Victory Soap v. 2.0

Apparently there's going to be another X-Files movie. Why does this news make my brain haze over with boredom?

I never watch "Law and Order: Criminal Intent," but I'm at a friend's house and it's their tv. So. There's something wrong with Vincent D'Onofrio, isn't there? He's not right in the head?

I am always right: desperate for the warm bath of flattery he bathed the world in, Bill Clinton's admirers will do anything to get him back in the White House. And after Mother there is Daughter, who I am sure will spawn no matter what her personal inclinations. Get used to the idea of a perpetual Clinton presidency.

I'm back home. I was at the house of a friend in need, so there was little time for thought or posting. Of course, my being home isn't a guarantee that I'll have any thoughts or feel like posting, but you know.

Now I have to get myself back in the mood for looking for a job.

Kim made me cry just a little bit here (scroll down past the title and the criticism of neo-pub food to the description of Bath and the Pump Room).

One thing I have decided to re-embrace in my life is my former Anglophilia. I had somewhat soured on the place due to overexposure in the form of a (now ex-) friend who was frantically nuts about the place, so much so that I became sick of hearing about how we needed to go to England together and get husbands. (By the way, that latter madness will not be revived.) And there were other reasons... but British tv is getting better again (the actor playing the new Doctor Who is hawt, and Scottish, drool), and I'm also breaking out of the self-imposed exile from life that four years of not driving and working as an office mouse -- which I have begun to realize was not good for me -- caused. And the place isn't the blasted hive of heroin users, punks, and redundant miners it used to be back in the 80s. True, there is a lot of PC nonsense, but we have that here too -- it's the disease of the age. So anyway, I have decided to plan to go to Blighty again (Scotland and Wales included, the former because I want to go back, the latter because I never got to go there). I might also take in Ireland. I have no idea how long it will take me to scrape up the requisite funds to make the trip, but I plan to go there before I am too much older and decrepit. I don't know if and when I'll have a fundraiser, but the Paypal and Amazon accounts are always open.

Update: NOOOOOOOOOO--! England without sticky, creamy, cholesterol-laden desserts isn't England, it's -- Epcot. Wait -- they have sticky, creamy, cholesterol-laden desserts at Epcot. Don't they? (Via.)

Emergency update: oh my -- looks like I waited too long.

...oh what the hell -- tha winnah and champeen.

SHIT. I started up my laptop this evening, after a day's hiatus (stayed over at a friend's), and got the following BIOS alert:

FAN ERROR
PRESS FOR SETUP

Setup didn't do shit. I had to unplug the laptop and jerk out the battery to get it to turn off, and restart it. This time the fan worked, but it sounds like a shredder. Guess I'm going to be laptop shopping, as this is my only computer. There goes a nice chunk of the budget. And I don't want stinkin' Windoze Vista.

Grrr.

Some idiot a little while ago set off fireworks outside my building. Why wasn't I informed that I'd woken up in Hell today?

I have so far this past week seen two -- that's two -- movies where a major character stands in the middle of a road and is promptly introduced to wheeled disaster of some sort. This annoys me on several levels not related to the quality of the movies themselves (one was quite good, the other quite bad). In other words: dear filmmakers, please think of some other way of getting your characters in trouble that does not necessitate them contravening basic human nature. One tenet of which is people do not stand in the middle of the road, thereby making themselves available to be hit by the next high-speed vehicle that comes along. They just don't. Unless they are very very drunk, a state which neither movie established to a sufficient degree. Otherwise the scene is just a lazy way of setting up an action scene.

Gah!

Come on, people, get those lists ready.

(Via.)

Today's thrilling activities: doing an infinite amount of laundry (where does it all come from?) and watching my Doctor Who Season 2 dvd collection.

That's it. I might go to the store later, seeing as I have hardly any food.

Computer fan update: so far it's still working and hasn't given me a new fan error. Note to self: call the place where I bought the computer and get a price for fan replacement. I am still going to buy a new laptop, but not right now.

The fact that news anchor Rick Sanchez is not living in a dumpster behind a Winn-Dixie in Miami. I practically grew up with this human car crash on my television and kept expecting his next fuck-up to be his last. Shit really does float.

Yup, I heard the sirens for this incident earlier. This is just a block away from my apartment.

Jesus, don't toady, people. It's embarrassing.

We lost. (Note: have eye-washing bleach handy.)

America-hating commie hippies are stupid: they can't even password-protect their event calendar.

I'm pretty sure that Grendel's ma wasn't meant to be a MILF.

Honestly. Here:

Soon found the fiend who the flood-domain
sword-hungry held these hundred winters,
greedy and grim, that some guest from above,
some man, was raiding her monster-realm.
She grasped out for him with grisly claws,
and the warrior seized; yet scathed she not
his body hale; the breastplate hindered,
as she strove to shatter the sark of war,
the linked harness, with loathsome hand.
Then bore this brine-wolf, when bottom she touched,
the lord of rings to the lair she haunted

Etc. I'm just not getting that "sexy, get her voiced by Angelina Jolie" vibe. But maybe you men are different. But I don't think so.

Ho-lee shit! I haven't read the last Harry Potter book. Well, there's something to add to the reading list. (Currently occupied by the post-mortem Dorothy Sayers nobel Thrones, Dominations -- verdict so far: "eh.") What I really want to do is to amass a nice set of HP paperbacks -- I'm not a hardback junkie, not with all the moves I've made. I gave away my random set of HP books in the last move. But I think I may need a refresher course before I embark on the final volume. Or not. I also should probably see the movies over -- I generally like the movies.

To jump to a not entirely unrelated topic, I will now confess I have a weakness for that Harry-Potter-grownup look (one reason I am single -- those who fit that bill are still men, and men are "much of a muchness" -- also they want me to talk to them and stuff, and I'm like busy, go away...) -- anyway. I went ahead and ordered the 3rd season of Doctor Who on dvd. I didn't think I'd like the revival -- I didn't like any of the Whos after Tom Baker -- but then along came David Tennant. It's also all part of my eventual rejection of cable tv. Really. I hardly watch all the channels I pay for (how much CSI: Miami and the Animal Planet and Murder She Wrote can a person watch?), except for BBC America, and that's only because of Doctor Who (drool), Torchwood (droolish, but uneven, and rather ostentatiously not for kids, but it's set in Wales, and thereby hangs a tale involving my childhood preoccupations, obsession with Susan Cooper's

(pause: I just killed another mosquito, with which my apartment is infested, but in the doing so I spilled my scotch and soda which PISSES ME OFF. Fucking mosquitos. Also Pandora radio keeps playing boring shit on my stations. Who can I kill?)

... fantasy novels and stuff, and so on I forget.) My father got to go to Cardiff when he went to Europe but I didn't, so all I have is a twenty-four-year-old map of the town that he brought me. I will remedy that on my trip to blighty.

What was I talking about.

Oh -- I bought the dvds, but scifi tv spinoff gadgets tend to leave me cold. Then again, a screwdriver is easier to handle with five human fingers than those iPod thingies and everything else credit-card-shaped. But I used to have a little credit-card-shaped flashlight that the weedy intellectual ex-BF gave me. Only it burned out.

Speaking of which: I kept meaning to add Violins and Starships to my blog list, and kept forgetting. The oversight is now seen to.

Note: there is a musical group called "I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness." No, really, their song is playing right now on one of my Pandora.com stations. I guess you can't get the goth out of the girl.

Update: if you follow this entry all the way through and can figure out what the hell I'm talking about you get some kind of prize, for patience anyway. What can I say, the thought of following the Democratic debate just bores the fuck out of me. Let Michelle Malkin do all that for you.

Update 2 or whatever: shut up! NFW! If you are against this what pussies you are and we are so doomed just GO AHEAD AND FIT YOUR GIRLFRIENDS FOR BURKAS.

Ouch. Note to self: stick to one type of booze per day.

It's nice cool weather outside. I have opened my windows and the cats are frantic.

Katastrofala omslag (Catastrophic Album Covers). To make you glad the world switched to CDs. The fear.... oh, the fear...

(Via.)

A jillionteen NEJ! update: and then there is the village in Borneo which kept the shaved orangutan prostitute. Remember, children, Western Culture is the font of all evil! Keep chanting it, like a mantra.

Having to call emergency maintenance at midnight on a Friday night because you haven't gotten around to buying a plunger for the toilet, which of course chose tonight to stop up and overflow.

...if by "better people" you mean in the eugenical, eliminate-the-"inferiors" sense. That's how they do it in New Zealand. Check out the comments for further proof that socialism = brotherhood.

Um, yeah. Buy it for your favorite ex-girlfriend!

There has been widespread upset concerning a recent poll taken of students concerning what they would supposedly trade their right to vote for. Insert many harrumphing protestations about our sacred duty to participate in the democracy that so many brave men and women fought to preserve, etc. What no one seems to have considered is the possibility that many of these students may simply have not taken the question all that seriously -- "Dude, what would you rather have, the right to vote or an iPod?" "The iPod, of course, man!" It's not a question that has any resonance in the real world -- no one's going to hand out valuable prizes in exchange for your right to vote -- so you can say anything you like. To those who charge the respondents with flippancy I say in return that a fundamentally unserious question doesn't necessarily deserve a serious answer.

For an article headlined "whale found deep in Amazon jungle":

It was chewing on a toucan.

Okay. After the week I've had, I've got to get good and smashed. I'm on brandy & soda and potato chips. See you sometime after the holiday madness.

I so fucking don't want another office job.

...despite all the money I pay to Brighthouse. There's a show called "Weeds," that sounds like Twin Peaks's bastard cousin?

Typing AB (After Brandy) is hard.

Gobble, etc. Brandy is evil. Um.

Help?

Watch out...

The Floridian big city bus stop experience has its counterpart in the Great White North:

So Monday morning I'm waiting for the 19 bus when a central casting ghetto dude shuffles up to the stop. Doo rag, baggy pants and blaring portable radio blasting bitch bitch nigga nigga full blast. I'm sure he thought he looked like 50 Cent but frankly he reminded me a lot more of Gene Wilder in Silver Streak.

Oh yeah. These losers think they're so fucking hard, but they are cliché city. I am so glad I have a car now and don't have to share questionable delights of public transportation with these bores.

It's the holiday season, once more coming upon us like a runaway freight train. Now the internet will be useless until March.

"Jellyfish," my eye. I think we all know that the Great Cthulhu is about to arise from the depths where He lies dreaming, and this is the first sign.

And the Care Bear Stare is useless against Him and His gelatinous helpers.

So my friends and I decided that this year we were all too tired to bother cooking for Thanksgiving. Let's go out to a restaurant instead! It never occurred to us, living as we do in a tourist burg, that every freaking restaurant except the ones my friends all hate (Denny's, Cracker Barrel, and the Crab Shack) would be closed. Even McDonald's was closed. Even all the pizza delivery places were closed. Except for the three above-named gastronomical devastators, this was a freaking ghost town.

I hate the holidays.

Can you leave this under my tree this Christmas? I've been very, very good.

There I am, listening to one of my Pandora stations play a mildly raucous industrial-lite ditty from the soundtrack to the latest Resident Evil movie when it suddenly breaks into a chorus of singing children.

Stop doing that.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has gone completely nuts:

THE (sic) Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.

I mean, that's really bringing the crazy. I've cracked a history book or two, and I'm pretty sure that the British Empire left anything we've ever done in the dust. Then again, maybe I'm wrong -- maybe we're just waiting for the final design to be approved for King George W. Bush II's crown. I don't follow politics much these days.

(Via.)

I can't find anything to argue against, myself.

There's this show on Discovery Health called "Mystery Diagnosis." It features people who've come down with mysterious symptoms that a battery of doctors can't figure out until much sleuthing of obscure ailments comes up with the arcane and/or ordinary explanation of what is wrong with the person, and they are cured or at least successfully treated. For one of those icky bodily-fluid-obsessed plus weepy victims things the show isn't bad, but there is one disturbing gimmick I wish they'd dispense with. I speak of the frequent use of the Single Eyeball Closeup. There will be a perfectly ordinary interview scene going on -- either of a doctor, a patient, or a relative -- and then suddenly, for no reason, the camera will zoom in on one of the interviewee's eyeballs until the entire thing fills the screen and you can count the individual eyelashes and sometimes even the mites that live in the dead skin cells and makeup, depending on the size of your tv screen. There you are, watching a Concerned Doctor or Fearful Patient discourse on symptoms and causes, when suddenly: EYEBALL. The first time I saw this I actually drew back in my seat.

I submit that this technique serves no purpose other than to confuse and possibly disgust the viewer, and to transform whoever is being interviewed from an ordinary person into some sort of gelloid, spike-encircled monster. Perhaps the technique is supposed to bring us "closer" to the emotions being experienced by the person in focus (for instance, when they are all weepy), but closing in on one eye like that negates the emotions being expressed. All you see is a giant eyeball, rolling around like the Eye of Sauron. So stop it.

Well, I went to the new Ikea that recently opened here in Orlando. My intentions were to get at least a couple of things on my list (I got a 5-quart stainless steel pot and an inexpensive bar stool for my counter). The place was... just a little bit different. And as we all know, ostentatiously "green." They had these hilarious water-saving flushers in the bathrooms with two settings -- for "liquid waste" and "solid waste." Guess which setting actually flushed the toilet paper and the disposable seat cover. And that's how I now know that in Sweden women don't wipe when they do number one.

That being said... it's definitely my dream store. However, it is gigantic, and I made the mistake of going out just a little bit too late to avoid rush hour traffic on I-4. (The store is all the way on the other side of town.) That was fun -- continuously jerking back and forth from first to second gear, and then it turned out half the problem was some idiot who had stalled his van in the center lane and no one had done anything to move it out of the way.

One more thing I forgot: it wasn't completely foreign efficient Scandi-land at Ikea. They made sure to make me feel right at home by hiring the usual contingent of local morons who prefer standing around in groups talking than actually attending to the person who had the help light on for nearly fifteen minutes at the self-help cash register. (I couldn't get the bar code to scan, and then when the attendant finally noticed me -- because I yelled "HELLO" as she walked by trying not to see me -- she came over and got it to scan right away, which made me feel like an idiot.) The only employee there that was at all helpful was the nice Hispanic woman outside who watched my things while I went to get my car and helped me put them in the trunk.

Well, except focus. This is my favorite sequence out of the list:

Earth biodiversity crisis, Earth dying, Earth even hotter, Earth light dimming, Earth lopsided, Earth melting, Earth morbid fever, Earth on fast track, Earth past point of no return, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning out of control, Earth spins faster, Earth to explode, earth upside down, Earth wobbling, earthquakes

I think I've found my excuse for everything that goes wrong with my life. It seems to work for everyone else; why shouldn't I hop on the bandwagon?

This is just weird: according to the ever-reliable Xinhua news, Tom Cruise is going to be in an upcoming episode of Doctor Who. Well, he's short enough to play a Dalek.

And this list of Tom Cruise-themed links at the bottom of the article are almost as weird:

"Ruined" Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise not a happy camper
Tom Cruise returns to big screen with Afghan-themed film
Tom Cruise mourns anti-Nazi heroes in Germany
Tom Cruise named "Sexiest small man."

Let me just say that despite my experience at Ikea I also love self-checkout lines at stores, for the same reason Rachel Lucas does. My first real job was as a cashier at Publix, and I (usually) have no trouble getting my purchases coded in. The only problem I've ever had is getting the attention of the human employees whenever I ran into a glitch.

PS: when are socialists going to present arguments in favor of their positions that don't reek of mothballs? Everything the guy says assumes that people have no higher ambition than to work at one job at one place for all their lives just like their fathers before them. Hey, lefties, this isn't the 19th century anymore -- minimum wage employees are allowed to move up the ladder to higher salaried positions.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Not that I'm going all Steve H. or anything, but after struggling to assemble the barstool I bought at Ikea with my cheap tools, and only succeeding in stripping the points of both my dollar store screwdrivers, I broke down and went to Home Depot today and bought an electric screwdriver with five interchangeable bits. It's charging up now.

Later I will buy a drill. And that's it. Honest.