Ramblings of an Anonymous Coward

Gosh. Idiot!

the "bad things" are greatly outweighing the "good things" things today and i'm left feeling like a total goof. lest it seem otherwise, by "bad things" i really mean along the level of annoyances versus anything particularly serious.

• the fourth of july weekend is this weekend. that explains all the american flags at the grocery store today.
• this also explains why the burritos i normall buy at 5 for $1.00 are 5 for $2.00 today.
• and the pizzas i normally get 2 for $5.00 are $4.99 each. damn it!
• they still don't have the nathan's hotdogs i like in stock and now the tag is down so i'm starting to think they won't get them either.
• i bought a loaf of bread. apparently we already had two. i didn't notice them because they were still in bags from a grocery run done a couple days ago. same with toritillas. :-(
• the blockbuster clerk nearly screwed up my account as well as some other random person's when she somehow checked in the movie i was returning (the jacket) to someone elses account and checked out the movie i got (cursed) on their account as well. fortunately the manager noticed that other person owed money (i don't and in fact have a small credit) and we straighted it out. net result, 5 minutes i'll never get back. but that's ok.
• because it was air conditioned and it is really warm today. not blazing hot or anything, but uncomfortably warm and difficult to work in.
• so i spilled ketchup on my circa 1993 (4.1.1993 to be exact) sun sharkstation t-shirt. it is a pun on sparcstation and commemorates the 1993 april fool's prank done on scott that year.
• kids wanted to go to the movies and i was in a position of having to play good dad. lets just say that it makes me cringe at the thought of spending that much for movies. the flick is war of the worlds, so part of my dislike in this instance aside from my hating to drop cash is that i don't get to see the movie.
• i do; however, get some quiet time. not like i'll actually get too much work done.
• several work complaints deleted. would be my luck that someone would read them and get all pissy making things all the much worse.
• i damn near lost my mobile phone. slipped out of my short's pocket. thankfully it feel out in my truck.
• you'd think someone complaining about not being productive enough wouldn't be here whining. doh! that would be me. ummmm. yeah.

Marriage is like a porterhouse steak

i can't take credit for this post or even the subject line as i've simply ripped this right off the page of heads or tales and reproduced it here. i was going to just take a snippet and link to it, but i think it needs to be kept intact. this is the original of what is below.

On one side, you have the meaty, hearty strip on one side and the other you find the delicate and delicious filet. They share the T bone in addition to being bound by the other connective tissues, but they are still separate, much like two married people. In marriage, the T bone and tissues represent the bonds that they share; the things that tie the strip of a spouse to his or her filet of a spouse.

Life, including the inherent financial problems, represent the grill and it's heat. When you place marriage on life, you have to constantly watch it, ensuring to take care with marriage so it doesn't get burned up. Like with the flame, keeping the money situation divided equally and under control will keep one of the two members from being overdone while the other is still raw. In a steak, that equates to four minutes on side, turning the steak 45 degrees halfway in between. In marriage, you need to keep the communication constant and open, making adjustments to ensure you're both together, exactly where you need to be in life.

Never ever forget to check to see how you're really doing. In a porterhouse, when a thermometer is placed in the center of each portion, the temperature should register at 155-160 to achieve a nice medium consistency. In marriage, you need to ASK how the other person is doing: That is your thermometer, your method of probing and discovering just what the other person needs. Sometimes, people don't always express everything they want in life. It takes work on YOUR part to make those discoveries.

A baked potato, like children, will not make a bad porterhouse a good porterhouse. It will simply be a bitter, half cooked porterhouse, which only fucks up the baked potato, no matter how resilient you believe potatoes are.

A porterhouse is a big piece of meat. Believing you can have a porterhouse with another filet on the side is a bad idea in practice, but yes, it does sound delicious. It's better just to sit back and be entertained watching someone deal with that much meat.

Taking someone else's filet away from them could end up with your own meat being turned into hamburger.

Two strip steaks together just seems wrong, but oddly, two filets seem to be quite lovely. Judging from the number of places that show two filets on the menu, it would seem many people feel the same way. Experiment if you so wish.

And finally, when you find yourself in the market for a filet to compliment your strip or vice versa, be careful you pick the right cut and not something that simply looks good.

Until we meat again...

i'm a filet mignon guy myself -- medium or medium rare depending on your perspective of what is medium or not. and mushrooms. must have those! so i wonder where the fungi (pun intended) fits in. and what about the bacon?

oh, nevermind. i could get far to silly with this one.

Dream Home

for less than $300,000 you can have your own island fort. if i were in the uk, this would be so tempting! i'd just have to figure out how to get power, sewage and internet access there ... not necessarily in that order.

update: seems there are some pictures available -- here and here.

Can You Hear Me Now?

i didn't plan to post anything else today, but then this entry from boing boing caught my eye and i just had to link to it.

scientists report that parts of a woman's brain switch off when she has an orgasm...

i can just see the wave of jokes from both sides crashing in right now.

Just A Quote

i'm quoting a frenchman... whodofthunkit?!?

when we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
-- francois de la rochefoucauld

Word Association, Week 124

word association time again...

1. Domesticated:: animal
2. Cask:: of amontillado
3. Wayne:: 's world
4. Insidious:: pressures
5. Cool!:: be
6. Dishwasher:: liquid
7. Little house:: on the praire
8. Stepford:: wives
9. Hung:: william
10. Falling:: down

All Good Things...

...come to an end. a friend of mine called to tell me that our saturday night hockey league was dropped and that he accepted an offer on his property and the rink would be closed by the end of the month. on the one hand i am happy that he will make a tidy profit on the real estate and get out of a business that has been stressfully teetering on the break-even point of late. i'm happy for him. really. but down inside i'm still sad at its passing and wonder when/if i'll be playing hockey again, much less having as much fun.

Waves of all Types

so i'm driving home around 9pm last night and the radio station i was listening to was interupted with one of those emergency broadcasting system alerts.

...A TSUNAMI WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR THE COASTAL AREAS FROM THE CALIFORNIA-MEXICO BORDER TO THE NORTH TIP OF VANCOUVER I.-BC. INCLUSIVE...
noaa link

wtf? i kept waiting for the dj to say this was some sort of funny ad or joke. he never did. once back, i asked around to see if anybody else heard the warning. all answers were "no". it has to be a joke that i just wasn't catching. sometimes i get the subtle hints/jokes, other times they go right past me and i feel like a dope afterwards. this time; however, it was apparently real and i guess i was there to hear tsunami bulletin number 001. cool. oh, and no abnormally large waves hit the coast. almost disappointing. for those that want to track waves, there is the norcal buoy data page.

sunburned from being outside for commencement exercises, i'd have felt a little better about it had steve jobs done the address like he did over at stanford. he left the students with a few things to think about. steve jobs commencement address.

and now a little rant...

apparently some guy took some pictures of president george bush and various guns and did an image mash-up. big deal? apparently somebody thought so and informed the secret service.

the images were on flickr and have apparently been removed. having read the account in the blog of the guy who make the pictures i'm left shaking my head. crap like this simply reinforces the "big brother" or "police state" the current administration seems to be bent on moving us to. don't get me wrong -- if someone threatens the life of the president (including gwb) i think the secret service absolutely has to follow up and take it seriously. now is putting bush and a gun in the same picture really a threat? since the images aren' there, maybe there were captions that implied something, but it just doesn't sound that way.

hopefully we aren't waving bye-bye to our freedom of speech so soon...

The Idiot Box

of late i have spent a lot more time watching television than normal. partly, i suppose, is because there have been a few more quality shows on broadcast television:

• house -- hugh laury plays dr. greg house plays a doctor that speaks bluntly to his patients, hospital staff and administration, and ... well ... anybody. it is to the point of being rude, but almost always the truth. there were clearly some skeletons in his closet one of which was worked out in the final two episodes of the season. we'll see how the next season goes, as the show definitely uses the same formula over and over and it is likely to get boring if they don't spice it up. the season ending helped with that, so there is promise on the horizon.
• law & order: trial by jury -- bebe neuworth plays a sexy assistant district attorney in a show that highlights the investigation and prosecution from a different angle than the other law & order shows. like most shows of it's kind, they'll often use current news in their story lines.
• grey's anatomy is yet another "doctor show" that to me is akin to er in it's early days. it has an interesting cast of characters and the plots tend to be reasonably original. the season ender was a bit of a kick in the pants and should make next season worth watching. network execs and nielson's must have agreed as its pilot bumped one of my fav's "boston legal" to play out the season.
• boston legal -- features james spader and william shatner as two "interesting" attorneys at a prominent boston legal firm. denny craine (shatner) is a partner that probably should have retired years ago, but still manages to make things happen. alan shore (spader) is the spin-off from the highly successful series "the practice" -- he is an attorney that seeminly has no morals and does what needs to be done to win a case. of course, when he is ignoring ethics and alike, it tends to be for a good cause that simply doesn't match up with what might always be "legally correct", so he tends to get plenty of sympathy from the audience. not that he would care, as he makes it perfectly clearly that he is ok with his behaviors and just lets those around him "deal with it". we all could use a little more alan shore in us. well, i could at least. when looking for the link, i noticed they even have a decent "unofficial fan site with rss feeds and a countdown to season two.

moving from broadcast to paid television, i'm still waiting for the next (and last?) season of the sopranos and am currently watching the last season of six feet under and wondering when/if huff will come back.

ok, i'll use this entry to throw out the movies i've seen recently...

• Suspect Zero -- the dust cover made it look like this was going to be a really good movie. it was "ok" and worth a rental should nothing better be available.
• Darkness -- don't bother. seriously.
• Unspeakable -- another is a long list of "ok" movies.
• Sideways -- a little wine. a little whine. i thought they were heading up to napa when they talked about the "wine country". it had it's amusing moments but all-in-all was pretty much middle of the road.
• White Noise -- terribly disappointing. i was all jazzed to get to what this right away and ended up wondering why i bothered.
• Kinsey -- informative i guess. i didn't know a lot about this guy and this flick filled in some details. it did make for an amusing story which i'll think about entering one of these days.
• National Treasure -- my expectations were low... and they were met. a decent rental, albeit a bit long. solving the puzzles on the dvd to unlock the extra content was amusing at 2am. and no, i won't give away the answers.
• Last House on the Left -- anw picked this classic movie (wes craven's first movie). it showed it's age, but was still fun to watch. not great by any standard, but coupled with the extras on the dvd.. it was entertaining. and yes, that is a little like saying "she has a nice personality"...
• Assault on Precinct 13 -- a little shoot 'em up is always good. the plot? eh, so-so. fine if you just want to veg out with something that isn't going to just put you to sleep.
• The Life Aquatic -- i expected a bit more from a bill murray comedy. the movie was amusing in rather subtle ways and a touch long for my taste.
• Boogeyman -- typical japanese horror. similar filming to "the grudge" with the camera movements and angles. it isn't something that is going to scare you and the ending has a lot left to be desired, but if you have nothing better to do you could pick worse.
• Are We There Yet? -- a predictable comedy that will make you chuckle from time to time anyway. ice cube shows (again) that he can actually act, but will never be confused with any great actors. of course, those actors haven't done as well as him in the music business, so i guess that makes them even.
• Blow -- that was johnny depp? he definitely had a different look and it took a second look for it to sink in. a pretty good movie about how the columbia drug cartel gained some of its first successful roots in the united states. go get 'em tuna!

i still have aviator checked out, but at 3 hours, i have no idea when i'm going to watch it. eventually i'm sure.

Word Association, Week 123

word association... 'nuf said for this week!

1. Wally:: world
2. Phantom:: of the opera
3. Slippery:: when wet
4. Fungus:: mushroom
5. Slot:: machine
6. Type:: a
7. Discharge:: bloody
8. "We need to talk”:: trouble
9. On the spot:: put
10. Liquid:: helium *

emem tebahpla cisum

ok, sometimes i get obsessive about things -- and yes, that is "music alphabet game" spelled backwards. so as you'd guess, it is like the previous post, just backwards. sadly, some songs are left unchanged.

character	song	band	album
-	-1	Mudvayne	L.D. 50
#	#41	Dave Matthews Band	Crash
(	(You Drive Me) Crazy	Richard Cheese	Tuxicity
.	...Slowdance On The Inside	Taking Back Sunday	Where You Want To Be...
[	[Untitled Hidden Track]	Korn	Untouchables
1	19th Nervous Breakdown	The Rolling Stones	Forty Licks
2	29	Gin Blossoms	New Miserable Experience
3	3x5	John Mayer	Any Given Thursday
4	4th of July	Soundgarden	SuperUnknown
5	5th Symphony (Techno Remix)	Unknown
6	6th Avenue Heartache	Wallflowers	Bringing Down the Horse
7	742617000027	Slipknot	Slipknot
8	86	Green Day	Insomniac
9	99 to Life	Social Distortion	Somewhere Between Heavan and Hell
A	Aye Davanita	Pearl Jam	Vitalogy
B	Bye, Bye Baby	Janis Joplin	18 Essential Songs
C	Cygmus... Visumnd Cygmus	The Mars Volta	Frances the Mute
D	Dying	Hole	Celebrity Skin
E	Ezekiel (Dialog)	Samuel L. Jackson	Pulp Fiction Soundtrack
F	Fx	Black Sabbath	Vol. 4
G	Gypsy Wedding	NovaMenco	Gypsy Fusion
H	Hysteria	Def Lepard	Best of Def Lepard
I	Izzat Love	Todd Rundgren	Todd
J	Justice Tonight - Kick it Over	The Clash	Super Black Market Clash
K	Kyrie	Mr. Mister	Billboard Top Hits: 1986
L	Lysergik Funeral Procession	Down	Down II
M	Myxamatosis	Radiohead	Hail to the Thief
N	Nyah	Hans Zimmer, Heitor Pereira	MI-2 Soundtrack
O	Ozone Baby	Led Zepplin	Coda
P	Pyramid Song	Radiohead	Amnesiac
Q	Quiet	Smashing Pumpkins	Siamese Dreams
R	Rx Queen	Deftones	White Pony
S	Syncronicity II	The Police	Message in a Bottle Boxed Set (Disk 4)
T	Typical Situation	Dave Matthews Band	Under The Table And Dreaming
U	Useless Begging	Todd Rundgren	Todd
V	Vodo Chile	Stevie Ray Vaughn	Live Alive
W	Wrote a Song for Everyone	Creedence Clearwater Revival	Chronical, Vol 2
X	XYU	Smashing Pumpkins	Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Y	YYZ	Rush	Moving Pictures
Z	Zwitter	Rammstein	Mutter

this meme done forwards can be found in my music alphabet meme post earlier.

Music Alphabet Meme

so there seems to be a meme going around (first seen at asv) where you take your iTunes library , sort the titles, and post the first entry for each letter, number, and character. i can do that. answers are based on my library as it is today -- 9446 songs which supposedly would play for 27.5 days and uses 43.27GB of disk.

character	song	band	album
-	-1	Mudvayne	L.D. 50
#	#34	Dave Matthews Band	Under The Table and Dreaming
(	(-) ions	Tool	Aenima
.	...And Justice for All	Metallica	...And Justice for All
[	[Hidden Track]	Marilyn Manson	Smells Like Children
1	1-2 Crush on You	The Clash	Super Black Market Crash
2	2 + 2 = 5	Radiohead	Hail to the Thief
3	3A.M.	Matchbox-20	You or Someone Like You
4	4 out of 5	Soul Coughing	Irresistible Bliss
5	5th Symphony (Techno Remix)	Unknown
6	69 Tea	Seether	Disclaimer II
7	7	Moby	Play
8	80	Green Day	Kerplunk
9	99 Luftballons	Richard Cheese	I'd Like a Virgin
A	A Big Hunk O' Love	Elvis Presley	The Number One Hits
B	B Minor Jam	Eric Clapton	461 Ocean Boulevard
C	C'est La Vie	Shania Twain	Up!
D	D'yer Mak'er	Led Zepplin	Houses of the Holy
E	E-Mac (Interlude)	Outkast	Speakerboxxx
F	F-Stop Blues	Jack Johnson	Brushfire Fairytales
G	Galapogos	Smashing Pumpkins	Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
H	H.	Tool	Aenima
I	I'd Die for You	Bon Jovi	Slippery When Wet
J	J'fait Une Promesse	Anathema	Resonance
K	K-Jee	M.F.S.B.	Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack
L	L'cho Fusill	Vladamir Vissotski	Le Vol Arrete
M	M.I.A.	Foo Fighters	There is Nothing to Lose
N	N.I.B.	Black Sabbath	Black Sabbath
O	O Girlfriend	Weezer	Weezer (Green Album
P	Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box	Radiohead	Amnesiac
Q	Quasimodo	Lifehouse	No Name Face
R	Radiance	Anthema	Eternity
S	S.O.S.	Abba	The Best of Abba
T	T.B.D	Live	Throwing Copper
U	U-Mass	Pixies	Best of Pixies
V	Valentine's Day	Marilyn Manson	Holy Wood
W	W.M.A	Pearl Jam	Vs
X	X-Girlfriend	Bush	Sixteen Stone
Y	Yairo	Lunascape	Reflecting Seylence
Z	Zak and Sara	Ben Folds Five	Ben Folds Live

maybe later do the last song for each letter, number, character....
update: done

Posted by ac at 06:41 PM | Comment