I’ve seen some years but you’re still my Caesar

October 10, 2005

I was watching Law & Order earlier tonight, as was my wont. I joined an episode that was already in progress, and was both ashamed and mortified when I remembered the episode and its resolution (“Monster“; the hapless admitted pædophile they indict at first isn’t the real rapist/killer) within 30 seconds of starting to watch. Of course, I kept watching, tho’ I already knew the ending.

Soon they showed the real killer, a security guard played by Paul Calderon. As soon as I saw him on screen, my immediate reaction was, “Hey! He was the guilty mail carrier in a more recent episode!” (“Veteran’s Day“; his Vietnam-vet mail carrier murders an anti-war protester who disparages his son, slain in combat in Afghanistan) As soon as I looked this Calderon guy up on IMDb, though, I learned that he guest-starred in a third episode as well (“Sunday in the Park with Jorge“). In this one, which I believe I’ve managed to avoid watching due to some fluke, I can only assume he plays some sort of murderous dogcatcher or exterminator. Someone who wears a uniform, anyway.

In other news, I was equally mortified when something else I saw on teevee today also showed me myself in an unflattering light. I refer, of course, to the VHS tapes my mother filmed during our family trip to the ESSR back in the summer of ’87, which I watched a bit of as part of my master plan to start transferring our massive collection of VHS tapes to DVDs.

What I saw in my four-year-old self was a self-absorbed, high-pitched-voiced and clumsy little child with a bad haircut who feigned a complete lack of interest in the jumprope while all the other children were playing with it, only to run over and pathetically tangle himself up in it after everybody else abandoned it in favor of playing “Telephone” instead. The only thing different now is that (a) my voice has almost changed and (b) these days I’d probably manage to convince myself to forgo the jumprope entirely. No sense getting all worked up and excited over something so patently juvenile.

Oh, at age 4 (4 2/3 to be a bit more precise) I was also evidently always the last one out of bed in the morning, and I’d often pretend to be asleep despite it being clear that nobody (myself included) was buying into my ruse.

What about the other people in the videos, all the various and sundry relatives we visited? In my self-absorption, they serve only to remind me of further self-absorption. At times the screen felt like a checklist of people I didn’t visit over this past school year, when I was in Estonia and not attending classes anyway. Kind of pathetic that I saw more relatives in two hours of tape filmed over the course of two or three days than I did in the 45 weeks or so I was living there.

Of course, some of those people died in the meantime (and I visited a few of their graves), but the rest of them didn’t so that’s really no excuse. Especially considering the number of people I still haven’t called back.

Song of the Moment: «Outsiders» — Franz Ferdinandикони

Oh for fuck’s sake

October 6, 2005

Re: Bush lashes out at ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Islamo-fascism, eh? Looks like nothing has changed in the past 61 years: “…as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” I guess convenient bugaboos, bogeymen, and catchphrases never really go out of style. And since they’re meaningless to begin with, you can combine them however you want! Like calling religious fanatics both “Fascists” and “Communists”, both of which terms generally apply to political and economic systems — and dissimilar ones at that.

I guess it’s refreshing, though, to see “Communist” as a slur come back into vogue.

Onward:

The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.

Whereas the President seems to believe that forcing one country into “democratic” hands will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all clerical governments in the region and establish a hotbed of democracy that spans etc. Go go gadget domino theory, let’s keep those pinkos out of Cambodia Syria! Does everything have to be so goddamn black and white? Do we really assume that a change in government in one country in a region must necessarily lead to the same change occurring in every adjacent country?

We are facing a radical ideology with immeasurable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.

How do you go from calling some objectives immeasurable to describing how they can be measured later in the same sentence? (Hint: measure their objectives by counting “Islamo-commie-fascistically-enslaved” countries, why don’t you.) Don’t words have meanings anymore?

…self-defeating pessimism…

I guess not. Mr Bush: You meant to say “self-fulfilling”. Self-fulfilling. Self-defeating pessimism would be pessimism that leads to the defeat of pessimism, which I don’t think is what you had in mind.

…I’m going to stop here. Sorry for the rant. But it’s not like anybody read it anyway.

In other news, I remain irked by Ubuntu’s decision against mp3, decss, etc; it’s hard to jump through the hoops to get all that stuff installed on a system when you don’t have any internet connectivity to speak of on it. manpages are certainly helpful for some things (like your fstabs and whatnot), but not only are they hilariously dense, they’re no help at all for Ubuntu-specific things (all but the barest-bones of documentation for which are online) or GNOME (ditto). All I wanted to do was watch my Futurama DVDs and listen to my vast collection of legally-obtained mp3s under linux, but without the interweb on that computer it’ll prove quite difficult.

However, I haven’t gotten ANY sound playback to work on that system yet so maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Song of the Moment: «Lupita» — Panico

Advertising

September 26, 2005

The only thing sillier than ads for money is ads for chemistry. I mean, come on. At least milk is, you know, a product that you can buy.

Song of the Moment: «Can I Get Get Get» — Junior Senior

Oh for heaven’s sake

September 22, 2005

Google News just greeted me with this interesting pair of articles:

I’m aware that the rise in vaccine-resistant flu cases (primarily in Asia) has nothing to do with America’s rising pansy-assedness and the associated constant ubiquitous use of antibacterial cleaners, that won’t stop me from drawing a possibly flawed conclusion from this.

To their credit, the site with that “wash your hands” article links, at the bottom of the page, to “ohshi antibiotics are being overused” and “hey maybe we need some germs after all“.

Sadly though, cutting back on human overuse of antibiotics won’t solve a damn thing, when this shit keeps going on. Fucking cattle. Fucking factory farms. Fucking petrochemical industry.

Song of the Moment: «No More Mosquitoes» — Four Tet

Love is when someone you trust cuts a smile in your face

August 31, 2005
  • I was in CVS earlier today when their unreasonably chipper Kodak photo-printer kiosk-machine thing told me to, and I quote, “share and enjoy” my pictures with others. I was reminded a little of this bizarre and hilarious poster.

    I suspect that in each case the guy who came up with the message did so with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, and the suit who approved the message did so without a trace of irony, thinking the message was entirely sincere.

  • Entropy and information are closely related. The more possibilities that exist for the state of a system, the higher the entropy. Conversely, the more information you have about a system’s state, the lower the entropy–uncertainty is reduced.

    Assuming, for argument’s sake, that the mind is a system to which this is applicable, does that mean that the less you know about my state of mind, the more entropy I’m creating? Is the act of engaging in thought accelerating the heat death of the universe?

  • We’ve all seen those goddamn “anti-drug” commercials; we all know how ridiculously preposterous and ineffective they are (answer: just as much as every other goddamn PSA out there). Yesterday, though, I saw one that really took the cake. “Just tell your parents you lost track of her because you were high,” the voiceover intoned while the camera slowly zoomed out while centered on a young child holding a balloon at an amusement park. “Responsibility: the anti-drug.”

    The message this ad appears to be sending is as follows: Are you a fuck-up, a burn-out, or a stoner? Get a girl pregnant and all of your problems will magically disappear because, after all, having children turns you into a wonderful person and magnificent parent. Hell, even Snoop Dogg chilled out after he had a kid. “Responsibility: the anti-drug”? What the fuck, I mean really. Having kids in an attempt to hold together a crumbling marriage is bad enough, but having kids in an attempt to kick a drug habit sounds absolutely unforgivable. How many stories like this is the “National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign” trying to cause?

I was going to say some other stuff too but I forgot what it was.

Song of the Moment: «Lampshade» — Kashmir

They’re turning us into monsters

July 10, 2005

So it’s come to this: in little more than 32 hours I’m scheduled to be on an airplane heading to Warsaw. Tomorrow, I need to do the following:

  • Finalize moving out, which includes
    • …atoning for the fact that I’ve essentially been squatting here for a while, as my lease expired at the end of June
    • …finishing packing
    • …bringing a few hundred empty bottles to the recycling place for the deposits, or letting some homeless guy strike paydirt
    • …probably mopping my floor and stuff because it’s absolutely disgusting
  • Mail some stuff to myself, since everything doesn’t appear to fit in my suitcases
  • Buy last-minute gifts and such for people, including Meie Mees CDs, and leather-bound blank books
  • Get my ass to Tallinn
  • Figure out what I’m going to do until the airport opens in the morning
  • Say goodbye to all the people I managed to put off saying goodbye to
  • Kick myself for leaving absolutely everything to the last possible instant as always
  • EDIT: Return a library book

And here I am, posting on the internet instead of doing anything productive. Go me!

rage fury, con’t

June 14, 2005

Perhaps you remember this entry from about a year ago. If not, you can go back and read it if you want; the point was complaining about a bunch of absolutely shameless pork-barreling.

As it turns out, the same bullshit is still going on. Really planning on vetoing the bill, George? Go ahead, but since both of Congress’s camerae have overwhelming support for the bill, it’ll be nothing more than an empty gesture if you do so.

Song of the Moment: «You Pay» — Crass

Oh please let this work out for the best

June 8, 2005

So I finally decided to book a flight back to the United States, and it seems there’s a chance that I may have capped off an absolutely wasted year abroad (read: “getting to know myself”) with an absolute waste of $587 (read: throwing it away outright). For, while I admit I’m still rather impressed with Yahoo!’s ‘Farechase’ system and the perfectly reasonable price for a one-way trip from Tallinn to JFK it quoted, onetravel.com has kind of left a bad taste in my mouth since I actually booked the ticket.

Googling for “onetravel” yields a far-from-laudatory Consumer Reports report and a series of consumer complaints, while Googling for “resfinder” (onetravel’s name for their reservation system) yields this wonderful gripefest. Of course I didn’t actually check this stuff until after entering my card number and telling them to go ahead and book a ticket for July 12. So it goes.

For what it’s worth, it seems the guy from the gripefest had his situation work out in the end, and the only real problem all along had just been piss-poor communication on the part of onetravel, which seems quite consistent with CR’s appraisal. On the (possibly) bright side, they’ve already hit up my card for charges, which means something is going on, and in the worst case I ought to be able to get the charges reversed. On the (most definitely) bright side, it seems my name and the reservation number that onetravel provided me do correspond to an entry in CZA Czech Airlines’ online reservation-checking system, an entry which matches my intended itinerary, to boot!

So here’s hoping everything works out fine.

Song of the Moment: «Final Fantasy 1, Town theme» — Some Jerk

What the Fuck

July 10, 2004

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson from last fall, or any number of other semesters or other academic terms. I guess not. Anyway, there’s still a chance I’ll be done with this infernal tedium forever.

In other news, I had a contact lens in my left eye until quite recently. I didn’t take it out and it didn’t fall out, but there is now no sign of it at all. I’m kind of freaked out.

Also: what the fuck is up with this? Hooray for excesses of copyrighting and DRM.

Song of the Moment: «(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman» — The Kinks

Grr-bah

May 13, 2004

I wish I were asleep right now. Really, I do.

Six hours ago I went to sleep after my last day of schoolwork at Cooper kept me awake for 32 hours or thereabouts. Then I woke up. It’s kind of funny that I’m capable of sleeping 12 or 16 hours in one go unless I really need to. As it is, I can tell you that waking up exhausted is not very fun.

Of course, on the plus side, nearly all of my obligations for school are met now, so I can relax a bit, maybe. I still need to do some very very important things, however, so

Fuck it, I got sick of writing this. Just remember that McSorley’s cheese platters are the best food in the world.

Song of the Moment: «Fade to Black» — Fade to Bluegrass

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