Category Archives: Entertainment

TV & PC

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As previously stated, I did not update this page yesterday. That is a fact that roughly 99.99999999998% of the people in the world already know anyway. I kind of wanted to, just to put on a spoof type news item of the April fool’s sort, but I spent so much time farting around with my mom’s PC that I just never got to it. More on that pc issue below, for now, some discussion of shows on t.v.

Survivor: All Stars was on again today, and it was satisfying if only for the fact that they actually voted someone off. There have been a few weeks where people leave of their own free will and that really makes it boring. In my mind the only time the show is worth watching is when you get down to ten players and they start all of the caniving, back-stabbing shit that they do, but if you had not watched the happy-go-lucky first half dozen episodes you really wouldn’t know who you want to vote for(to win I mean).

I think the two players who are going to make an impact, for the good or the bad, seem to be Boston Rob and Lex. They are each the strongest male on their respective teams, though neither of them really appear to lift a finger, letting the other members do the daily duties. Each one of them, though, also seems to be intelligent enough that they could beat Rupert or Big Tom if there was a mental challenge. If the challenge were physical (pure muscle and stamina I mean) they would certainly be the front-runners there as well. The show has seemed to notice that as well, since they have changed a lot of the immunity challenges to involve a lot of finesse as well as strength to give the women a fighting chance. I am not saying that women are weak, but a fifty year old woman trying to out-lift a twenty-five year old man is not really a fair challenge. If that challenge was to get a hundred pound block on a six foot tall platform, though, the man would just try to lift it there, while the woman would more likely look for a device around her to make it so that she didn’t have to actually bear the weight. That makes it a bit more fair, at least as long as they do not specify that you can’t use what you find on the ground to help you.

At the end we all know (at least anyone who has watched any season of survivor) that the person who is going to win it is one that is going ‘Under the Radar’. That is very likely not what they are doing, but the way that it is edited. My wife and I have noticed that most of the time the less they show someone on camera, the more likely that person is to win. I guess it makes for better viewing, but it kind of makes it almost predictable. Well, to a point. I think it was Sherlock Holmes who said that it is easy to predict the actions of a crowd, but impossible to predict the actions of a single person.

Now, if Survivor were to take it to the next level and do a 24/7 feed online, with a simulcast for the episode on Thursdays (for those who don’t watch the feed mostly) then we would all know a lot more about the contestants and be able to make rational judgements about them. That would, of course, be a little bit creepy for the players, the viewers, hell that is just creepy. I would watch it though.

•South Park

I don’t know how Trey and Matt can get away with the stuff that they do on South Park. This week they showed Kyle watching the movie, “The Passion of the Christ” and deciding that what he needed to do was apologize for the Jews killing Jesus, not because he was the son of God, but just because he was horribly crucified. That seemed well and good to me. I am not a religious pundit, but I am pretty sure that the bible does mention jewish involvement in the death of Christ.

The other plot (if you can call it that in a South Park episode) that was developing was about Stan and Kenny trying to get back their nine bucks each after having hated the film. Without going into too much detail, I will say that they made it to Mel Gibson’s house, took 18 bucks out of his wallet and ran like hell. Mel Gibson was portrayed to be basically Daffy Duck with a weird pain fetish, it was quite funny. They used his actual face on their chartoon model of him, and made him do some really sick stuff, like putting his hand in his underwear then proceeding to spread an unknown brown substance all over the door of a building. I laughed, I cried, then I laughed some more. I have nothing against Mel Gibson, but when they have him chasing a school bus, in the truck from “Mad Max”, and throwing his own feces around, I just have to laugh in that sick and wrong kind of way.

There may be Lawsuits, as I am sure that Mel didn’t agree to have his likeness used in that way, but I still found it funny. Thank you Trey and Matt.

•Mom’s PC is totally fucked!

My mother sent me her pc, well actually handed it to me, after it started to have a problem. The problem was that it seems to have a pretty nasty virus on it. I have spent the last few hours online trying to figure out exactly what it is that she has on there. The virus that she has corrupts all of the system files, and I mean all of them. It has also cleared the BIOS so that I have to start from scratch, if the computer will ever work again is still up in the air, but as of now I am thinking that there is about a 95% chance that it is just dead.

Her hard drive is totally corrupt, the only way to save it will be to reformat it. Why waste the time on a six gig, partioned hard drive though. I thought that her cd-drive was working, but that only worked when connected to my own system. I hooked one of my cd-drives to her PC and nope it won’t work. Yes, I did make sure my jumper settings were right. The closest match that I could find for what this virus did to her system was called “CIH” there are many mutations of that virus, but she seems to have gotten the worst one, that or her boyfriend spent so much time trying to get it to work so that he could look at porn, that he totally destroyed the system.

I have never seen a system in so bad a shape, and I do view my fair share of porn, but my god man, if you kill your computer to get that “full porn video” you are just a fucking idiot.

Diablo

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So after speaking about my personal issues with DiabloII yesterday, I went ahead and searched the DiabloII.net forums for some info. I have never used a guide to build a character, and was a bit set back by what I saw there. The first Paladin that I ever built was totally reliant on his ‘thorns’ aura, which works right until you get to Nightmare mode. Having wasted 20 points on thorns already, I started pouring the rest of my points into ‘fanatacism’. Fanatacism is a good aura, in doses, or with a well built character…I was in neither position…

That character became the first ‘mule’ that I ever had, and he was already in nightmare so he could take items from the characters that I was trying to build at the time. I do not regret that character, though I do certainly regret that they did not tell you in the user guide that thorns is going to be useless the second you step into ‘Nightmare’ and laughable by the time you reach ‘Hell’.

The online character that I was playing yesterday had 27 skill choices remaing (after having put all points possible into fanatacism and vengeance), and I was wondering why I died all the time. It turns out that there is a very simple answer to that question. The answer is ‘Holy Shield’, that it is a skill from a tree that I did not ever use (the skill I mean) and it certainly made my ability to live in ‘hell’ increase exponentially.

The difference between 1,300 and 6,000 defense is pretty notable. That is about the defense that I got once I poured most (not all) of my remaining stat points into Holy Shield. I did have to place a half a dozen or so pre-requisite points also.

Then it was time to go back into ‘hell’ and find that damn tower, mostly for pride. It took some time to find the damn thing, and when I did, I noticed that they have done a bit of rennovating since the last time I has seen it.

This is what the Tower level one used to look like. Notice the use of nothing, to show that it really is something. Notice the use of negative space to show that it really doesn’t exist, and may have been a sham since the day they drew it up. Marvel at the way that it is just so tiny that no character would be able to move around in that area. After you are done with all of that get back with me. Ir has cleared areas for the people that hate the innovation, and it has cleared areas for those who love the innovation. I think this place is pretty solid.

Well, here is a view of the same level in the 1.10 release.

They must have knocked a wall down to get to that, eh?

Dogs; Diablo

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Our puppy, Zelda, took it upon herself last night to start chewing on a pair of glasses that my wife had just bought, instead of the normal rawhide things that she is allowed to chew on. She has drug some of the wife’s high heels out in the past and chewed on them also, but dogs and shoes are pretty much linked by the oral tradition of our society, so that is to be expected. But, eyewear? There is just the tiny little piece of plastic on each arm, why would a dog find interest in that? A pair of slippers I could understand, especially if they were fuzzy, but glasses? What the hell was that dog thinking?

That is rhetorical, of course, and something that I may have been better off not to mention since I am the one trying to say that dogs are the more intelligent pet. The thing about training a dog is that there is a point where a puppy who can’t really understand discipline turns into a dog that knows that what it is doing is wrong, and you have to figure out at what point that happens.

Just like children, dogs go through a teething process. It is a bit different because the dogs will continue to chew on any item available until their teeth have completely grown in. I am assuming that this is because of their base animal instinct, knowing (however subconciously it is) that they must have strong teeth to tear apart their prey. I am speaking only from observation and have done absolutely zero research into it, but that is what I theorize from what I have seen.

Having been a dog owner since I was very young (3 or 4 years old at best), I have found that certain things do not help in teaching a dog what it should and should not chew on. Like the glasses, if you find them on the floor and they have been chewed on, showing them to the dog and smacking the dog seems to make it just hate them and want to chew on them the very next time it is possible. On the other hand, if you catch the dog chewing on something that they should stay away from it just takes a quick smack on the snout and the word “No” spoken firmly to make them never touch that item, or any similar item, again. I think that is why our puppy only drags her high heels out of the closet, since she has been smacked for dragging sneakers outside but has yet to be caught with a heel.

One other odd thing that she likes to chew on is bras. There is nothing crunchy on a bra, even the underwire ones only have a little piece of metal below the cup. I didn’t know that dogs would really chew on metal, but there are several old soup cans in my back yard that can prove that they do. We do try to keep rawhide chews available for her all the time, but those things can get expensive when she is going through one every day ( I mean like a bone, not just a strip ), and even then when it is gone she will start chewing on things like the laundry detergent bottle that is in the room they stay in while we are not home. With a bit of luck, and patience, she will grow up to be a much better dog than most pit bulls get credit for, unless she decides to start eating the wife’s jewelry next, in which case I will call a buy a gun and call a taxidermist, and then she will truly be a very good dog.

D2 talk below, may as well turn away now if you don’t play it.

Well, I spent entirely too much time playing Diablo today. Or to be more precise, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction version 1.10. Way too much time. It started out innocently enough, just screwing around with the new single player character that I created shortly after the release of the patch, but then I decided to go check on the on-line characters that I have remaining. I lost about 80% of my on-line characters through lack of play while I was playing everquest waiting for them to put out the patch for Diablo. The sad part is that had I sold some of the gear that I had over ebay I could be a couple hundred dollars richer because of it, instead, it is just gone.

I had a level 67 paladin that had just killed Baal in nightmare before I put the game on the shelf for a couple of months. He is one of the few characters that I still have remaining. I had not really tried to do anything in hell level since the patch was released, so I figured I would give him a go, just to see. They certainly have increased the difficulty in hell level. I am not saying that is a bad thing, just that it was obvious from stepping out the game that they had.

There are Super-Unique monsters galore. It wasn’t too bad going through the first couple of zones, I was able to survive using only potions and running like hell a lot of the time. Blood Raven was a lot more difficult than I remember her, but it has been a long time since I have faced her on hell level. Even longer since I have faced her on hell level with a melee character. It wasn’t that it was particularly hard to kill her, but it was significantly harder than it was prior to the patch.

The theme of having tons of Super-Unique monsters continued through as far as I got in act 1, and they are pretty tough sometimes. It wasn’t until I got to the Black Marsh (beyond the Dark Wood) that I started to get my ass handed to me pretty regularly. I happened upon four Super-uniques that were in about a four-screen range of each other. Two were Shamans, and were taken care of pretty easily, the other two were the two guys I am going to put pictures of below.

Any time they are stone skin and immune to physical a melee fighter has to cringe, but the lightning immunity made it even worse for me, since my weapon only does lightning damage. Luckily, this is the character that I had built to survive against physical immune creatures, so he has vengeance maxxed also, but this was still a pretty tough battle. My mercenary died a few times, and I got way too close a time or two myself. Then I decided to do the tower.

The tower might as well be a hack that was added to the game later, judging by the number of people that actually do the quest, but that could also be said for the majority of act 3, so who’s to say. I died in the tower. I am not sure if this guy had died before, but he died in the tower, on the first level. There were, again, at least four super-uniques on the first level of the tower. The fourth pack that I encountered were the ones that killed me, I did not have time to see what exactly their attributes were, but one had curse and spectral hit. I died with a full belt (16) full rejuv potions. Dead before I could hit a button. Thank god I don’t play hardcore.

I have read a lot about people thinking that the patch is too easy, or too hard, I think that it is just about right, you really have to think about your actions, and pay attention to what you do. It is certainly not a cake walk, but if you play it right it can be done with less than elite gear. So instead of bitching about how it is too hard or too easy, I am gonna say that they got it just about right. You have to really TRY to beat monsters at the higher levels, while you can just beat them up at the lower levels. Isn’t that the whole point of a game? To make the beginning easy enough for novices while having an ending that challenges the most seasoned player?

If I ever happen upon a game in my lifetime with the infinite replayability of D2:LOD, I will probably never have to buy another game.

PC; Radio

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Strange, I had thought of a ton of stuff that I wanted to talk about while I was at work. As I sit here now, my brain is every bit as blank as the monitor in front of me. Perhaps I should start to do these before I take my daily dose of Percocet?

Well after typing that last paragraph I saved and then went to surf, got an idea about something to write about, and wrote at length about a woman’s age determining whether her perfume smelled more like flowers or pesticide. Then I got the happy blue window of death, and lost it, so I am starting fresh, trying not to piss off the old woman that lives in my pc.

Strange thing about computers, it really is an old woman at this point. It was certainly not cutting edge even when I bought it, what four years ago, but now it is just barely clinging to life. I have upgraded as much as is possible, more so than possible in the case of the hard drive as it took me several hours to get the damn thing to register the 40gigs that it is on a system that was only made to recognize as much as 12gigs. I don’t remember how I did it, I remember having to search the internet extensively to find the ways to circumvent the counting problems. Not something that I would be likely to do again if I were to buy a pc. Not that I would have a problem doing a memory upgrade or anything like that. There is no way I am going to pay someone 50 bucks an hour to swap out a cd drive or install memory when I can do it myself in like 3 minutes, but I don’t think I want to have to deal with any major things like the aforementioned hard drive when I buy a new pc. The hardware is just so cheap now that you can get a pretty good dell system or even compaq for 500 dollars. I say pretty good, since they have quintuple my processor speed and even more than that as far as system bus.

I am reluctant to buy a new pc for only one reason and that is that all of the parts, that I horribly overpaid for, that are in my system would not work in a new one. Of course all of the parts would be a lot less expensive now, so I should just go ahead and do it. I mean there would be no reason to keep a horribly outdated 32mb pci 3-d accelerator anyway. If I were to buy a new system I could just use this one for cd burning, that is something that it does pretty well, but it makes it impossible to do a damn thing other than watch the pretty spinning disc. There would even be the possiblilty of networking the two computers to play a bit of diablo with the wife, if she still had the interest. As it is now I don’t know if she does or not since I spend so much time on the machine that she rarely ever plays any games on the pc.

Then there is also the issue of the missed work due to a neck injury, which makes even a twenty dollar purchase seem a bit excessive, let alone putting out that much money for a new system.

§ I don’t have any idea what this symbol actually means, but it looks pretty cool, and I am going to start using it to break between ideas instead of just using a line. I am hoping that it will make my little site look better as I found it a bit strange to have single paragraphs seperated with hr lines. If it turns out that I don’t like it, it too will fade away. I just looked at that symbol on the screen and totally hated it, so it has faded rather quickly. I am going to use a more conventional dot instead.

• After having screwed around after losing my initial post, I decided to go check out the “new look” of 98KUPD.com. That is the rock station of choice in the area I live, and it has been rated the number one rock radio station in the U.S. many times, but I am not sure exactly what rating system it was that gave them that honor. The good new is that I found that you can download some songs from the site, songs that were played live at the station, but you have to be a member of the “u-crew”. I went ahead and signed up, hell what is the worst thing that can happen, they send me spam? (though they let you click on whether you want to get email from them.)

I was also quite happy to see that they have downloadable replays of the “Guadalupe squares” (I wish that I could link to that, but you must be a member to access it) , this is an often hilarious, sometimes disgusting thing that they do every friday. As the name implies it is like a rip-off of Hollywood squares, but they often throw the rules out the window so that they can play more clips from the celebrity impersonators. The jokes are generally quite poor in taste, and some of the celebrities are done quite badly, but I think that is exactly what they were aiming for.

Like a lot of things, it is just not possible to explain something like the “Guapalupe Squares”, so I have instead uploaded one of them to this site for your listening pleasure. This is, of course, material that is copyrighted by 98KUPD.com. I am not entirely sure if I am breaking the law by posting it here, but I think that once you hear one of these little shows you may want to download one every week. This is not their best one by far, it is just the most recent. You can download it Here.

You could, of course, just sign up for the “u-crew” and get them for yourself, and I would highly recommend it. As such, if you happen to notice that I have not updated this page in a week or so, assume that i have been arrested for putting that mp3 on my site. That being the case, try to find it in your heart to send my some K Y Jelly so Bubbas love for me doesn’t hurt so bad.

hodgepodge

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Well I don’t have anything really planned for writing today, so I am going to go into a brief talk about the weather, and how it relates to yesterdays evaporative cooler talk. Throw up a couple of probably rhetorical questions about things that were going through my mind today, and then type just a few paragraghs about South Park. That is the plan anyway, we will see what actually happens as it goes.

The weather in Arizona is notoriously hot, most of the time. The last week has been even more than us locals could bear. This is the time of the year when the temperatures are usually in the mid 70’s with occasional jumps into the mid 80’s. That is what we call ‘Spring’, it usually lasts for about three or four weeks. This year it lasted exactly one day. I am not even slightly exaggerating when I say that two weeks ago it was cold enough overnight that it would put frost on the windshield of your car, this Sunday we broke a record high, before 11am, it was more than 93degrees before 11am, that is too damn hot! No one should have to see weather like that in March, it’s just not normal.

I am not sure if I ever actually did write about the temperature on the site ( I did email a few people about it) but I would have been wrong if I had. I thought that we had record breaking temperature all last week, and it turns out that we only tied the record on two days, broke it two days (by 4degrees on Sunday) and were just very near it all the other days. So to be technical it wasn’t record breaking stuff all week, but I am gonna call it that because it sure as hell felt like it.

When I started to write about the evaporative cooler yesterday I was going to talk about this a bit because it just sucked for me, but that is my luck. The hours that I spent on the roof working on that cooler were from 11am to 3pm, the hottest part of the day. The roof is painted with an elastomeric coating that is almost day-glow white, (very few houses down here use shingled roofs because the asphalt composition that can take extreme lows in the temperatures will turn to dust in four or five years down here. Most all of the new housing is going with those terra cotta ceramic type roofs, since they last a lot longer, while most of the old building opt to go with the ‘spray foam’ since most of them don’t have enough structural support to hold up the ceramic shingles. It is quite an odd site to look at the houses on the street, which appear to be covered in snow, then you realize that it is 120degrees, and you are in Arizona.), which reflects the sun way too well, and adds to the heat index as well. It is usually 20 degrees hotter on the roof of this place than the reported temperature, so call it about 110 while I was up there working. I drank at least a gallon of water in those four hours and ended up with a pretty severe sunburn.

This time I was at least smart enough to keep all of my clothing on while working, that usually kills me most years. When I start to get too hot I throw my shirt aside, allowing the rays to pour down on my chest and back, then the burn usually will all but immobilize me for a day or two. Sunburn only really hurts me when it is on the pasty portion of my skin (chest and back) while I can burn my arms and they will peel in a day or so and then my skin is a couple of pigments darker. Same with my face and legs. In fact the only part that really hurt about the sunburn was on the back of my neck, where my t-shirt didn’t cover, and even that doesn’t really hurt anymore. I guess it went well for what I was doing. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend that any idiot climb up on a white roof and work there for the four hottest hours of the day, especially in Arizona, especially when the heat is record breaking. So why did this idiot do it? Funny you should ask.

Every year I service these coolers, there are two of them, each has 8 grills and hold a total of 16 pads. Every year I hope to be able to complete the both of them in about ten hours, each year I also miss that goal because of unforseen circumstances (the worst was one year when I actually had to run about 75 feet of new water supply line because the old line was so horribly corroded that it was pouring more water onto the roof than into the coolers.) This year I wanted to get one of the damn things done by the day I said I would have it done, and by God I did, that is why I was up there in all that heat. I got it done on Sunday just like I said I would. That is the first time in the nine years that I have been servicing those coolers that I got either one of them done on time, that is the only positive that I can take from the experience.

Now, what really pisses me off is that I really did that all as a matter of pride, to finally get one of them done on time. Now I hear on the news that we are going to be back in the mid to low 80’s for the rest of the week. After I did all that work when it was damn near 100, that just sucks! The good news is that I only have one cooler left to service and I should be able to work on it an hour or so in the evenings this week, when it is like 80 and the sun has already set to the point that I won’t be able to get a sunburn. So I should have the second one done by this weekend and hopefully that will result in me not being so wiped out when I sit down to type. But who knows.

What is the actual point of the traffic choppers on radio stations? I am usually at work when they are on and listen to them because I don’t really have any options. The ones that I hear on the station that I listen to day in and day out are exactly the same. Something like, “Slow and go on the 60, the ‘stack interchange’ is backed up to ‘x’ point, slowing on the 202 near ‘x’ offramp”. The same every day, well sometimes the x is a different spot, but it is all the same. It may just be the station that I am forced to listen to, but I would think it is probably similar with most stations here in the valley, and probably in every major metropolitan area in the U.S. If you do that commute on a daily basis you probably know that it is going to be ‘slow and go’ at whatever point, know that the ‘stack interchange’ is going to be backed up to the ‘x’. The things that would concern you would be things like, oh accidents, cars broken down in the middle of the freeway, godzilla running amok. These things all happen of course, but it seems that they are always on surface streets (90% of the time at least according to the one that I have to listen to).

Then when something does happen, say a collision with a rollover and fatality (that is going to shut down the entire road for quite some time) they don’t go into that at the end of the song, no, they wait until they do the official: This traffic report is brought to you by ‘whoever’. Would the average person rather hear a bunch of pre-scheduled traffic updates that are the same crap brought to you by whoever, or just have the one or two that really matter, and take an extra five minutes of commercials per hour to counter that? Curious question, let me know what you think.

Lawyer’s commercials. Why is it that every damn accident/injury lawyer’s commercials all have these people in them that sound so staged? Do they really think that the average person can not read a cue card? They put things on the bottom of the screen that says “actual clients”, as if one could mistake them for actors? I could read the ingredients off the back of a shampoo bottle in a live auditorium and make it sound more like something that I had spoken off of the top of my head than the idiots that they get to try to read that crap. Maybe that’s what they’re going for though. They want you to think that if they can get 250,000 dollars for this guy that can barely read you would fare a lot better? Or maybe they are just trying to emphasize the point that the people are not actors (that certainly needs no emphasis) that they had hired? Again, I just don’t know.

In a retail situation, why do certain people think that the rules don’t apply to them? Pick any rule you want, there will always be someone who thinks that it doesn’t apply to them. I even tried that once when I wanted to return a game that I had already opened and installed, when it didn’t work I took it back. They had a policy of “no returns on video game purchases”, so I just sucked it up. I knew that that was the policy, I explained that I had not been able to register the game, so it was still brand new, they said no, I walked away. I didn’t make a scene, scream that they were raping my children by not giving me back the twenty bucks, I just walked away. I didn’t even ask for them to call a manager who could come out and clarify the store policy, then not give me back the twenty bucks, while making everyone behind me wait longer for their (possibly) legitimate claims.

I suppose that I am a bit more tolerant of people who do this, since I do work in retail. We really want every person to be happy when they walk out the door, but sometimes it is a bit much. For instance, there is a little platform at the register (where I work) for people to place their checkbook while they write the check. On top of that platform is a HUGE sign that says: “There is a $25.00 fee for all returned checks”. That should be pretty simple to understand. I believe that it costs us about $18.00 up front for the returned check, then whatever amount it takes for the time and resources to actually get the person to pay up. The number one claim is that it was a banking error that made the check get returned (that translates to, I didn’t have the money in their that day, but three days later I did), and that is not an acceptable answer. If the bank made a mistake they are always quite happy to rectify it, else you would bank elsewhere, but for some reason these people always expect us to believe it. On occasion, we will actually try to verify the funds for the check while the customer is still there bitching about it being a bank error and find that they still don’t have enough money in their account to cover it, another bank error, of course…

There was this one woman that was so brazen that she offerd to write a check for the amount from a different account, at a different bank, with check number 101, we of course called to verify funds, and there was yet another bank error since the money wasn’t in that account either. This was all over a four dollar check. It could have been a bank error, in fact I think it likely that they had pulled her monthly fee before they processed that check and that is why it bounced. It is not her fault (if that did happen) but it is certainly not our fault either. Her problem would be with her bank (if they do not cover her check when she has overdrafted by a dollar or two she probably has had other instances where she has done it. I overdrafted my account by 613.52 by mistake last month – forgot to deposit a check- and they covered it, didn’t even charge me, but I would have paid the 27 dollar fee that the company posted for returned checks because that was what I agreed to when I wrote the check in the first place).

South Park:

Just going to be a few random musings about the show ‘South Park’ here. The first is that I just can not really believe what they are able to get away with. There are many times that I am watching the show and thinking to myself “how did they get that by the censors”, but I guess the censors are a bit more lenient to shows that do not air on abc, cbs and nbc. Honestly the censors for cable networks are just about non-existent. South Park deals with a lot of issues, has very fresh writing, and can get away with doing whatever the hell they want. Must be a golden position to be in. They can do no wrong, well, they can, but the network will air the show anyway. That is why I really do adore the show so.

Point in the first, they have a kid called ‘token’ who is, of course, the only black person in the entire show, well that is not true, since they also have Chef who is played by Isaac Hayes, but token is the only black kid, and the show is mostly about the antics of the four kids. In one episode, Eric Cartman tells Token to go get a ‘Bass Guitar’ out of his basement. Token says that they don’t have one, but looks anyway at Cartman’s urging, and yes he did have a bass in the basement. Cartman tells him to “give me a ‘bass-line'”, token says that he can not play bass, and Cartman says, “God damn it, Token, you are black, you can play bass.” Token tries it, and yep, he can play bass, he says, “God damn it!” and we go to the next scene. There is no way that that would have ever aired on a network tv show.

In that same episode, Eric Cartman spoke a line that I will never forget, well sang it really, and that line was; “I want to get down on my knees and start pleasing Jesus, I want to feel his salvation all over my face”. There is no way that you are gonna get that line by a network censor.

In the most recent show, the kids all buy weapons at a local fair and think that they are ninjas. Whenever it is just the kids in the shot, it shows them all in their ninja gear and larger than life, when their parents (any parent) is around, it is back to lame 2-d animation. They certainly show with the episode that they would be able to make it a much more believable animated series if they want to, but I don’t think that they would stoop to that level. It is what it is, and it is the funniest thing that I have ever seen because of it.

The thing that I really love about the show is that in the aforementioned episode they made two referrences to the Mel Gibson movie “The Passion of the Christ”, only a couple of weeks after it came out. And, at the end, they made referrence back to the “wardrobe malfunction” when one of the kids is actually seen naked. This is only weeks after the things happened, and why I love it so. The animation may seem a bit dated, but the ideas and morals that they are using within the story just seem so dead-on that you have to watch more.

God I love South Park.

Games

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Well, it has been some time since I have spoken (typed) about the pain in my neck, so I am going to go into it a bit today. The good news is that I no longer feel like my heart is only beating inside my head, that is I don’t have the constant head-ache anymore. As a matter of fact, I have not taken any of the muscle relaxant pills over the last couple of days, and ibuprofin only sparingly. I do have a bit of pain when I wake up in the morning, but I suppose that is to be expected. Once I am up and moving about I can actually forget about the injury altogether, unless I sneeze or cough, but those actions do both involve a bit of head whipping, so again, I guess that is to be expected. With those two exceptions, the only real pain that I am feeling is in the trapezius muscles and it is more like the pain that you get with a muscle cramp than the debilitating, ‘I am going to die for sure this time’, type of pain that I was feeling at this time last week. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to say that I am healed, but I am a hell of a lot closer to it than I was last week. I now think that I can work through the pain as long as I am able to use liberal amounts of Tiger Balm on my neck region after having been up and active (working) all day. Let us call this issue done. -Barring any unexpected recurrences of the pain-

I believe this lack of pain has left me in a much better mood than I have been in over the last couple of days for sure, and as I result I have spent way too much time playing games. There is nothing like a good game to get you back into the swing of things. First, I will talk about the game that I tried after seeing BlackChampagne link to it.

On a side note. If you haven’t noticed by now BlackChampagne is the only blog that I really read. I visit and read CalPundit pretty religiously also, but it is a bit more political than I am trying to be with this site, so I rarely (if ever) link to it. If you have never been there, and you aren’t a seriously right-wing republican, you would probably appreciate someone looking at political news objectively and presenting facts rather than misguided opinions. Time after time I am amazed by the way he can quote articles that send me into a blind rage, but he just presents facts to rebut them, with seemingly no emotion. Some of the advertising on his site does tell you which way he leans as far as politics, but you would never know it to read his writing on very hot political issues. “He is wood that will not bend.”

To the games!

The game that was linked to over at BlackChampagne was Dynomite. It is one of those PopCap games. Some of their games I love, some of them I hate, more love than hate I suppose. I went into this game after never having played the arcade version when I was younger, and as such I had no idea what I was doing for the first few minutes. The first few levels (in puzzle mode) are so easy that it doesn’t really matter if you know what you are doing anyway, so it went well. The game is, I am sure, quite addictive. I would likely have been totally into throwing several hours into mastering it, had I not been experiencing exactly the same problem that I have with Snood. That problem is that I will think I have a shot totally lined up, I will be able to clear out a group of ‘things’, then I fire the shot and it just misses the target. Maybe it catches one of the objects on the way to where I want it to go, maybe it passes the object I am trying to catch the corner of and passes a level too far. End result, I am usually screwed.

It could be that I am just not very good at this type of game, I am certainly not going to deny that. But, when you have that shot lined up that is going to clear half the board and save your ass, and it misses, the frustration is overwhelming. Sure you can load it all and do it again, but it sure is frustrating. I will probably give the game another go tomorrow just to make sure that I both love and hate it as much as Snood, but I really doubt that I will be trying to master every nuance of it.

DiabloII:LOD, on the other hand, took away many hours of my life yesterday, and for no good reason. If you don’t play that game, don’t bother reading below as I am not going to go into a breakdown of the game for what I am going to bitch about.

My brand new paladin has been in act 3 for a lot longer than I would like to admit. I have yet to find a single waypoint. I am playing is single player mode, so the map stays the same and every area that I have explored is outlined on the map, but the monsters come back. I had already gotten the first two pieces of Khalim’s thingy and I had yet to find a single waypoint. The first waypoint that I found was actually in the ‘Great Marsh’, which is a zone that I rarely ever travel through, since most of the time (in my experience) you don’t really need to. I started mapping that zone thinking that I might find another entrance to one of the other zones, specifically the flayer jungle, since I was not at all concerned about having a waypoint in the spider forest.

I spent several hours last night following the edges of the great marsh, and I did eventually find another entrance to the flayer jungle. I followed that route for another twenty minutes or so and found the waypoint, about two steps off the screen from where I went into the great marsh in the first place! I would have really been irritated if I had not gone up two levels (23-25) during this, and had my mercenary (still an act 1 archer) not gone up very near three levels (20- a kill less than 23) in this little walk.

I know that I have previously written about why I started playing single player again, and I think that a little setback like this really kind of defines it. I can not recall having a mercenary this close to my level since the expansion came out, now that I have to walk around until I find the stuff that I really want/need (as opposed to someone just giving me waypoints on b.net, but then who on b.net would have the act 3 waypoints?) I gain levels, and my merc. gains levels, since she is fighting things that are very close to her own level. It is like the game seems somehow ‘Fresh’ again, even though I know where to go and who to kill.

One other thing of note that has happened since I started playing my new off-line character is that I don’t really care about any sort of magic find. That is the polar opposite of my on-line characters. My on-line characters are looking for gear that they can trickle down to the other characters who can use it, or else I will trade the elite unique items for items that I want/need for my new builds. My new pally is all about resistances and extra gold from monsters, all the better to survive and to gamble, respectively. A rare ring from ‘Ormus’ is usually absolute crap on hell level, but on the normal level it could be the difference between life and death against Mephisto. The same can be said for gambling. You would never gamble a belt when you already have a string of ears, or a helm if you already have a shako, but when you have nothing if it comes up with a little bit of life steal or resistance against the next boss in the way, that is good stuff.

When you are a paladin, and you have placed only six total stat points at level 25, you are going to be looking for any advantage you can find. At the same time, I think I could just probably kick it up to players 8 and run lower Kurast for a while, then be like level 30 when I take on Mephisto and likely take him down easily. But, for now, I am still just looking for better gear.

Aren’t we all.

Web searches changing broadcast news?

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Well, like it says above, it is Friday, it is about 7:30p.m. my time and I have had a couple of hours at home to try to come up with something to post here, that has not happened. I have read the news sites that I read on a daily basis, and been sorely disappointed. I have read the blogs that I read on a daily basis, and found nothing of worth to lash out about in them either. Either the world is just getting so damn predictable that I don’t feel the need to point it out, or I am just getting a tad sick of it all (by that I mean any form of media in general, t.v. news, web news, blogs, just everything in the media).

I think what may be happening here is that the major internet sites may be giving in a bit to the pressure of your average consumer. By that, I mean that they are posting stories in their major headlines that are a bunch of crap that I am sure is the result of so many people searching for it. Sure lots of people that are living in the Jerry Springer Watching areas of the US are interested in seeing that Janet Jackson is going to be on T.V. later this month, but is that news? Then there is the story about Howard Stern being the moderator in an interview with her. The lack of links here is directly related to my lack of giving a shit about it. She showed a tit, he talks about sex, what in the hell has the US come to when that is more important than the soldiers that we are killing to try to make sure that rich, white americans can be driving hummers? That seems to be the way the American psyche is swinging and, being American, I can not believe that we have failed so much as a society that we would put material things above human life…But, we are capitalists…

To clarify that last paragraph just a bit, what I was intending to say is that we are having soldiers die in Iraq still, just to protect the oil-fields. While people wealthy enough to buy those gas-guzzling Hummers are actually getting tax breaks. Our media, however, does not think that is nearly as newsworthy as a 60 year old tit that popped out during the super bowl.

I don’t like the way I am going with this so I will stop now. I said at the founding of this site that I would not mention news, then I changed it to not doing political type news. I have strong opinions when it comes to the policies of the administration in charge of my country, but they are my views and everyone else is free to feel/think otherwise and it was never my intention to put anything either way on this site. It is, after all, the freedom of choice that makes our country strong, but when you have to dig through the data-bases of several news sites to find out what atrocities America has done today, I just have to sigh.

Now to the happy clowns!

Damn, I don’t have any happy clown pictures to link to…Okay so just imagine that clown from the old ‘Scoobie-Doo’ show and picture him in your mind, then continue. Now that I think about it, he was a rather freaky looking clown, maybe not the best one to think of. Okay, so picture John Gacy in a full clown outfit, wait, that is a bad example also. How about the rainbow-haired guy that was showing up in sporting events on t.v. in the late seventies-early eighties holding up the ‘john 3:16’ sign, wait, he was later arrested for holding hostages in a hotel.

Okay, quit thinking about clowns.

I was thinking about putting a photo of a very cute puppy here, in a thumbnail, that when clicked would show a photo of a rabid dog. The thing is that I can not find a really good photo of a rabid dog. Poo. Oh well, I am sure that I will find something better to put on this site in the days to come, so I won’t have to do such ruses, but I probably will anyway. I am an ass, after all.

Comedy Central; Pictures

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Well it turns out that Flux over at Blackchampagne had a link to my site in his blog today. The good news is that it did make me have quite a spike in site traffic, the bad news is that there was not much worth reading on my post. Whether there is ever anything worth reading here could be debated till the end of time, so I won’t go there. It is the thought that counts.

I awoke this morning (I am using the term ‘morning’ very loosely here) and flipped on my television to find out that some jack-ass had taken comedy central off the air. There had been ads running on Comedy Central all week that said that Dish Network was going to quit carrying the channel, but I just assumed that was a ploy to get a bunch of people to call Dish Network and say “I want my Comedy Central!”. Well if that was the case I guess not enough people called, or Dish Network just didn’t seem to care, since it is certainly gone now. Other networks that were ripped from the lineup include Mtv, Vh1, Nickelodeon and a bunch of others. To put it bluntly, my “top 50” package is now more of a “top 35” due to this.

Wy wife called to ask if the stations were really gone, and I assured her that yup, we’re fucked. But, at least we still have our CBS affiliate, as they have removed CBS from the lineup in many major markets including New York and Los Angeles. So it could be worse, I guess.

Once home from work I really wanted to go see just what the whole fuss was about, and I found it in heaps. I went to Yahoo News and did a search for ‘Viacom’ (who own the stations in question) and found at least a dozen stories there that had been added within the last three hours. Every on of them was about Viacom and Echostar’s (the company that owns dish network) dispute. I read about ten of them, starting with the earliest post. It just sickened me. The following quotes are taken from this article

Viacom officials said EchoStar was fighting over what amounted to 6 cents more per customer per month.

I am not sure which side is telling a version of the story that is closer to the truth, but if I just take viacom’s claim and Dish Network’s claim and average them it still comes out to being an increase of like 30 cents. 30 cents for all of those channels on a monthly basis, a penny a day, hell I would pay that in a heartbeat if it would get Comedy Central back on.

I can certainly see where each side is coming from after having read all of the articles though. Viacom is constantly stressing the pennies per person per day thing, while Echostar is talking about Hundreds of millions of dollars over the next four years. I am pretty sure that they are using the exact same number but it sure seems a lot bigger when you say hundreds of millions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong, I bet that if everyone that subscribed to Dish Network would send my six cents per month I could easily retire and buy that new Ferrari Enzo I have had my eyes on.

I had been siding with Echostar on this, thinking that Viacom was really trying to be a mean old bully and beat us up for our milk money, then I saw this particular quote;

EchoStar said it planned to give $1 monthly credits to customers who lose CBS programming, and another $1 for those who subscribe to additional Viacom channels. Besides CBS, media conglomerate Viacom also owns MTV and the Paramount movie studio.

So what they are telling me is that I am going to get a dollar a month credit for losing 15 channels? One dollar off of my $34.98 bill for losing 15 channels? I mean what the fuck? There are probably a lot more than 15 channels, those are just the ones that are on the list we look through daily, and that is only one dollar? I am starting to think that both sides may just be mean old bullies trying to steal my milk money.

What burns me worst of all about this whole situation is that I only signed up for Dish Network for two reasons. The first reason was that it was about three dollars a month cheaper than my local cable, the second was that they had Comedy Central. Now what am I to do? If they do not bring back Comedy Central I may well just go back to local cable since I could then get high speed internet access in a package deal with the cable and save myself a bit of cash. In case you had not yet noticed, this whole thing just really has me pissed off.

I got yet another email today, that is like two in two days. I don’t know how I am going to deal with this constant barrage of email… Seriously, though, this one was from an old friend who was wanting to know if I had any pictures on the site since his wife has never seen myself or my wife. I feel quite obligated to throw a couple of pictures up here because, well, I don’t really know why. So here are a couple of pictures. As always click on them for a full size pic.

Here is one of me playing guitar. This picture is a bit dated, but I really don’t look that much different now, unless you want to count that strange third arm that recently grew out of my forehead. The problem is that while I am usually quite photogenic, that requires that I be near a camera while someone is clicking it, and for some reason that is something that I really try to avoid.

Here is yet another rather dated photo of me, maybe three or four years old. I am standing in front of the grand canyon if you were not able to guess. I really actually hate this picture because it makes me look like I have one of those little Fu-man-shu moustache type things. I am pretty sure that I hadn’t shaved that day, but still.

Here is one of my wife and myself at the wedding ceremony. For some reason the camera has made the color of my flesh look a lot more red than it actually is, but it did the same thing to the Pastor. This may have been one of the photos taken with the cheap disposable cameras that we left on all of the guests tables, I am not really sure. It certainly does look like I have been holding my breath for about three minutes though. This was the best photo I could find that really showed how beautiful my wife’s dress was. Of course you need to look at the full size shot to see that.

Well, that should be enough photos to sate you all for roughly the rest of your natural lives. I had never actually seen these shots side by side before, and I think that I really look just about the same in all of them. Sure I have more gray hair now than I did in the photos, but with just a bit of selective plucking or some “just for men gel” I could probably take a photo in a similar pose and be able to fool people into thinking that they were taken at the same time. If I am ever reduced to that, though, it will probably be at about the same time as I buy a convertible and start cruising for women twenty years my junior. Since I am quite happily married, and I really think that it would be sick and wrong to look for dates at a gradeschool, I will let that thought go for now, and hopefully the rest of my life.

Now on a side note. If any of you are reading this after having linked through from blackchampagne yesterday, I would really like to know your thoughts, good or bad, about my little site thing. What, if anything you like, what, if anything you hate kind of thing. I do enjoy email.

Diablo; Signs

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I would like to go into a bit of detail about my neck again today, but let’s be honest, I am absolutely sick of writing about it, and you are no doubt sick of reading about it. Instead I will just say that you should assume that it is in the same condition as it was the previous update if I do not mention it. That way, hopefully, I won’t write about it again until the injury is healed…Don’t quote me on that.

I stayed up late last night playing DiabloII:LOD, several months ago that was a very common thing for me to do, but now it seems almost like my world has gone in a big circle. I started playing DiabloII after I had bought it for my wife as a birthday gift. I played single player for at least a year or more before the ‘purity’ of on-line play pulled me in. By the time LOD came out, I bought two copies of it, one for desktop, one for laptop. I played the game so much and had gotten so much gear muled that I never played a character that was not *helped* by my other characters. This became rather boring after a while, and I just resigned myself to just using a sorc, baba and zon for magic find, and that was all I played for the last few months of my Diablo career.

While waiting for Blizzard to get around to releasing the patch (that was like two years in the making), I split my time between everquest and a diablo mod that was really pretty cool. In the process of doing that, my on-line characters mostly expired. Out of a total of 32 characters, only four of them remained, one high level sorceress, and three mules, though not the mules with the elite gear. None of my friends were playing online anymore as they had moved on to the everquest for the PS2 or World of Warcraft, this made levelling a new character difficult. So what did I do? I started an off-line character so that I could adjust the difficulty to help me gain experience between act bosses.

It had been so long since I had played a character through from the beginning that I was a bit surprised at how difficult it was. Not that there was really any threat of my death in the first act, just that the monsters were all a lot tougher than I remembered them. Keep in mind that this was the first time in probably at least two years that I had been playing a character without hand-me-down gear to help him out. When Andariel (boss of act 1) died and dropped a magic mace I was overjoyed. I used that weapon for the majority of act 2.

That led me to thinking about just how different this was than my recent play style. I never picked up anything that was just magical unless it was an elite item, now I was picking up every magic item I saw and saying please,please,please as I identified it. It is a lot more fun this way, but if I were to start a character on-line again the temptation to trickle some gear down from my mules would overcome me (probably about the time I had to fight Duriel, since I always have a problem with him), and that would take away the anticipation and joy of seeing an item drop then seeing it is actually a useful item.

What is it about DiabloII that has this effect on me and so many others? In just a quick look around what passes for an office at my house I can see Morrowind, Alone In the Dark 3,Arthurs Knights 2, Atlantis: the lost tales, Egypt Tomb of the Pharaoh, I could go on. I haven’t spent more than an hour or two playing any one of those games( never even installed a couple for that matter), yet I am still consumed by DiabloII. The only logical answer is; Blizzard put subliminal messages in the game cinematics that make you want to play it more.

As long as I am in the mood to write about Diablo, I may as well throw a theory out here regarding ebay. In lots of articles over at DiabloII.net people have criticised Blizzard for not taking a firm stance against people who sell game items for real money. I don’t really care either way, if someone is dumb enough to pay actual money for a string of binary code that can only be used in an on-line game, the deserve what they get. A theory that I have had in my mind for a while, though, is that the Blizzard employees actually sell gear over ebay to cover the costs of maintaining battle.net without having to charge the players. The reason that I really love that theory is that it would mean that people who don’t play often enough to find the really good stuff (that is part-time players), and those with more money than brains, would be paying for the dedicated fans who devote ten hours a day to it without ever dropping a cent. This is also the reason that it can’t possibly be true, it would make me far too happy if that was the reality.

I woke up early this morning and was not able to get back to sleep, so I decided to watch a DVD. I found one under the end table called Signs and popped it in. Before I go into detail below, let me just say that there was a BlockBuster sticker on the front of the case that said “Previously Viewed $14.95”, and I think that BlockBuster is just assuming that whoever rented it was actually able to view it.

If you have never seen the movie and plan to, I am gonna spoil it all here, so don’t read it.

The trailers for this movie, as well as the description on the box, say that this is a movie about one family’s experience dealing with crop circles and extraterrestrials. That is true, to a point. The villains in this movie could have been pigeons, frogs hell even day-glow ping-pong balls and it would not have made a difference to the plot. Here is the entire plot in a sentence; Man loses faith in God, things happen to make man believe again. That is the entire movie.

To be fair to the movie I guess I should do a bit more detail about that. The main character (mel gibson) is a man of the cloth. His wife dies in a car accident which makes him question his faith, he turns in the cloth (this happened before the point where the movie starts). As the movie progressess he begins to think that his faith helps to save his son not once, but twice. He then believes that his son has asthma only because there would be a point where poison gas would be sprayed in his face, but God had made it so that he couldn’t breathe at the time. He then believes that what he used to think were his wife’s non-sensical dying words were actually a vision of the future, telling him what to say to his brother six months later when faced with a dilemma.

Okay, I am gonna take a few deep breaths and try to collect my thoughts since it does get even LESS logical.

There are a lot of things in the movie that are inconsistent or just don’t make a damn bit of sense. The first in my mind is why would the aliens decide to try to invade the earth when water is toxic to them. Wouldn’t they have noticed in their cursory exploration that we live on a planet that is more water than land? Wouldn’t they have seen that every dwelling in the entire world -regardless of wealth- had water in it? Attacking would be like trying to dig a paperclip out of a huge bowl of razors, are these beings, that have already mastered interstellar flight, really that stupid?

There is also the issue of the aliens and their ability, or lack thereof, to open doors. In one scene there is an alien that is not able to escape from a pantry which has a couch against the door, in another scene you hear them break out windows to get into a house, then find a disused coal chute (which would surely have been sealed off when the house went to a more modern climate control system) and somehow break through that. Even in the basement where two grown men had done the pole-under-the-doorknob trick and were also leaning against the door, the aliens nearly broke through. This was necessary to build tension, sure, but it was just not consistent.

Then there is the dead wife. So she was hit by a truck and pinned against a tree. In the scene you can see at least three ambulances and a dozen firemen and EMS workers. They just left her there until Mel got there. Great. The movie explained this away saying that the woman should be dead but that she hadn’t died…Well that is when one is supposed to use medical knowledge to keep them not dead, isn’t it? I am sure that letting her bleed internally for however long it took for Mel to get there was probably why she died, but I guess that was what the movie was going for. I think that what you are supposed to believe is that their combined faith had kept her alive long enough to talk to him one more time, so she could could say “swing away”.

My wife said that she has never even made it thirty minutes into this film, and I am actually kind of surprised that I did. I just kept looking at the timer on the DVD player and thinking, something has got to happen soon, and it never did. This is one of the worst movies that I have ever actually sat through, but I did sit through it, so that is something. I just sat through it waiting for something to happen, and then it was over, and then I was pissed off that I had just wasted over an hour and a half of my life watching a movie that you could see at vacation bible school. But don’t take my word for it, the Cap Alert guy gave it what I would say is the best review of his that I have ever seen.

Hoping to see how the movie was reviewed by people other than ultra religious kooks, I went to Rotten Tomatoes and found that it actually has a 78% positive review. Did those people watch the same movie as I did? 78% is like a C+ right? The movie I saw doesn’t even deserve a letter, or if I had to give it one it would be a ‘Q’ or an ‘S’ for Quit or Stop. But it doesn’t even stop there, I went and checked Ebert’s review and he is blowing more sunshine up your ass. The last two paragraphs of his review aren’t too far off the mark though;

Instead of flashy special effects, Shyamalan creates his world out of everyday objects. A baby monitor that picks up inexplicable sounds. Bo’s habit of leaving unfinished glasses of water everywhere. Morgan’s bright idea that caps made out of aluminum foil will protect their brains from alien waves. Hess’ use of a shiny kitchen knife, not as a weapon, but as a mirror. The worst attack in the film is Morgan’s asthma attack, and his father tries to talk him through it, in a scene that sets the entire movie aside and is only about itself.
At the end of the film, I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has essentially ditched a payoff. He knows, as we all sense, that payoffs have grown boring. The mechanical resolution of a movie’s problems is something we sit through at the end, but it’s the setup and the buildup that keep our attention. “Signs” is all buildup. It’s still building when it’s over.

The problem is that I could not find anything better (worse for the movie) to put here from anyone with a reputation. I guess I may be the only one in the whole world that hated the movie and I am okay with that. It just goes to show that there is a damn good reason why I rarely watch any movies other than comedies.

Crosby; pain

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I did only work for four hours today, but they were the wrong four. The pain that I feel in my neck has now spread to the point that I always have a head-ache and a lower back ache at the same time. That is because I can only even attempt to sleep in a few postitions, when I try anything else the pain is just death. I have to turn over while I sleep, first because my neck starts to hurt if I stay in one position too long, second because my back does also.

If I have ever bitched about anyone elses’ pain, then I think that this is my retribution, but, I don’t think that I have ever done that. The fact that my neck now seems to be the least of my problems does concern me though. It seems like the problems with my neck are working themselves out just fine, but I still end up with a throbbing head-ache, and my lower back has been in pain for two or three days -that is directly related to not being able to move around a lot in my sleep-.

I really can not emphasize ehough just how much Pain I am feeling right now, and even if I could I am not sure that anyone would really believe it. In fact, I am going to just stop typing now and go and lay down.

It is Saturday, March 06, 2004

Well, in case you didn’t notice, I did not do an update yesterday. I found the beginning of it here, and decided to just leave it as is, since today’s will be more of the same. I certainly wish that I had something more profound to write about than all the pain that I am feeling, unfortunately the dice have not rolled as such and I don’t like to just sit at home and bitch about how much pain I am in -well, I guess I do, but when you are reading it you do have the liberty of being able to just skip past it-.

Last night I slept like something that sleeps for a really long time without ever waking up from pain. That is the way that I guess a lot of humans sleep, I am just not one of them. Even before I had the injury in my neck I often would wake up with pain in my back and be forced to pop it a bit before being able to get back to sleep. Last night I slept for at least ten hours, and I did not wake up even once, I was just that exhausted. Upon waking I stayed in bed and let myself drift in and out of sleep for a couple more hours, just happy that I was not feeling any pain in my neck or head.

I got up to take a shower at about 11:30 and found that I had a bit of lower back pain but my head and neck were holding up pretty well. Since I didn’t have to be to work until 2:00, I just layed there in bed and watched some mindless dribble on t.v. I ate a couple of cheeseburgers also.

I didn’t take any Ibuprofen to work with me, sicne I was feeling so good, that turned out to be a big mistake. The thing is that I can lay or sit for just about any length of time without having any problems. When I am both standing and moving around (especially if I am moving around with things in my hands) the pain starts to come back. I thought that it was possible that this would not be the case today, since I just felt so wonderful when I did go in to work.

The first two and a half hours or so really did go quite good, I was not feeling any pain in my neck at all, only a bit of lower back pain. At about the three hour point my neck was hurting again, and then came the head-ache. I did not have any Ibuprofen with me, so I asked the boss for whatever pain killer they had available. The only thing that they had were these 81mg aspirin pills. I read the back of the bottle and it said that you should take 8 every four hours or 12 every six hours, not to exceed 48 pills in 24 hours. I really thought that they must have the numbers backwards on that, I mean really 12 pills, I took six of them, and they did nothing.

At about 7:00 my head was throbbing to the point that I was able to count the “lubs” and “dubs”, by some stroke of luck my wife came in for something and I asked her to bring me some Ibuprofen, which she did. I gobbled down one more of those pills than I was supposed to (800mg) and it did not start to kick in until well after I had gotten home. The funny thing is that after all the aspirin, Ibuprofen and about 5 beers, my head-ache is now gone and I am finally starting to feel the pain in my neck again…

There is one news item that I simply have to put down here, I don’t know why, maybe the insanity is finally starting to kick in and I will be using my shoe for a telephone by the end of the week. Anyway, the headline is “David Crosby arrested on gun, drug charges in NY” and you can find the story Here

The 62-year-old musician, who rose to fame with the Byrds and later Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in the late 1960s and 1970s, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and unlawful drug possession, said Manhattan District Attorney spokeswoman Barbara Thompson.

As you can certainly tell by the photo, this man is a hardened criminal. He is one of the guys that are out there “banging” to protect his “hood”.. At his age I think that any drug he does should be considered ‘medicinal’ and the most likely reason that he has a gun is just in case the pressure/pain of his life becomes overwhelming and he just wants to end it all. He looks far more like Santa Claus than a musician and I bet he has arthritis and other such maladies that he is not able to take care of with over-the-counter pills. Would you hold your wallet/purse any tighter if you saw him board a plane?

The story goes on to say this;

Crosby later gained notoriety when he donated sperm to fellow rocker Melissa Etheridge so she and her lesbian partner could have a baby through artificial insemination.

Now I have nothing against homosexuals, but Egads man, what are they expecting the child to look like? It is probably possible that there could be two sets of genes that would result in a child less attrictive than that particular pairing but you would really have to look for them.

At any rate, I really don’t think that Crosby was going to try to take over any embassies in New York, and it is funny (to me) that this is getting any press coverage at all. There are far more important things going on in the world than a rocker 30 years passed his prime getting arrested for possesion of miniscule amounts of marijuana, and a firearm.

If John Lennon had realized that his life was in danger, so long after he was out of the public eye, he may have carried a firearm, and as such he may be alive today. Let us not fault persons who live in situations that only they can understand.