seem to all agree). Those are the only people that seem to find Howard Stern so offensive that they listen to it long enough to figure out why they are offended by it, then take action by getting the FCC involved.

Howard Stern’s show never uses the “F-word”, or it is at least bleeped if they do, and he is catering to a voluntary audience. No one that is listening to the Howard Stern Show actually HAS to be listening to it, while in the case of Cheney saying, “Fuck Off” on the Senate floor, everyone that was there heard it whether they wanted to or not. These are the same people that are trying to get Howard Stern taken off the air for using such offensive words as Vagina, Penis, Clitoris and Orgasm. If Stern were ever to drop the F-Word on a radio show he would simply be gone, there would be no explaining, he would just be gone.

I assume that there must be a pretty harsh consequence for using such a word on the floor of the Senate then, right?

Pressed whether he condones the use of such language in the Senate, Frist pointed out that the chamber was not in session at the time, “so I am not going to condone, I am not going to overly criticize the language that people in the — the language that people use to express themselves.”

Well if that isn’t proof that democracy seems to be far more lenient on those in power I don’t know what is. Not even a, “Hey, by the way, try not to curse on the Senate floor”. No, no, just a defense that he was basically angry. Lots of people get angry, lots of people don’t tell other people to “fuck off” in the face of a lot of media and other witnesses. How far would that anger have had to escalate before they thought he did something wrong? Yes, he ripped the heart out of a child and ate it in front of the reporters, but he was in a bad mood so he shan’t be punished.

I say again, Hell in a hand-basket.

• I am likely about the last person in the entire world to get into the Harry Potter craze. I think that I am doing it more out of curiosity than actual desire, but I am still enjoying the experience. Today, for instance, I read about the last two-thirds of the second book in the morning, then watched the dvd starting at about noon. This is the only time I have watched a movie within ten years or so of having read the book, so I was able to see a lot of the changes that were made when the book went from print to the big screen. I am not sure whether or not that is a good thing.

The books (at least the two that I have read) are children’s books, one wouldn’t expect them to have any major twists in the plot or the target audience just would not be able to follow. The first book was so predictable that I knew the outcome within about the first fifty pages. The second book actually had me tossing around a couple of ideas in my head as to how it would turn out. Neither of which turned out to be accurate. So that was good, I didn’t know the ending in the first chapter -well, I knew Harry was going to defeat whatever it was, I just didn’t know what it was, or who it was-. The movie was pretty faithful to the book, there were a lot of changes that were obviously made due to time constraints, but the plot went about the same. I could sit here and nit-pick about a bunch of stuff that they changed from the book to the movie, but most of it was for the better. Even as simple as the storyline was, it is hard to fit everything into a couple of hours.

My biggest bitch about the book was that there was a diary with the inscription T. M. Riddle on it. About half way through the book it actually spelled out all three names (which it showed on the diary in the movie, but only for a second), and since the last name was riddle, and the name was so weird, I looked at the name for about three minutes until I finally found the anagram. The anagram was revealed later in both the movie and the book. I had taken half of the fun out of reading the rest of the book at that point, but I went ahead anyway, just to finish it. As I said, it is just a brief glimpse in the movie and one would likely not be able to figure it out from that alone.

The movie version did clean up some of Rowling’s sloppy work. The last fifty or so pages of the book I was reading on in WTF mode. Things didn’t fit, things got garbled, there was talk of a rooster…The end of that book just kind of sounded like she was trying to pound it out to meet a deadline so she could get a paycheck. The movie cleaned up a lot of her rough edges, while still leaving major holes in the fabric. I don’t think it will get better in future episodes, but I have been wrong before.

I think there will eventually be two camps on this subject, one that adores the books, the other adoring the films. From what I have seen in the first two books and films, Hollywood makes it seem much more logical than the books. I certainly hope that the next book will prove me wrong, but Rowlings endings just seem to suck. You see it coming, it comes, and you are left to wait for the next book.

All that being said, it is still more enjoyable to read those books than to read this site, you FREAK.

Steakhouse and Deadly Rooms of Death

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As anyone who has read this site at all would expect, I went ahead and played some more of that silly DROD game, both yesterday and today. For similar reasons you would also know that whatever board was just “absolutely impossible” yesterday was easily overcome with a bit of thought. As well as a couple of other boards that I had been stuck on for a while. It is for that reason that I will not go into any detail of the particular board that has me stuck currently, since that will be a non issue by the time I post again, at least to follow the trend.

• The wife and I went out to dinner tonight, which is kind of unusual on a Friday night, but not unheard of. The place that we went to was “Yolanda’s Chuckwagon”. I would love to give you a link to a website, but the place doesn’t even accept credit/debit cards so it is probably unlikely that they have a website. The steak was excellent. If you ever happen to be somewhere between Phoenix and Tucson I would highly recommend stopping by for a taste of their Sirloin. Unfortunately there is just the one location, and it is a long way from damn near anywhere. Well worth the drive from where I live, maybe not worth the drive from upstate New York. I must say that it is the best steak that I have ever eaten in a restaurant though, far better than what passes for steak at the Outback Steakhouse.

The only problem that Yolanda’s has is the location. I think that they probably get a lot of traffic from the people who work at the prisons but live in Tucson, those people would have to pass the place twice a day on their commute, and it is the only thing resembling a steak for fifty miles in any direction. The fact that the Steak is extremely good and the portions are simply huge just makes anyone who eats there tell their friends. I would do the same, if I had any friends, instead I will tell you all about it, just in case you ever happen to be in the area. They do offer non-bovine meals as well, but only chicken as far as what I could tell. There were options on the menu for shrimp and lobster but they did not list a price and just simply said ‘varies by market, when available’. You could also just indulge in the salad bar, 6.25 gets you that in unlimited quantities and there are enough things to put on the salad that you certainly would not be disappointed. (unless, of course, you are that one asshole that wants fresh-steamed pumpkin on your salad, even though pumpkin is way out of season).

I sure do wish there were places to eat around here that had more than just one location as I am sure that it is pretty boring to read about a restaurant that you will never dine at. Of course lots of people read about Mc’Donald’s in the news and would never dine there either, so perhaps market saturation alone does not a restaurant make.

For some reason continuing on the restaurant thing, why I got no idea, I began to think about the place that we usually eat our mexican food. I have spoken about the place in at least a few posts, which I am not going to look up currently. L&B has extremely good mexican food, and I suppose it is not a real big surprise that the people who started the restaurant were hispanic. They were serving the chips and salsa prior to the meal long before someone figured out that if you did that you could have smaller entrees. L&B serves huge portions that are far better than any chain restaurant could ever do.

It was only when I started to think of the two local places that I realized why the Denny’s and JB’s of the world do so well. If you roll into a town you have never been to and see a Denny’s sign you kind of know what to expect, while when you see the sign for “Pete’s Good Eats” you don’t really know anything about it. While every town likely has a couple of eateries with wonderful reputations, most also have that one place that no one ever visits. How are you to know which is the one that has a golden reputation and which has recently reopened after bribing the local health officials to hide their insect problem? I guess that is why the Denny’s and the JB’s will spring up on every corner while the local place will get shut down; people would rather eat mediocre food than gamble about whether it will be great or garbage -I am not going to exclude myself from this group of people-.

That is why I find it such a wonder that McDonald’s is as big as it is. We know that the food is mediocre, at best. We know that the food is going to lead directly to obesity and heart conditions, yet we continue to eat it. Subway has started to expand rapidly in the last few years as well, but seriously, if you are eating a 12″ sub sandwich for lunch everyday, and then layering it with mayonaise, cheese, olive oil and the such, you would be better off with a big mac.

There is no way that anyone would mistake me for someone who lives an ‘active lifestyle’, but I was trying to get an estimate of how far I walk in an average day of work. I tried to face it like the way one would try to determine the word count on a thesis. I simply counted my steps during one-minute time-frames (randomly, you know, like when I remembered to do it again) over the course of a day. I averaged the number of steps based on the eleven one-minute examples, then multiplied that by the number of minutes I was at work. Then, assuming that each stride is about (I said 24 inches, since there are a lot of corners and the such that can not be compensated for otherwise) I calculated that I walk just a bit over eight miles while I am at work each day. That might not seem like much, but I also do not have the opportunity to sit down and the motion is pretty much constant. To someone who didn’t do what I do it would be a real cardio work-out. When you add to that the fact that I have to move around boxes of beef (average weight about 70 pounds) in the walk in every day, I think that I probably get more excercise than the majority of people in my age range. Now if I could just quit drinking all the beer I might be able to reverse the nine pounds that I have gained since the neck injury I had earlier this year…

Deadly Rooms of Death; Politics

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So yesterday brought about another late day at work, thus nothing new posted here. As usual I was not aware that it was going to be a late day until halfway through my shift. Since that is normally the case I guess it would be a bit senseless to bitch about it. After all, I have been working there for damn near ten years, if I were that annoyed by it I would surely have found a different job by now, right?

As for the day at work today, it sucked and I hated it, thanks for asking. Not that it really sucked, or that I really hated it, but that I spent the extra hours at work last night using a scraper to remove excess was and dirt build-up from the edges of some of the tiles on the aisles that get a lot of traffic. I was pretty impressed with how good they looked, so was the boss, as she suggested that I spend a bit more time today working on it. Problem there is that I have a huge blister on me knee from having spent a good couple of hours kneeling on it during the process yesterday (as well as sliding on it, as it was quicker than actually standing up and taking a step to get to the next tile) so I was in pretty serious pain while I continued the process today. I understand that work is meant to be work, and that it is often uncomfortable, but man that hurt. I tried to be smart and use the other knee while I was doing it today, this lead to the denim on the blistered knee getting stretched really tight over it, which hurt more than actually kneeling on it, but that is all over now. On to the animal porn!

• I don’t know why, but I have taken to playing that silly little Deadly Rooms of Death game again of late. The reason that I stopped playing it originally was that when I got the new computer I didn’t bother to swap my player file from the old machine. I thought it may be fun to play through the first few levels again, see how easy they were in comparison to the level that I was at now. That was all true and such, but I got stuck on exactly the same damn boards for exactly the same reason. The drod forums were down at the time so I couldn’t even get a hint as to what I was doing wrong, that mixture of frustration and anger is not what one is looking for when they try to play a game then, is it? Since having recently started playing again I have managed to defeat all of the boards that I had been having problems with on the old machine, but still can’t seem to make it all the way through the 8th level. I know that I can do it, so I guess maybe a more accurate statement is that I don’t have the patience to do it. All of the monsters in the game act in very predictable ways, so you know what every action will result in, yet, in haste, it is easy to overlook some of the consequences to a certain action. When tar is involved it is easy to overlook a lot of the consequences. The way the tar, in particular, acts makes you need to take at least a few seconds to think about your next move, else you could block your escape, box yourself in, or end up with a tar baby in a position to kill you.

The problems that I am having with the tar are easily overcome if I just think for a few seconds before I slash, but where is the fun in that? I guess the fun may be in actually conquering the boards, I wouldn’t know. Honestly, I know that I could beat each of the boards if I were to take my time and think through each move, yet that seems really tedious at times. If I wanted to spend that kind of time on a game I would just find my copy of Pandora’s Box and give it another go.

I suppose I really shouldn’t bitch about freeware though. I didn’t pay for the opportunity to play it, and I enjoyed it, at times. Not to mention there seem to be legions of followers of the DROD game. I suppose that means that there are legions of people with a hell of a lot more patience than me. Hmmm, who knew.

• The last couple of days have been littered with all sorts of news. The problem with the so-called news is that it has all been about the 9/11 commision’s ruling that Saddam Hussein, and therefore Iraq, were not in any way involved with the attacks on 9/11. This is SO not news. That is exactly what everyone in the free world, with the exception of the current U.S. administration, has been saying since long before Bush was able to start a war with Iraq; A war based totally on the absolute lies that he and his administration fed to the American public.

I do not like to talk about politics, I do not feel that I am informed enough to do so. There are, however, some things that are just so obviously lies or ‘mis-truths’ that it doesn’t even take a three-year-old’s intellect to discern the truth. As is the case here. Much like the following quote, which I gleaned from Reuters (I think) where Bush tries to clear this all up:

“This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida,” Bush said. “We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. For example, Iraqi intelligence officers met with (Osama) bin Laden, the head of al-Qaida, in the Sudan. There’s numerous contacts between the two.”

Now isn’t that kind of the polar opposite of what he was saying to get us all drummed up to go into a war with Iraq?

To use the logic in Bush’s statement, wouldn’t it be true that the U.S. was also pretty directly involved in the 9/11 attacks? We did supply arms to Bin Laden in the eighties. Certainly giving them weapons would be worse than a hand-shake somewhere in the middle of Sudan, right?

To follow that same train of logic, everyone that has ever spoken to Bush must also be 100% behind the invasion of Iraq. If that is not the case then even his (Bush’s) latest cop-out isn’t going to hold any water. How ignorant can one be and actually make it into the oval office? Ask Dubya.

That is why I do not like to write about politics. I am too inclined to NOT believe what I see on tv. I am not very good at being an American since I like to form my own opinions as opposed to having them spoon-fed to me…Or, at the very least, put into the ‘mad cow burger’ that I am eating, while the government turns a blind eye.

Harry Potter; Personal

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Today was a day of mixed blessings. The first of which was that I did not know which of the pipes was distrubuting cold and hot water, so I let each of them run into a bucket for about a minute. Or course the one that was spewing out warm water turned out to be the “cold” water, a fact that I did not know until I went to see what was taking the thing so long, and noticed that the water line marked as ‘C’ was quite hot to the touch. You live, you learn.

The stalemate between my wife and my parents-in-law seems to be over as they were over at the house today. While she (the mother-in-law) was less than friendly, he (the father-in-law) was quite cordial and I did enjoy speaking with him. That is likely in a lot of families though, the public in general would like to villify the father of the bride while the reality is that the mother of the bride has so much control over him/the situation that it is always going to go her way no matter what. That is not a given fact so much as it is an estimation that I have come up with after seeing the reactions of numerous Mothers on the day of the prom, compared to numerous fathers on the day of the prom. After all, whatever happens on PROM night is sealed in a mayonaise jar on the front porch of Funk and Wagnalls so it can’t be disputed or conversed about, right…

• So I read the first Harry Potter book over the weekend. I suppose it would be more true to say that I read the first thirty pages of it while I was on the shitter on Friday and Saturday, then read the other 300 pages today. It was a pretty decent read.

I am not trying to imply that it is a literary masterpiece or anything of the such, just to say that it kept me involved to the point that I read the book (basically cover to cover) today. I have not been so involved with characters as this book makes you since the first John Saul novel that I read. Of course Saul continued to write the same story over and over again just to get a check.

The first two chapters of the “Potter” book, I was joking with my wife about circling the noun and under-lining the verb. Sometime between then and now I actually read damn near 300 pages of that same book.

Was it compelling? No. Did I feel drawn to the book enough to keep reading it? No. It was certainly a book for very young people. There were no complex sentence structures, even the ending had been telegraphed from the start of the book. At the same time the characters were wonderful and you want to read just a bit more to find out what happens to Hagrid, Draco, the Weasley’s and Ms. Granger. The story that this book told might not have been compelling, but the speculation of the next book is.

Bottom line, had I been in my teens, or pre-teens, when this book was released, I would have been all over it. Like a teen-ager to a new Harry Potter book, if you want to use an analogy. Why this thing, “Harry Potter”, is doing so well at the moment we may never know, but if it is getting kids to turn the pages of a book rather than stealing their daddy’s gun, it is certainly a step in the right direction.

Appliances; Feedback; Pogo

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This is going to be a pretty late post even by my standards. To the point that it will likely no longer be the 12th by the time I get it finished and uploaded. Not that I think anyone reading my site is actually looking for late breaking news or anything, just that I was going to skip the post today, but decided to go ahead and type something up shortly after 10p.m. That being said, this might not live up to the high standard of journalistic integrity that you have come to grow and love…somewhere…definitely not here, but it likely won’t even hold up under my, much more realistic, ideals concerning site content. Reading further will be your choice, not mine…

I got some feedback about the site today, but not in the typical fashion. Someone actually came into the store to tell me that he had felt exactly the way that I did when I took customer service to a whole new level. This was not a person who happened upon the site by accident of course, I had given him the URL a couple of weeks ago but had no idea that he was actively reading what I was posting. While I did enjoy the fact that he could relate to the story, I now understand why it is better to let people that you don’t know read the posts if you are going to be getting into stories regarding your work or other personal affairs.

Not that I am going to let that stop me from bitching about local events or anything, just that I am going to make sure that the actual names of the persons involved are not used. I mean if I were to quit bitching about the idiots I have to work with where would I find the same quality of idiot stories to tell? Dubya is too easy a target, btw.

The reason that I was going to be skipping the post today was two-fold. The first reason is that I have been playing yet another silly game over at Pogo.com. The game that I was playing tonight was ‘Tri-Peak Solitaire’. I think that every gaming site out there has a version of the game, I chose to play this one since it adds to my total token count. I have played the game extensively in the past, but rediscovered it after I got tired of Phlinx. So I had to clear the board six times to get the ‘bonus spin’, and I proceeded to do that about 4-5 times. It took a bit of time, time that could have been better spent doing other things, but then again that is true of most endeavors.

The other reason is certainly not something that I would care to go into in this venue, but something that was far more important than the silly game that I spent so much time playing. The immediate concern was for the happiness of my wife, which is priceless, but also shattered today by conditions that were ‘kind of’ beyond her control, but that she should have seen coming. Much like standing between two railroad tracks, you may not see the train when you take that position, but a train will eventually be going that way. There likely aren’t a whole lot of options if you are the one between the tracks either.

Sure the reference is pretty vague, but that is all that I am willing to commit to at this time.

So we got our new washing machine today. It sure looks nice, all sleek, like something that is very sleek, and white. It is much more streamlined than our old washer, but then one has to ask one’s self if they are going to base a washing machine purchase on said machine’s aerodynamic qualities. I am not going to throw the thing out the window, I doubt that my wife is either, even as sleek as it looks I don’t think it could fly. Even if it could fly it is not sapient and would likely just sit there in the laundry room, hovering. That would be pretty cool though; view the amazing, flying, washing machine.

I suppose the “Consumer Reports” mag. has been a bit lax in the last few years. I mean what, they didn’t even test the aerodynamics of large appliances? If and when I do decide to throw my refrigerator at the kids in the lawn, I want to know how well that sucker flies! If it is going to fall after ten or twelve feet based on the fact that that was the height of the window it was thrown from, that is stuff I need to know! If no refrigerator can be thrown that distance with a man of average strength throwing it, that is something that I also need to know. If two of the top body-builders in the world can not make the thing get air-borne, that is something that I should also know. Every appliance does what it is supposed to do, if they didn’t they would never be sold. I want FEATURES, like the refrigerator flying around and smacking the heads of kids who piss it off. Damn it, Features.

Also, I have taken the liberty of ripping off the latest “Guadalupe Squares” from 98KUPD. It seems that they get less and less funny the more that you listen to them. By that I am not meaning to listen to one over and over again, more that the originality of it is totally gone and they are redoing stuff they did only weeks before. It still is pretty funny, and you can hear the latest one by downloading this file. I think this may have been their longest game ever, and while it was humorous, I would not recommend you waste the tiem on it if you do not have a cable modem.

The ultimate in customer service; silly games

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My wife and I went out to dinner yesterday, and it was nice. There was a bonus in the fact that the establishment did not have any grenadine syrup, which is one of the three ingredients in a Tequila Sunrise, which was the drink that my wife ordered. So the guy who was tending the restaurant’s bar (who actually runs the joint) gave her the unfinished tequila sunrise (which was just O.J. and tequila) and a different drink that he thought she might like, which was just coconut rum with pineapple juice, at no charge. Aside from the that the food was quite good, as always, the service was great, it usually is, and I likely gained three pounds by eating all the food.

The reason that I bring up the dinner story is that I wanted to talk a bit about Mario. I am not sure who technically owns that restaurant at this point, but I do know that Mario is the guy that handles all of the day to day operations of the place. In addition to that he also runs a bar at the other end of town, again handling everything on a day to day basis. Can you imagine how many hours a week he must spend at one place or the other? That must be a tremendous amount of work and stress, I don’t know how he does it. When I say that he is running the place I don’t mean like a supervisor, he actually does whatever needs to be done. Last night he was tending bar while also dealing with customer complaints and the such. That is a level of dedication that I don’t think a lot of people really ever have, though it is true that the more money the places make the more money he makes, but at some point you would think that he would just get tired of being there eighty hours a week.

His dedication to both of the establishments is probably a huge factor in why they both remain busy all year while other restaurants and bars end up going out of business the first slow season (which is now). I am sure that like any good P.R. Guy he knows just how to talk to each customer to make them feel like whatever problem there may have been it had been completely resolved. To the point that they will not only leave happy, but recommend the place to friends even after a potentially bad experience that was taken care of. Whatever good fortune comes his way it is going to be based 100% on his dedication and understanding of the customer. I know that I could never do that.

There was a particular incident where I am working now that would prove that, or at least it did at the time, though I have gotten a lot better at keeping a level head when people are being belligerent since then. Without going into too much detail I will just say that there was a guy who was screaming like we had shot his wife when he was overcharged by six cents for something. He would not accept the six cents in return, he would not accept a full refund for the item as a courtesy for our mistake, he just wanted to yell about the damn six cents. He wouldn’t leave the store, there were a lot of people watching, I was barely 21 I didn’t really know how to handle it. I explained to him that all I could do was refund his money, he would not take it, he just wanted to yell. After ten minutes or so of this I told him I was going to call the police to have him escorted from the property.

This was the exact moment that I got really, really pissed off. When I went for the phone to call the police, the man in question made a very quick, very quiet exit. In fact when he saw me reach for the phone, he ran out the door. I proceeded to NOT call the police, I gave my name tag and apron to the cashier, reminded her that I was not actually on the clock (which was true, I came over since the boss was on vacation and someone needed to make this guy go away,) and chased after him. When I confronted him out front he seemed a lot more agreeable than he had been while he was inside the store and for some reason that just pissed me off even more…

The actual details get a bit vague at this point. I remember a bit of very stern dialogue, I remember giving him five dollars, I remember punching him in the face so hard that it probably ruptured his appendix, beyond that I remember nothing. He apparently never called the police on me (I thought he wouldn’t since he bolted when I tried to make the call from inside the store, that was likely why I did what I did) and I never heard another word about the entire thing again. Well, truthfully the cashier did ask what happened when I went back into the store and I told her what happened, but I never said anything to the owners, nor has anyone come around looking for the guy that punched the guy in the parking lot all of those years ago. I never saw that guy again either, which was unfortunate since I really would like to have apologized for what I had done, either that or I really wanted to see how bad a shiner he had, I mean I hit him hard.

Now that I am a bit older I know that I would not have handled that situation the way that I did then. When you work in customer service or retail for any amount of time you simply learn to mask your emotions with a happy smile, while you are thinking about doing something like that. I guess it takes a lot of years to develop sufficient patience to handle people like the guy that I dealt with that day, but I would also think that no matter how patient you are there has got to be a limit. Fortunately I have not found occasion to actually bring a fist against anyone since then, though I have really wanted to a few times.

For the record, that story was just that, a story. There are only two people in the entire world that know the outcome of that particular altercation, if you happen to find the other guy, please kick his ass, he deserves it.

• There is a game that I have been playing a lot of recently, it is called “Phlinx”. It is one of the games on Pogo.com. I think that you have to be a “club pogo” member to play it, but as I recall there is a free trial period for the club if you really want to give it a try. The game is very similar to Snood. It is also very similar to Dynomite. I am not sure why I have such an obsession with this one, but it probably is due to having high scores by the hour and by twenty-four hours that you can check after every completed level (a level being four games).

The graphics and sounds in Phlinx are a lot better than the ones in Snood, while it doesn’t have an actual puzzle mode like Dynomite. Also the different difficulty levels in the game actually make a difference in your ability to solve it, as opposed to just having more blocks to start with. You can not necessarily ever “win” the game since it will just load up and start over, but you can marvel at getting ever higher scores, particularly when you set it on expert mode, to see how many of the day’s high scores you can get.

The game certainly isn’t for everyone, yet for some reason I play it a couple of times before I actually get into playing any of the actual games that I have installed on my system. Why? I guess to just make sure that I can still at least get on the top 5 high scores in the last 24 hours. I know that is a pretty empty goal, but it is all mine.

Nirvana

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I have nothing slated to write about today. There are a couple of subjects that I would certainly love to get into, yet I am inhibited by the fact that I do not want to name any names (or even imply them through description). If you are reading this post and wondering if one of the inhibited stories was about you, I can assure you that it was not. The inhibited stories were regarding people other than you, and stories other than the ones that you spoke to me. I am aware that the previous does not make for a spectacular opening statement, yet, I also know that someone, somewhere may continue to read.

• This is going to be a very unpopular post, I am sure. I am going to talk a bit about the band Nirvana. I can not find a definite link to an “official site” for the band so you don’t get one here.

I have absolutely nothing against the band Nirvana, I was one of the many millions of people that bought their album NeverMind when it was first released. My purchase of the CD was likely fueled by the constant airplay on MTV. They certainly did smash the Hair-Band type stuff that I was listening to into the ground. Nirvana was fresh, crass and angry. They were trying to piss people off with their music, and they did a good job of it. The more the parents got pissed off, the more the kids listened to it. Nirvana was like a drug that you would do in your basement when your parents weren’t home, just to get the fix.

I am the type of person that thinks that your name should only appear in the paper/local news at three times; Birth, Marriage and then Death. When Nirvana ‘hit’, it made me think that maybe there was a bit more to teen aggression than anyone had ever told me about. I followed Nirvana faithfully for the first few albums, I was paying to see shows as well as paying for albums and t-shirts, I was totally into the message that they spoke (whether that was intention or not).

The thing about it is that my infatuation with Nirvana only lasted for a couple of months.

Metallica, who had been releasing albums since about 1982, and who I had also followed pretty religiously, released the “Black Album” later in 1991. I was pretty damn sure (even at that time) that there were going to be no more glam/hair bands, but I was not sure which tangent of music to follow. I tried to get behind Metallica, since they had been keeping me in a cervical collar for the better part of a decade, yet the grungy sound of Nirvana stuck in my head. I do not mean to imply that the one was better than the other, just that I had been listening to the one while I was damn near in diapers and, as such, unlikely to change my musical views.

I went the way of the grunge only until everyone that I was hanging out with started to smell really bad. No offense to the whole ‘grunge scene’, but you can buy a bar of soap for like fifty cents, and in most cases you really should.

What happened next is that both Nirvana and Metallica started to release a bunch of crap that even my fireplace would not have. Is there something about success that makes you think that you can do anything you want, or do they just get so high that they think they are releasing stuff as powerful as their earlier stuff? The world will never know. The reason that the world will never know is that Cobain killed himself, if you can believe What you see here.

At least Cobain can fall back on the excuse that he is dead, Hetfield continues to write lyrics that are increasingly annoying, and less and less important to anyone. When Hetfield can no longer think of new lyrics, he rips off old songs like ‘whiskey in the jar’ or ‘turn the page’. Metallica then contiues to do horrible re-makes of the songs.

It is kind of funny, to me, that I started this whole thing with the intention of bitching about Cobain’s band Nirvana. Yet, as I write it I am talking myself into bitching about the later releases of Metallica.

At least Cobain had the good sense to get out while he was still a superstar, Metallica has gone the polar opposite direction from there. I will not be surprised to see Metallica playing show-tunes the next time I visit Vegas.

I know that I am no one to be bitching, I own only a piece of digital real-estate that is rarely visited, but, truth be told, if the Macarena had been released in 1991 it would have broken the country’s grip on glam rock. We didn’t need a Super-Star, we just needed an alternative. That is why, I think, we labeled all of the Seattle bands as alternative. They were the alternative to the crap that was on the radio.