Blozor

For animals that are reported to be such amazingly clean creatures, cats certainly are lazy fucks when it comes to doing housework. The mere sight fo a vacuum can send them running for miles.

They do what now?

A bad incident at the doctor's when I was younger left me with a fear of noodles, because I had a very strange accent.

I find it mildly amusing that the word for having dreams and ambitions is the same word for choking on your own vomit.

Who invented this language?

There are more cell phone stores than bookstores in any given city. That means there are a lot of people talking with nothing interesting to say.

If you're walking down the street and you see a kid in a helmet, you think, "That kid must be handicapped."

If you're walking down the street and you see a kid in a welding helmet, you think, "Watch out!"

Rape Abuse & Incest National Network ..... Wilson

There's this electronic message board at work that gives us inspirational quotes everyday like it's the Two-Minute Goddamned Hate. Today's was: "It's easy to make a buck. It's much more difficult to make a difference."

My kneejerk response was to think: "It's easy to give a hand. It's much more difficult to give a damn."

I don't care what anybody says; what separates man from beast is the sense to not eat our own throw-up.

Our confidence is nothing more than an illusion which shelters us from our insecurities. Shatter that illusion, and all we're left with is worthlessness. The worthlessness is no more realistic than the confidence, but if no one reinforces our value to each other, our insecurities begin to dominate.

However, no one is ever truly worthy or worthless. We just are, and what we are is only determined by what we mean to each other, and what we mean to ourselves. We can spend as much time as we want building ourselves up or tearing ourselves down, but in the end it doesn't change the reality of what we are, only the illusion of what we feel.

We get to choose whether we are ugly or attractive, whether we are worthy or worthless, whether we are confident or insecure. We have control over these things; not anybody else. Our reality is only as valid as we perceive it.

As promised, prophesized, and sworn by me, I saw Where The Wild Things Are last night. There is a lot to say about this movie, probably the foremost is that I did not hate it, not nearly as much as I'm sure a lot of people will.

Paige didn't hate it either, but she couldn't say she liked it any more than she disliked it. If you're going in expecting a ninety-minute retelling of the classic children's book, I think you will be markedly disappointed. As one would expect there is a lot more going on in this movie than in the book, and many of the events were given to dramatic license to make them appear more realistic. The Wild Things were true to their illustrated appearances, though, and many of the lines and events in the movie paid appropriate homage to the original book.

The one thing I can say for certain about this movie is that it is not really a movie for children, rather this is a movie for the dysfunctional Gen-X children who were read this book by their Baby Boomer parents. A friend of mine was told by someone who'd seen an advanced showing of the movie that it is a very angry movie that pushes its anger onto the audience. More than that, it is a movie that exposes our dysfunction for what it is and slaps us across the face with it. Whether we are the fucked-up product of our emotionally distant parents or the emotionally distant parents themselves, this movie mirrors the way people can often unintentionally hurt each other, and how we generally deal with it. Many people will not embrace such a grim reality as easily as I did, and I suspect a public backlash will ensue.

( Synopsis cut to prevent spoilers. )

The premise and execution of the movie was shocking, and the voice acting in particular was phenomenal. You could easily identify with the humanity in each of the Wild Things. Much like us, they are all broken people trying desperately to love each other because they are all they have. Despite all the heavy, angry, dysfunctional, and emotional scenes, the movie was littered throughout with lighthearted comedy, a few laugh-out-loud moments, a lot of heart, hope, and redemption.

Before going in to seeing this movie, I was having a very bad night following a very bad week. I was sad and filled with self-doubt, and possibly because of that, I connected to the heart in this movie more than I probably would have otherwise. Despite all the dysfunction of this movie, the one thing it does have at its core is heart. It shows us that the only thing that rivals our capacity to hurt is our capacity to forgive. As far as I'm concerned, this movie is Oscar-worthy.

*This entire review was written to Stabbing Westward. "Perfect," in particular, is a good song for this movie.

CNN reported that China only trails the US in billionaires. Then why the hell are we borrowing billions of dollars from China? I think, when China comes to collect on our debt, we should sell them our billionaires first. Let them fuck up China's economy with their greed for a while.

I think Seth MacFarlane should do something quirky and irreverent, like design a show that doesn't shove quirky and irreverent down our throats.

Look, whether you like it or hate it, I will admit that Family Guy broke ground. Then there was American Dad, and you could buy the talking fish and the ambiguously gay alien because the guy worked for the government. Now there's The Cleveland Show. It's pretty much a rip-off of Family Guy right down to the talking animal, only now the gags are just becoming cliché and boring.

Perhaps a straight hour and a half of Seth MacFarlane is a bit overkill. Perhaps he should have waited until Family Guy was finished before cloning the formula.

I'm about to blow all your impressionable young minds.

Contemplate this...

Alyson Hannigan and Scarlett Johansson, with Scarlett Johansson as the dom.

Have fun with that thought tonight.

How about that health care crisis, huh? Is that some wacky stuff or what? To take our minds off of the Obama re-election crisis, let's discuss another serious political issue that has slipped through the cracks during this whole sordid affair. I'm talking about the serious threat of the gum disease stupidity.
( I'm putting this under a cut out of respect for a friend who is sensitive to some of the situations contained within. )

For those of you who care about Transformers, and possibly even those of you who don't, the sister company in Japan, Takara, is doing some pretty nifty things while Hasbro is immersing itself in the Shitformers from Michael Bay.

First they came up with Soundwave as a working MP3 player:


Then I caught wind of Ravage as a working 2GB flash drive:


Now they're not only making Grimlock and Trypticon as a mouse:




But also Soundwave's arch-nemesis Blaster as a working USB hub in the shape of a laptop:

I'd like to tell you about the most powerful, most heartfelt, touching speech I'd ever heard in my entire military career. This speech wasn't given by a commander. It wasn't given by a general. It was given by a master sergeant in charge of my aircraft inspection dock.

Over the course of the days following September 11th, 2001, talk ran wild amongst the younger Airmen that this was their chance to go to war and to kick some ass and to have their moment of glory. Many of them were exciteda about the prospect of going to war, especially for such a tremendous cause, saying that this was what they had signed up for.

On the third day after the attacks, MSgt Arrington called us all in for an impromptu briefing. He had had enough of this foolish, misdirected bravado.

He stood before us, directly outside the closed door to his office, and I will never forget the way he looked when he delivered this speech. There were no walls. There was no rank. There was no pride or confidence. He looked like a broken man talking to a group of broken men. He was not a supervisor, not a senior enlisted official, but a human being, speaking from his heart, to his fellow human beings.

He shook his head in remorse as he spoke the first line: "You do not want to go to war."

He told us there is no pride in what we do. There is no pride in leaving our families, our wives who love us, our children who admire us, and our parents who respect us, to murder other human beings who are only trying to do the same thing we're trying to do, fight for the cause they believe is right. There is no pride in having to shoot a child who has picked up a rifle and is pointing it at you. There is no pride in having to see your friends shot, killed, blown up, and slaughtered right next to you.

He said that if any one of us signed up to go to war, he wanted us out of his military right now.

He said that no one should ever want to go to war. No one should ever wish to see the things he has seen. No one should ever desire to do the things he has had to do.

He said that any of us who have been excited about going to war just to prove ourselves just don't know what we're talking about.

He ended, tears in his eyes, by repeating the first line: "You do not want to go to war."

I didn't want to go to war. I was terrified of having to leave Amy behind to fend for herself, to worry about whether or not I was coming home. I was terrified of making her a widow. I didn't sign up to go to war.

To hear someone in the military, someone who had been a part of the first Gulf War, not only echo my concerns, but tell me that it was okay to feel that way, it moved me in a way that no other speech given during my entire military career had ever moved me.

This wasn't some pompous commander with an over-inflated ego trying to rally his troops around some misguided cause. This was a scarred human being in a moment of sincere, unbridaled humanity, exposing his wounds so no one else had to, because no one else would.

Those words still echo in my head as I fight back the tears of the pain I felt in that man that day: "You do not want to go to war."

An old friend of mine called me up the other day. I've known this guy for a really long time, but the other day he told me that he was schizophrenic. So now I gotta figure out if I'm really just one of his delusions. Just how elaborate is his fantasy world anyway?

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the words of the immortal Megatron: "I still function."

More to come.

Tonight, I dug out my stereo speakers and hooked them up. I am listening to Killing Joke as it was meant to be, as Jaz Coleman put it: "at welding volume." It sounds like a fucking earthquake, and it's only at 1/4 volume and 1/3 bass. The cats are not amused. Apparently they are not fans of music that sounds like an active construction zone.

Patti: What are the benefits of a computer oriented society?

Me: Skynet.