I notice Radio got slighted by the Oscar people.

(With apologies to smaller people).

An IM with Czelticgirl about this yielded the following regrettable conversation:

SB: Seems like exploitation. “Look at the freaks! they have different genetic makeup!”
CG: Look at the freaks try to get a date!
SB: And midget porn sales WILL spike. I guarantee
CG: Just wait — if this show does well, its star’s gonna get a call from Playgirl.
SB: “I wish I had a girl like Missy on ‘Joe Dwarf'” Maybe a cameo from Gimli?
CG: Missy? Ooh — and we’ve found a new calling for hobbits!
SB: Missy is just a random woman’s name. Popular among the little people. (I’m lying; I know nothing about that section of our population.)
CG: Oh, sure. Right. Like you just guessed about the midget porn.
SB: Not at all. I can trace the thought train on how midget porn hits the mainstream due to this show with relative ease. I did note the spike when Total Recall was released.
CG: You’re a midget porn distributor in your spare time, ain’tcha? I can tell.
SB: I have a tracking collar on the midget porn industry.
CG: you scare me.
SB: I scare myself sometimes.

With my obsessive nature, I sometimes find myself lost in loops of repetitive gameplay. In fact, to my mind, the video game industry had encouraged this throughout my youth. Recently, however, they discovered their new medium, led by Squaresoft. The new medium? No gameplay at all. Just watch the movie and occasionally hit a button to see if the movie will progress.

It’s like watching a DVD chock full of CG eye candy that just suddenly pauses at random times to be sure you’re still watching.

Somebody understands me too well. Guest starring the highly underrated Peter Cetera, just so I’m sure how incredibly uncool I will appear to my children.

Today, Czelticgirl was having difficulty deciding what to eat for lunch.

CG: I know it sounds weird, but I could really go for a nice, crunchy, tasty casserole. But, there’s no place around here where I can get something like that. It’s not like there’s a Casseroles ‘r’ Us or something.

Me: That could be your new business. Or, ooo, maybe the McCasserole! Of course, people wouldn’t separate those first two syllables, and that doesn’t sound terribly appetizing all slurred together like that.

Think about it, say it out loud. It will come to you.

Typical conversations between me and some people I care about go like this (conversations with those I don’t care about involve nearly zero interaction from me):

A Friend: So, what do you guys think we should do tonight?
Steelbuddha: (realizing that my crowd is not much for bars) I don’t know, really. You have any ideas?
F: Not really.
S: Well, if we get desperate, there’s Landmark which has bowling, pool tables, and an arcade. Plus, if people want to get drinks, that’s easy enough. Everyone should be suitably stimulated, even the pedarasts.
F: …
S: I suppose it is a little smoky for people’s tastes, but it’s an option if we can’t think of anything else and we want to DO something.
F: What if we just saw a movie?
S: Is there anything out that you want to see?
F: That new movie with The Rock is out.
S: But, is there anything out that you *want* to see?
F: Well, it’s something to do.
S: There are so many things that fall into that category.
F: Well, what do you want to do?
S: Fuck it, let’s just play Soulcalibur 2.
F: (merrily) OK!

OR

Steelbuddha: (excited) Hey, do you want to go to the Friday Night Freak Show tonight? It’s “Neverending Story.”
A Friend: What’s the Friday Night Freak Show?
S: College kids shouting drunken comments at a theater screen, thinking they’re MST3K. It’s a good time. What else you got to do tonight?
F: Nothing really.
S: So, let’s go.
F: Hold on, let me ask the girlfriend/boyfriend.
S: K.
F: It says it can’t. It’s got to study/work on some project it will never finish/throw up from some severe illness/any other excuse to avoid something new.
S: OK, well I’m not attached to those plans. Is there anything that it wants to do?
F: Anything inside, I guess. And cheap is good.
S: OK, any suggestions?
F: Um, it says we could get together over here and play Soulcalibur, or maybe hit iColiseum and play LAN games. Oh, or that new movie with the Rock is playing!

See what happened there? It’s insidious. And it’s not just the obvious things you see, either. For one, did you notice that the person outside of the conversation is up for things, just not the things I’m suggesting?
(more…)

Randy “Macho Man” Savage stands clear as the voice of our generation, an American treasure not to be discounted. When he sings “Don’t be a punk, Hogan,” how can one not hearken back to Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and its lightning-strike criticism of societal constructs?

Stand aside, Mr. O’Reilly. Warm up your justice machine, Ashcroft. Put down your microphone, Eminem. Hulkamania, like McCarthyism, will stand the test of time only as a shameful mistake in our history. There is a new glittering star shining a harsh, revealing light on the ills of our society, and his music will be the anthem to which all Americans will march proudly into the future.

On my way home from Racine last night, I noted that the local Ground Round had those stick-on letters in a slightly off-kilter way enticing all passersby to “Join [them] for Sweetest Day”.

I’m not sure if this was an ominous warning to men who thought that (if they remember the Hallmark Holiday at all) Ground Round was even an option how exactly they would be leaving the restaurant (i.e. partially digested after being ground into “round”), or if it were more a message to cannibals who know that the sweetest meat comes from a loved one.

Either way, it was bizarre. World Cafe on NPR throws my mind into strange dimensions, it would seem.

I used to be a single match,
strike me and I burn a bit.
Now I’m an Aim-N-Flame,
and if you pull my trigger,
I’ll burn down your house.

Most-honoured Girlfriend wrote that in high school. I rather like it.

Mind you, I haven’t had much sleep lately. I was working late, and I refuse to shorten the time I spend at home, and so sleep is the obvious sacrifice to the slavering, unsatisfied maw of time. On my weekend, I was supposed to get some here and there, but did not. So, with justification mostly in hand, I detail the following anecdote.

At the Taco Bell drive-thru window, a crossing of ley-lines, a Hellmouth if you will, I waited patiently, Most-Honoured Girlfriend interjecting with occasional complaints about her job. The time passed slowly and my mind lept from subject to subject with abandon. I was in a cheery mood, excited about the night’s events. Absent-mindedly, I tapped at the open car window with the twenty I was to proffer as payment for vittles.

As sometimes they do, my ADD fingers began to slide the twenty back and forth in the precarious opening where the window normally resides. What part of my brain then had epiphany I cannot tell, for afterward I was in as much shock as any observer might have been.

“Clare,” I heard myself cheerily intone, a child-like need to impress evident in my voice, “check this out.” And immediately thereafter I dropped the twenty dollar bill into the void between the car door’s molded interior and metal frame.

Before Most-Honoured Girlfriend could even react, I stammered, “What the hell did I do that for?” For I truly did not know. Was it an untethered Buddhist instinct to unburden one’s self of such materialism? A mistaken premonition that I somehow would be able to retrieve the bill? Simple insanity? MHG simply stared, agape in disbelief. We hadn’t much time to analyze before we had to rapidly thrash the car’s insides about, searching for cash with which to pay.

Needless to say, my friends and MHG got at least twenty dollars worth of belly-laughs out of this, so I suppose I got a fair deal.

Finally…The Buddha…has come back…to his blog.

So much has happened and I have this long list of things I’ve wanted to put here. I’ll start, however, anti-choronologically with a conversation my girlfriend and I recently had through the bathroom door.

Buddha: (on the toilet, reading)

Most-Honoured Girlfriend: (disdainful tone) Well, then.

B: (shouting a bit) Eh? What did I do?

MHG: Can I show you something?

B: Um.

(Bathroom door opens. Strangely this is only mildly embarrassing.)

MHG: You know how I said those pitchers were dishwasher safe? Well. Have a look. (One pitcher appears completely unscathed. Its identical twin, however, is now an avant garde piece on the transparency of sculpture and its sometime inability to capture anything of significance other than the sculptor’s skill, the irony of the work apparent in its very existence. Not a pitcher, though.)

B: Huh.*

MHG: I think that our dishwasher does not operate like a regular dishwasher, but instead runs entirely on entropy. The dishwasher uses entropic principles to break apart the dirt and food particles, but sometimes runs entirely amok. Exhibit A, the regular pitcher, now clean. Exhibit B, this thing. What do you think?

B: I think I know my next blog entry. Could you close the door now please?

As Mil might say, how can anyone not love this woman?

*I am so very eloquent when interrupted from this the most manly of duties.