WTF???

Singer Boy George, foreground, leaves Manhattan Criminal Court
after his arraignment on cocaine possession charges early Saturday, Oct. 8,
2005. A lawyer for Boy George is denying that drugs found in the British
singer's apartment belonged to him. (AP Photo/Newsday, Robert Mecea)

Boy George is a Misfits fan? And is just me, or does he look like Frank Black of The Pixies and Moby merged into one person?
Still, I have to say that for someoone famous for dressing like a girl he's looking like quite a bad-ass here.

For Anyone Who Might Be Wondering...

When I posted the Alyson Hannigan picture last night I mentioned that I "cheated" on the skirt.
In case you were wondeirng, that means that I copied the skirt out of the original source image, pasted it into my picture and positioned it properly, then applied various Photoshop Filters to make it look like it was a painting rather than a photograph.
I have actually drawn plaid (a much less complex pattern) in the past, but given that it had already taken me a week to draw this picture, I didn't feel like taking another shot at it.
It really shouldn't have taken me as long as it did to finish the picture, but I was pretty lazy all this week.
Anyway, just wanted to clear up the skirt thing.

Finally!

Okay, I managed to finish the picture of Alyson Hannigan as a naughty schoolgirl.
Don't be too impressed by the skirt; I had to cheat on that, as trying to actually draw the pattern by hand would have ensured that I'd either be working on the picture for a long, long time, or, more likely, that I would just give up and not bother finishing it.
Anyway, it's done (or at least done enough to post a copy here.
And on that note, I bid you all good night.

So Close...

A week ago I started working on a picture of Alyson Hannigan that's fairly complex.
I got pretty far into it before I went to bed. So far, in fact, that I almost ended up staying up past my bedtime to work on it.
However, this week I lost some of my fervor, though I did get a lot more of it done.
I thought for sure I would finish it today before bed, but then Brian called and asked me if I wanted to go catch a matinee of "Flightplan" at 4:50, so it looks like I won't be able to get it done.
I did manage to finish the hair, though, which was the last thing I needed to draw. I put it off until last because hair is my enemy, and I only engage it when I'm fully prepared to do so.
So all that's left is to do some fine-tuning and bring all of the layers together, but I don't have enough time to do that before I head to the theater, and after putting so much effort into it I don't want to rush things.
There's a chance I might be able to get it finished after I get back, but if not, that will at least give you all (or some of you, at any rate) something to look forward to next week.
If I don't manage to post again before bed, I hope you all have a good weekend.

Random Celebrity Baby News

Apparently Tom Cruise has knocked up Katie Holmes (Let me just say this one last time before she gets all fat and riddled with stretch marks: mmm....Katie Holmes....).
I think there would be a certain bitter irony if Katie were to suffer from post-partum depression and manage to make Tom's life miserable because he won't let her go on antidepressants...
Of course I'm just being glib (Sorry Tom; I know you hate that. Now quit jumping up and down on Oprah's couch.), and I don't actually wish them any sort of misfortune.
Not that it would matter if I did, though, as I've come to the conclusion that the reason Tom has had such good fortune in life is that he's actually a leprechaun, and therefore has his lucky charms to keep his career going strong and to ensure that he keeps getting to nail extremely women who are much taller than he is, though being taller than Tom is pretty much a given...
On another celebrity baby front, Nicholas Cage has named his newborn son after Superman.
Kal-El Coppola Cage...there's a name that no one will make fun of.
I mean, how cruel can you be to a child? It's bad enough that kids are going to pick on him for having a dad who appears to alternate between being manically insane and overmedicated for said mania, but to give him a name like that? Why not just put a sign on his back that says "Beat the shit out of me" before you send him off to school?
What's ironic is that years ago Cage did a sketch on "Saturday Night Live" that was about these expectant parents who were trying to pick a name for their child, and the joke was that Cage's character, whom at the end we learn had a name (which escapes me) that was a guaranteed bully magnet, was breaking down every suggested name to find ways in which it could be used to make fun of their child.
Apparently the lesson of that sketch failed to sink in for him.
So, little Kal-El, from someone who's had to put up with a lifetime of "Pope" jokes, you have my sympathy...

Charity Is For Suckers Or Hope Springs Infernal

This morning when I got up I was determined to finally make up for the past two days and go for a walk.
I was actually out the door when I remembered that one thing had happened yesterday that had annoyed me: while I was gone, that hard drive enclosure kit I ordered weeks ago was finally delivered, but I wasn’t home to sign for it, so it had gone to the office, which was closed by the time I got home.
Naturally my impatience kicked in, and, as I was meeting Kathleen for lunch at 11:30, I wanted to have time to put it together and make sure it worked, so I opted to not go for a walk once again.
I headed over to the office, where I learned that that the fact that they’ll most likely be losing their jobs after the conversion to condos goes through, the people working in the office don’t even bother pretending to care.
In the past when I’ve gone over to pick up a package, one of the employees would go to where they keep the packages and get it for me.
When I told her I had a package to pick up, the girl working said, “You can just grab it yourself. They’re all in that closet.”
The problem wasn’t so much that I had to go in and sift through all of the packages in there, though that was a bit of a pain, it was that, in all likelihood the girl had no idea who I was, so I could have very easily walked off with other people’s packages as well.
In any case, once I got my package and got back to the apartment I opened up the kit and got started.
In addition to the 40 GB hard drive from my old computer that I’d bought the kit for, I had a couple of much older hard drives that I wanted to test out with the kit to see if I could recover some of the files.
As I said, they’re much older drives, so it was no surprise that they didn’t work. In fact, when I plugged them into the computer it didn’t even notice that a device had been connected to it.
I didn’t have that problem once I threw the 40 GB drive in, though.
Nope, once I did that, I had an entirely different problem.
Basically, the computer recognized that a device had been connected; it just couldn’t communicate with it.
I messed around with it a little bit, but the same thing happened every time.
Eventually I tried connected the power and the USB/IDE controller to the drive without actually putting it into the enclosure, and suddenly it worked.
While I had it working I decided to move the files that I wanted to preserve onto the internal drive. Everything was going fine until it just spontaneously crapped out in the middle of transferring the files.
Before just giving up completely, I put it all together one last time, making sure that all of the connections were tight and that I’d carefully slid the drive into the enclosure.
That, somehow, seemed to do the trick.
Of course, I ran into one problem in that the hard drive had been set up with three partitions, so my computer was recognizing it as three separate drives.
Eventually I remembered that I had PartitionMagic installed on one of the partitions, so I merged the three back into one, then formatted the drive.
I’m not sure what I’m going to use the drive for. Just extra storage, I guess.
After that was over I picked up Kathleen and we went to this bagel/sandwich place and had lunch.
It’s actually been a while since I’d seen her, as she’d been gone on a business trip, which she followed up with a trip home to visit her mom.
Her mom actually lives in a town called Beaver, which, quite naturally, has led to a lot of off-color comments whenever Kathleen mentions the place.
While she was there this time, she was thoughtful enough to actually pick me up a little (stuffed) beaver from Beaver, which she gave me today.
The place we ate at is known by many people as “Karate Bagels,” thanks to an unfortunate (and since corrected) placement of signage for it and the karate school located right next to the bagel place.
I got a sandwich from there once before, at the risk of my own life. The woman working the counter had been extremely unhappy with me for having the nerve to actually walk in and order something. I thought she was going to come out from beyond the counter and attack me.
I remember that after she’d grudgingly accepted my order I noticed another sandwich on the menu that looked better than what I’d ordered, but even though she hadn’t started making my sandwich yet, I didn’t dare change my order for fear of getting shot.
Today was the first time I risked going back.
The sandwich I’d considered changing my order to that time had been called “The Heart Attack.” Apparently out of some kind of sensitivity to people with cardiovascular problems, they’ve changed the name of the sandwich to “The Heart Artichoke,” which makes no sense whatsoever (they also got rid of Pastrami as one of the ingredients), considering that the sandwich doesn’t involve artichokes in any fashion whatsoever.
Still, it was okay, even if it didn’t cause my heart seize up.
And of course, this time I feel quite so much like my life was in any immediate danger from any of the employees.
Yesterday when I was eating lunch at McDonald’s, I was fortunate enough to hear a pleasant conversation going on between two old men discussing how the victims of the recent hurricanes don’t deserve any help.
I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion, but they seemed to have some sort of elaborate system of justifying their opposition to charitable works of any kind, as, in some fashion, nobody actually needs charity. Even if people do need it, though, they don’t deserve it, as they have deliberately chosen to become charity cases.
From what I could gather, they didn’t necessarily believe that the people of New Orleans “asked for it,” but if people are gullible enough to waste money trying to help them, their reward will be seeing all of the money they give being wasted on booze.
Yes, that’s right; every person displaced by Katrina and Rita will spend any and all money received on booze.
They went on to discuss how every homeless person in the world is simply lazy and has chosen to drop out of society. Every last one.
They could assert this because they heard from someone who knows someone who heard from someone else who had a dream that that the homeless are all homeless by choice.
They continued talking about how helping your fellow man is for suckers, and felt very proud of themselves for not being foolish enough to ever try to help anyone.
…
This is why I hate people. They construct these elaborate justifications, often hinging entirely on something “they heard from a friend of a friend” or from some conservative commentator who tells them what they want to hear, and suddenly it becomes okay to not care about what happens to other people.
It becomes even easier if the people who need help are different in some fashion: different religion, different color, different accent.
If they just didn’t care and owned up to the fact that they don’t care, rather than concocting some half-assed rationalization for not caring, I could almost respect that.
At least it would be honest.
But this crap is just disgusting.
Then again, I suppose that the basis for a lot of this is a feeling of powerlessness, that there’s nothing that can be done, which is difficult to accept, so it’s easier to believe that nothing should be done.
Or maybe that’s just a way of justifying the fact that people are rotten.
I have no doubt that there are people who are homeless by choice. I know for a fact that there are people who scam the welfare system. There probably are victims of Katrina and Rita who will blow their money on booze.
But there are also people who are mentally ill who, don’t have the capacity to make choices, who have been dumped out on the street because there’s no money to provide them the care they need. There are women who have been abandoned by their abusive husbands and can’t feed their children. There are people who lost their goddamn homes.
But people do this all the time (I’m doing it right now, in fact); they see something once or twice and suddenly it becomes a broad trend.
They see someone working the system, so that means that everyone is working the system.
It is, after all, how stereotypes are born.
And yeah, as I said, I do this, too, though I go a little broader and just conclude that human beings of all creeds and colors suck.
After all, I began painting this picture of humanity in broad strokes using these two old farts, who themselves ought to be old enough to know better, as models.
I, however, am willing to at least entertain the notion that there might be a handful of worthwhile people out there.
There was a kind of irony to be found in the fact that, as I watched them struggle to figure out how the McDonald’s “Monopoly” game works, and, in fact, were unable to even find their game pieces, I considered what miserable specimens of humanity these two codgers were, and how they’d just gotten through concluding that no one deserves help, I was charitable enough to explain it to them.
To stick to their principles they should have greeted my assistance with contempt rather than gratitude…
Ah well, that people suck is hardly a new sentiment coming from me.
My post-lunch day was pretty uneventful. Shortly after I got home I decided that I would finally go for a walk, so I accomplished that much, at least.
Yesterday at the Smithsonian I got to see the Hope Diamond. I took a picture of it with my PDA, but as you can see, it didn’t turn out very well:



That’s hardly surprising, though; hope almost never turns out very well for me…

Long (But Good) Day

Today was a long day. A lot longer than expected.
It started with the world trying to push me to get up, for whatever reason, at 7. I said, “The hell with that,” and decided to push back rather forcefully.
So forcefully, in fact, that I pushed myself to sleep a half an hour beyond when I normally get up.
This delay in waking threw things sufficiently out of whack that I seized the opportunity to not go for a walk when I got up.
After all, I’d already stepped outside of my routine.
I had plans for the day in the form of heading to DC with Scott to see “Mirrormask,” the movie written by Neil Gaiman, at the only theater in the area (outside of Baltimore) that was showing it.
We had to catch it this week, as it was only a one-week engagement.
The plan was for me to meet Scott at his house at 1:30, which would leave us enough time to get to DC (and find the theater) in time for the 2:55 matinee.
Because it takes anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes to get to Scott’s house, I figured I’d head out into the world a bit after 11 to do a few things and get lunch before making the trek to Manassas.
First stop was Wal-Mart, where I returned a pair of pants I bought last week, and then picked up a few things like a birthday card for my niece Jenni, and various toiletries.
The funny thing is that the total cost of what I bought was just shy of exactly how much money I’d gotten back for the pants I’d returned.
After that I drove around trying to figure out where I was going to eat lunch before finally settling on McDonald’s, which was kind of silly, as I could have just eaten at the McDonald’s inside of Wal-Mart.
Ah well.
From there I made my way to Scott’s. Traffic was relatively light, though there was an infuriating moment in which I found myself stuck behind a slow-moving truck that was hauling a bulldozer.
I’d been caught behind it at a light, and so I was unable to get into the other lane to pass it, as I had to wait for the stream of traffic whizzing past me.
(I said “stream,” and then I said “whizzing.”)
Eventually, I got an opening and moved into the other lane…where I was stuck behind some Jackass in a Land Rover who was matching the speed of the bulldozer-hauling truck.
After several minutes I moved back in behind the truck and managed to actually get past the Land Rover, which had slowed down even further, that way. WTF? Why would anyone deliberately drive slower than a truck that’s hauling a bulldozer?
Anyway, I still managed to get there a bit early. I didn’t stop, as I didn’t think Scott was home (I thought he was at the doctor’s with Stacy, who was going to be home at 1:30, which was why we’d set that as the time to head out DC), but after making a pass by to see if Stacy’s car was back yet I noticed that the door was open, so I parked and made my way over to the house.
Once Stacy arrived (in their newly-purchased Grand Caravan), Scott and I headed out.
We actually made very good time, and arrived at the theater with ten minutes to spare.
Except…
Turns out that we’d read it wrong on the Web; the movie started at 2:25 not 2:55.
So, given that there were very few previews, that meant that the movie was already well underway, with the next show not until 4:50.
After Scott made a quick call to tell Stacy about the change to our schedule, we decided to head over to the Smithsonian to pass the time.
We went into the Museum of Natural History and found that the IMAX theater had a 3-D movie called “Into The Deep,” which would carry us through most of the time we needed to kill, and so, after checking out some of the displays it was time for the movie.
The 3-D effect, at times, was pretty amazing, but for the most part it made my eyes water and gave me a headache.
From that theater we were off to the other theater, which, I must say, was the most unusual theater I’ve ever been in. As best we were able to determine it had been converted from a hotel.
(The theater seems to specialize in “art” films and various other special interest movies)
The actual auditorium in which the movie was playing was pretty small, and there were only a handful of people there to see the it (no doubt all hard-core Neil Gaiman fans).
As for the movie itself, Scott and I both enjoyed it a great deal. It was funny, magical, and visually astonishing, particularly given the almost non-existent budget Gaiman and McKean had to work with (a scant $4 million, which is nothing for a movie, especially one so full of eye-popping visual effects). I think it’s a shame that it’s getting such a limited release.
I was especially impressed by the performance of Stephanie Leonidas, who starred as Helena, the 15-year old girl raised in a circus who wants to run away and join the real world. She was very cute (in real life she’s 21, so I’m not a total perv) and engaging, and she brought a great range to the role.
After we left the theater we got out of DC surprisingly quickly, and, since it was after 7, thought we would be avoiding the rush-hour traffic.
We would have done so, but an accident on 66 slowed things down considerably and we were forced to take a detour around it. The detour was supposed to simply take us off the freeway and then lead us to an on-ramp on the other side of the accident. Unfortunately, the on-ramp was also blocked off, and we had no idea how to get back onto 66.
Eventually we found a road that Scott knew and we were well on our way.
My drive home was uneventful and surprisingly quick, allowing me to get home just in time to catch “My Name is Earl.”
Still, like I said, while overall it was a good one, it was a long day.
After leaving the movie I was telling Scott about the fact that Neil is actually working on making his mini-series “Death: The High Cost of Living” into a movie. I mentioned that I’d read an interview with him in which he was asked if he had any thoughts on casting, to which he replied that he did…in a rather coy manner that indicated he had no intention of telling anyone what those thoughts were.
Sort of out of the blue, Scott said that he thought that Rachael Leigh Cook would be ideal for the role of Death.
(For those who don’t know, Death, as presented in “The Sandman” and related comics is a very sweet, quirky, petite, and beautiful Goth chick.)
I was a bit nonplussed by this.
Not because it isn’t a good idea, but rather because it is a good idea and it never occurred to me.
I don’t mean that to sound egotistical, as if to say that I’m the only person who has good ideas, but if you consider that Death is a favorite character of mine, and I love Rachael Leigh Cook, you’d think that putting the two together would have been obvious.
But it never occurred to me.
In fact, I said to Scott, more than a little shocked, “It never occurred to me that my beloved Rachael Leigh Cook should play Death.”
And yet it’s so obvious.
Of course, in fairness to me, it’s really been years since I’ve thought about who should play Death. Back in the day, the most obvious choice had always been Winona Ryder.
Of course, that only adds to the obviousness of RLC as Death, as there are a lot of physical similarities between her and Winona.
I can only offer my humblest apologies to RLC (and Death) for this oversight on my part.
In any case, I think it’s time that I bring my long day to a close.

Baby Winos, Horoscopes May NOT Be Accurate, Cause For Alarm, And Not THAT Kind Of Dream

This morning I was awoken by the sound of two little kids outside my window talking about drinking wine.
At least, I think that was what they were talking about with their shrill little voices that pierced through the veil of sleep and woke me at 7:30 in the morning.
Why they would be talking about drinking wine, given that they were at least 14 years away from being old enough to do so, is beyond me, but the important thing is that they woke me up because children tend to talk to each other when they’re right next to each other at the same volume they would talk to each other if they were a hundred yards apart.
Even after the little boozehounds had been hauled off to baby rehab – or elementary school, as the case may be – and their horrid little voices had faded into vague memories of having been awoken by a sound worse than a buzzsaw, I found myself unable to get back to sleep, despite the fact that I’d only gotten a bit under five hours’ worth.
So I got up, thought about going for a walk, and decided against it.
In fact, at some point in the morning I decided that I wasn’t going to go anywhere or do anything.
And I didn’t.
In fact, at around noon I decided that since I wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything I might as well get the rest of the sleep I’d missed on, thanks to the baby wine connoisseurs.
So obviously my day was pretty uneventful.
This was actually my horoscope for the day:

Someone you adore is silently begging you to try -- just this once -- to be tender, romantic and maybe even sentimental. Okay, look. Try a new approach. Instead of dragging them out, rushing to be first in and out of everywhere and insisting that they carry everything -- you know how you feel about carrying things -- mind your manners. It won't kill you, you'll have a great time, and they may even agree to see you again. Soon! What's wrong with that for a battle-plan?

I think I will make that my battle plan. After all, I wouldn’t want to distance someone I adore and….wait a minute, that horoscope doesn’t apply to me at all! What the hell? I’m beginning to think that these horoscope things might not be 100% accurate…
Over the weekend I learned that the CD player on my alarm clock seems to have crapped out.
Saturday morning I was awoken by my alarm clock beeping as it tried, and failed, to start playing the CD.
Sunday morning I woke up on my own, a half an hour after the alarm should have gone off, as this time it didn’t beep. It was still trying, and failing, to play the CD, spinning it up and flashing the number of tracks on the display in an unending loop of failure.
The upside was that I had a convenient excuse for not going in and working out yesterday morning, but the downside is that CD player portion of the clock is shot, meaning that I’ll have to resort to being woken by the radio or the buzzer, and I can’t go back to being woken by a buzzer. In fact, all of the damn TV commercials that feature an alarm clock buzzer make me want to smash my TV, find the people responsible, and perform acts of unspeakable violence upon them.
Or, you know, just call them jerks.
The irritating thing is that this had happened once before, and I thought it was only a one-time thing. A fluke. Two days in a row, though, seems like more of a problem, but in playing around with it tonight, I’ve gotten it to work consistently several times in a row, so I don’t know if I should trust it come this weekend.
Speaking of CDs, tomorrow Fiona Apple’s long-delayed third album, “Extraordinary Machine,” will finally be released. A version of the album had been leaked out to the Internet a while back, though this commercial release, which contains the same tracks plus two new ones, is very different from what was leaked out.
I actually listened to the whole thing today at AOL Music’s “Full CD Listening Party,” which lets you listen to full CDs for free. I also checked out Liz Phair’s new CD, which is also being released tomorrow. As free music services go, I’d have to say that this one is pretty cool.
The other night I found myself dreaming that I was in some kind of teen comedy starring Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff.
I don’t recall much of the plot beyond the fact that there was some rivalry between Lohan and Duff, nor do I have any idea what inspired the dream.
All I do know is that it soon became apparent that this wasn’t going to turn into the kind of dream involving Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff that I’d be interested in being involved with, so I got up and walked off the set.
From there I found myself walking on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere (aka “Home”), and eventually made my way to a small cabin on a lake. Though it didn’t look exactly familiar, it was clear that I was someplace that I’d been many times, and it could very easily be a spot on a lake back home.
In fact, it was something of a small, secluded bay on the lake, though there were other cabins located around it.
I’m not sure when in my life this was supposed to be, but as I had been walking, I’d been thinking about how my mother had been finding it strange that every day I’d been going off on these increasingly long walks. I also knew that, whatever year it was, it was the 4th of July.
In any case, as I was hanging out on the deck of some complete stranger’s cabin staring out t the still water and smoking, a bunch of families began arriving to celebrate the holiday at their cabins, so I decided that I should probably go. As I was departing, and resolving that after I finished the pack and a half of cigarettes I had I would quit, one of the people arriving asked me if I needed matches. I said no and told him that I had a lighter. Then I was back on the dirt road. The overgrown trees formed a canopy over the road, making it look like a tunnel through which only scattered fragments of sunlight were able to shine as I made my way home.
I have no idea what any of it was supposed to mean, but it was all very odd.
On that note, I think I’ll bring this entry to a close.