Darkness

No, the movie, I mean. Went to see that with Aki and Rachel after a couple martinis and several hours of being in an airplane had dulled my senses. Oy, gewalt. This has to be the worst movie I've seen since Van Helsing, not that that is a fair comparison, since that's the worst movie I've seen in years. Anyway. Confusing story. Dopey characters (Turn some fucking lights on already!!!) and a soundtrack that is pretty uninspiring. At one point one of the characters asks: "What is going on here?" To which I felt compelled to answer: Lady, I've been watching over an hour and I can't tell ya.

Crossroads

So, somehow I've managed to book a three hour layover here in Chicago's beautiful and spacious O'Hare airport so I thought I'd blog a little to pass the time, since my tour of terminals B and C is concluded. I had nice long walk through the airport, looking at the plethora of Hudson News kiosks, the giant replica brachiosaur at the Field Museum, and the throngs of people going to wherever it is that they're going. O'Hare is a giant crossroads and that sort of resembles how I feel right now. Things are going to change soon. I can't really elaborate because some of it is just a sense of things that I have and some things I haven't quite worked out in my head yet. Definitely going to get into better shape in the coming months. I know that the New Year is an artificial boundary line, but it seems as good a demarcation as any to me. I think next year I'm going to take the Life Is Good people's motto to heart: Do what you like. Like what you do.

New Christmas Gift

So for Christmas I appear to have gotten the East Coast version of the head cold going around that everyone's getting. Was just about over with the West Coast version, when I woke up on Boxing Day (Sunday) with intense head pain and a plugged left nostril. Blew my nose and the most foul stuff came out. I would call it phlegm, except phlegm, except phlegm is somewhat gelid and this crap is liquid. I was leaking. Ewwwww. And the exquisite pain in my head! There was so much pressure on my jaw, I could feel my fillings trying to escape. Didn't sleep much last night. Feel a little better today. Hopefully I will be shipshape enough (with appropriate applications of sudafed) to fly on Wednesday.

Life Is Good Has A Store In Portland

The company that makes the Life Is Good clothing has a physical store in Portland as I discovered Friday shopping in Portland's Old Port. Naturally this made me happy. :-)

Merry Christmas!

Wishing all my friends and loved ones a very Merry Christmas from out here in the land of ice and snow. Although, truth be told, there's not that much ice and snow here. Chilly though. Anyway, my warmest wishes to everyone.

Christmas In Maine 2004

In the boarding tube at my transfer in Denver I got to talking with this woman who started cursing at her cell phone as we were going down the tube. All of a sudden I had an epiphany: I looked around and saw nothing but foul mouthed, grumpy, white people. I had found my tribe! These are my people. Suddenly it felt like I was truly going home again. :-) Pretty good trip, although the flight from SJC to DEN was an hour late because the flight crew discovered a bolt in the tire as the plane was taxiing off the runway. This led to obvious questions on my part such as: "Where did the bolt come from? From this plane? That sounds bad. From some other plane? That sounds bad too. Were they scattering bolts on the runway for some reason?" Evidently the bolt in the tire was not a critical problem because we took off without them removing the tire. <shrug>

Boston was cool, by which I mean, below freezing. Got out of the rental place in under two hours after they first tried to give me an Explorer with a broken driver's side mirror. Dropped in at Bean's at 2 in the morning to grab a couple things. :-) It was 6 degrees (that's Fahrenheit for those of you used to metric temperatures) at my gram's when I got in. This cold must really be kicking my ass because I slept 12 hours (!) that night. Which kinda put a damper on the shopping I planned on doing. Took my mom down to Portland and did some shopping. Went up yesterday to Bangor where I finished almost all of my remaining shopping, somehow. I appear to have brought warmer weather with me to Maine, since on Thursday it was upper 40s and rainy. In fact, it was like a monsoon last night. High winds and sheets of rain. I thought the land yacht I'm driving was going to go overboard a couple times. Saw some good friends I haven't seen in ages and had our annual dinner at Olive Garden. Scared/offended the other guests and perplexed our friendly waiter. Just like old times. :-)

Back in Portland to find that one last gift and make use of the InterWeb, which I've been disconnected from lo these past three days. Well, back to it, I guess.

Heading Off the Land of Ice and Snow

Be back in a week or so. Have a Merry Christmas, y'all!

New Porcupine Tree Album

Yay! There's a new Porcupine Tree album coming out in March called Deadwing. They have kind of a preview site up at deadwing.com. I hope the new album is as good In Absentia, which I still enjoy tremendously.

Reeeeallly Bad Audio Tracks

While looking fruitlessly for Joe Pesci's Christmas Song on the web (I believe it's him singing If It Doesn't Snow At Christmas) I stumbled across this mother lode of crazy audio tracks. I think there's a little something for everyone here like The Worst Rendition of O Holy Night Ever (the horror, the horror) or a 50s educational tract about Menstruation is God's Plan or this old chestnut: William Shatner singing Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds. There's sooooo much good stuff here I'm adding this to my sidebar.

Lemony Snicket

Went to see Lemony Snicket on Friday and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It features a ingenious trio of orphans who must endure a series of tragedies, including their relentless Uncle Count Olaf (played by Jim Carrey) who wants to get his hands on their inheritance. I laughed a lot during this movie. Warning: Jim Carrey plays *gasp* a really bad actor in this movie. I think some people who've read the books were turned off by that, but I enjoyed the performance, even though I do not ordinarily enjoy that aspect of his acting (he was excellent in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for instance).

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

Sigh. Oh well. Probably for the best, anyway. One interesting revelation, though. Beautiful sadness is still beautiful, so it's not that weird to appreciate it. Not the weirdest thing I've done, anyway. Maybe that's only interesting to me.

There There (The Boney King Of Nowhere) from the album "Hail To The Thief" by Radiohead

Red Light Cameras ?= Cash Cows

So I blatantly stole this article from Random Musings because it seems like a fairly serious case of The Man using his powers to rip off the common folk. Looks like you can forget about hearsay evidence not being admissable against you or to being able to confront your accusers, these communities have money to make. It's up to $351 a pop in some places in California now. The most interesting thing I found was that while red light running has decreased where the cameras have gone in, rear end accidents have gone up 140% at those same intersections. Seems like robbing Peter to pay Paul to me.

Uh oh

Last night at Carl's birthday dinner I noticed my throat was a bit scratchy. Noticed that it's still that way this morning. Hope this isn't a precursor to illness. That's all I need.

My My, What A Weekend

Friday: Cooked up dinner, drank most of a bottle of wine, ate, and gamed until 1:30 AM.

Saturday: Saw the awesome Hives show, but didn't do much else (How could that be, I got up at 11? Oh, I remember, there was baking for several hours.)

Sunday: Got up at 7, went Christmas shopping for about a dozen people, transferred chairs to Noelle, went to Noelle's, ate a lot of yummy food and celebrated with good folks.

No wonder I feel tired and oogy in my belly. A few more weekends like this will be the end of me! Oh, well, a good way to go out, I guess. :-)

Note to self: Next let's see if we can avoid going to malls on the Saturday two weeks before Christmas, m'kay?

The HIves

The Hives played the Warfield last night. Went to see them with Aki and Rachel. I expected a good show, but this was brilliant! The band was really tight, they had a good rapport with the audience, and the lead singer Pelle Almqvist (ja, dere Svedish) had a cocky, strutting stage personality that reminded me of Mick Jagger in his heyday. The energy the band had was sooo awesome (which you might expect from a neo-punk band)! I left feeling really good, although this morning my stomach doesn't seem so happy with the mixture of booze and nachos I put into it. Oh well, it's not like I'm going to a Christmas party or something today. Oh. Wait.

Feline Christmas Tree Decoration

Here are some instructions on how to have your cats set up and care for your Christmas tree.

Hopkin!

If you loved All Your Base you will no doubt find Hopkin charming as well.

PS - I'll find my frog.

Mmmmmm-mmm!

So it turns out that the tenderloin cut of the cow is delicious and easy to cook. Had a friend over for dinner last night. I was afraid this solid gold cut of meat might be temperamental to cook, but it's really easy to roast. And the taste! In the words of Samuel L Jackson (well, Dave Chapelle playing Sam Jackson): Mmm-mmm, bitch! Too bad it's all gone.

The Machinist

Pretty good flick. Christian Bale plays a guy named Trevor Reznik who hasn't slept in a year and has these weird deja vu like experiences and starts seeing a guy that no one else seems to see. And then things get weird and a bit creepy. Bale is truly scary to look at some times, he is soooo thin. He lost over 60 pounds to do the film and looks like he just got out of Auschwitz. Anyway, I was able to figure out a lot of what was going on ahead of time, so I guess it wasn't that original, but it had me thinking all the time. Basically a solid thriller.

Vaya Con Dios, Teac CD Player?

So for the past few weeks I've become increasingly apprehensive about the sound of CDs played out through my stereo speakers. The sound has grown more and more distorted. I was worried that my overpriced speakers were about to go the way of the dodo or perhaps that my hearing was really starting to shut down. On a whim, I tried playing a "bad" sounding CD through my DVD player (which is capable of playing CDs too). Distortion goes away. I guess my good old Teac (15 years old!) CD player is on its last legs. I've been having problems getting it to play CDs reliably, but if I reached inside and jiggled stuff around with my fingers I could usually sort things out. But bad sounding audio is just unacceptable. I guess I'll have to get a new CD player, which will hopefully last as long as the old one. :-(