Proof That Anyone Can Be A Hero

This handsome fellow is the picture that I mentioned working on in my earlier post.
As part of a non-Flashy, low-tech, interim upgrade to Heroic Portraits, I was thinking about changing the main page so that it looks sort of like a gallery wall with Portraits hanging on them that give a visual of the basic idea behind the site.
This would be one of the Portraits.
I'm still working out what the others will be.
Kathleen wants me to print up a flier that she can bring to her various networking meetings to try to drum up some business. I'm thinking that this picture with some text saying something like, "If he can be a hero, so can you!"
I found the guy during a random image search and thought that he'd be a perfect candidate for an Heroic makeover.
(He also looks like he'd be a perfect addition to the assortment of weirdoes that Letterman has on his show.)

That Sucks For Mr. Young

Shortly after I applied for that job yesterday I got a FOAD e-mail in response.
Or at least, someone named “Mr. Young” did, as that’s who the message was addressed to.
I came extremely close to sending back a response saying, “Well, it’s too bad for this Mr. Young guy that you aren’t interested in hiring him, but what about me?”
Yes, I realize that it was just a generic response copied and pasted into a message to me without anyone bothering to change who it was addressed to, but hey, rejection hurts – especially when the person rejecting you can’t bother to get your name right – and the message put me into a defensive and snarky posture.
I also considered sending back a response saying, “You said that my résumé was reviewed carefully…I hope it was reviewed more carefully than the response you sent to me.”
Oh well.
Today was a pretty uneventful day. Apart from doing some work on a picture, I really didn’t do anything.
I actually continue to be amazed by my ability to not do a damn thing all day. Too bad there’s no way to market that skill.
Of course, even if it were a skill that was in demand, I probably couldn’t manage to get hired to do it.

Okay, So It's A Little Late (Or Really Early) For Halloween...

...but cut me some slack; I just stumbled across the source image last week.

Slow Day Entry With Entertaining/Offensive Links

Today has been pretty uneventful.
I got up. I sat around. I read the comics I bought on Wednesday. I went for a walk. I got back. I sat around. I read the Left Behind Friday post at Slacktivist. I applied for a job.
I got a call this morning from the other recruiter who’d been submitting my résumé to the company that the recruiter that called yesterday said wasn’t interested in me. He was looking for some additional information to provide said company with. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the company had already said they weren’t interested in me.
I’m not 100% sure, but there may be yet another squirrel in the attic.
It’s hard to say for sure, as it’s windy today, and the noise I heard might have just been the branches of the tree out front brushing against the house.
Sound travels and echoes in an odd fashion in the house. Sometimes when I’m sitting downstairs watching TV, someone out on the street will slam a car door or something and it will sound like someone walking heavily upstairs.
In any case, I haven’t set the trap up again yet, though I was thinking about setting it up in the backyard, as the squirrels seem to pass through there (if only via the fence) on their way to whatever ingress there is to my attic.
(I also considered mounting squirrel number two’s head on a pike and sticking that on the fence as a warning to other squirrels, but I couldn’t do that, as doing so would mean that I killed the squirrel, and of course that just can’t be the case.)
I’ve walked around the house a few times craning my neck skyward, but so far I haven’t been able to spot any sort of opening, except one that seems too small (and awkward) even for a squirrel to get in through (I realize it doesn’t take much), and it may not even be an opening. Not sure what it is. There’s no easy way to get to whatever corresponding opening there may (or may not) be on the inside, either, so I can’t really check it out from the attic.
Speaking of Slacktivist (well, a couple of paragraphs ago), in the characteristically interesting comments on one of the characteristically entertaining posts, someone posted a link to a blog entry and a photo gallery detailing a visit to the Creation Museum.
It was far too entertaining to not pass along, so check out the blog entry here.
The entry itself has a link to the photo gallery. There are a lot of pictures in the gallery, but the accompanying captions and comments make going through them all time well-spent. My favorite captions: “Diormageddon!” and “When You Gaze Into the Abyss, It Gazes Back, and Looks Like an Ape.”
What makes the whole thing even more entertaining is that the author of the blog – writer John Scalzi – essentially went to the museum on a dare. In exchange for readers of his blog donating $250 to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, he agreed that he would visit this monument to what I hesitate to even call pseudo-science. The total donations received actually reached $5,118.36. His response to this largess, in addition to eventually going to the museum, was to a post a picture of himself holding up a sign with a message for his readers: I hate you all.
Now, if any of you would like to make donations to Americans United for Preventing the Separation of Jon from His House, click on the PayPal link over on the right. In exchange, I probably won’t go to any museum, but I will happily pose for a similar picture, though with a different message (probably something like, “I hate you all…but thanks for the money.”).
Anyway, if you’re as amused/horrified by the agenda of fundamentalists who view the Bible as a science textbook as I am, check out the blog entry and gallery for a good laugh, or, if you’re the type who does view the Bible as a science textbook, check it out to keep your moral outrage and feelings of persecution by the evil, sinful secularists at their maximum levels.

This Is Pretty Much How I Feel Today

(From an e-mail my mom forwarded to me. There were several others that were funny as well, but this one was my favorite.)

Jon 2, Squirrels 0

The title says it all.

NOC NOC! Who's There? Not Me, Apparently.

So today was the day of my job interview.
Yesterday, in comparing their relative awkwardness, I mentioned that I have a lot more experience with job interviews than I do with first dates, but on my way in to the interview it occurred to me that, oddly enough, it’s been longer since I’ve had a job interview than it has been since I’ve had a first date.
So technically I’m actually a little more rusty with the interview skills than with the dating, even though my interview skills are stronger.
Overall, I think the interview went well, but I found that it was very hard to get a read on the guy interviewing me. The recruiter, whom I met with after the interview for a sort of “debriefing,” wasn’t quite so cagey, and seemed genuinely impressed by my skills and experience, but I have no idea how much input she has in the decision-making process.
The job itself is one that I think I’m ideally suited for, but again, I can’t really gauge how well I did in getting that idea across.
If I did get the job, I probably wouldn’t start until January, which would mean that I would still get my severance package despite the fact that I’d be back in the employ of the same corporate entity, though that would mean that the severance wouldn’t really be “extra” money in the way it would be if I were to get a job with another company and start immediately.
One advantage, though, would be that I would be sort of “grandfathered in” as far as my benefits go, so I wouldn’t, for example, have to start all over again for things like accrual rate for vacation time. I would have to accrue the time again, but the rate at which I would do so would be the same as if I’d been working there for six years.
Evidently the employee-contribution for insurance is much lower than it is at AOL, which is also a plus.
Anyway, at this point it’s back to the “wait and see” posture.
To be on the safe side, I’ve dialed down the level of hope to 1.5%.
(For the record, when it comes to my – excuse me, I just burst into a fit of painful, choking laughter over the thought of using this term in reference to me – love life, the level of hope is much lower than 1%. It’s not even .1%, or .00001%. How many decimal points has Pi been calculated out to? However many that is, the one would go three decimal points beyond that.)
Yesterday I ended up spending a bit more at the comic shop than I’d planned on. For one thing there was a bigger than usual pile in my subscription box this week, as a lot of book shipped this week. Beyond that, there were a couple of “if you like x, you might be interested in y” books that the shop throws in subscription boxes, much like TiVo automatically records other TV shows using the shows that you actively record as a basis.
I also opted to buy a few bags and boards, and when I was being rung up I noticed that Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier has finally been released, so I decided to grab that, too.
If worse comes to worst, the comic shop is hiring. Sure, it’s unlikely that I would make enough there to even make a mortgage payment, let alone pay my mortgage and my other bills, but at least I’d have ready access to comics, and probably some sort of employee discount.
(Just got a call from one of the recruiting companies letting me know that yet another prospective employer has decided that I’m not a match for one of the positions they have an “urgent” need to fill. Apparently spending five years working in a NOC doesn’t provide sufficient experience for an entry level NOC position. Not really sure how that works, particularly given that, depending on the specific duties, 50-90% of the requirements for a NOC job consist entirely of simply showing up. Oh well.)

The 1% Gambit

Lots of people have various superstitious rituals that they make use of every day, assorted methods for attempting to bargain with the Universe (or Fate, or God, or whatever you want to call it) in an attempt to get the things that they want out of life.
Last week I mentioned my own attempt at striking a bargain with the Universe, and mentioned how it did not appear to work.
In light of that apparent failure, I fell back on a ritual that I have come to call The 1% Gambit, or, as it can alternatively be called, Giving Up Hope.
Or rather, Giving Up 99% Of Hope.
Last week when I didn’t hear back about the job I’m really interested in, I gave up hope, or at least gave up most of it, holding on to just 1% of it, The idea is to trick the Universe into thinking that I’ve given up so that it will decide that I’ve suffered enough, move on, and cut me a break.
Of course I know that you can’t actually bargain with, cajole, or trick the Universe into doing what you want it to do, but the fact remains that this morning I got a call and tomorrow I go in for an interview.
So now I’m at about 2% hope. We’ll have to wait and see whether or not the hope grows.
I really hate job interviews. A job interview is worse than a first date. After all, the whole “Do I move in for a kiss?” thing tends to be even more awkward.
Still, it does feel good to finally get called in for one, and honestly, I have a lot more experience with job interviews than I do with first dates.
One annoying thing about this one was that I had to fill out an application to bring with me. The application (and authorization for a background check) asked for all kinds of information that I don’t really have about previous jobs, like former supervisors. It’s been over six years since I worked for anyone other than AOL. Who knows if any of them are even still at the companies I worked for?
It also asked for my previous addresses for the past seven years. I don’t remember that kind of crap, or keep records. I had to leave one place out because the only thing I could remember was the name of the street.
Anyway, shouldn’t it be the job of the people doing the background check to find that information?
But whatever. I’m not too concerned, as I passed a background check to get into AOL six years ago, and this new job is with a company that’s a different branch on the same corporate tree.
After doing my laundry today – I had absolutely no clean socks or underwear – I headed out into the world briefly to get a haircut, buy some batteries for my new garbage can (which will now freak me out every time I move past it to get something from the cabinet near it and the lid automatically opens), and stop at the comic shop. Scott didn’t join me today, as he’s got the 1st and 15th Blues.
(Because he’s on salary, he gets paid semi-monthly, on the 1st and the 15th, so he’s short on his comic book budget this week.)
Apparently while frolicking in the “enchanted forest,” the squirrel told one of its woodland friends about what a great attic I have, and so it decided to venture forth and see it for itself.
This morning I’d looked out my kitchen window and had a “No fucking way” moment as I saw a squirrel running along my fence. For a moment I thought I was seeing a ghost, though that was, of course, impossible, as it’s not like I killed the squirrel or anything. *Cough*
Later in the day I heard the pitter-patter of squirrel feet up in the attic, and so I’ve set the trap once more.
Without a ladder I can’t really find the spot where the squirrels are getting in, and I can’t spare the money to hire someone to check for me, so I guess I’m going to have to keep relying on the trap.
In addition to being called about the interview, I received some other good news in the form of a letter informing me that I’ve won $70,000! All I have to do is send a check for $2,890 to cover “administrative costs.”
“But Jon,” you say, “do you have that kind of money to spare right now?”
Sadly, no, I don’t, but luckily the people awarding the prize were kind enough to send me a check for $2,990 which I can use to pay those costs! Hurray!
Obviously I realize this is a scam, but I have to say that it was kind of novel to receive a scam letter via snail-mail rather than a scam e-mail.
I’m sort of unclear about how the included check aspect works. Do they wait for me to deposit it and then get my account number from the returned check somehow? Are they just willing to make a risky investment in the hopes that it’ll pay off? What would happen if I were to bring the check to a check cashing place?
The check itself was issued from a Teacher’s Credit Union in Colorado (though the company awarding the “prize” is in Canada).
I couldn’t find much information online about the specifics of the scam.
Anyone out there have any details on exactly how this scam works? I mean, I can see the obvious way of running it: get me to give them all of my account information so that they can “deposit my prize,” but what purpose does the check serve?
Just curious. Obviously I’m not going to try cashing it or depositing it (depositing it anywhere other than my shredder, that is).

Ain't No Party Like A Jon Party 'Cause A Jon Party...Ends

I have to say that I was inordinately pleased about catching the squirrel.
As to what happened afterwards…well, best not to dwell on unpleasantness.
Tonight was the night of my housewarming party.
In planning the party I forgot that I’m supposed to check with Kathleen before making decisions about my life, so it turns out that she and Brian had prior commitments that prevented them from coming while the party was actually going on, though she did stop by afterwards, as did Brian shortly thereafter.
My Realtor, David, wasn’t able to make it, as he and his wife had just brought their new baby home from the hospital (Congrats, BTW), so Scot and Stacy and Jamie and Casey, along with their respective broods, were the only guests.
Having so many kids in the house was…an experience.
Thanks to Stacy for taking it upon herself to act with an efficiency that would make FEMA green with envy and restoring the disaster area to normal conditions in short order.
I ultimately had a lot more food than I needed. The Torta di Pasta (essentially a pizza made out of spaghetti) didn’t go over as well as I’d hoped – especially since I made two of them – so I guess it’s a good thing that I like it, as I have a lot left over.
My mint chocolate cake was a hit, but then it always is. Still lots of that left, too, though, despite the truly massive piece that Kathleen had.
As for swag, I got a Crème Brûlée set and a gift card for Bed, Bath & Beyond from Jamie and Casey, and a cool, high-tech garbage can from Scott and Stacy that will, once I get batteries for it, automatically open its own lid through the use of infrared motion detectors. It’s like I’m living in a futuristic wonderworld!
Seriously, though, I’d been hoping that they’d get me one ever since Scott told me about theirs. I’ve been wanting to get a new garbage can for a while, in particular a nice stainless steel one, but whenever I’d see them at Bed, Bath & Beyond I would become enraged at how ridiculously expensive they are – and we’re talking about non-futuristic, manual garbage cans – and refuse to even consider buying them.
Honestly, I’ve stood there staring at them and shuddering with impotent rage over the ridiculous notion of paying upwards of $100 for a freaking garbage can.
So I’m pleased, and now I can stand in Bed, Bath & Beyond staring at the displays of expensive garbage cans with an attitude of amused condescension (and I probably will).
I also got cards from my mom and my sister (and family), along with some gift certificates for Wal-Mart and Ruby Tuesday.
So not a bad haul.
In the afternoon when I was cleaning I had a pretty severe reaction to some sort of allergen that got kicked up in the process. It felt like there was something lodged in my throat and I started coughing really hard. Not sure what it was, but, eventually, a Benadryl took care of it.
On the job front, I heard from two separate recruiting companies contacting me about the same job. It’d pay about a dollar less an hour than what I made at AOL and there would be no benefits, unless I eventually got hired on full-time. Beggars can’t be choosers, though, I guess.

Caught!

The squirrel took the bait!



The obvious question is, "What did you do with it after you caught it?"
Well, if you want to believe that I drove it to an enchanted forest and set it free so that it could frolic with all its little woodland friends, I'm perfectly willing to let you.
(But that's not what happened.)
Now, if I could just catch Moose I'd be doing twice as well as Boris and Natasha.

The Show With The Highest Per Capita Hotness

First of all, happy birthday to Kevin (and, if he’s reading this, which he probably isn’t, to his cousin Joel).
Today has been, of course, largely uneventful. I went grocery shopping and picked up some things for tomorrow night’s housewarming party.
Then I came home and did a little bit of cleaning/de-cluttering.
It’s a non-stop thrill ride, I tell you.
No movement on the job-hunting front, apart from getting an e-mail from the friend of the ex-AOLer whom I’d been referred to asking if I ever heard anything from the people that he’d given my résumé to. I told him that yes, I had heard from someone, but that what I heard was that they weren’t interested in me. He wrote back saying that not hiring me doesn’t make any sense, so he’s going do some digging on my behalf, which is cool.
Lately I’ve been watching the show Shark on Sunday nights. It’s an okay show – I like James Woods – but the main thing it has going for it is the amount of hotness it has per capita compared to other shows.
Sure, most TV shows have a lot of hot chicks on them, but Shark wins out because of the quality and intensity of the hotness.
First up is Jeri Ryan, who is still smoking hot, and while she’s not wearing the so-tight-she-often-passed-out-on-the-set bodysuit she wore as Seven of Nine on Voyager, she usually wears outfits that follow her curves pretty closely.
If you watch House – which I’ve also been watching lately, if only because doing so gives me the opportunity to look forward to reading the episode reviews at Polite Dissent – you can compare her outfits to the outfits that Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) wears: lots of cleavage and curve-hugging skirts.
At the center of the hotness, though, is Danielle Panabaker, who plays Woods’ daughter (and whose IMDb photos do not do her justice). She is just unbearably cute. That’s pretty much the only way to describe her.
Plus her character goes to a private school, so most episodes feature scenes of her in a school uniform, short plaid skirt and all.
Sophia Brown is not quite on par with the others, but is still a very attractive woman and adds to the overall hotness.
Rounding out the hotness is Sarah Carter, who all-too briefly played a non-Lana Lang love interest for Clark on Smallville.
Of course, because Smallville has to be all about Lana all the time – the primary reason I gave up watching it – the powers that be pretty much immediately killed her and had Clark basically forget that she ever existed. In a season and a half following the episode in which she died, he never once made even a passing a reference to his brutally-murdered girlfriend. It was basically, “Oh, she’s dead. Welp, back to pining over Lana.”
Prior to Smallville, I didn’t actually hate the Lana Lang character, I just thought that she was pointless.
(Smallville made me hate her by making her even more bland and uninteresting than the version in the comics and then insisting on centering pretty much every episode around her.)
After all, she was retroactively shoe-horned into Superman’s history to serve as a cheap rip-off of Lois Lane in his retroactively added youth, and later to serve as Lois’ rival for his affections in his adult life.
And that’s really all she ever was and all she ever could be. Lois was there from the start, and she was always the only woman for him, not Lana.
When John Byrne revamped Superman’s history, he clearly understood the role of Lana Lang. It was pretty well summed up in the thoughts that went through the heads of Lois and Lana upon meeting for the first time in the newly-established history:

Lois: She’s very pretty. Is he in love with her?
Lana: She’s beautiful. No wonder he’s in love with her.

Of course, since that time Byrne’s vision of Superman has fallen out of favor (and so have thought balloons, for that matter) as current creative teams scramble to put things back to the way they way they used to be (With a modern twist!), which is a subject for another rant entirely.
Speaking of JB, of late I’ve been re-reading his early 90s creator-owned series John Byrne’s Next Men. You may recall, but probably don’t, that JBNM was one of the books that I dropped a bunch of money on back issues to replace the issues I was missing.
For his many strengths as a writer and artist, Byrne also has many weaknesses, and both are clearly on display in JBNM, but overall I’m enjoying it as much now as I did then.
Of course, my enjoyment of it now is hampered by knowing that when I get to the end of the series it won’t actually be the end, and now, unlike then, I know that it’s unlikely that it will ever be finished properly, despite the promise of that very last image which showed what was supposed to lie ahead for the series.
My modern sensibilities also lead me to be inclined to believe that the series would have been better if written by Warren Ellis, as it’s exactly the kind of thing that he writes well.
And for the record, it was re-reading JBNM that actually sparked lat week’s memories about Jen – along with many other memories – as it was one of the main titles I was reading during that period in my life.
In any case, I started writing this hours ago, so I suppose I should just post it now and be done with it.

Keyword Kraziness: Kreepy Edition

I've gotten a few hits from people looking for nude pictures of Megan Lee Ethridge, the chick with the amazing abs from that couple of really crappy movies I watched recently.
Technically, she is topless in the picture I posted of her to illustrate the tightness of her body, but she's also literally topless, as you can't actually see much of anything above her (amazing) abdomen.
Regardless, you're not going to find any other pictures of her (nude or otherwise) here - unless I do some drawings of her, which I may - because this isn't that sort of site.
There are plenty of sites like that on the Web, though, and they shouldn't be hard to find, or to recognize in the summary provided with the search results.
For the record, I found the pictures I have of her on Usenet. Usenet is older than the Web, yet so few people seem to realize what a resource it is for things like pictures (and pretty much anything else you can imagine). So my advice? Do a search for Usenet, read up on it, and then sign up with Easy News.
If it weren't for Easy News, I probably wouldn't have to be clearing files off my hard drive.
Barring making use of Usenet, though, I would at least recommend that if you're looking for images you actually, oh, I don't know, try an image search.
Like this one. (Hey look: that search leads to nude pictures of Megan Lee Ethridge! Why, using the image search actually provided me with images! Who'd have thunk it?)
Anyway, on with the rest of the search strings (excluding the standard Giada searches) that have been leading people astray (i.e. here) lately:

is there any nude photos of tanya memme?
Not here.

jessica alba nipple grocery
Wait, you can buy Jessica Alba nipples at the grocery store?

herman beeftink
Ah, Herman Beeftink, the man behind the music for most every softcore porn ever aired on Cinemax. It's been so long since I've been treated to your award-losing sounds.

latex catsuit sold in virginia united states
I suspect the seeker is someone who probably shouldn't wear one. Anyway, do you have to actually buy it in Virginia? Can't you just order one, like from this site?

Extra really fucking creepy and disgusting bonus search string:

how to have sex with your mom

And with that, I am officially at a loss for words.

Down Too Long In The Midnight Sea

I never got around to posting anything yesterday not because I was busy, but just…well, because. For the most part very little of note actually happened.
Today has been much the same. I’ve mostly busied myself with some hard drive hygiene, backing up files I want to keep and deleting files I don’t in an effort to free up some space…so that I can fill it all up again and start the cycle over.
If I were still gainfully employed, I would simply buy some more hard drives, or maybe one of those Windows Home Server systems and some more hard drives, but I’m not, so it’s onto DVDs and CDs (or into binary nothingness) for the files cluttering up the drives I do have.
I’ve also done a bit of work on yet another picture that is now fairly close to being finished, but I haven’t felt terribly motivated about it.
Two entertaining things did happen yesterday when I went downstairs and turned on the TV. I was flipping idly through the channels and ended up in the 600s, which are the digital music channels. I was checking out the MTV2 Headbanger’s Ball music channel when the song Holy Diver by Dio came on.
I found this hilarious because a) it was Dio and b) when we spoke on the phone a bit ago, Kevin and I actually talked about Dio, and specifically the song Holy Diver.
(I know that most of you won’t understand why, but seriously, Dio and particularly Dio performing Holy Diver, is just inherently hilarious. Kevin, I’m sure, gets it.)
The next little moment of joy came when I changed to the generic Metal channel.
Back when they were still cool and were busy making good music rather than suing people for stealing it, Metallica had recorded a few strictly instrumental songs, my favorite of which is Orion.
It took a couple of seconds for my brain to wrap itself around the information it was being presented, but I soon realized that the Metal channel was playing a cover of Orion – performed Flamenco style.
This is obviously one of the most awesome things ever.
It was recorded by a Mexican acoustic/folk duo, Rodrigo y Gabriela.
Flamenco Metallica is possibly even more awesome than Metallica played on cellos (By a group from Helsinki, Finland, called Apocalyptica), though I’m not sure I’m willing to go quite that far (Mostly because Apocalyptica covered so many Metallica songs, as well as songs by several other metal bands. My favorite non-Metallica cover by Apocalyptica? Faith No More’s song From Out of Nowhere. For Whom the Bell Tolls is my favorite Metallica cover.)
Again, you have to know the song – and have a particular sense of humor, I think – to appreciate why this is awesome, but take my word for it. The only thing that could make it more awesome would be for it to be performed by Charo.
(And Kevin, you need to find a copy of it; you’ll dig it, I think.)
Anyway, that pretty much brings you up to speed on what’s been going on since my last update. I know you were dying to find out.