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F U.

Friday!

Greetings from sunny Dayton!

That’s right folks. It has been 10 years since I should have graduated from college. But since I was in a top secret government/CIA drinking program, I went to college for *5* years and it has therefore been 9 years since I graduated. Nonetheless, a bunch of us UD alum (and some other, non-UD alum) are heading down to Dayton for some of that old-time religion. Or old-time drinking. Or “Holy crap, it’s like 4 dollars for a round of beers!” As a matter of fact, since I’m not really writing this right now (but pre-writing it on Thursday), I’m probably already drunk. Ok, I’m not drunk, I’m asleep at home, BUT I will be drunk in like 8 hours or something – sorry, I wasn’t a math major.

Here are some things I’ll be looking out for when I’m roaming around campus:

• How everything is completely nicer than it was when I was there. If you extrapolate into the past, the rate of improvement I’ve seen the last few years since I went there means that in the 80’s the students must have lived in thatched hutches and foraged for berries as part of their meal plan. It’s ridiculous.
• Actual students look like tiny little babies. I mean, it’s scary. And then they give you a ride in a golf cart and give you a beer and you think, “I am telling your mother! Whom I’m old enough to have made out with!”
• Speaking of babies, last time we were there – there was a GIANT-HEADED BABY. It was seriously like Stay-Puft baby head. So we took a bunch of pictures where the baby was in the background. But one of my buddies got trapped by the gravitational pull of his head. He’s now the baby’s man servant.
• Loose change.
  

Events like these do make me nostalgic and force me to think about how swiftly life passes. She waits for no man, as they say. More practically, I think theMonica and I will take a break from stressing about homes and just get really, really hammered. Wish my liver luck!

Have a great weekend. Come on down to UD if you’re bored.

quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard

I love Netflix, but this is (earmuffs) fucking stupid (/earmuffs). In a nutshell, profiles allow theMonica and I to both enjoy Netflix. While I have 400+ movies in my queue, theMonica has her own queue under my account with which she can add and prioritize movies as she pleases. When she watches a movie from her queue and returns it, she receives another movie from HER queue. It allows her to get movies she wants to see in a timely fashion without us having to reorganize one, giant mega-queue everyday.

Then, they say the old profile queues will disappear on 9/1 so you have to "consolidate" (I assume manually) or print them out. (Print them out? Let me fire up the dot matrix.) I don't know. I guess they'll otherwise disappear. It was confusing. WAIT. It was confusing Netflix - better not do it!

I always thought of Netflix as a company that "got it," whatever that means. Now they're just a bunch of idiotic idiots that mindlessly get rid of a great feature because a few morons somehow created a profile and then saw something shiny and poked themselves in the eye.

At any rate, I left this comment on the blog linked above:

Next from Netflix . . .

Netflix to discontinue use of "adding machines" for movie rentals.

Citing mass customer confusion over how to use their "electricity boxes" for effective movie rentals, Netflix has announced they will no longer allow DVD rental by computer. Unhappy customers had complained of CONFUSION and DISORIENTATION caused by the bright shininess of their monitors and the WHIRRING, WHIRRING of computer internals. "Boxes make me dizzy," one befuddled Netflix users said.

Netflix suggested users pony express new additions to their queues or they could do that thing where you hitch a bag of mail to a passing-by train. Of course, if this also confuses, Netflix suggest shouting movie titles very loudly and hoping a Netflix representative hears you. One poor sould was heard roaming through the streets shouting, "CRASH!" into the night air.

When pressed for comment a Netflix representative said, "People began using their machines in unforeseen ways. Take profiles. Profiles are frightening and scary. How can one person be more than one person at the same time? That's witchcraft where I come from and we must discourage that type of behavior." He continued, "We at Netflix decided that it'd be better to discontinue the use of 'devil boxes' for movie rentals rather than being forced to boil a bunch of our customers."

set to stun

Foilage and I have an uneasy relationship. It tends to make my eyes dry and itchy and I tend to hack at it with golf clubs. My contacts do not help the eye situation and this year has been particularly irritating. That's why I can't wait to get laser eye surgery. The ophthalmologist said people usually wait a couple of years before deciding whether or not to go through with the procedure, but I'm not going to hesitate. I want my eyes lasered up post haste!

Later . . .
As it turns out I will NOT be able to shoot lasers out of my eyes upon successful surgery . . . disappointing.

do you like me? And can you quantify that in dollar terms?

Putting offers in on homes is far more nerve-wracking than I ever expected it to be. I guess my main misconception was that things moved along fairly quickly. That if you put an offer in you would hear pretty soon: yea, nay or how about this? In truth, it's not quite like that. We've put some offers in and the response is, "Uhhhhhh, yah. Let me see here. Please hold for like 36 hours." 36 hours elapse. "Hmmm, Peter, yahhh. I'm going to have to go ahead and ask you if this is your best offer?" Ok, um, no, I guess my best offer is a little better. "Ok. I'll go ahead and say I'll get back to you by end-of-business today, but in reality, I'll drag this out as long as possible while your fears and regrets rip at your very soul." Oh, sure, super.

And really, I have no problem with lacksadaisical sellers/real estate agents. The sellers want as much as possible as does the agent - dude wants to maximize his 3%. That's great; that's capitalism and that's what I believe in. But don't tell me end-of-day today, tomorrow and the next day. Tell me you're going to wait 3 to 6 years for more offers. I can handle it. Telling me I'll know by the end-of-day, every day, makes me anxious. And if it makes me anxious it makes theMonica sleepless. And if it makes theMonica sleepless it makes me even more anxious because she's cranky when she's tired. See, this is no good for anyone. And if there are 3 offers in on the same house and we're, you know, not in the conversation, it wouldn't kill you to give us a heads-up.

In many ways, the process is similar to trying to figure out if someone likes you or not. Every second after an unanswered phone call feels like hours and you wait for them to (not) call back. You feel like an imposition even though what you want to know is a pretty basic thing. If you do not like me, I will be fine. You are not so great. And so it goes with homes. Many are nice; many are afforable. Not-so-many are nice and affordable, but if we fail to bid highest, it will not strike me dead to know we've failed. There will be other homes, like so many lonely hearts.

Friday!

This is an adaptation of an email I send around to friends on Fridays. Why? No real reason, just started doing it and kept at it. Because I'm lame.

You know, 6 ounces of water doesn’t look like a whole lot when it’s in a cup, but all over your desk? Well, then, it’s plenty. I mean, sure, all my important business document-type papers needed a good moisturizing, but I could have been a little more efficient with the process rather than clumsily knocking over a Styrofoam cup filled with the first day’s glass of aqua. That was a mutilation of a sentence, but I’m not going back to edit – run with me folks. Anyway, according to “college laws” spilling water all over your desk and then wiping it up constitutes cleaning, so I am good to go with that for at least 6 months. (That’s another college law: you only need to clean every 6 months. Right, time it properly and it’s only once per year. I’m smelly.)

I’m melting. You melting? I am a typical whiny bastard, you know? When it’s 30 degrees in May, I’m complaining about that. Then a week later when it’s 95 with 115% humidity (this weather system is the Pete Rose of meteorology), I’m complaining about that too. But honestly, does anyone benefit from getting swamp ass by looking out the window? No, I didn’t think so. I am especially looking forward to the wedding I’m going to on Saturday. I once sweated through the back of a suit jacket forming a giant lower-back sweat stain, which was then held up (by and ex) for all the world to see. I think I can top that though. I am going to sweat through my tie! Sweating through my tie would probably get into the sweating man’s hall of fame. I’ve been inducted via one of those sham “lifetime achievement award” deals, but this would be legit. The last frontier would be sweating through my shoes. Hey, a guy can dream.

Fyi, new contractor nickname, Cups. He’s always over getting tea or something and asking me if I know where the cups are. And then the other day I saw him pilfering some cups from the floor below mine. Ah, Cups. When will you learn that mugs are like 87 cents?

Have a sweaty great weekend!

irish jesus

theMonica and I went to see The Swell Season, which if you're not wise to Academy Award-winning (I think) songwriting, is the group who wrote the songs featured in the movie Once.

A friend had recommended the movie to me. For him, it was seemingly a life-changing experience. I liked it fine enough and theMonica liked it more, but not treasurer of the fan club more. There was nothing wrong with it per se it was just one of those flicks that kind of happens and you go, "Oh, that was nice." It featured time-tested plotting, enjoyable characters, etc. Your ultimate enjoyment of the moview is directly proportional to how much you enjoyed the music. I hate Irish music as a rule, but this was more singer-songwriter lamenting-lost-loves music by an Irishman, rather than drunken tales of whiskey and whatnot, standard-issue Irish music. Out goes the pennywhistle, in comes the lone acoustic-guitar playing street musician singing for his Guinness.

Ok, so it should be your standard concert-going experience, right? Right? Wrong. I knew there was something amiss when the place was pretty much jam-packed. Fine - a little more popular than I expected. Then, the opener (whom I had never heard of before) completed every song to uproarious applause. Strange, right? Usually audiences tolerate an opener and will, at best, offer surprised applause, like, "Wow. I don't totally hate these guys." But this was genuine, WOOHOO kind of applause. I've been to my share of shows and this one was starting to get creepy . . .

Then Swell Season came out. Hallelujia He has re-risen! Never had I seen such an effusive response for a musician before. It was, quite honestly, kind of unsettling. I kid you not, the guy took a sip of tea and the crowd busted out in guffaws. Seriously. For drinking tea. And then he went on this long, rambling, largely incoherent spiel about tea and being Irish and drunk maybe or it was about corned beef - whatever, made no sense - but you would have thought it was Seinfeld. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA - everything you say is hilarious even though it makes no sense. Every other move was met with extreme approbation. The same kind of thing happened when the chick came out and started stammering about falling in love with a goat or some such. I don't know. Again - made no sense. But man was the crowd eating it up.

Needless to say, it was a sing-a-long show for everyone in attendance but theMonica and I. At one point I whispered to her, "If they start passing around kool-aid, we're out." I had to whisper because I didn't want to be exposed as a non-believer. I felt like I had mistakenly ended up at a Jimmy Swaggert service. "Wait isn't this the average-musician-wrote-ok-movie event? Oh, it's not. My bad."

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Dull

*ZING!*

I thought it was all like Harrison Ford didn't want to do this movie for the money only, he wanted the right script, he was too old, whatever. Well, I don't think this was the right script. I can not say that the movie made me want to vomit, but it wasn't anything special by any means. It was overly reliant on special effects, some of which were silly looking. Though I will admit to being impressed with the man-eating ants.

On the other hand, it was fun and most of my complaints were more post-watching. And hey, we got Mitchell's beforehand, so I had that to look back on fondly.

Dang - Mitchell's needs to work on their webpage. Hello 1996!

all your books are belong to some old guy that yells at you if you go near his boxes

I busted out of work (with permission!) for a couple of hours today to go to another ultra-inexpensive used book sale.

Silverfish must have rejoiced at the sight of the (about) 70,000 books lined-up on tables in the Case gym. (Case is a school for brainiacs and from the looks of things, they're basketball team hasn't had many practices in there). I went for the last day of the sale: the no-holds-barred, all bets are off, awe-inspiring, jaw-droppingly inexpensive, box of books for 5 bucks. Yes, you got to choose the books that fill the box, but while doing so you had to fight your way through all the greedy re-seller types, weakling college freshmen and their inability to control their boxes and pedestrian old school folks whose power-walking group had taken an unexpected detail. Many of those 70,000 books were already gone, but there was still plenty to pick from.

My tact this time was to look for things I was generally interested in or authors/topics that "rang a bell," as it were. Problem being, aren't exceedingly crappy things, that I'd be best to avoid, just as bell-ringing as my vaguely remembering I once read of glowing review of Bruce Catton's work? As sometimes, the names are familiar, but the reasons for recalling them are nowhere to be found.

Well, I got me some Catton amongst other things and in the end I paid about 80 cents a book (I include the $4 parking). So, I got me some free knowledge - just like the internets only nicely bound.

celebrity lost

Sorry folks. I am back. Apparently, Wednesday is a big off/golf day for doctors and important celebrity PR people alike. I will try to post some screenshots of my time in the sun (i.e. photographs of my tv) and my subsequent sunburn, which is somewhat itchy.