Even though its been a short week for me with Monday off for the easter holiday, it still seems like a long hectic week and I am very glad that Friday is here. Been trying to get together with some friends for a few drinks and some Rock Band for quite a while now but schedules have been hard to coordinate and last minute things have come up. Barring a major tragedy, hopefully that will finally happen tonight. Everyone has been talking about how they could use a few drinks tonight. That reminded me of a part of the show that Bill Cosby did quite a while ago called 'Bill Cosby: Himself'. In it he talks about people owing it to themselves to go out drinking, getting drunk and having a good time. Here you go:
There is a lot of other funny bits in there. Especially if you are a parent dealing with young kids you would enjoy watching the rest. But the whole drinking thing just came to mind when everyone was talking about stressful weeks and wanting to go out and have a few. He goes on a bit later in the segment to talk about people coming back to work on Monday almost relieved saying something like "Thank god I'm back here.. I'm just no good on my own for two days"
See.. I think thats the real problem with the way things are set up right now. We work for 5 days and usually have a ton of stuff crammed in during the week. Then when the weekend arrives, we only get two days to get everything done we couldn't during the week and still try to find time to relax and have some fun. So we end up trying to go "all out" for those couple of days to really enjoy ourselves before we go back to the grind for another week. We just need to switch stuff around. Just think about it. If you had 5 days to relax and have fun and then you went to work and put two solid days in .. wouldn't that be so much better?
Look at the people around you.. sure some of you have jobs where you are actually working hard the whole time you are there. A lot of people though really end up stretching out two days of work to take the entire week anyway. Lets just be a pinnacle of efficiency and get it all done in the two days, get paid the same, and then have 5 days every week off. Ah.. in my world that is the way it would be. There would be much merriment and rejoycing. I would be a popular person. Hail to the king baby.
That was a movie reference by the way.. if you didn't get it .. let me give you a couple more lines and we'll see who can come up with it. No googleing it to cheat either.
"First you wanna kill me.. now you wanna kiss me. Blow" "Good, Bad.. I'm the guy with the gun." "Gimme some sugar baby."
Aww come on. No Boston fans here? C you should at least know the song since you butchered it last time we played rock band! :P Title just seemed fitting as its been a bit since my last post. I blame work and a 4 day holiday weekend. I felt kinda guilty at first, but then remembered I'm not getting paid for this and got over it real quick.
I know I rambled on in a previous post about music triggering thoughts and memories. Flipping through my XM satellite radio stations this morning I dropped by the 80s channel and what was on but 'Joy and Pain' by Rob Base. Some of you may know this song, but it came out right before we took a trip with our youth group to San Diego. I had bought the single for the song.. yes, on a cassette tape, and we must have driven the adults crazy listening to it over and over on the way there. And while we were there. And the whole way back too. But now that song instantly triggers memories of that trip every time I hear it... even almost 2 decades later. Wow..kinda makes me feel old when I can type in that its been almost 2 DECADES since a high school trip. Good thing I am not just now starting to lose my hair or I would probably have to buy a little gray 2 seater sports car to compensate.. maybe like a Mazda or something. :P
It's kind of funny how some people are not into music really. Some prefer the quiet or only like quiet background music. For me, its like a soundtrack to my life and I love it. About the only time I don't have music on is when I'm on the phone, or asleep. It's on in the morning when I get up, in the car, at work all day, at the gym, while I'm online at night playing. Sometimes its in the background and I'm not really paying attention to it, but most of the time I'm singing along even if its just in my head as to not scare my coworkers.
As I was talking on the phone with a very special person in my life, we got on the topic of music as we often do as we both like a lot of the same stuff. I had heard a song that had lyrics that made me immediately think of her on XM Squizz and had mentioned it briefly the previous night. I didn't tell her the artist or song name however as I was meaning to send her the song later. Then I got a text from her that she had heard this song and it had made her think of me. Low and behold it was the same song. Of all the songs out there right now, I thought it was pretty cool that we both heard the song at seperate times and it triggered thoughts of the other person even though we had never heard it together. <3
Another far more annoying song that triggers memories for me is that song 'Who Let the Dogs Out'. That song reached its tragic peak of popularity right at the time we were headed back to AZ for a visit with the family. Due to work schedules we had decided to take a red eye flight out on a Friday night. We had a brief layover on this flight.. in Vegas. Well we soon found out that the Friday night redeye is the drunks heading to Vegas for the weekend flight. So here we are with two young kids who are tired and just want to sleep and we have a plane full of drunk idiots headed to a party weekend in Vegas. That would have been bad enough. Now toss in that some drunk guy starts singing "Who let the dogs out... hooo hooo hooo" at the top of his lungs while stumbling up and down the isle searching for some bimbo to join the mile high club with and it just got so much worse. Now all the other drunk idiots.. men and women alike, join him for an impromptu karaoke session all acapella style. I had never seen such an awe inspiring sight. The only thing that could be better than this would be if someone happened to have the macarena song and a boom box so I watch a pack of stumbling window lickers do a stupid dance while confined to their tiny amount of space aboard the plane.
I don't know if you have seen the movie "Snakes on a Plane" or not. It extremely cheesy, but then it was supposed to be and it has some great one liners in it. I think the guy that came up with the idea was not just reaching for a script idea. I think he was in a similar experience to the one I mentioned there and sat in his seat trying to ignore them and a thought popped into his head... "You know what .. I wish poisonous snakes would drop from the overhead bins and kill these morons" Now granted its not a well thought out plan as after they were dead you would still be on a plane full of snakes and no where to go, but sometimes desperation makes you think crazy thoughts. It's much like any time I hear a Spice Girls or Hanson song being played from my coworkers desk... I start thinking .. hoping.. that just maybe a small meteor will come out of the sky and crush my skull, releaving the intense pain in my head from the tragedy that is any song done by them. Its the same feeling I get whenever I find out that Snaggletooth or Drew Borememore (Barrymore in case you missed it) has put out a new movie.
Maybe thats what Rob Base was talking about. Some music brings you Joy.. some brings you Pain. I suppose though if we didnt have bad music, bad movies, bad times in our lives, we wouldn't appreciate the good stuff as much. To all my friends and family out there that make life good .. much love.
Rock Band is quite possibly the coolest thing to hit the video game world in a long long time. Its the only reason I bought a console as I generally have very little interest in them. I much prefer gaming on the PC. However, after playing Guitar Hero 3 at my Sister's place over the xmas holiday and then getting to play Rock Band at a friends house here, I was hooked. I love this game. Its fun, easy to get into, and is very challenging at the later stages. I mean who doesn't love the idea of being in a rock band? If you are not familiar with the game, you basically have one or two guitar controllers (lead and bass), drums and vocals. Each person gets their own queues on screen as to what they should be doing and the band does well or gets booed of stage based on how close everyone is to what they should be playing.
Getting a group of 3+ people together to play this just makes the game. It's a blast for me to play with the boys, and we do often, rotating between the instruments. It's a ton of fun to get a group of friends together and play. Alchohol only adds to the fun when people who normally wouldn't pic up the mic and start belting out "Wanted Dead or Alive" at the top of their lungs.
Rock Band gets another cookie for their DLC .. or DownLoadable Content for those not familiar with the XBox Live terminology. The company that makes Rock Band has commited to putting out at least 3 new songs for the game every week and they have released a ton of good stuff since the game came out late last year. They are now planning on some full albums as well from Nirvana, The Who and The Grateful Dead. Most packs are 3 song sets from a specific band. You can go here for the full list of what songs are in the game now and what is available for download. Interstate Love Song by Stone Temple Pilots.. need I say more? :P
So I mentioned this was a love-hate relationship. Why the hate? Two reasons. The instruments and the online gameplay. First.. the instruments. Go to any forum that talks about rock band and you will find quickly what I'm talking about. The instruments break... it just seems to be an inevitable thing. I have had my set for less than a month .. and last night I broke my bass pedal for the drum kit. I know people with faulty guitars, drum pads that stop responding etc. The only thing I haven't heard a lot of problems with is the mic, but then you don't do a whole lot to put wear and tear on the mic either. The drums obviously take a beating. The guitars are constantly being strummed.. and sometimes strummed pretty hard depending on the song. They are notorious for only taking a strum in one direction after a while. There is also an overdrive feature in the game that when you are doing very well that you can go into like a mini 'bonus' scoring phase by activating overdrive. This overdrive on the guitar is supposed to be activated when you tip the neck of the guitar quickly towards vertical and then back down. My rock band guitar is now so sensitive that if you are just grooving along with a song, barely moving the guitar, you will still probably set it off at random.
The company recognizes these problems and has setup ways to get people replacements in a reasonable time frame. If you are willing to put a hold on your credit card, they will ship advanced replacements to you and then you just return the defective part in the same box, postage all paid by them. However, this hold is $125 bucks now across the board even for something as cheap and simple as a bass pedal. They don't send refurb pieces either, it's a new one which is to be commended, but still you are getting the same kind of thing back. Its not like they have redesigned things and are sending better quality pieces back. Your only other option is to wait for them to send you a postage paid box, send your defective one to them, and then wait for them to receive, process and send you a new one.
Why were these items not constructed better? I mean its not the occasional piece breaking here and there, its basically guaranteed that you are going to have to fix/replace one or more of the instruments pretty quickly. I expect stuff to wear out over time under heavy use. I don't expect to break an instrument 3 weeks after I bought it with moderate use. I have read reports of them having done focus groups to see how much people would be willing to pay for RB and that is why they shot for the price range they did. Honestly though, the game is extremely fun and I am willing to bet that people would have paid another 20, 40, 60 bucks for it for higher quality instruments. Hell, offer two different packs even. One at the price point its at now and then a premium package with the instruments designed the way they need to be.. durable. I mean seriously, I understand I am a big guy and I have heavy legs, but the thickness of these pedals and the fact that a bass pedal is meant to be stomped on is just silly. Take a look how thin the plastic is:
Yes, it really is that thin. Silly isn't it? I can picture the powers that be sitting around thinking "If we make the bass pedal really thin, sure it will break, but we save 3.1 cents per box and I need that if I am going to get the yacht upgrade I want this summer!" I can't imagine that doubling the thickness of that pedal woudl have hurt the bottom line that much. I would think it would have been a helluva lot cheaper than staffing and paying for all the replacements theya re now. I have been trying to figure out what to do with my bass pedal. I don't relish dealing with an RMA on it to be without a bass pedal for possibly weeks only to get the same cheap plastic crap back again. In digging around online for solutions to the problem, I found that they make a metal replacement for the plastic pedal. For about 20 bucks I can order one. Why did they not use a metal plate for RB in the first place? If I can get it for 20.. you can be damn sure if Harmonix had bought them in bulk for the pedals, they would have cost a lot less. I would have paid another 10-15 bucks to have that metal pedal included in the first place.
The other thing I hate with RB is the lack of a world tour mode for online play. When you have 2-4 people in your house playing, you can go into whats called 'World Tour' mode in which your band actually progresses together. You start off with the easy songs, earn fans, money, items and unlock different locations to play. As you get further in, you get to do song sets. Some that you pick and some that are set by the game. Sets are fun and usually mean bigger rewards. The online mode for playing as a band only offers what they call quick play mode. You can jump in, pick any song, and play. Now don't get me wrong, this is a nice feature for when you just want to hop on, message someone and jam along with a couple songs quick. I like to play with my sister and bro-in-law in Phx. as well as various friends. It would be nice to have an ongoing thing with them via the 'world tour' mode. The mode already exists in the game, they just needed to offer it in the xbox live world.
So in summary, rock band pretty much ROCKS. It is fun as hell. Just remember, go easy on the instruments please. No one wants to deal with getting them replaced. If you all are lucky though, you can play with me while I'm a little tipsy and hear my amazing renditions of Interstate Love Song and Boston's 'Foreplay / Longtime' ! Unlike a certain other person I know that slaughtered Longtime into sounding like an angry cat was being disemboweled with a rusty spork. Good times!
For those of you unaware how RB works.. here is a video of a group of people doing Green Grass and High Tides on expert for all instruments / vocals. This is one of the hardest songs in the game and on expert everything comes at you crazy fast. On the screen you are seeing bass guitar on the left, lead guitar in the middle, drums on the right and the vocals are up top.
So the topic of the greatest Disney movies of all time came up. Now I know a lot of you that read this blog are die hard Disney freaks. I don't take it quite a seriously, but I do have my favorites. They can be entertaining for various reasons. They might be overly funny with adult humor. It might be the animation and characters. For me a lot of the time its the music involved. My favorite Disney song is definitely from Jungle Book. Here you go:
Normally I wouldn't say I was a big fan of jazz / swing music, but this song is just great. I have fond memories of dancing around the living room with my boys when they were younger singing along with that song.. especially towards the end when they are doing their whole freestyle riff thing. I never got a hold of a grass hula skirt for the part of Baloo, but who knows. Maybe someday.
Im sure everyone has their Disney movie memories. I remember when I was younger that on Sunday nights they would have a Disney movie on ABC. My family and I would always do a "party supper" with lots of appetizer and finger foods, and sit in the living room together and watch the movie while we ate. Its something I still do today with the boys from time to time. We did it the other night actually. Not while watching disney movies, but the time together is whats important.
Another for me was when I was sick, I always used to watch Mary Poppins. I know.. you can start mocking me now, but it was long and fun so it passed the time while I was laying around feeling miserable. I still have fond memories of watching that movie as a kid. That one and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Both great movies.
I know.. finally a short blog post. I was going to ramble some more about my other favorite Disney flicks, but honestly most of them are great and we could just get into a whole debate about which ones best for what reason. I will let you duke that stuff out. So til next post.. I'm gone man.. Solid Gone!
Chicago is not too far away from where I live .. and every year down there they dye the river for St. Patricks day. Yes, they dye the whole river green. Here's a picture:
When we took one of our first trips to Chicago after we moved here, we did the whole tourist thing. Took the bus tour of the city and heard all the interesting facts about various buildings and locations. One of the things they talked about as we cut back and forth across the city was the river. The river used to flow into Lake Michigan. Due to the polution of a city, the river was carrying too much harmful trash and polution into the lake. Since they couldn't really control the polution back then like they can now (this was in the late 1800's) they did the next best thing. They reversed the flow of the river.
Pretty cool yes? I thought so. My inner engineering geek was immediately intrigued. I was no longer listening to the tour guide talking about this shopping area or the building that Oprah films in. I was looking at the river and trying to figure out how exactly one would go about reversing the flow of a river. Yes, I actually researched this on the net when I got home because I had to know. They used a serious of canal locks to redirect the flow of the river into a new "Sanitary and Ship Canal" that they had designed for this purpouse. Thus preventing the flow of toxins and garbage into the lake.
I know you probably don't care, but I studied civil engineering and for quite a while thought that is what I wanted to do for a living. Then I got into computers.. and never looked back. I have several relatives who are civil engineers though, and while I was studying that subject, my uncle invited me to do an internship with a civil engineering firm that he knew of in VA. I spent the summer with them working on various construction projects with this company. My uncle was a big project guy with the firm he worked for. He was more into the planning end of things. Doing the evaluations and coming up with the solutions to the problems that he was presented. Many a times getting lost in his own thoughts despite anything going on around him.
This provided my cousin with ample opportunities for entertainment. There we would all be, my aunt, two cousins, myself and of course my uncle sitting around talking over dinner. At random times, my uncle would clearly just drift off into his head analyzing some project or issue he had to come up with a solution for at work. Just lost in his own thoughts, he would usually stop eating even and just kind of be staring blankly into space. Every time my cousin would see this, he would look at him and then quite loudly shout out "REINFORCED CONCRETE" and my uncle, hearing a work related term would snap out of his daze. Maybe you had to be there, or I'm just easily amused, but it was funny every time.
That was also the summer we developed a top 10 country music video countdown. Now neither myself nor my cousin really like country music, but that was back about the time that MTV stopped actually playing music on a channel called "Music TeleVision". Go figure. More Real World and Road Rules please! Anyway.. we were flipping through the stations one day and on CMT there was a video for a song called "God Bless Texas" and we happen to catch the part with hot chicks in bikinis around the pool. We were intrigued. The planets had aligned that day it seems and it was video after video filled with hot chicks. So we ignored the music and set out to rank the videos based on the quality and quantity of scantily dressed females. Hey.. this was important stuff we were working on here. Sure its no cure for cancer or anything, but once we had them ranked, it made our lives much easier. Now when we were watching another program, we could quick switch to see what video was on.. and then we could decide on its rank on the list if it was worth possibly missing part of the other program we were watching to make sure we caught a glimpse of the hot chicks in the video.
Oh mock if you will, but this was manly efficiency at its finest. I mean seriously.. it was country music for crying out loud. You surely don't want to get stuck listening to that crap if you aren't distracted by a nice rack and a skimpy outfit or a nice ass in some tight jeans. I miss the 80's big hair band music videos. They had the right idea. Rock music... with mostly naked chicks squirming over the hoods of cars or dancing on stipper poles. Want a good example? Check out Warrant's "Cherry Pie" video. You will have to go here as I cannot imbed that one. You want to talk about some classic lyrics ..
Swingin' in the living room
Swingin' in the kitchen
Most folks don't 'cause
They're too busy bitchin'
Swingin' in there 'cause
She wanted me to feed her
So I mixed up the batter
And she licked the beater
If you don't catch the meaning there.. you should really get out more and join the rest of us with our minds in the gutter. :P I started this whole thing off talking about St. Patty's day, so enjoy some green beers with friends tonight and maybe if you play your cards right you can find someone that will go home with you and lick your beater for you. ;)
I was talking with someone the other day about all the personalities in our guild. We have always considered our guild like an extended family. Over the years, I have gotten to know many of the people quite well. Hell I have been running this guild for almost 10 years now through various games and some people have been a part of our crazy little group for close to that long. What really struck me the other day is how much like a family dynamic the guild can be.
Think of your typical big family get together. Picture extended family gathering from all over for a family reunion or say a big Thanksgiving day meal. You like a good portion of those people. Some you are very close to. Others have little habits or mannerisms that drive you insane and make you want to drink heavily. There is that crude uncle that makes everyone just a little bit uncomfortable with his poorly timed off-color jokes. The crazy aunt that loves everyone but is just a little bit creepy when she says she wants to give you a kiss with that "ISmoked3PacksADaySinceAge15" voice. There are those that would do anything for you if you asked. Others that play nice since its a family gathering but seriously dislike you even if you don't know it. We have all those personalities and more in the group of people we call guildmates.
Two things became very apparent to me over the years running this guild. First was that not everyone is going to get along. The second was that you better have a thick skin if you want to participate. I had to realize that the super bubbly and giggly quasi goth chick is going to get on some peoples nerves and that there are those that will rub her the wrong way in return. We have a guy in the guild that is super nice.. loves to help out and trys to get along with everyone. Being a guild full of sarcastic bastards who love to give people endless amounts of crap, he got it from all directions when he joined the guild. Initially he didn't handle it well at all, getting upset that people were constantly ragging on him. I am well beyond policing guild relationships at this point. I tried early on with little success to make everyone get along and it just didn't work so I had to tell this guy flat out that he either cowboy up and learn to take it and throw it right back at them, or move on to a different guild because he was going to get eaten alive.
Relationships are a tricky thing. A lot of time it comes down to confidence in yourself and of course learning how to deal with certain personalities. You have to be happy with yourself before you are ready to start jumping into those shark infested waters. You can't take everything personally. You have to learn how to deal with the guy that generally is an asshole to everyone and doesn't seem to know he's an asshole. (who you later find out has an interest in sewing!) You have to learn to deal with the people that pick up on sensitivity like an angry rottwieler on a t-bone steak and will haze you til you either start crying or you throw it right back at them and show you have a spine. It's not an easy thing to learn for some people that most of us only give crap to the ones we like and care about. Oh sure, I am not above mocking someone who clearly needs it (see the post on Durth), but 99% of the time, if I joke around and mock you on a daily basis, its because I like you. I think it all harkens back to the days when boys and girls would chase, punch and tackle people they liked. You like that hot little third grader over there? Chase her around the playground. If she cries and tells the teacher, you are pretty much hosed. If she tosses her hair playfully over her shoulder and smiles before running and pretending to hate you for chasing her.. well then you are golden!
A lot of times you get to see way more of someones true personality being online, or maybe how they percieve themselves. We had a guy in the guild for a long time who I had met in person on quite a few occasions. In person he was pretty cool, down to earth and genuinely fun to hang out with. Online he was a giant puss filled blister of hate, anger and rage who didn't filter anything that came into his head and in fact generally strived to be as offensive and argumentative as possible. They anonymity of the internet is a double edged sword. I think people are somewhat freer to be themselves, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. A lot of times its a good thing as you can actually really get to know someone's personality and what they are like when they are relaxed and themselves and are not putting on a show of what they think you want to see. Other times its a bad thing because people don't censor or filter themselves like they would in the real world. The anonymity provides them with a safety barrier that allows them to do what they want with little fear of repercussion and thus do/say things that are very out of character compared to what you would see if you met them in person.
In this day and age of internet dating, chat rooms, emails, and text messages, is one way of doing things better than another. As people head back into the dating world these days, is meeting someone online a bad thing? I know it used to have a huge stigma attached to it, but nowadays most of the single people I know are using internet dating sites to meet people. The pool of people to "fish" from is much larger than say if you have 2 or 3 bars/clubs that you hang out in and are hoping to meet someone. Its more clinical in a way as well in that you can speficy your criteria and the dating site won't even show you people that don't meet that profile. Which is scary in itself in that you have to know exactly what you want :P
So I guess the real question these days is which method is better? Old school dating? Or starting relationships online and then moving into the "real world". I can see arguments for both ways, but the thing about actually going out on a date for the first time with someone is it always seemed so uptight and fake. You are on your best behavior. You stick to safer topics of discussion. You are super polite and trying to give that best first impression. I'm not saying you don't want to put your best foot forward in any relationship, but you still have to be yourself, not what you think the other person wants you to be. The last thing you want is for someone you are interested in to keep all that crazy bottled up and then one day like a chapagne bottle the top pops off the the crazy just comes spewing out and you wonder where the hell this nutty bitch came from. Now I'm not saying that you can't run into the same thing with starting a relationship online, but I think in general people are a lot more open as they don't feel quite as exposed and vulnerable as they do in person.
Either way you do it, you really need to get to know the person you are interested in and plan on spending a lot of time with. Don't ignore the awkward topics. The things that maybe you would like to keep hidden if you could. Now I'm not talking about a fun date with someone you just met or anything, but if you are seriously interested in someone, you have to be able to discuss anything. If you are not comfortable doing that, then you really need to ask yourself how its going to work out in the long run if you can't be open and honest about your thoughts and feelings. I mean you don't want to take someone who you think is a wonderful, mild mannered person home to me the family to have them suddenly announce they they are quitting their job to be a roadie for some band, and that they have a wierd midget clown fetish and sometimes like to do the furry thing. Maybe they even throw out in an offhand manner that they are a vegetarian and that meat eaters make them sick.... while your dad is out back grilling up some burgers for dinner. Oh... good times.
Once again.. I started with the intention of making a smaller post, but I have rambled on from one topic to another. You should all be used to that by now however. I leave you with a quick glossary of key terms that will hopefully help you in your future relationships:
One more thing, if you didn't get the "furry" reference.. here's some reading for you. And before you ask how I know anything about it.. get your mind out of the gutter. There is an episode of CSI that deal with a furry convention in Vegas.
It's true.. I so very much have a case of the Mundays today. I miss having Monday's off. It was such a nice way to ease back into the week. I blame daylight savings time .. and the fact that I am back to 6am shifts this week. That is two less hours of sleep and I certainly didn't get to bed any earlier last night. Who invented this daylight savings time crap? I did a bit of research as to why the practice was implemented and most sources agree that the main reason was to increase the amount of daylight in the afternoon and early evening hours. Good for those who do activities after the workday I suppose, but those of us who have to be at work by 6am don't really care. Its going to be dark when I get up anyway and when I go home in the afternoon its light regardless of daylight savings time.
Does it really matter if there is an hour more of daylight in that late afternoon / early evening time frame? No studies have supported any decrease in traffic accidents, crime or anything else that might have supported this practice. Is it so people can go outside and enjoy life after work? It was 22 degrees at 4pm here yesterday. No one in their right mind is outside enjoying the bonus daylight. If they are outside, they are probably partially crazy and they would be out there even if it was dark. They probably don't even use clocks and just go off their own internal clock which is clearly set to crazy time.
Even more annoying is the fact that there are states that don't comply with daylight savings time. Mainly Arizona. I have family that lives there and so now once again I will have to do the whole "What time is it there right now.. ok.. then you are 3 hours difference again" conversation. I will probably have to repeat that each time I talk to them for the next few months. I usually have it down by about the time there is less than a month left to the change back in the fall.
Let's just go ahead and make things easy. The whole country should be moved to CST. Its the middle ground and works out best for me so clearly it is the right choice. No more having to mentally calculate when its ok to call family members or figure out when your favorite TV is on since they only list the times in EST and PST. No more trying to call a vendor for support only to find out they are on Pacific time and don't open for another 2 hours. And Arizona .. you antisocial bastard, get with the damn program. Not sure what your deal is, but considering the hell that is the weather there for about 80% of the year, I would think you guys would be trying to lay low and yet here you are flaunting your lack of DST. I am tired of having to break out an abacus, graphing calculator and a periodic table just to figure out if its too late to call my sister or not.
I read a bunch of articles about how massive studies have been done on the effects of DST on the economy, health, traffic accidents, crime rates and a host of other things. How about we just leave the damn clocks alone and you channel all that wasted manpower and money into something someone actually gives a crap about? Give that funding to Mythbusters. Honestly, they research stuff that is actually interesting and can be put to practicle use. Like can you float safely to the ground off a building using a piece of plywood like a hanglider. Or which random object shoved in the barrel of a cannon causes the most collateral damage to a target. This is stuff I need to know and if all else fails, they usually just end the show by blowing something up. When do I watch Mythbusters? In that extra hour of daylight. When its still too cold to go out and do anything, I am sitting inside either watching TV or playing something or just listening to music. Which coincidentaly is the exact same thing I would be doing had we not changed the clocks and it was darker.
In summary, get bent daylight savings time. I don't like you. Now I'm not saying I hate you on a level that would put you in the realm of say a remake of the movie Biodome still with Pauly Shore in it but also addding Snaggletooth and Ben Afflek to the mix, but you are getting close.
If you have never seen the show Scrubs, do yourself a favor and go check it out. Seasons 1-6 are available on DVD. I introduced the boys to the show last night wondering if they would like it. I think they watched about 8 episodes in a row. This show is comedy gold .. at least if you have a sense of humor like mine which granted not all do. I love the biting sarcasm of Dr. Cox and Bob Kelso and their interactions with the rest of the staff. There are so many great moments in this show that its hard to pin down any kind of favorite. JD's dream sequences, impromptu musical numbers, great guest stars.. you get the picture. There are two scenes, which are pretty much directly related that do stand out in my mind however.
The first time I was watching the episode with the scene it it, I remember quite clearly laughing and laughing and not being able to stop. I had to pause the show for a minute. Rewind and watch it again. All while K was looking at me like I had just sprouted horns. Apparently I found it too funny. What can I say? It was one of those things that just slays me and makes me laugh just thinking about it. So, just for kicks I googled the scene and low and behold, someone had the same opinion on the humor that I did and picked the two scenese out of the episode and put them together in a little clip. Oh how I love the internet! So, without further ado, I give you The Legend of Bob Kelso:
Now, if you watched that.. and didn't find it funny as hell, you need to get yourself checked out because tragically you must have been born without a sense of humor. That is just money in the bank. I have been so tempted to use this at work when someone brings me a stupid problem I just really don't care about. If I thought I could get away without a counseling report over it, I certainly would.
If you watched that .. and then watched it again and laughed just as hard the second time, let me buy you a beer. If you watched it again and laughed just as hard and also happen to be an incredibly hot woman, well then drinks are on me for the night! ;) TGIF everyone.
A close friend of mine asked me the other day if I was into sports. I had to actually think about that question for a minute. Had you asked me that question 10 years ago, I wouldn't have even hesistated. I used to be very much into basketball with a lesser interest in football (mainly college) and would watch them pretty often. Now I'm not talking playing here. Playing it yourself is a different scenario. Im talking people who are sports "fans" and actually look forward to watching it live or on TV. Throughout high school and college I used to watch a LOT of basketball. Nowadays, despite being in a fantasy basketball league, I just can't seem to get back into watching the games. I was trying to figure out why that is.
First I decided that I had just grown up and grown out of that, but that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me as there are just as many adults that are sports nuts as kids. So I started to really think about what attracted me to the game back then. What made it fun to watch? I started to think about the teams and players I used to love to watch. Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Patrick Ewing, Kareem, James Worthy, Jordan, Alonzo Mourning, Stockton and Malone... David Robinson etc. What did they have that made the game what it was.. and how is that missing today? It's going to sound very cliche, but they loved to play the game. They were players that understood the game. They knew that it takes a team to win and be good. They were competative as can be, but still understood that it was a game that they enjoyed playing. I honestly think they felt privaledged to be making a very good living playing a sport. I don't think that same mentality exists in 95% of the NBA superstars out there now.
Magic Johnson, in 15 seasons, earned approx. 32 Mil in his salaries playing with the Lakers. Michael Jordan in his first 12 seasons earned approx. 25 Mil. Now there is very little argument that those are two of the greatest players of all time. They LOVED the game. They were a pleasure to watch. Both were amazing leaders and playmakers. When they were on the court they elevated the play of their team. They could both make the clutch decisions, the key plays at the end of the game. They were bothed revered in the towns they played in and widely respected across the league.
Now take a look at some of todays players. Take Stephon Marbury for example. Here is a guy who recently didn't show up for a road trip with the Knicks to make a point that he was upset about his position with the team. He didn't like the way the coach did this or that, or the way he felt management was treating him and his mad skills. So, instead of talking to staff and working things out as a professional, he just didn't show for the teams road trip. Out of about 60 games the Knicks have played this year, he has played in 24. The reasons varying from death in the family to minor injuries, to personal time, to just plain hissy fit. This is a guy who puts little importance on being there to do the job he is paid to do. He obviously don't feel like he needs to be out there helping his team on a nightly basis. So, how much is he making? In 13 seasons he has made about 127 Mil. Including 17 Mil this last year .. a year in which he has not played in close to 60% of the teams games. He's currently the 3rd highest payed player in the NBA and feels he has the rights to pull that kind of crap.
There was a neighboor kid that did or still does throw temper tantrums. At 12 years old I looked out the window one day to see what the wailing noise was to see her flopping around on the ground, flailing arms and legs and screaming something about how she wasn't going to do whatever she was being told to do by her parents. I was going to go over some advice about how hanging her from her toes in the tree in the front yard .. with duck tape over the mouth to reduce the screaming of course.. might change her outlook, but decided against it. She is 12 and I find it absurd that she is pulling that kind of crap still. How on earth does an adult making 17 million a year to PLAY A GAME for a living get off doing essentially the same thing?
The number of players in the NBA, or really any professional sport these days, that feel they have a right to act however they want and cause dissention among teammates, fans, and coaching staff is out of hand. Players coming right out and demanding trades to a different team. The top players demanding massive contracts and still being a shithead in general. Its appauling to see a player making more per minute of playtime than you make in a month acting in a manner that would have gotten you a beating with a wooden spoon from your mother if you pulled that crap. Probably still would. Put down the spoon Mom, I didn't do anything.
Why don't I enjoy watching sport much these days? The players are not fun to watch. Sure, I have Kobe on my fantasy team and there is no doubt he puts up huge numbers. But are the Lakers even close to the team they were back in the Johnson, Abdul-Jabbar, Worth days? I am not going to bore you with statistics, but think about it. Teams are just willing to deal with prima donnas and pay them retarded amounts of money for the hope of a 'W'. I would rather watch a team that had decent players and was fun to watch and support than a team full of superstar level talent that was always entangled in some controversy and infighting.
You are getting rediculous amounts of money to play a game that you must have enjoyed at one point. Grow up and realize that you are one of the lucky ones, NOT one of the poor, underappreciated ones. Go be a ditch digger for 6 months in Phoenix in the summer time and make 8 bucks an hour doing it. Then maybe you would have some bloody perspective on what is and is not ok behavior for someone like Marbury who is going to make about $14,000 a MINUTE for the season at his current pace. That ditch digger is going to make less in a year than you make in several minutes of playing basketball. Get the hell over yourself and do your job.
What I wouldn't give to be a 3rd string bench player for the NBA. You seldom have to play when it counts and the league minimum for 1 year in the league is 700K. Sign me up. I will be happy to be a practice dummy for a team for that.
Here's my suggestion. Professional sports should be just like any professional job. Degree or experience required. 4 years of college sports experience and/or a college degree. Then, an internship. The shitty jobs no one wants to do. Let them do that for 6 months. Give them a real sense of what the other side looks like. Show them how hard normal people work to make ends meet. Maybe then they will realize what a blessing they have in the talent they posses for a sport. Maybe then they will strive to be a better person and better teammate and make the game fun to watch for fans again. Professional sports is really an entertainment industry. I don't find the antics of most of these players entertaining. Quite the opposite. It makes me want to take a 2x4 to the side of their head to knock some bloody sense into them.
Bring me back the players that make a commitment to being the best they can be and do the best they can for the team they are playing for. Bring back the players who actually enjoy playing the game. The rest should be relegated to working as a ride operator at the Small World ride in Disney Land. That'll show them.
I am a huge fan of blues music. Even more so of blues done with acoustic guitars. I was just doing some browsing on youtube a while back and stumbled across this artist:
Most peoples first reactions to this video are that he looks like Vince Vaughn and that he is so animated when he plays. He has a bunch of stuff on youtube which is worth checking out if you like that kind of music. His name is Nicholas Barron. If you so desire you can download his music here. The record label he is on, CandyRat Records has some very incredible guitarists in different genres. Mainly Rock, Blues and Jazz, both acoutstic and electric. You can listen to samples of most of the artists on there. Worth a listen if you are looking for some lesser known musicians that are very talented.
Speaking of sites I have found new music on lately, someone turned me on to a site called Garageband.com. This site is outstanding. You can listen to tons of different bands based on categories or user ratings. Depending on the band, a lot of them will even give you the ability to download some of their tracks for free in MP3 format. I found a band called the Corby Yates Band on there. Great driving rock blues sound. Reminds me a lot of Stevie Ray Vaughn. And if you don't know who SRV is .. please, put down the damn Rascall Flats cd and go skydiving. Use this parachute I packed for you. I swear I didn't put that anvil in there, its a standard safety feature.
I find it very refreshing that through the wonder of the internet, unsigned bands and a lot of regional acts that just can't catch on with a label have a chance to have their music heard. With all the mainstream trash that labels are putting out these days, its a great thing. You take people like Britney Spears who is quite obviously insane and can't even speak a coherent sentence and yet somehow is still releasing albums. How on earth is she getting money from labels still to "make music" when she can't even get dressed by herself? Yet you have very talented people who can play circles around the closest thing Britney ever had to talent and yet they are struggling and playing small regional gigs while she is in her 10 million dollar mansion talking to her fingers about how they should stop telling her secrets to the press.
I know everyone listens to the radio from time to time, but try some new music that isn't from the major labels and radio approved. There is so much good music out there and yet people get stuck listening to "My Humps" on the radio and based on the number of times it gets played in a two hour stretch it must be award winning, ground breaking music. If you are going to turn out absolute trash music, at least have the common curteousy to be smoking hot. Britney had the right idea originally with that plaid catholic school girl skirt and white top in her first video. It's too bad she has fallen so far since.
To wrap things up, since we started off talking about Vince Vaughn, if you haven't seen the movie Dodgeball yet with him in it, go rent it. Right now. Go. It's quite possibly my favorite comedy I have seen in the last several years.
I have two little tidbits to share with you today. Both of which truly left me speechless when I encountered them. One is IT related .. and one is related more towards knowledge any 3rd grader should have.
The building that my gym is in also houses a lot of medical offices for the company I work for. Due to the specific nature of a lot of the medical programs and hardware configurations, they hired a full time IT person for over there. She is employed by the health division and technically has no affiliation with our IT staff here at my office. Every now and then she will call over here looking for help with something she can't figure out or doesn't have access to in her position. I begrudgingly help despite the fact that she is flat out annoying as hell, stupid and lazy.
This past Friday .. as I was getting ready to finish up a very long stressful week, she calls me about 10 minutes before I am ready to head out the door. Her voice alone makes me cringe and now that she is bugging me right before I want to leave has me quite irritated. She starts going through this whole spiel about how this big multifunction copier / printer they have over there that the medical staff uses is not working. I start working through some troubleshooting stuff with her, assuming she has done the basics already. I told her to call the IT Engineers for the medical side of things and she said that she had already talked to him and that there was nothing wrong on the server side of things. I'm running out of possible reasons for them to be unable to print. I then remembered that this individual is both stupid and lazy. So I make her go through the basic things again like cycling power on the printer, clearing out any stuck print jobs from the queue etc. Still not working, so I get the IP address for the printer and connect to it remotely to see if I can look through the logs and find an error message. As soon as I connect to the web page for the printer, I see 2 flashing alerts. One for printing, one for copying. I mouse over said alert and here is what it said:
"Tray 1 .. out of paper"
Normally I would get angry, but I am trying to control my rage at stupid people. Honestly, between stupid and lazy.. its a wonder she can get dressed in the morning by herself much less actually be expected to physically look at the printer and see the big message that I'm sure was on the display there about being out of paper. Sadder still is that 8 people in the health department over there were all complaining about not being able to print and not a single one of them bothered to go look at it. Yes, its time to try and shake the stupidity out of some people again. However, with that quantity of stupid we are dealing with here and how deeply ingrained it is, normal shaking is just not going to cut it. Besides with 9 of them in total, my arms would just get too tired. Instead I am going to have to see if I can design a supersized 9 station device like the thing that they have at the hardware store that shakes cans of paint really fast. That should work. To be honest, I could probably sell it to a japanese game show after I was done with it. Those people are crazy and would probably make a game out of it.
The second incident involved a member of my online gaming guild. This is the same individual responsible for the forum post that I discussed in this earlier blog post. Yes.. that master of the english language is still around. I don't know why he is still in the guild. Maybe its just my morbid curiousity at what could possibly come out of his mouth next. Maybe its because my soft side thinks that even a certified window licker deserves a second chance.
So there we are .. hanging out.. talking and having a great time. This individual, which I will call Durth to protect his identity, types a question out in guild chat that goes something like this:
"wat is the heroic daly today?"
I am willing to overlook the misspelling of 'daily' because that one IS tricky. But the fact that he spelled the word 'what' as 'wat' is one of those pet peeve things of mine. It just bugs the crap out of me for some reason. So, I type back into the guild chat:
"Durth, the word is 'what' try to use it next time. Your teachers will thank you for it."
He doesn't say anything for a bit. I figure maybe he got his super sensitive feelings hurt. Part of me was hoping that maybe he was sitting at his keyboard crying. It turns out he wasn't crying though. He was trying to form a thought and trying to bend his mind around that statement I had typed in. About 3 minutes after putting that into our guild chat, I get a private message from Durth that said this EXACTLY:
"wat wurd are you talking about?"
Again.. ignoring the misspelling of the tough words in that sentence like 'word', he apparently didn't even recognize the fact that 'what' is the right way to spell 'wat'. I was literally speechless. I was trying to tell the people I was playing with at the time over voice chat what had just transpired and I was just babbling. I just couldn't fathom the level of stupidity contained in that question as a response to my statement. I started thinking to myself.. oh, this must be his attempt at a joke. There is no way someone who is 17 and not locked in a padded room is that dumb. There is just no way. I didn't respond and just let it go. Durth didn't however. 2 minutes or so after his first respone, I get another private message that says this:
"blade, wat wurd?"
It seems I am just going to have to make that human sized paint can shaker-thing a 10 person unit so I can slide Durth on in there too. I consider my kids to be fairly smart. They always get very good grades, and so when something like this comes up, I always think to myself "Can my 4th grader handle this?" If the answer is yes, unless you have to wear a helmet full time to protect yourself, you should know that the word 'what' is spelled with an H at this point in time. Even if by some freak of nature you somehow missed that before you made it to 17, when I typed in that the word was "what" .. how can you not compare that to the 6 words that were in your statement and by process of elimination figure out which one I was talking about.
what = daly? nope.. thats not it. what = is? maybe, but I don't think so what = the? well there is an H in it.. hmm what = heroic? not sure, I just copied the word from someone else to sound smart. what = today? I know wat today is.. its friday, not whatday what = wat? 2 ez, has to be a trick! ne way I no wat is speld wat!
Nope, Durth just didn't know so rather than appear to be a moron, he sent me a PM to clarify. Depsite that old statement to the contrary, I am here to confirm that there are indeed STUPID QUESTIONS. Pretty much anything that Durth asks at this point is bound to fall into that category. I think I just need to mute him in vent and put him on ignore before it spreads. Now we are all stupid from time to time. If you were in vent and hanging out with a group of us on Saturday night, you will know that many of us were quite intoxicated. Yet despite my drunken state, I can pretty much guarantee that if you asked me how to spell the word 'what' I could still manage to remember to get the H in there.
I think that wherever Durth lives, they must not have banned lawn jarts yet. Or maybe he has older brothers who like to bow hunt and decided that poor little Durth needed to play William Tell with them and sent him over to a stump with an apple to put on his head. Seriously, there is no way anyone can be that dumb without having suffered a serious head injury. Maybe I should tell him to go play with the lawn jarts again. Maybe a second serious head trauma will knock things back to the way they should be.
Anyway, after the second request to tell him 'wat' word I was talking about, I sent him this:
"Durth, take your right hand and use it to smack yourself in the face as hard as you can. Do it right now"
His immediate response to this request? Cmon.. work with me here.. I know you can come up with it if you really try. Yes, indeed it was:
"wat for?"
/Whimper ... I don't know how to handle that. I just can't deal with it. He has overpowered my will to even attempt to make fun of him and that takes a lot. Durth, I concede. You have beaten me. I cannot compete at that level. Well played sir, well played. Your reward is coming in the mail. Along with your helmet that you must wear at all times now. This helmet is flourescent pink and says in bold letters "I'm not with stupid .. I AM stupid" Wear it with pride buddy, you have certainly earned it.
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