Yes, Because I ALWAYS Keep My Teeth In The Refrigerator*

Even though I have tomorrow off specifically for the purpose of going out into the world while there will be fewer people congesting the streets and store aisles, for some reason, after talking to my mother this morning, I decided to venture out.
I credit masochism as the primary reason for making this decision.
In any case, while I was out and about I figured I’d head to Circuit City to check out their going out of business sale.
That carcass has been pretty well picked clean, but there were still quite a few scavengers slurping up its marrow.
The ads – and the signs people were holding up on the roadside – said that there were savings of up to 60%, but I didn’t see anything like those numbers. Most things were at about 30% off (though I suppose it’s possible that they’d already been marked down by 30% before being further reduced).
As I said, there really wasn’t much left, and what was left was still too damned expensive even after the markdowns.
I did see some good deals on digital photo frames, and considered picking one or two up, but then I thought, “Meh.”
If I were more into photography I would have been interested in the markdowns on the few remaining DSLR cameras, as there were some bargains to be found there. But I barely take any pictures with the camera I do have, so I couldn’t justify dropping $400+ on a camera that I’d be unlikely to use, even if it was a hell of a bargain.
After leaving there I swung by Wal-Mart and was dismayed by the filled to overflowing parking lot, until I saw that huge sections of the lot are actually closed off for some sort of construction project. Still, while the store wasn’t as packed as it at first appeared it would be, there were far too many people there, and I quickly picked up the few things I’d gone there to get.
I came thisclose to saying to someone, “Really? You really need to stand right there with your cart turned sideways while you just idly stare off into space? Really?”
The lady who decided that blocking off the cleaning supplies aisle while arguing with her husband on her cell phone narrowly avoided a similar stinging remark, if for no other reason than that the orange track suit she was wearing made her look like a pumpkin.
I neglected to mention in any of my earlier posts that Wednesday saw the return of Riff Trax Night, though Scott and I didn’t actually watch a Riff Trax movie.
Instead we watched Marvel’s latest animated offering Hulk Vs., which had two separate features, Hulk vs. Wolverine, and Hulk vs. Thor.
Overall it was a damn sight better than most of Marvel’s other animated offerings, which, while generally okay, are considerably weaker than DC’s (despite DC’s maddening – and perplexing – insistence on not producing the animated feature based on The Judas Contract), and even held up pretty well in comparison to their Distinguished Competition.
Hulk vs. Wolverine, in particular, was damned entertaining. Much moreso than Hulk vs. Thor, though that’s not really a slight on that feature, which was also pretty entertaining, it’s just that Hulk vs. Wolverine was especially good.
After that we watched an old episode of MST3K featuring the Edward D. Wood, Jr. classic Bride of the Atom Monster. I’d wanted us to watch that one for a while because it is especially entertaining, but also because it gave me the opportunity to show off some of my knowledge of Ed Wood trivia (“That chick was Ed’s girlfriend at the time and she was supposed to have had the lead female role.”).
It will be Riff Trax all the way next time, though, and I’ll take this opportunity to warn inform Scott that he’s in for a real treat.
Also, does anyone know if Pizza Hut – or “The Hut,” as they seem to be calling themselves of late – has changed their pizza sizes? Because I have difficulty believing that what we were presented with was actually a Large.
Speaking of food, while I grabbed lunch at the McDonald’s in Wal-Mart, my stomach did that whole “Now that you’re trying to actually feed me I’m not hungry…but I will be as soon as you get rid of the food I don’t want right now” thing, so I suppose I should start looking into my dinner options.

*I said this earlier today when I was getting ready to take a shower. I was intending to grab my partial plates to put them cleaning while I was taking a shower, but for some reason I went to the refrigerator to grab them, rather than the downstairs bathroom where I’d set them on the sink...which is where I really do keep them when not wearing or cleaning them.

Catch Up Post

It’s been a while since I’ve done a proper post, so I suppose a little catching up is in order.
At work we’re making the upgrade from Microsoft Office 2003 to Office 2007, and as part of the process various training sessions were held in which reps from MS came and discussed some of the changes and new features and to answer any questions.
I’ve been using Office 2007 at home pretty much since it came out, so I’m pretty familiar with it. However, at home I don’t use Outlook, but at work I practically live in it, so on Wednesday I went to one of the training sessions to find out what’s changed in the new version.
At the end of the session they asked some review questions and gave out prizes to the first person to answer the questions. In exchange for saying “The Office Button,” I was rewarded with a Microsoft hat.
I’m not much of a hat person – or terribly inclined to be a corporate shill via the clothes I wear – but who doesn’t like winning stuff?
They also gave away a grand prize to the person on the sign-in sheet who matched the random number that the MS guy picked (which wasn’t me).
The prize was a couple of X-Box 360 games. However, the person who won didn’t have an X-Box 360, so instead he was offered a full copy of Office 2007 Professional, which was actually pretty cool, especially considering that it can cost more than an X-Box 360 system.
Wednesday night Scott came over for Riff Trax night. We watched the Riff of Aeon Flux, and, out of a sense of nostalgia, watched an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Specifically, we watched Manos: The Hands of Fate, which is a perfectly dreadful movie, masterfully mocked by Joel and the Bots.
I had actually intended for us to watch the Ed Wood “classic” Bride of the Monster, but circumstances were such that it wasn’t an option.
On Thursday evening I was invited out to dinner at Outback with Scott, Stacy, and their friend Dawn.
As it would have been silly to drive all the way home to Leesburg and then turn around and drive to Centreville, I decided to head that way straight from work.
The Google driving directions suggested that the trip would take 22 minutes, but as I would be driving at around rush hour I assumed a considerable amount of time would be added to my drive.
This proved to be the case, but, of course, it wasn’t quite enough time. We were supposed to meet at 6. I arrived at around 5:15.
I killed some time by wandering around the Giant grocery store located in the plaza.
As an aside, I do my banking with Chevy Chase – the bank, not the comedian/actor – and every Giant I’ve ever been to either has a Chevy Chase branch inside, or at least a Chevy Chase ATM. Given that the sign said that there was a Chevy Chase bank inside, I assumed this Giant was no exception, so I intended to hit up the ATM, as I was rather low on cash. Turns out that the sign was a lie; there was a PNC branch and ATM inside.
At around 5:50 I decided that I could head over to the Outback and wait for the others to arrive. I assumed I would be waiting for the others to arrive because that’s generally how it works, especially when I arrive almost 45 minutes early.
So initially I sat in the waiting area, but as it started to get busier I decided I should get us a seat. Once I was seated I sent Scott a text telling him where I was seated.
This resulted in Stacy appearing and telling me that they were already there, and had been since 5:30.
D’oh.
This made me a little more surly than usual, but I took note of this and attempted to set my annoyance aside and enjoy my baby back ribs (and the company, of course).
On Friday when I got home from work I decided, as is typical, to take a bit of a nap.
I only dozed for about an hour or so, but throughout that time I had mini-dreams in which I imagined myself looking at my hands and finding that they were riddled with odd sores and covered with some sort of crud, which was weird.
I finally got up when my mind created a rather startling image of some random, masked person leaning down and putting his face right in front of mine and shouting something that was mostly unintelligible, but may have been, “I’m going to the drug store!”
As another aside, when I was 12-13, I shared a bedroom with my older brother Stuart. He had a habit of coming home late at night/early in the morning, walking over to my bed, and hovering his face just centimeters from mine until I would wake up and yell “Gah!”
It’s worth noting that he was, of course, drunk when he would do this. On other occasions he would just come over and pound on my chest until I woke up.
Other times I would wake up before he got in the room – he generally wasn’t terribly quiet when he would stumble his way into the house – and he would engage me in bizarre conversations before falling asleep.
The most memorable one was when he came in, said, hi, got into bed, paused, and then said, “Are you my brother?”
When I answered in the affirmative, he said, “Brad?”
I said no, and he responded, “Jon, right?”
I congratulated him on getting it right on his second try and told him to go to sleep.
In any case, after I got up and ate the leftover Chinese food from Riff Trax night, I set about the task of watching some of the TV shows that had piled up on my DVR - I still have an hour and a half worth of shows to watch – and then came back upstairs to download and watch the Thursday night episode of Smallville that I’d forgotten to set to record (and was too late to catch after I got home from dinner). I gave up on watching Smallville two seasons ago, but this was a special episode that I wanted to check out, and about which I’ll write more in a subsequent post.
At 10 I watched Numb3rs, then I watched the premiere of Battlestar Galactica, which I’d recorded while I was watching Numb3rs.
I slept for about 9 hours last night, waking up sometime close to 11.
I was preparing to take a shower and venture out into the world when my mother called.
After that I sat around for a while, then finally made my way out to get gas and go grocery shopping. I’d stopped at the comic shop on Wednesday, as it had occurred to me last week – after I’d gotten home – that I should have picked up a copy of You’ll All Be Sorry! for Scott. Since I was going to be seeing him that evening, I figured I should rectify that on Wednesday.
Somehow the grocery shopping experience seemed to be even more maddening than usual, so I tried to wrap things up as quickly as possible.
Once I got home I had a very late lunch/breakfast, then decided to take a nap, one from which I had to violently struggle to wake.
Apart from some random sitting around not doing much of anything and some more TV watching, that’s pretty much been it.

Rounding Out The Weekend

So I saw this Twix ad earlier today…



…and my immediate reaction was, “No, fuck him. Why should I help someone else score? Nobody ever helps me.”
It was a pretty good indication of what kind of day it was going to be; you always know that the day won’t be great when you start it out with a bitterly-angry reaction to a harmless ad for a candy bar that you somehow manage to view as a personal insult.
I needed to head out into the world at some point to gas up and buy the Zyrtec that I forgot to buy yesterday, but I put it off as long as I could, and spent most of the day sitting around not doing much of anything.
After I finally got around to taking a shower, I’d gotten out and was drying off with this nagging feeling that I’d forgotten something. It wasn’t until I noticed that dragging the brush across my scalp was taking a lot more effort than it really should have that I realized that I’d forgotten to wash my hair, as when it’s just wet and hasn’t actually been washed my hair tends to be rather coarse and resistant to brushing.
I decided that it didn’t matter, though, and just got on with my post-shower activities, which were a lot like my pre-shower activities.
Last night I was bored and and didn’t feel like doing any of the things that I could have done with my time, so in desperation I hit up the Mystery Science Theater 3000 newsgroup to see if there was anything I wanted to watch. I found that the group has been taken over by some sort of racist/misogynist spammer, and that there’s only been one day in the last forty-eight on which someone has actually posted something relevant.
That turned out to not be any episodes of MST3k, but rather some DVD rips that had Riff Trax added to them.
Riff Trax are DVD audio commentaries created by MST3K alum Mike Nelson, in which he and other MST3K alums – and sometimes special guest commentators – provide MST3K-like riffing about the movie.
You can download the commentaries in MP3 format from the site and either put them playing at the same time as the DVD they’re intended for, or use their special player, which takes care of the synchronization for you, or in some cases you can get the DVD with the Riff Trax commentary included.
In any case, several Riff Trax movies were posted. Last night I watched Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, featuring guest commentator Neil Patrick Harris – who was a riot – and this afternoon I watched Spider-Man.
(By the way, MST3K creator and original host Joel Hodgson, along with several other MST3K people, has a movie-riffing project of his own called Cinematic Titanic.)
After that I finally ventured out into the world and did what I needed to do.
And as always I did the laundry today.
So that’s how I rounded out my weekend of excitement. I didn’t really do anything productive on the creative front. The old “Why bother?” question kept coming up, and I found that I couldn’t come up with a response more convincing than “What the hell else are you going to do with your time?”

Quick Updates

Just a few quick updates.
The clicking noise on my car was coming from the brakes. The car is still at the shop as there are, of course, other problems with it.
Scott came and picked me up and we went to see Transformers. I'll have more to say tomorrow, but for now, I'll simply say that it was pretty damn awesome.
And finally, here's a picture - inspired by all of my MST3K watching - that I started on Sunday and finished just before Scott got here. I actually used some new techniques that I picked up from a tutorial that I'm definitely going to add to my regular bag of tricks.

Excellent Timing, Extra Expenses, Exceptionally Creepy, And I'm Out of Words That Start With Ex

I woke up a bit after 8 this morning, thinking that I should get up, as my Wednesdays are always abbreviated due to my ridiculously early bedtime.
Of course, I also thought, “Fuck that,” and managed to stay in bed until a bit before 9.
In an unusual bit of motivation, I made my way to the kitchen and began making some breakfast. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal yesterday, opting for a sandwich for lunch and grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, so hunger was the source of my motivation.
I had just finished making my bacon and eggs and was in the process of setting my plate down on the table when my phone rang.
It was my mother. I opted to eat the eggs, figuring I could do that quietly enough so that she wouldn’t have to listen to me chewing, but decided that the bacon was just going to have to wait.
After talking to my mother – and eating my bacon – I did the whole shower and shave thing, got dressed, and headed off to the comic shop.
I spent quite a bit there, as I picked up a copy of the trade collecting the first five issues of Jack of Fables, as well as a copy of the Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall hardcover.
Beyond that I also paid for Scott’s comics (though he will, of course, pay me back), which was pricier than normal, as he’s opted to begin collecting Jack of Fables and Buffy: Season Eight and had requested that I grab whatever back issues of those I could find there, so that added some extra comics, and I grabbed a copy of the Jack of Fables trade for him as well, as it only made sense.
From there it was off to Super Target where, based on the wary looks most of the women present were giving me and their general skittishness around me, I learned that I must have been looking especially creepy today. Not sure what made today so special. Maybe there’s just something inherently disturbing about a guy buying toilet paper and paper towels.
Anyway, that’s been my day so far. It’s not likely to get any more interesting.
I’ve often mentioned that there are certain movies that, when they’re on, I feel compelled to watch. One such movie is Tim Burton’s black and white cult classic Ed Wood, which was on IFC the other night, and which I watched.
(As an aside, people think that, because of my feelings about his Batman movies, I don’t like Tim Burton. It’s not true. With the exception of the aforementioned Batman movies and the complete waste of two hours of my life – time that I will never be able to recover – that was his Planet of the Apes remake, I’ve liked most of what I’ve seen.)
I really enjoy Ed Wood in large part because of the performances of Martin Landau and Johnny Depp, but also because the real Ed Wood was an utterly fascinating man in so many respects.
As terrible as his movies were, you just have to love the cockeyed optimism of the man, and his total commitment to bringing his singular vision to life. Sure, his movies sucked ass, but he put everything he had into making those shitty, shitty movies. Nothing could deter him from following his dreams.
His awful, tacky dreams.
How can you not admire someone like that?
In the Burton movie much time is spent focusing on the making of his movie Bride of the Monster (originally titled Bride of the Atom), and in reading the Wikipedia entry on Wood I learned that, unsurprisingly, Bride of the Monster had been featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
So naturally I hit the MST3K newsgroup and downloaded the episode.
It was kind of interesting to watch the movie after having seen the fictionalized version of its making so many times. Seeing an actual scene rather than Burton’s version of the scene often made it rather jarring, particularly if there was a big difference between the two, though conversely it was interesting to see the scenes that Burton had really nailed.
The casting difference were also kind of jarring. I was watching it and thinking, “But that’s not Juliet Landau playing the part of Loretta King playing the part of Janet Lawton, it’s actually Loretta King playing the part of Janet Lawton!” or “Hey, that’s not Sarah Jessica Parker.”
Knowing at least some of the backstory – or at least some version of it – surrounding the making of the movie also added to the experience.
And of course it all made the comments of Joel and the gang that much funnier.
Oh, and the movie itself? Absolutely terrible, but then, how could it be otherwise?