I found this article about Scarlett Johansson that attempts to explain why the world is so enthralled by her.
Personally, I think the answer is pretty straightforward as there are two big reasons I can think of, but the main point I wanted to make was the glaring omission in the opening sentence of the article:
Audiences love her, critics adore her.
To be complete, it should read, "Audiences love her, critics adore her, Jon really wants to do her."
(I don't mean to trivialize her talent - she is a very good actress and she does seem to be very intelligent and, based on the article, down to earth - but damn she's hot.)
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Another Reason For The List
As my cartoon watching continues largely unabated, I took in one of my favorite episodes of Superman: The Animated Series today, an episode entitled “The Late Mr. Kent.”
The story revolves around Clark finding proof that a man who’s about to be executed was innocent, which leads the real killer to try to eliminate Clark. Of course it doesn’t work, but circumstance are such that Clark can’t reveal that he survived the attempt without revealing that he’s Superman.
Working with Lois, Superman reveals that the real killer was a corrupt cop who framed the man on death row, a convenient turn of events allows for Clark to turn up alive, and the corrupt cop is himself sentenced to death.
At the end of the episode, we see the cop in the gas chamber as he asks a question that’s probably been repeating in his head over and over: how did Kent survive the car bomb?
Then we have the light bulb moment as he says aloud, though no one can hear him, “He’s Superman!” just as the executioner throws the lever to release the gas.
There’s rather a lot more to the episode, which is told with a voiceover narration in a style reminiscent of classic crime dramas, but the essential and defining moment that makes it one of my favorite episodes is that final scene.
Apart from that, what I really like about the episode is the opening scene in which we see a small memorial service with various members of the Daily Planet staff in attendance, and as we move back we see Superman in the distance, which becomes puzzling once we learn that the person being memorialized is none other than Clark Kent! But how can this be? If Superman is Clark Kent, and is clearly alive, how can Clark be dead?
In watching this opening sequence one can envision the kind of classic Silver Age cover that might have accompanied a story like this in the comics (assuming that said “one”is me, or someone similarly familiar with comics, at any rate).
In fact, I can’t imagine that there wasn’t a cover similar to what I’m imagining somewhere along the line, something featuring Lois and Jimmy in funereal garb standing in front of a headstone that says “RIP Clark Kent” lamenting the loss of their colleague and friend, while Superman stands behind a monument with a thought bubble summarizing his dilemma: that he’s alive, but can’t let anyone know, lest they discover his secret.
There has to have been a cover like that somewhere along the line in the last 68 years.
At any rate, there’s a scene in the episode in which Superman and Lois are in Clark’s apartment looking for clues as to who might have killed him when Lois discovers that Clark’s computer has been stolen and that his phone had been bugged. She also discovers a bomb that’s about to go off.
Superman whisks her out to safety in the nick of time, flying her across the street and dropping her off on a balcony while he turns back to deal with the fire.
Now here’s the actual point of all this.
Among the many, many reasons why I think it’s a shame that there is no such person as Superman in real life we now need to add “Because he will never randomly deposit a beautiful, short-skirted investigative reporter on my balcony.”
The story revolves around Clark finding proof that a man who’s about to be executed was innocent, which leads the real killer to try to eliminate Clark. Of course it doesn’t work, but circumstance are such that Clark can’t reveal that he survived the attempt without revealing that he’s Superman.
Working with Lois, Superman reveals that the real killer was a corrupt cop who framed the man on death row, a convenient turn of events allows for Clark to turn up alive, and the corrupt cop is himself sentenced to death.
At the end of the episode, we see the cop in the gas chamber as he asks a question that’s probably been repeating in his head over and over: how did Kent survive the car bomb?
Then we have the light bulb moment as he says aloud, though no one can hear him, “He’s Superman!” just as the executioner throws the lever to release the gas.
There’s rather a lot more to the episode, which is told with a voiceover narration in a style reminiscent of classic crime dramas, but the essential and defining moment that makes it one of my favorite episodes is that final scene.
Apart from that, what I really like about the episode is the opening scene in which we see a small memorial service with various members of the Daily Planet staff in attendance, and as we move back we see Superman in the distance, which becomes puzzling once we learn that the person being memorialized is none other than Clark Kent! But how can this be? If Superman is Clark Kent, and is clearly alive, how can Clark be dead?
In watching this opening sequence one can envision the kind of classic Silver Age cover that might have accompanied a story like this in the comics (assuming that said “one”is me, or someone similarly familiar with comics, at any rate).
In fact, I can’t imagine that there wasn’t a cover similar to what I’m imagining somewhere along the line, something featuring Lois and Jimmy in funereal garb standing in front of a headstone that says “RIP Clark Kent” lamenting the loss of their colleague and friend, while Superman stands behind a monument with a thought bubble summarizing his dilemma: that he’s alive, but can’t let anyone know, lest they discover his secret.
There has to have been a cover like that somewhere along the line in the last 68 years.
At any rate, there’s a scene in the episode in which Superman and Lois are in Clark’s apartment looking for clues as to who might have killed him when Lois discovers that Clark’s computer has been stolen and that his phone had been bugged. She also discovers a bomb that’s about to go off.
Superman whisks her out to safety in the nick of time, flying her across the street and dropping her off on a balcony while he turns back to deal with the fire.
Now here’s the actual point of all this.
Among the many, many reasons why I think it’s a shame that there is no such person as Superman in real life we now need to add “Because he will never randomly deposit a beautiful, short-skirted investigative reporter on my balcony.”
My Subconscious Desires Are Retarded
So August is almost over, taking the summer with it.
I know, technically summer isn’t over for a couple of weeks, but even though I’ve been out of school for a long time I tend to measure summer’s end by whether or not school has started up.
In some places around here it started last week, mostly because the schools take so many snow days throughout the winter, so they end up starting early to make up for them.
While I am sad to see the summer go, I’m glad that all of the little monsters are back in kid prison for a while.
Of course, it’s not as though summer really means anything to me except for a lot of time spent sitting around not doing anything and sweating anyway.
When I was younger I loved the summer, but that was mostly because I hated being in school, though back in those days I did at least do some stuff in the summer. I spent a lot of time in the water
Easy access to a body of water was one of the benefits – in fact probably the only one – of growing up in a town called Twin Lakes.
These days I pretty much never swim.
My condo complex has a pool, but meh. I’m sure the water consists mostly of kid piss.
At my old place I used the pool once. They had a lifeguard on duty, and as I was the only person there swimming it kind of ended up feeling like that SNL sketch with Jim Carrey as the hot tub lifeguard, so I never went in the pool again.
I suppose that if I felt ambitious I could drive out to some beach on the ocean, but what are the odds of me feeling ambitious?
So really I guess what I’m saying is, “Screw summer.”
Honestly, as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to feel more of an affinity for autumn, though I have to say that I haven’t been impressed by autumn out here. For one thing, there isn’t nearly enough foliage to provide anything like the spectacular color show they get back home.
For another, it tends to stay a little too warm a little too long. I mean, we might very well have 70 degree weather well into December.
That’s not entirely a complaint, but autumn isn’t quite autumn without that chill in the air that hints at the coming of winter.
At least it does get cool at night, wich is one of the things that appeals to me about autumn: warm days and cool nights.
Of course, back home autumn generally lasts like a week and then winter starts, so I suppose can’t complain too much about it not being like home.
Speaking of winter, and by winter I mean real winter, with weeks on end of sub-zero temperatures, the kind of cold that makes it hurt to breathe and makes ice crystals form everywhere so that at night the light from the moon makes everything sparkle like diamonds, there seems to be some part of my subconscious, some deeply-buried part hidden off in some dark recess, some dark, retarded recess, that actually misses winter.
And again, I mean real winter, not the pussy bullshit that people think is winter out here.
The thing is, I hate winter, real or otherwise.
Oh sure, there can be a kind of stark, desolate beauty to it as the world is blanketed in white, but that’s not enough to make me miss having my nose hairs turn into razor sharp frozen blades as soon as I take a breath, or losing all feeling in my extremities. And that’s to say nothing about having to deal with driving through all of that white shit.
And yet, I keep dreaming about winter and having images of winter (mostly moonlight shining on a field of snow), and memories of winters past keep popping up, and buried somewhere in there under all of that waist-deep snow is a sense of – there’s really no other word for it – longing.
WTF? I mean, as I said, I hate winter.
I suppose that what’s at the root of it is the fact that I’m reading a book (rereading actually; the book is American Gods) in which much of the action, at the point I’m at in the book, is taking place during the winter in a town that’s very near to my (original) neck of the woods, and the author (Neil Gaiman) is very deftly and vividly describing the kind of winter that I grew up with and I guess there’s some part of me – some demented and retarded part – that is responding to the familiarity of it all.
On passage in particular stood out for me, in which we find our protagonist about halfway into a twenty minute walk on the day after Christmas:
He kept walking, revising his estimates of the temperature downward as he walked. Minus ten? Minus twenty? Minus forty, maybe, that strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same thing. Probably not that cold. But then there was the wind chill, and the wind was now hard and steady and continuous, blowing over the lake, coming down from the Arctic across Canada.
He remembered, enviously, the chemical hand- and foot-warmers. He wished he had them now.
Ten more minutes of walking, he guessed, and the bridge seemed no nearer. He was too cold to shiver. His eyes hurt. This was not simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer.
And that’s what I’m missing? Again, WTF?
Reading this particular passage I was reminded of winter nights spent staggering home from the bar, walking against a wind so strong that I could almost lean into it and let it support my entire weight as it hurled dry, brittle flakes of snow that scraped across my face and made me feel like I was being sandblasted, and, insulated against the cold by a potent combination of beer and self-destructive stupidity, I would laugh and say, “Is that the best you can do?”
Anyway, of all the things that I could feel homesick about, I would have thought that winter would be the very last of them.
Oh well.
Today I decided that I really should venture out into the world, and so I headed out to Super Target to pick up a few things to make an early lunch and to grab some snacks for work.
Not much of interest happened there. I did notice a rather large woman with a gratingly unpleasant voice browbeating someone on her cell phone, leading said someone to, evidently, hang up.
I’m guessing that either she was talking to a child or a spouse whom she treats like a child.
At some point later on as I walked past her again she had gotten reconnected and was saying, “You hung up on me; you’re lucky you’re not standing in front of me right now!”
Being unlucky enough to actually be standing in front of her myself, I couldn’t help but agree.
On the drive home some jackass in front of me hesitated at a green arrow that had just turned yellow, demonstrating that the adage is not complete: he who hesitates is lost…and so is the schmuck stuck in traffic behind him.
I was behind the guy the rest of the way home, as he was actually taking pretty much the same route I was, ultimately heading to a row of townhomes just past my place.
Along the way he ended up cutting me off when he got in front of me to turn off of 15, and as he was turning up my street and saw that I was as turning as well, I think he decided that I was following him, as he hauled ass and narrowly avoided an oncoming car in an effort to make the turn and get the hell away from me.
I thought that it was kind of cute that he was afraid of me.
If he only knew how unlikely I would be to put forth the effort it would take to act out on my road rage.
In any case, I suppose I should do my “penmanship drills” for the day, and maybe start on a picture that I’ll never be able to finish before I go to bed.
I know, technically summer isn’t over for a couple of weeks, but even though I’ve been out of school for a long time I tend to measure summer’s end by whether or not school has started up.
In some places around here it started last week, mostly because the schools take so many snow days throughout the winter, so they end up starting early to make up for them.
While I am sad to see the summer go, I’m glad that all of the little monsters are back in kid prison for a while.
Of course, it’s not as though summer really means anything to me except for a lot of time spent sitting around not doing anything and sweating anyway.
When I was younger I loved the summer, but that was mostly because I hated being in school, though back in those days I did at least do some stuff in the summer. I spent a lot of time in the water
Easy access to a body of water was one of the benefits – in fact probably the only one – of growing up in a town called Twin Lakes.
These days I pretty much never swim.
My condo complex has a pool, but meh. I’m sure the water consists mostly of kid piss.
At my old place I used the pool once. They had a lifeguard on duty, and as I was the only person there swimming it kind of ended up feeling like that SNL sketch with Jim Carrey as the hot tub lifeguard, so I never went in the pool again.
I suppose that if I felt ambitious I could drive out to some beach on the ocean, but what are the odds of me feeling ambitious?
So really I guess what I’m saying is, “Screw summer.”
Honestly, as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to feel more of an affinity for autumn, though I have to say that I haven’t been impressed by autumn out here. For one thing, there isn’t nearly enough foliage to provide anything like the spectacular color show they get back home.
For another, it tends to stay a little too warm a little too long. I mean, we might very well have 70 degree weather well into December.
That’s not entirely a complaint, but autumn isn’t quite autumn without that chill in the air that hints at the coming of winter.
At least it does get cool at night, wich is one of the things that appeals to me about autumn: warm days and cool nights.
Of course, back home autumn generally lasts like a week and then winter starts, so I suppose can’t complain too much about it not being like home.
Speaking of winter, and by winter I mean real winter, with weeks on end of sub-zero temperatures, the kind of cold that makes it hurt to breathe and makes ice crystals form everywhere so that at night the light from the moon makes everything sparkle like diamonds, there seems to be some part of my subconscious, some deeply-buried part hidden off in some dark recess, some dark, retarded recess, that actually misses winter.
And again, I mean real winter, not the pussy bullshit that people think is winter out here.
The thing is, I hate winter, real or otherwise.
Oh sure, there can be a kind of stark, desolate beauty to it as the world is blanketed in white, but that’s not enough to make me miss having my nose hairs turn into razor sharp frozen blades as soon as I take a breath, or losing all feeling in my extremities. And that’s to say nothing about having to deal with driving through all of that white shit.
And yet, I keep dreaming about winter and having images of winter (mostly moonlight shining on a field of snow), and memories of winters past keep popping up, and buried somewhere in there under all of that waist-deep snow is a sense of – there’s really no other word for it – longing.
WTF? I mean, as I said, I hate winter.
I suppose that what’s at the root of it is the fact that I’m reading a book (rereading actually; the book is American Gods) in which much of the action, at the point I’m at in the book, is taking place during the winter in a town that’s very near to my (original) neck of the woods, and the author (Neil Gaiman) is very deftly and vividly describing the kind of winter that I grew up with and I guess there’s some part of me – some demented and retarded part – that is responding to the familiarity of it all.
On passage in particular stood out for me, in which we find our protagonist about halfway into a twenty minute walk on the day after Christmas:
He kept walking, revising his estimates of the temperature downward as he walked. Minus ten? Minus twenty? Minus forty, maybe, that strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same thing. Probably not that cold. But then there was the wind chill, and the wind was now hard and steady and continuous, blowing over the lake, coming down from the Arctic across Canada.
He remembered, enviously, the chemical hand- and foot-warmers. He wished he had them now.
Ten more minutes of walking, he guessed, and the bridge seemed no nearer. He was too cold to shiver. His eyes hurt. This was not simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer.
And that’s what I’m missing? Again, WTF?
Reading this particular passage I was reminded of winter nights spent staggering home from the bar, walking against a wind so strong that I could almost lean into it and let it support my entire weight as it hurled dry, brittle flakes of snow that scraped across my face and made me feel like I was being sandblasted, and, insulated against the cold by a potent combination of beer and self-destructive stupidity, I would laugh and say, “Is that the best you can do?”
Anyway, of all the things that I could feel homesick about, I would have thought that winter would be the very last of them.
Oh well.
Today I decided that I really should venture out into the world, and so I headed out to Super Target to pick up a few things to make an early lunch and to grab some snacks for work.
Not much of interest happened there. I did notice a rather large woman with a gratingly unpleasant voice browbeating someone on her cell phone, leading said someone to, evidently, hang up.
I’m guessing that either she was talking to a child or a spouse whom she treats like a child.
At some point later on as I walked past her again she had gotten reconnected and was saying, “You hung up on me; you’re lucky you’re not standing in front of me right now!”
Being unlucky enough to actually be standing in front of her myself, I couldn’t help but agree.
On the drive home some jackass in front of me hesitated at a green arrow that had just turned yellow, demonstrating that the adage is not complete: he who hesitates is lost…and so is the schmuck stuck in traffic behind him.
I was behind the guy the rest of the way home, as he was actually taking pretty much the same route I was, ultimately heading to a row of townhomes just past my place.
Along the way he ended up cutting me off when he got in front of me to turn off of 15, and as he was turning up my street and saw that I was as turning as well, I think he decided that I was following him, as he hauled ass and narrowly avoided an oncoming car in an effort to make the turn and get the hell away from me.
I thought that it was kind of cute that he was afraid of me.
If he only knew how unlikely I would be to put forth the effort it would take to act out on my road rage.
In any case, I suppose I should do my “penmanship drills” for the day, and maybe start on a picture that I’ll never be able to finish before I go to bed.
Jackhammers, Penmanship Drills, And Cabin Fever
This morning I was lying in bed semi-conscious and thinking about how, if I didn’t want to, I didn’t have to get up. There was nowhere I had to be, nothing I had to do, and it was extremely unlikely that the circumstances of my life had changed sufficiently to make the prospect of getting up any more interesting than the prospect of just staying in bed all day, and so I decided that I was going to stay in bed for at least a couple more hours.
That’s when I heard the jackhammer.
It was 8:45 am and someone was outside demolishing the concrete steps that lead from the front of my building to the sidewalk. With a jackhammer.
Recognizing the fact that a jackhammer pounding on concrete just outside my window was likely to make my dream of sleeping for hours longer an impossible one, I reluctantly got up.
As per usual I sat around for a while doing not much of anything, eventually making myself some French toast (and again neglecting to take a picture), and then going back to sitting around.
The other night, as something of an exercise, I started writing something.
The idea behind writing this “something” is that I will work on it, at least a little bit, every day and thereby try to get myself into the habit of writing something (beyond blog entries) in the hopes that flexing my creative muscles a little more will work out some of the kinks and possibly help me develop some kind of discipline.
It’s a very faint hope, but it’s something.
In any case, the “story” I’m working on has no plot whatsoever; I’m just randomly typing whatever comes to mind. It’s sort of like doing penmanship drills, though it’s a little bit more involved than that, as I’m not just typing out random nonsense; I’m actually developing characters and describing events in their lives and trying to create a setting and an internal logic. I just don’t really have anything in mind for the characters to do in their setting with their internal logic.
Ideally spending time every day working on a practice story will prepare me to one day start sitting down and writing a real story that does have things for the characters to do, but looking back on it, the penmanship drills I did when I was in grade school didn’t do anything to keep my handwriting from turning into an illegible scrawl that looks like something a crazy person might have used his fingernails to carve into the walls of the filthy room that he’s squatting in inside of a condemned building, so like I said, it’s only a faint hope that this effort will amount to anything.
The point is, I did devote some time to that today, so my day wasn’t all sitting around and not doing anything; it was at least partly sitting around and kind of doing something.
So I worked on that for a bit, and then after a late lunch I decided that I had two options available to me: I could go for a walk or I could take a nap.
Which one do you think I opted for?
Even though I have the windows closed and the A/C running, as the humidity has shot back up, when I was trying (and failing; I barely got in a half hour) to nap I had to turn my fan on to provide some white noise to drown out the shitty music that the plumbing guys who were outside working on whatever plumbing mishap (most likely related to all of the jackhammering that’s been going on since last week as part of the sidewalk replacement project) had caused the water loss on Friday night were blasting out of their truck.
Said plumbing guys had been here yesterday, though they didn’t arrive until almost five, at which point hey shut the water off and left.
I discovered that the water was off when I was starting to make dinner and was pissed, as I knew that the plumbing guys were gone.
“Nice job, fucktards,” I said to no one, since the guys it was directed at were gone.
Fortunately they did return and about an hour and a half later I had water again.
As I’ve mentioned before, my condo complex has one centralized area for all mailboxes, though it’s not exactly “central.”
In any case, it takes the mail carrier a couple of hours to actually finish putting all of the mail into the boxes, and the section with my box is one of the last ones he does.
This means that as he typically arrives at around 2 he’s not finished until sometime after 4.
Lately, though, he’s been arriving later or just taking longer, as he’s often still in the early stages when he would normally be finishing up, so I’ve just been waiting until later in the evening to walk down to get my mail. Because I’d had no reason to go outside until I went to get the mail on Monday it wasn’t until well after the fact that I found the notice on my door telling me that the water would be shut off for a while in the evening, so my bitching, it seems, was ignorant and uninformed.
Oh well; not noticing things put on your door is one of the perils of being a near shut-in, I guess.
If I don’t venture out at all tomorrow, the odds are that I’ll feel a little anxious when I head in to work on Thursday morning. Spending multiple days holed up (I didn’t go anywhere Sunday and I was only out for a very short time on Monday) generally leads me to get a little bit agoraphobic when the time comes to leave the nest.
Fortunately the feeling doesn’t last long.
Of course, come Thursday I’ll be in my new darker, danker, and more crowded workspace, which could exacerbate the anxiety a bit, what with the whole being cramped in a small room with a bunch of people, but I guess I’ll manage.
It can’t be any worse than being in jail. I mean, at the very least I won’t be stuck in a bunk right next to the toilet.
At least I hope I won’t...
That’s when I heard the jackhammer.
It was 8:45 am and someone was outside demolishing the concrete steps that lead from the front of my building to the sidewalk. With a jackhammer.
Recognizing the fact that a jackhammer pounding on concrete just outside my window was likely to make my dream of sleeping for hours longer an impossible one, I reluctantly got up.
As per usual I sat around for a while doing not much of anything, eventually making myself some French toast (and again neglecting to take a picture), and then going back to sitting around.
The other night, as something of an exercise, I started writing something.
The idea behind writing this “something” is that I will work on it, at least a little bit, every day and thereby try to get myself into the habit of writing something (beyond blog entries) in the hopes that flexing my creative muscles a little more will work out some of the kinks and possibly help me develop some kind of discipline.
It’s a very faint hope, but it’s something.
In any case, the “story” I’m working on has no plot whatsoever; I’m just randomly typing whatever comes to mind. It’s sort of like doing penmanship drills, though it’s a little bit more involved than that, as I’m not just typing out random nonsense; I’m actually developing characters and describing events in their lives and trying to create a setting and an internal logic. I just don’t really have anything in mind for the characters to do in their setting with their internal logic.
Ideally spending time every day working on a practice story will prepare me to one day start sitting down and writing a real story that does have things for the characters to do, but looking back on it, the penmanship drills I did when I was in grade school didn’t do anything to keep my handwriting from turning into an illegible scrawl that looks like something a crazy person might have used his fingernails to carve into the walls of the filthy room that he’s squatting in inside of a condemned building, so like I said, it’s only a faint hope that this effort will amount to anything.
The point is, I did devote some time to that today, so my day wasn’t all sitting around and not doing anything; it was at least partly sitting around and kind of doing something.
So I worked on that for a bit, and then after a late lunch I decided that I had two options available to me: I could go for a walk or I could take a nap.
Which one do you think I opted for?
Even though I have the windows closed and the A/C running, as the humidity has shot back up, when I was trying (and failing; I barely got in a half hour) to nap I had to turn my fan on to provide some white noise to drown out the shitty music that the plumbing guys who were outside working on whatever plumbing mishap (most likely related to all of the jackhammering that’s been going on since last week as part of the sidewalk replacement project) had caused the water loss on Friday night were blasting out of their truck.
Said plumbing guys had been here yesterday, though they didn’t arrive until almost five, at which point hey shut the water off and left.
I discovered that the water was off when I was starting to make dinner and was pissed, as I knew that the plumbing guys were gone.
“Nice job, fucktards,” I said to no one, since the guys it was directed at were gone.
Fortunately they did return and about an hour and a half later I had water again.
As I’ve mentioned before, my condo complex has one centralized area for all mailboxes, though it’s not exactly “central.”
In any case, it takes the mail carrier a couple of hours to actually finish putting all of the mail into the boxes, and the section with my box is one of the last ones he does.
This means that as he typically arrives at around 2 he’s not finished until sometime after 4.
Lately, though, he’s been arriving later or just taking longer, as he’s often still in the early stages when he would normally be finishing up, so I’ve just been waiting until later in the evening to walk down to get my mail. Because I’d had no reason to go outside until I went to get the mail on Monday it wasn’t until well after the fact that I found the notice on my door telling me that the water would be shut off for a while in the evening, so my bitching, it seems, was ignorant and uninformed.
Oh well; not noticing things put on your door is one of the perils of being a near shut-in, I guess.
If I don’t venture out at all tomorrow, the odds are that I’ll feel a little anxious when I head in to work on Thursday morning. Spending multiple days holed up (I didn’t go anywhere Sunday and I was only out for a very short time on Monday) generally leads me to get a little bit agoraphobic when the time comes to leave the nest.
Fortunately the feeling doesn’t last long.
Of course, come Thursday I’ll be in my new darker, danker, and more crowded workspace, which could exacerbate the anxiety a bit, what with the whole being cramped in a small room with a bunch of people, but I guess I’ll manage.
It can’t be any worse than being in jail. I mean, at the very least I won’t be stuck in a bunk right next to the toilet.
At least I hope I won’t...
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
You Say It's Your Birthday? It's My (Blog's) Birthday Too!
While I remembered that yesterday was the anniversary of my sobriety, it had nearly escaped my attention that today is the second anniversary of the birth of Threshold.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years already and that in the course of those two years literally dozens of people have stopped by, mostly out of a sense of obligation, to quickly skim through my canny insights and cogent analysis of just how mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly dull my life is.
Oh, and to look at the occasional picture.
In the spirit of that last point, I thought that I would mark the occasion by posting a recently-completed picture of the lovely and talented Carla Gugino, the voluptuous actress who shares a birthday with this blog.
That isn’t her only tie to Threshold, as last year’s fall TV season found Ms. Gugino starring in a supernatural thriller titled, of all things, Threshold.
Of course, TV’s Threshold proved to have ratings comparable to the Internet’s Threshold, and was just about as exciting (despite the always welcome presence of Ms. Gugino who can only do so much to liven up a dull show, or even a dull blog post) and unlike the latter, the producers of the former had the good sense to pull the plug on it.
In any case, I hope that all (as has been the average for this month) seven of you will join me in sending out birthday greetings from to Carla Gugino from her fellow Virgo, Threshold.
Oh, and thanks to all of my readers, past and present, who don’t so much make the time and effort of maintaining this blog worthwhile, but who at least make sure that someone else sees it every so often.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years already and that in the course of those two years literally dozens of people have stopped by, mostly out of a sense of obligation, to quickly skim through my canny insights and cogent analysis of just how mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly dull my life is.
Oh, and to look at the occasional picture.
In the spirit of that last point, I thought that I would mark the occasion by posting a recently-completed picture of the lovely and talented Carla Gugino, the voluptuous actress who shares a birthday with this blog.
That isn’t her only tie to Threshold, as last year’s fall TV season found Ms. Gugino starring in a supernatural thriller titled, of all things, Threshold.
Of course, TV’s Threshold proved to have ratings comparable to the Internet’s Threshold, and was just about as exciting (despite the always welcome presence of Ms. Gugino who can only do so much to liven up a dull show, or even a dull blog post) and unlike the latter, the producers of the former had the good sense to pull the plug on it.
In any case, I hope that all (as has been the average for this month) seven of you will join me in sending out birthday greetings from to Carla Gugino from her fellow Virgo, Threshold.
Oh, and thanks to all of my readers, past and present, who don’t so much make the time and effort of maintaining this blog worthwhile, but who at least make sure that someone else sees it every so often.
Monday, August 28, 2006
A Phair Effort
Last week I started working on a picture of Jessica Simpson, but set it aside because I decided it was going to be much more of a pain in the ass than I was prepared to deal with.
So instead I started working on a picture that I've been meaning to do for quite some time, a picture that turned out to be 17,000 times more of a pain in the ass than the Jessica picture would have been, which is why I didn't get it finished until today.
And here it is, my "cover" of the cover of Liz Phair's self-titled 2003 album.
I hope that the fact that it was a lot of work shows, because damn, this was a lot of work. The hair alone was a nightmare, to say nothing of the guitar...
Anyway, you know the drill.
So instead I started working on a picture that I've been meaning to do for quite some time, a picture that turned out to be 17,000 times more of a pain in the ass than the Jessica picture would have been, which is why I didn't get it finished until today.
And here it is, my "cover" of the cover of Liz Phair's self-titled 2003 album.
I hope that the fact that it was a lot of work shows, because damn, this was a lot of work. The hair alone was a nightmare, to say nothing of the guitar...
Anyway, you know the drill.
Six Years Of Sobriety? I'll Drink To That! (Just Kidding)
As of today I’ve been sober for six years.
I’m celebrating this momentous occasion by not celebrating, as it was celebrating that ultimately led me to have to give up drinking in the first place.
Okay, it wasn’t so much celebration as self-destructive debauchery, though of course it was a rather tame sort of “debauchery” as it didn’t involve any of the really fun kinds of debauching.
To be perfectly honest, staying sober hasn’t been too much of a struggle. I mean, basically it involves not doing something, and I’m very good at not doing stuff.
And, to continue in the vein of being honest, while, all things considered, I’d probably rather not be sober, that’s not really an option, so it’s not something I spend much time thinking about.
But the fact remains that sometimes I do miss drinking, especially given that the fact that not drinking means that there’s this big part of life that’s closed off to me.
That would probably bother me a little less if that part of life had not formerly been the primary part of my life, and maybe it would be easier for me to find other ways to have fun and enjoy life if that hadn’t been the only source of fun and enjoyment for me, though, again with the honesty, I wasn’t really having that much fun or enjoying life when I was drunk anyway.
Far from it.
Still, there were some good times in there, and I do miss some of my old drinking buddies, and the whole “Cheers effect” of having that place where everyone knows your etc.
But then honesty pops up again and I’m forced to admit that I miss the time spent sitting alone in the dark and drinking just as much as I miss the time spent with my friends, and I realize what it is that I really miss and I’m reminded of why it is that I did eventually sober up.
In any case, today marks six years so I thought I would mention it, and yay me or whatever, but, just like I’ve been doing for the last six years, it’s time to get back to getting on with it.
Today that involved waking up at 6 am, saying, “Screw that,” and going back to sleep for two and a half hours.
Once I did get up I fell into my usual routine of not doing anything in particular, eventually getting around to showering, shaving, getting dressed, and heading out into the world for gas, food, and whatnot.
The whole thing was over before noon, and I realized that not only was my day over, my entire week was over, as at this point I have no reason to venture out into the world again until Thursday.
While I was on my way home I saw something that confused me a great deal: a Ford Festiva, being driven by a woman, adorned with the compass and square symbol of the Masons. I mean, huh? Aren’t Masons supposed to be rich? And male?
I mean, certainly you don’t expect to see Free and Accepted Masons driving around in a Ford Festiva, a car that even my cheap piece of crap can feel superior to.
Must not be very high up in the conspiracy.
I’m celebrating this momentous occasion by not celebrating, as it was celebrating that ultimately led me to have to give up drinking in the first place.
Okay, it wasn’t so much celebration as self-destructive debauchery, though of course it was a rather tame sort of “debauchery” as it didn’t involve any of the really fun kinds of debauching.
To be perfectly honest, staying sober hasn’t been too much of a struggle. I mean, basically it involves not doing something, and I’m very good at not doing stuff.
And, to continue in the vein of being honest, while, all things considered, I’d probably rather not be sober, that’s not really an option, so it’s not something I spend much time thinking about.
But the fact remains that sometimes I do miss drinking, especially given that the fact that not drinking means that there’s this big part of life that’s closed off to me.
That would probably bother me a little less if that part of life had not formerly been the primary part of my life, and maybe it would be easier for me to find other ways to have fun and enjoy life if that hadn’t been the only source of fun and enjoyment for me, though, again with the honesty, I wasn’t really having that much fun or enjoying life when I was drunk anyway.
Far from it.
Still, there were some good times in there, and I do miss some of my old drinking buddies, and the whole “Cheers effect” of having that place where everyone knows your etc.
But then honesty pops up again and I’m forced to admit that I miss the time spent sitting alone in the dark and drinking just as much as I miss the time spent with my friends, and I realize what it is that I really miss and I’m reminded of why it is that I did eventually sober up.
In any case, today marks six years so I thought I would mention it, and yay me or whatever, but, just like I’ve been doing for the last six years, it’s time to get back to getting on with it.
Today that involved waking up at 6 am, saying, “Screw that,” and going back to sleep for two and a half hours.
Once I did get up I fell into my usual routine of not doing anything in particular, eventually getting around to showering, shaving, getting dressed, and heading out into the world for gas, food, and whatnot.
The whole thing was over before noon, and I realized that not only was my day over, my entire week was over, as at this point I have no reason to venture out into the world again until Thursday.
While I was on my way home I saw something that confused me a great deal: a Ford Festiva, being driven by a woman, adorned with the compass and square symbol of the Masons. I mean, huh? Aren’t Masons supposed to be rich? And male?
I mean, certainly you don’t expect to see Free and Accepted Masons driving around in a Ford Festiva, a car that even my cheap piece of crap can feel superior to.
Must not be very high up in the conspiracy.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Cartoons And Egg Salad
Though I was extremely tired last night I was unable to get to sleep before 1 am.
In the time that I was awake between arriving at home and finally falling asleep I didn’t manage to do much of interest.
I watched a couple of episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, as throughout the day my mind had kept flashing back to a particular scene from an episode in which the Joker had gotten his hands on a nuclear bomb and was planning to detonate it in Gotham.
In order to try to find the Joker, Batman enlisted the aid of the Joker’s girlfriend/gun moll/former therapist, Harley Quinn.
In any case, the scene in question involved the Joker walking merrily on his way, completely oblivious to the fact that Batman is behind him and has hurled a batarang in his direction. At the last second, he notices something amiss, turns, and wham! Right between the eyes.
Despite the fact that we don’t see the actual impact, as the Fox censors were violently opposed to any depictions of people getting hit in the face, as presented it’s a pretty brutal, cringe-inducing scene, but at the same time, it’s funny.
Overall it’s a great episode, with one of the highlights being a song that Harley (voiced by Arleen Sorkin, who annoyed me in every other thing she ever did, but who was great as Harley) sings in an illegal casino in order to create a diversion.
I had always assumed that the song was written for the show, maybe as a parody of an existing song, as it’s so perfectly suited to describe the…complex relationship between Harley and her beloved “Mistah J,” but apparently it’s a real song from an old movie called Meet the People.
The title of the song is “Say That We’re Sweethearts Again,” and here are the words:
I never knew That our romance had ended. Until you poisoned my food. I thought it was a lark When you kicked me in the park. But now I think it was rude! I never knew That you and I were finished Until that bottle hit my head! An' I tried to be aloof when you Pushed me off the roof - I feel our romance is dead.
It wouldn't have been so bad If you had told me. That someone had taken my place! But no, no you didn't even scold me! Ya just tried ta disfigah mah facth! (Her voice is distorted at this point as she stretches her cheeks out)
You'll never know How this heart of mine is breaking. It seems so hopeless but then Life used to be so placid! Won't you please put down that acid? And say that we're sweethearts again!!
After watching that and a couple of other episodes I switched over to watching some episodes of Superman: The Animated Series, including two that I had never actually seen before, though one of them actually had a scene that proved to be of vital important some years later in an episode of Justice League Unlimited, and was actually an adaptation of a classic Superman story done by John Byrne back in 1986.
And that was my cartoon-filled evening.
So far today has been less exciting.
The big highlight of the day was when I made egg salad.
I can no longer make egg salad without thinking about that scene in The 40-Year Old Virgin, and I always have to laugh at how well that scene correlates with my life.
The scene in question, for those who haven’t seen the movie, involves the titular virgin having a conversation with a co-worker on Monday morning.
The co-worker talks about how over the weekend he and some friends drove down to Tijuana to watch a woman have sex with a horse, going into comically graphic detail. He then asks Andy, the virgin, what he did over the weekend, and Andy talks, in equally comic detail about how he really wanted an egg salad sandwich and had been thinking about it all day on Friday – much like the way I kept thinking about that scene from Batman – so on Saturday, he tells his co-worker, he got up and went out to get what he needed to make egg salad, and then describes the process of making it, from the boiling, to the peeling and cutting of the eggs through the mixing, and after having gone through all of that work – and the boring story about it – it turned out that he didn’t have any bread.
And that was Andy’s weekend.
So, yeah.
Last night I watched an episode of a cartoon that had been on my mind all day, and today I described it to you.
And I made egg salad.
And told you about it.
*Sigh*
At least I had bread.
In the time that I was awake between arriving at home and finally falling asleep I didn’t manage to do much of interest.
I watched a couple of episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, as throughout the day my mind had kept flashing back to a particular scene from an episode in which the Joker had gotten his hands on a nuclear bomb and was planning to detonate it in Gotham.
In order to try to find the Joker, Batman enlisted the aid of the Joker’s girlfriend/gun moll/former therapist, Harley Quinn.
In any case, the scene in question involved the Joker walking merrily on his way, completely oblivious to the fact that Batman is behind him and has hurled a batarang in his direction. At the last second, he notices something amiss, turns, and wham! Right between the eyes.
Despite the fact that we don’t see the actual impact, as the Fox censors were violently opposed to any depictions of people getting hit in the face, as presented it’s a pretty brutal, cringe-inducing scene, but at the same time, it’s funny.
Overall it’s a great episode, with one of the highlights being a song that Harley (voiced by Arleen Sorkin, who annoyed me in every other thing she ever did, but who was great as Harley) sings in an illegal casino in order to create a diversion.
I had always assumed that the song was written for the show, maybe as a parody of an existing song, as it’s so perfectly suited to describe the…complex relationship between Harley and her beloved “Mistah J,” but apparently it’s a real song from an old movie called Meet the People.
The title of the song is “Say That We’re Sweethearts Again,” and here are the words:
I never knew That our romance had ended. Until you poisoned my food. I thought it was a lark When you kicked me in the park. But now I think it was rude! I never knew That you and I were finished Until that bottle hit my head! An' I tried to be aloof when you Pushed me off the roof - I feel our romance is dead.
It wouldn't have been so bad If you had told me. That someone had taken my place! But no, no you didn't even scold me! Ya just tried ta disfigah mah facth! (Her voice is distorted at this point as she stretches her cheeks out)
You'll never know How this heart of mine is breaking. It seems so hopeless but then Life used to be so placid! Won't you please put down that acid? And say that we're sweethearts again!!
After watching that and a couple of other episodes I switched over to watching some episodes of Superman: The Animated Series, including two that I had never actually seen before, though one of them actually had a scene that proved to be of vital important some years later in an episode of Justice League Unlimited, and was actually an adaptation of a classic Superman story done by John Byrne back in 1986.
And that was my cartoon-filled evening.
So far today has been less exciting.
The big highlight of the day was when I made egg salad.
I can no longer make egg salad without thinking about that scene in The 40-Year Old Virgin, and I always have to laugh at how well that scene correlates with my life.
The scene in question, for those who haven’t seen the movie, involves the titular virgin having a conversation with a co-worker on Monday morning.
The co-worker talks about how over the weekend he and some friends drove down to Tijuana to watch a woman have sex with a horse, going into comically graphic detail. He then asks Andy, the virgin, what he did over the weekend, and Andy talks, in equally comic detail about how he really wanted an egg salad sandwich and had been thinking about it all day on Friday – much like the way I kept thinking about that scene from Batman – so on Saturday, he tells his co-worker, he got up and went out to get what he needed to make egg salad, and then describes the process of making it, from the boiling, to the peeling and cutting of the eggs through the mixing, and after having gone through all of that work – and the boring story about it – it turned out that he didn’t have any bread.
And that was Andy’s weekend.
So, yeah.
Last night I watched an episode of a cartoon that had been on my mind all day, and today I described it to you.
And I made egg salad.
And told you about it.
*Sigh*
At least I had bread.
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