Conversations With My TV

When I watched The Simpsons Movie DVD the other night I discovered that I’d inadvertently bought the full screen version rather than the widescreen. D’oh!
I also learned that the first post-cancellation Futurama feature-length DVD is out, so now I need to pick up a copy of that as well.
Apart from being called a jerk that no one likes, my weekend was largely uneventful. I did the laundry today. That’s about as exciting as it got.
I did complete a picture – which I’ll be posting tomorrow – and was going to start working on another, but I got distracted this afternoon when I sat down to eat a late lunch and discovered that TLC was running a marathon of Property Ladder, so that ate up the rest of my day.
Sure, I’ve seen all of them before, many of them multiple times, but how could I say no to hours and hours of Kirsten Kemp? I couldn’t, that’s how (Even though, technically, I probably got under an hour of actual Kirsten time, as she’s only in each episode for like ten minutes.). And if I’d tried, I’m sure Mistress Kirsten would have disciplined me severely.
Property Ladder is one of those shows that invariably leads me to engage in a “conversation” with my TV.
This often takes the form of me saying things like, “See? You should have listened to Kirsten.” when the house-flippers run into trouble for not taking her advice. Or saying, “That’s what she does” when a formerly optimistic flipper has met with Kirsten and is talking about how she came along and viciously slapped down their hopeful attitudes with a dose of reality. But more often I’m engaged in conversations with the announcer that invariably go something like this:

Announcer: Want to make more money in a couple of months than you did all last year?
Me: Not as much as I want to get it on with Kirsten.
Announcer: Try climbing the Property Ladder!
Me: I’d rather try climbing Kirsten.
Announcer: Let’s see what Kirsten thinks about their progress.
Me: Let’s see what Kirsten is wearing.
Announcer: Now it’s Kirsten’s turn to check out the results.
Me: Now it’s my turn to check out Kirsten.

…and so forth.
(And no, my TV does not talk back to me.)
Now that I’m once again between jobs I’m back to being uncertain as to what day it is. I was convinced it was Monday when I woke up. I actually had to check the clock on my computer before I would believe that it was Sunday, not that it actually mattered. Every day is the same as any other for the next two weeks or so, then it’s back to an entirely different kind of salt mine than the ones I’ve been in for the past six years or so.
The five day work week is going to take some serious getting used to, but I will appreciate the shorter work days and things like having holidays off.
And, you know, not having to be in a dark, cold cave listening to people talking endlessly about WoW.
In the short time I spent in the actual NOC at the job I didn’t want, I actually ended up hearing lots of talk about raids and mages and dwarves and whatnot, though that was all interspersed with just slightly more sports babble than was present at AOL.
Either way, I’m glad to be out of there.
One thing that really bothered me about the job I didn’t want – apart from the job itself – was the fact that nothing there was free. I don’t drink coffee, but it bothered me to note that coffee from the machine had to be paid for, as that seems really chintzy. Worse, they didn’t even have a water cooler (or a water fountain, for that matter), so I actually had to buy water.
Sure, it’s cool that they actually have a little convenience store and, for the coffee drinkers, an actual Starbucks right in the building, but come on, you can’t even provide water and cheap coffee for free?
The whole time I was in the class we were often interrupted by the sound of construction of their new fitness center – the use of which will also not be free for employees.
When I got the voicemail on Thursday from the recruiter for the job that I want and now have, I immediately recognized her voice before she identified herself and got to the point of asking that I call her back as soon as I had a chance because she had “great news.”
When I did call her and she gave me the news, she asked if I was at the contract job. I said that I was, and she asked how that was going. When I said, “Meh,” she laughed and confidently stated “We’re better.”
She’ll be absolutely correct if they simply have a water cooler, as I am, as Brian once put it, a crazy water drinkin’ fool, but I’m sure there will be plenty of other things that make them better.
My Christmas present from my mom arrived yesterday. I already knew what it was (Wal-Mart gift card) so I opened it. Still haven’t gotten anything from my sister Kim, but I’m sure it’ll arrive tomorrow.
Last night Stacy called to invite me over for Christmas brunch on Tuesday, and she informed me that Scott has gotten me something “awesome.” Sadly, what I got for them is considerably less than awesome.
As I said in an earlier post, I pretty much punked out on buying Christmas presents this year.
Oh well, there’s always next year.

I Don’t Come To Your House And Make You Watch Porn Department:
One day shortly before I started working at the job that I didn’t want, I spotted some Jehovah’s Witnesses prowling around the neighborhood, so I shut everything off downstairs and headed up to the office, where I totally ignored the inevitable knock on my door.
After they gave up and went away, it occurred to me that in the future I should put my Evangelist Emergency Plan into effect. It’s an idea I’ve half-seriously considered for a while which could be perfectly executed now that I have the 42” LCD TV up on the wall.
The “plan” would consist entirely of having a porn DVD handy at all times so that I could put it playing before inviting the door-to-door God salesmen in.
And not just any porn, German porn.
If they complained, I would simply say, “You’re the ones who wanted to come in to my house; now you have to face the consequences. Besides, I don’t go around to other people’s houses asking the to watch porn, so don’t come into mine asking me not to watch.”
Of course, this would be needlessly cruel – and I’ve probably engaged in enough needless cruelty already – even though it would be funny (to me), so I suppose that hiding out in my office until they go away is the best option.
Besides, my HD DVD player takes forever to boot up (it has an OS built in), so it wouldn’t be that easy to have it ready unless I had advance notice that they were coming, which I normally don’t (this last time being a notable exception).

Keyword Kraziness: Mind Kontrol Edition

It’s time once again to examine some of those Wacky World Wide Web searches that lead unsuspecting Web surfers to dash themselves against the pointy and pointless rocks of Threshold Beach.
Let’s see what we’ve got.

Watchmen Babies
This is rapidly becoming the new Bikini Cavegirl. Just to be clear for anyone who doesn’t know, it was just a quick (and hilarious) throw-away gag on the episode of The Simpsons featuring Alan Moore. Milhouse asked Alan, “Mr. Moore, will you sign my DVD of Watchmen Babies?” At which point we see a DVD featuring the primary characters from Watchmen, as babies, waterskiing in an adventure titled V For Vacation. This, of course, sets Alan off on a rant about having the marrow sucked from his bones by evil corporations. There is no such product, and given that the video was taken down from YouTube, there’s not much I can do to help you even find the image.

Variations on “demotivational poster jailbait”
This is just barely behind Watchmen Babies for the number of hits it’s generated. I would assume you’re looking for this (fairly NSFW). Perverts. (It is a funny poster, though. There’s also this one. And this one. And several others. Note: The links might not actually take you directly to the pictures that I had intended them to, but the jailbait ones are easy to find at the site.)

flight attendant mind control chip
If I’d ever been on a flight that had a flight attendant who looked anywhere near as hot as flight attendants do in movies, I might well be tempted to invest in such a product, should it exist. Nothing related to such a thing can be found here, though. But my question is, is the mind control chip really profession-specific? Could you, for example, get it to work on someone who works for a technical recruiting company?

automatic doorsanimation
Uh, okay.

kirsten kemp cleavage
Personally, I’m a fan of it, but sadly, I have no images of it available.

ginger alexander beautiful
I wouldn’t go so far as to say beautiful.

xenosexuality
Found yourself a hot alien and are now busy trying to figure out how to get it on, huh?

direcpath speeds
Interestingly enough, the spell checker in Word suggests “Dire Path” as a replacement for DirecPath. As for their speeds, well, “slow as hell” is a speed.

And that’s it for another round of Keyword Kraziness. Keep those zany searches coming.

And A Vicious Wind Blew Hard And Fast

I had Thanksgiving dinner at Jamie and Casey’s house along with Scott and Stacy and their brood.
(Thanks again for having me over. Sorry I didn’t bring anything.)
I hung out as long as I could before the dog started to get to me, and then I swung by Brian and Kathleen’s to deliver Kathleen a plate (and some peanut butter cookies I’d made for her). As they’d had to put one of their cats down the night before, Kathleen wasn’t really up to going to any sort of celebratory feast, and Brian was working.
What had started out as a beautiful, slightly windy day rapidly turned into a dismal, cold, rainy, and incredibly windy day.
The wind had picked up pretty early on, and in my backyard it looked as though it was raining falling leaves before the actual rain started.
Fortunately, in the front yard the wind stripped the still-leafy tree bare, and blew clear the massive blanket of fallen leaves that had developed immediately after I’d raked up the first batch of fallen leaves, sparing me the effort that would have gone into raking again.
Today has been pretty uneventful. There is, after all, nothing that could compel me to venture out into the world on Black Friday.
Lately I’ve been watching a lot of HGTV, mostly because I have the HD version in my HD line-up, and I have to say that I’m continually amazed at how many hot chicks there are associated with real estate and home improvement. I’m not just talking about the hosts, because, yeah, obviously producers are going to pick hotties to be the primary on-air presences, but also among the designers and Realtors, and whatnot.
Among my new favorites are Brandie Malay from Hidden Potential and Jane Wogan from the show Don’t Sweat It.
(Of course, none of them holds a candle – an icy, frozen candle – to Mistress Kirsten of Property Ladder)
In any case, I suppose I should get back to figuring out just how I’m going to waste the rest of the day.

Happy Day Off To The People Who Don't Normally Have It Off

So I ventured a bit outside of my routine over the past couple of days.
On Saturday night I was sitting at home getting my Saturday night fix of Kirsten Kemp (who was so utterly disgusted by the foolishness of her house flipping advisees that she was letting down that warm, nice person façade and unleashing her cold, inner ice queen, which I, of course, found extremely hot), whom, I’m afraid, I have no pictures of here, topless or otherwise, for those of you seeking them. As with all other seekers of famous and semi-famous boobs, I wish you luck in your quest.
Just as Kirsten had made one of the errant flippers say “Ow” in response to her ice-cold words, I became faintly aware of the sound of music coming from somewhere.
I shrugged it off until I recognized it as my Scott ringtone, at which point I got up, too late, to answer my phone.
I called him back and learned that he’d been calling me to catch a 9:55 showing of Balls of Fury.
Though I normally wouldn’t venture out on a Saturday evening, there are no actual rules that I live by in this regard, so I decided to take him up on the offer, even though doing so made me a liar, as at work Simon had asked me if I was going to see it and I’d said no.
The movie was entertaining in pretty much exactly the way you would expect it to be, though I found it to be much more entertaining than I’d expected.
My drive home from the theater at close to midnight was sort of an odd experience. Nothing especially interesting happened, but given that I took the decidedly less-traveled and considerably more rurally-located back roads home, it almost felt like being back home in Michigan, complete with sections of actual dirt road.
Of course, it wasn’t quite the same as driving on similar roads back home, as there is considerably more paving, they’re populated by a lot more homes, and the trees don’t quite form the kind of canopy that make the experience of driving on back roads in Michigan rather like driving in a tunnel.
Also, like any road in Virginia, there is a lot more traffic to contend with on the back roads here.
Yesterday, as mentioned, I actually ventured out into the world, where I purchased a nearly $1,200 piece of paper that says I now own a 42” LCD HDTV.
In the interest of balance, I’m not doing anything today to make up for having done things on the past two days.
And that’s pretty much where and how things stand.
I hope you are all, laborers and non-laborers alike, having a good Labor Day.

The Quest For The Lost Mug or I'd Need A Ladder To Reach Her

When I got home from work last night and was pulling into a parking space the lady from downstairs was on the sidewalk walking stupid dog.
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t contemplate “accidentally” gunning the engine, jumping the curb, and turning the little bastard into a nothing more than a stain.
Of course I didn’t do that and instead returned the lady’s friendly wave.
Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the lender my realtor likes to work with to see if it’s even remotely possible for me to get a loan that I can afford to pay on the house I want to buy.
At the very least I’ll get an idea of what I can afford if it’s not possible, and will have a better idea of what to look for in terms of potential housing.
My weekend at work was largely uneventful. The only noteworthy thing that happened was the loss of my insulated company logo mug – which no longer has the company logo on it, as it wore off some time ago. It was the old logo anyway.
In any case, the mug had faithfully served all of my water holding needs for years, until that fateful day last week when I left it on the sink in the locker room when I stopped to use the facilities on my way out to my car at the end of the day.
I didn’t notice that it wasn’t in my car until Wednesday morning when I went to take it out so that I could transfer it to the loaner that I thought I was going to be using, and I forgot to look for it when I went in for training Wednesday afternoon.
On Thursday morning I was looking around for it, and was checking the cabinet in the break room where people keep their mugs when someone mentioned seeing one on the sink in the locker room the day before. That’s precisely where I thought I’d left it, so I went in to check. Alas, it wasn’t there, though there was someone in the locker room who confirmed that it had been sitting there all week.
I checked with security to see if anyone had brought it to them for lost and found, but no one had.
So I sadly accepted the fact that my mug was well and truly gone.
And then grabbed one from the cabinet that didn’t have a name on it, washed it out, and claimed it as my own.
What, I was supposed to mourn for a mug?
And that was pretty much the extent of my excitement at work over the weekend.
Last night marked the season premiere of Property Ladder on TLC.
(Quick side note: remember when I did my entry about cable networks and mentioned TLC’s obsession with little people and suggested that they might end up sending the little people to Miami to get tattoos? Well, on the ads for the next episode of Miami Ink, guess what I saw? A little person getting a tattoo. Sure, it’s not someone from the actual little people show, but it’s still kind of an eerie coincidence.)
If you’ve never seen the show, it’s essentially yet another house flipping show, though it focuses primarily on people who are trying the whole house flipping thing for the first time and really have no idea what they’re doing. As a consequence, there can be some severe train wreck episodes in which you see people burying themselves in debt, marriages collapsing due to the various pressures, and quite frequently things just don’t end happily.
Quite honestly, it’s a little painful and kind of depressing to watch.
As sort of a twist, at the beginning of the show the host, a real estate expert, consults with the would-be flippers, listening to their plans and offering suggestions – and criticism – in an effort to help make sure that their budgets and schedules are realistic and to try to get them to maximize the payoff for their efforts.
Sometimes they listen to her. Most of the time they don’t. When they do, things generally work out better for them. When they don’t, well, like I said: train wrecks.
She shows up at various points in the process to see how they’re doing, and, without doing so in so may words, say, “I told you so,” as they tell her about how not taking her advice made them blow their budgets and their timelines.
Now, to be honest, the host is the primary reason I watch the show because she’s hot...yet ice cold.
Her name is Kirsten Kemp, and she is a tall cold glass of ice water. She tries to come of as warm, always hugging everyone and smiling, but she’s not fooling anyone: that is one frosty bitch.
Think Martha Stewart, only younger, and sexy, and with a kick-ass rack.
Kirsten is all passive-aggressive cocked eyebrows and barely-restrained contempt.
(I like to call her Kirsten Contempt.)
She would not look out of place with a riding crop in her hand.
Oh sure, she’s supposedly trying to help people and looking out for their best interests, but you know she doesn’t want them to listen. She wants them to fail so that she can lord it over them. If she could get away with it, she’d be wearing spiked heels and using them to grind the failed flippers’ faces into the cheap-ass laminate floors that they put in despite her insistence that high-end requires real wood.
And I have to say, she gives me real wood.
Let me tell you, I would love to have her look at me like I’m a retard when I tell her my too-aggressive asking price, or raise that eyebrow contemptuously…right before I make that ice queen melt into a puddle.
(Or file a restraining order.)
The only problem with Property Ladder is that we really don’t get to see enough of Kirsten (in more ways than one). She shows up at the beginning to give her advice, stops by somewhere in the middle to check the progress, and then comes in at the end to see how things turned out and to try one last time to talk some sense into them (and, as mentioned, say “I told you so.”).
All told, we get maybe ten minutes’ worth of Kirsten.
Still, there are other reasons to watch the show. In general, I like to see the whole “before and after” aspect of house flipping shows, and I’m interested in seeing some of the design ideas people come up with.
And though there are often train wrecks, I generally do hope that things will work out for them and I hate to see them fail, especially when they work really hard at it but just can’t seem to catch a break.
(Like the cute girl whose cabinet doors were stolen by the guy she’d hired to resurface them for her, though in the end things worked out and she actually sold her place for more than her asking price. Of course, things worked out for her, I think, just because she was so cute. I’ll bet the person who bought the place was a guy and he did it hoping that she’d go out with him. Seriously, she was a hot bartender who got most of her labor done for her by her male regulars from the bar.)
I generally don’t have that much sympathy for the people who totally and willfully ignore Mistress Kirsten’s commands…I mean, Kirsten’s advice, in part because they tend to be kind of stupid and make really, really idiotic decisions, but mostly because she’s just so hot when she’s smug and delivering well-deserved punishment, and it just makes me want her to tell me that I’m bad and that I need a spanking.
*Sigh*
They seriously need to put her in fishnets and leather.
In any case, if you’re into house flipping shows – or hot blonde pseudo-dominatrixes – you should definitely check it out. It’s on Saturdays at 8 Eastern on TLC.
That’s all I have for now. I’ll likely be posting a special Jack T. Chick-centric entry within the next couple of days, so you have that to look forward to (or to avoid).
(In the interest of fairness, I should note that I have no doubt that in real life Kirsten is a very nice and genuinely warm person, and I have no real basis for believing that the heft of a cat o’ nine tails would feel comfortable in her hand. I will say, though, that I have no doubt that she would look amazing in a corset and thigh-high boots with stiletto heels.)