I had the good fortune to watch two good movies over the weekend, one on DVD and the other in a theater. (A theater is a place where you go to watch movies before they show up on Netflix. You get to watch it on an enormous screen with wraparound sound, and observe the reactions of the two other people in the theater.)

The DVD one came out a while back, and the main actors are Frodo and the guy from Gogol Bordello.

ASIN: B000DWMN2S Everything Is Illuminated     Product Type: DVD          List Price: $ 19.98          Amazon's Price: $ 13.49          You Save: $ 6.49 [Buy Now!]

(That is, Elijah Wood and Eugene Hutz.) It's an art flick, so no explosions or boobies, but still a great flick.

The theater one is worth seeing in the theater, or you can wait for DVD, but it's definitely worth watching. And the soundtrack is amazing.

Pirate Radio  

Go see it if you get the chance, especially if you love music.

As y'all know, I'm a cat person. Cats rule; dogs drool. (Really. Dogs drool. I've seen it.) So reading this was pretty cool:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cat_know

(17 things worth knowing about your Cat)

Now, here's the thing: I know for certain that many of those items are true.

But if the part about Nikola Tesla is true (I'd never heard that before, so I don't know), then that is the most awesome thing in the history of the multiverse.

Seriously.

Anyone know?
 

Yes, I know it's been a while since I've done anything here. Just haven't had the inspiration.

Even now, I only have one thing to post. For some reason, I find this highly amusing.

http://punditkitchen.com/2009/11/14/political-pictures-vladimir-putin-roses-red/...

More later from me, I hope...
 

So, let's get back to Music that I Like for an entry.

There's a band from England called Sniff 'n' The Tears. You may not have heard of them. In fact, I'd be really surprised if you know who the hell I'm talking about.

But you've probably heard their one US hit, "Driver's Seat," from back in 1978. Yes, about the same time as Bob Geldof was rocking with The Boomtown Rats. So I'm old. So sue me.

Point is, as it turns out, the band did other music. Quite a few albums, actually. Here's one you don't hear:

Every once in a while... okay, every damn day, I find something that's so funny that it makes me wish I'd done it instead of whoever actually did it.

This is today's.

http://www.gfranks.com/blog/2009/11/3/universal-studio-free-photo-booth-lol-funn...

Well, there are many advantages of marriage, not the least of which is preferential tax status (sometimes), but one big one is:

It is not necessary to search for a mate; therefore, it is not necessary to cruise the internet looking for a mate.

http://www.viraleruption.com/imgs/online-girlfriend-flowchart.jpg

Note: the above only applies to guys. If there are any left reading this blog. The flowchart for figuring out the true identity of your online BOYfriend is much, much simpler:

Maybe not this year, after all.

I got a work deadline that's kicking my ass, and it doesn't look like I'm going to make it - which means I'm not going to be able to start tomorrow, either.

Oh well, what the hell, right? It's only my dream. I can put it off again for the sake of doing something I don't really want to do anymore, right?

Fuck.
 

I don't like videos.

That's probably weird coming from a guy who keeps linking videos, but the only reason I link videos is because I can't link the songs. This is probably for copyright reasons, leading me to question: Why are the videos on a different copyright?

Whatever.

I don't like videos because I think the song should stand alone (as I've pointed out, some don't).

That said, this video is epic.

Happy Halloween and Spiffy Samhain to everyone!

I fully admit that it's backwards, but it's the way I am, and I have to accept that, even if my friends and family don't understand - which they don't.

See, when it comes to music, as you've already figured out, I'm not normal. First of all, I don't either love or hate a song. For most people, it's like Beavis and Butthead: either it's cool, or it sucks. But as they once said, "If everything was cool, and nothing sucked, how would we know what was cool?" For me, there's a whole spectrum from "suck" to "cool." About some songs, I'm just indifferent.

Second... well, what's "cool" for me has a wide range of styles, including what some would call "depressing" songs and what some would call "happy" songs. I like 'em both - when they're done right. The thing is, "depressing" songs make me smile. They make me happy. I don't know if it's because of my finely-honed sense of schadenfreude, or because I just like a good sad song, or because I can say my situation is superior to that described in the song.

Meanwhile, "happy" songs make me want to cry. (I don't actually cry, of course; I'm a man, after all.) They show me a glimpse into a world from which I am forever barred from participating. It's not that my life sucks; it's just that joy has been elusive to me. I get a small taste of emotion from these songs, but I try not to overdo it.

So today's video is a song about what most would consider a depressing subject, but it's one that never fails to make me happy. It's from The Boomtown Rats, who were probably better known for their lovely, upbeat song about school shootings, "I Don't Like Mondays." I love that song, too, but for whatever reason, the one I link here is the one that sticks in my head as an all-time favorite. From the depths of 1979, I present:

As voluntary penance for rickrolling everyone in the last entry (and for mocking the Eurythmics a while back, which I don't really apologize for, but it was rather negative), I'm going to use a few entries to link YouTube songs/videos that I like. They'll be embedded, so you'll be assured of not hearing Rick Astley (who, incidentally, was born just twelve days before I was).

We'll start with one that I promised to link a while back and overlooked. Written by Me and performed by our very own Brandiwyn♪ , it's not so much a video as a vehicle for the song. But Brandiwyn♪ is easy to look at, in addition to being talented, so don't mind the static "video."

(Lyrics are linked in "It lives!" )

(Edited to add this link   I found about the subject of that song, Nikola Tesla. In 1931 Tesla announced to reporters at a press conference that he was on the verge of discovering an entirely new source of energy. Asked to explain the nature of the power, he replied, "The idea first came upon me as a tremendous shock... I can only say at this time that it will come from an entirely new and unsuspected source." - well, of course it came upon him as a tremendous shock. I daresay he had more than a few of those in his lifetime playing with electricity.)

Someone had to do this   in a blog entry. It might as well be me.

Don't blame me. It's all The StoryMaster 's fault.

"[BETA] New xLinks and Locations!" 
 

As most of you know, my Theory of Comedy states that adding a duck to anything makes it funnier.

Consequently, this is about the funniest thing I've seen all month:

http://failblog.org/2009/10/23/ad-placement-fail-4/

And now I'm convinced that a duck is watching me.
 

Yesterday, Lorien quoted a song, as she is wont to do on occasion, for a blog entry: "Sweet dreams are made of this" .

My first comment was "That song sucks."

Lynn McKenzie disagreed, even going so far as to impugn my favorite psychotherapist, Jung.

Well, we can argue about Jung, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the Eurythmics' song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" sucks massive rat turds.

And I can prove it.

First of all, I'm not saying the Eurythmics suck. Annie Lennox has a beautiful voice, and their music was polished and not too overproduced compared to some of the other crap the industry was pumping into a tone-deaf public in the early 1980s, pre-Born in the USA. I hear the video was pretty well done, too, but the video is not the song and I would no more judge the song by the video than say The Matrix was a good movie just because it had killer special effects.

That said, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" sucks.

Let's start with the lyrics, because to be good, a song has to have good, meaningful lyrics. Otherwise, why bother making it a song? It can be an instrumental.

The lyrics:

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world
And the seven seas--
Everybody's looking for something.
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused.

That's all. That's it for the lyrics. It's all chorus. Or, looked at another way, it's all verse. Oh, except for the almost-unintelligible part:

(Hold your head up--Keep your head up--MOVIN' ON)

Which before I could look up lyrics on the internet, I could swear went, "Powderhead (movin' on) Chowderhead (movin' on)" - but that's me, and that doesn't contribute to the song's massive vacuum pull. More, that was, in fact, the only saving grace of the song, and to find out that it was as much of a lie as "'scuze me while I kiss this guy" was a massive disappointment.

Okay. Okay. So the lyrics are spare. Haiku gets by with only 17 syllables; maybe they were going for that same kind of feel?

Well... No. Look at the lyrics again. Is there any imagery there? Is there a metaphor, an onomatopoeia, ANY kind of poetic trick?

Um... no.

In fact, the second line is a cliché: "Who am I to disagree?"

Oh, wait, I lied. There is one poetic device used: Rhyme.

But wait - what's the first line? "...this / ...disagree."

Do. WHAT?

They get around this by singing, "Sweet dreams are made of THESE."

That isn't a mishearing; that's no "There's a bathroom on the right." That's a LONG E and Z sound, when the lyrics - and the song title - and the album title all say THIS, which is a SHORT I and HARD S sound. You don't get those two mixed up, even if you are British.

If they'd said "Sweet dreams are made of CHEESE" and wrote that in the lyrics and song title and album title, then I'd change my opinion of the song. Really. Surrealism is always a good thing.

But it's not cheese - not even Wensleydale - it's THIS.

Okay, you say, you're wrong, idiot. "Disagree" is meant to rhyme with "seas." And yes, I'm willing to forgive the absence of the sibilant at the end of the first word. But my point remains - they don't say "this;" they say "these," creating an internal rhyme. So, no, I'm not wrong, especially if you consider "Sweet" through "seas" to be FOUR lines, which is how I've always seen it written.

Moving on: "Everybody's looking for something." So? You might as well say "Everybody needs air to breathe" or "My cat likes to lick her asshole."

I'm not even going to go into the next four lines, except to say that they'd make a set theory mathematician cry. The categories are neither overlapping nor mutually exclusive nor, as with the previous line, do they really mean anything.

As for "Hold your head up," well... Argent did it better, and first, with a song that's only marginally longer, lyrics-wise, than "Sweet Dreams:"

...And if they stare
Just let them burn their eyes on you moving
And if they shout
Don't let them change a thing what you're doing... Hold your head up, etc, etc.

Overall, if I encountered those Eurythmics lyrics written out here on WDC, I'd probably have to rate them - assuming everything was spelled correctly.

Now, if you want a Eurythmics song that was popular AND good, you need to look no farther than "Here Comes The Rain Again."

But hey - at least it's not "Brass In Pocket" by the Pretenders. So "Sweet Dreams" does have one thing going for it.
 

I just got tickets to go see these guys in Richmond.

http://gogolbordello.com/

It's been a LONG time since I've been to a punk show. I wonder if I can find my old combat boots and skull rings.

Here's the video that convinced me that this was a great band:

http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/slate-belt/index.ssf/2009/10/woman_killed_by_pet...

A Ross Township woman who keeps exotic animals as pets was killed this evening after she was attacked by her pet black bear[WTF?]

But it gets better. This chick liked to live dangerously:

Also kept at the house are a Bengal tiger and an African lion.

Lions... and tigers... and BEARS? Oh. My.

While she was inside, the 350-pound bear turned on Walz [no relation] and killed her, officials said.

So, verily I say once again unto you, forsooth:

My goal: To become the healthiest man in America.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/279005

A study by German scientists showed that 10 minutes a day of ogling women’s breasts by men was as good at warding off heart disease, high blood pressure and stress as 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.

But what if I ogle breasts while I'm at the gym? Win-win! I could potentially live forever!

(My computer is back, by the way - though I'm in the long, arduous process of reinstalling and restoring everything.)
 

I'm typing this from my laptop. This evening - it being Saturday night and me having no life worth speaking of - I'm going to reinstall Windows XP on my main, desktop computer.

Yesterday, after some updates around noon, the thing started acting slower than Sarah Palin trying to explain science. That evening, I got the BSOD not once, nor twice, but six fucking times.

I tried the silly "restore point" thing, but that only muddled things up worse.

So now, after having backed up gigabytes of music and photos as well as pretty much everything else that wouldn't survive Armageddon, I'm about to reformat the desktop's hard drive.

If you don't hear from me, it's because my computer rebelled and destroyed me before I could do the same to it.

(And yes, next time (should I survive), I'll get a Mac. That doesn't help me NOW.)
 

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Being the only country to lose a nuclear war does something to the national psyche.

http://www.lemondrop.com/2009/09/15/the-creepiest-workout-video-weve-ever-seen/

Words would normally fail me, but I do believe that WTF is more than appropriate here.

At least we can all take comfort in the fact that there's no Hello Kitty in there.
 

I think I found the source for yesterday's "Random Thoughts."

http://ruminations.com/site/

There are certainly things I hate worse than when people forward shit without attribution, but how about I make that the top of my list just for today?

(The link is currently slow. That is because someone posted it on Fark, which tends to overwhelm lower-bandwidth websites.)
 

A friend of mine just discovered the wonders of email. This means that she's currently forwarding every bit of glurge

http://www.snopes.com/glurge/glurge.asp

and misinformation on to all of her hapless friends.

I was just about to relegate her latest recirculated bit of "wisdom" to the compost pile

Microsoft introduced the "Recycle Bin" as the result of Mac apparently having a copyright on "Trash Can." So I use "Compost Pile" to avoid lawsuits.

when I accidentally looked at it.

And laughed.

So I looked at it some more.

This one's actually pretty good, so I'm sharing it. Just don't consider this permission to forward the latest sob story, questionable joke, or right-wing screed

Left-wing screeds are welcome. They tend to be actually funny

to my inbox.

Random thoughts from a friend of mine.

* I wish Google Maps had an "Avoid Ghetto" routing option.

* More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can't wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that's not only better, but also more directly involves me.

* Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.

* I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.

* The letters T and G are very close to each other on a keyboard. This recently became all too apparent to me and consequently I will never be ending a work email with the phrase "Regards" again..

* Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn't work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ's. We just figured it out. Today's kids are soft.

* There is a great need for sarcasm font.

* How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?

* I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.

* I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

* Was learning cursive really necessary?

* I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

* Whenever someone says "I'm not book smart, but I'm street smart", all I hear is "I'm not real smart, but I'm imaginary smart".

* How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear what they said?

* I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a jerk from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!

* While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it....thanks Mario Kart.

* Map Quest really needs to start their directions on #5. Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.

* Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.

* I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.

* Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.

* I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired.

* Bad decisions make good stories

* Whenever I'm Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don't mind if I do!

* If Carmen San Diego and Waldo ever got together, their offspring would probably just be completely invisible.

* You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you've made up your mind that you just aren't doing anything productive for the rest of the day.

* Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don't want to have to restart my collection.

* There's no worse feeling than that millisecond you're sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.

* I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.

* "Do not machine wash or tumble dry" means I will never wash this ever.

* While watching the Olympics, I find myself cheering equally for China and USA . No, I am not of Chinese descent, but I am fairly certain that when Chinese athletes don't win, they are executed.

* I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Darnit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What'd you do after I didn't answer? Drop the phone and run away?

* I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.

* I like all of the music in my I Tunes, except when it's on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs.

* Why is a school zone 20 mph? That seems like the optimal cruising speed for pedophiles...

* As a driver I hate pedestrians, and as a pedestrian I hate drivers, but no matter what the mode of transportation, I always hate cyclists.

* Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.

* It should probably be called Unplanned Parenthood.

* I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

* Even if I knew your social security number, I wouldn't know what do to with it.

* I wonder if cops ever get pissed off at the fact that everyone they drive behind obeys the speed limit.

* I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

* I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with liquor than with "Kay".

* The other night I ordered takeout, and when I looked in the bag, saw they had included four sets of plastic silverware. In other words, someone at the restaurant packed my order, took a second to think about it, and then estimate d that there must be at least four people eating to require such a large amount of food. Too bad I was eating by myself. There's nothing like being made to feel like a fat bastard before dinner.