Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Friday, September 14, 2007

the road to hell was paved with...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/09/14/hundred.dollar.laptop.ap/index.html

Instead of shitting on a project, why not celebrate its original purpose? Use your forum of national news to inform people of what goes into something like this. All news is biased, but how about balancing out that negativity? Any publicity is not always good publicity. And cut out this video news shit. If I wanted to watch a talking head I'd get a television. Reading news lets me pretend that it was researched instead of produced. Sorry to reach for the lowest hanging fruit but that one stood out more than the rest.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

talking^2

Some medical students had no idea who Henry Kissinger was. Nor had they heard of Lou Gossett Jr. Another didn't recognize the abbreviation WS in an IMing context about baseball. An engineer wasn't familiar with the concept of "sampling" in reference to music, even when they proclaimed to be a hip hop and RnB fan.

Maybe it's the way I use language, assuming that everyone else is on a similar wavelength - able to understand analogies, or at least able to pretend. I'm afraid of blank stares. They make me self conscious. Did I say something stupid? Do I have a boogie? Am I that weird?

Am I focusing on the trivial? recognize bits of superficial information because that's the way my brain works. I remember a lot of things that I should not and very little of the things that I should. This doesn't make me a better person, or even more "well-rounded." It just gives me shit to bs about. Furthermore, not knowing these things shouldn't detract from someone's character or their personal enjoyment of the world. My doctor needs to know about thoracic surgery, not how to sustain rural development in the Sahara. My accountant doesn't need to know which Mariah song sampled the Talking Heads.

I didn't mean to single out specific peoples or professions. Is there a point to knowing useless facts? Few of us will aspire to compete on Jeopardy, but doesn't it feel good to be "in" on the knowledge, or at least part of the conversation? Beyond Trivial Pursuit skills, maybe these factoids are solely fodder for the talking heads. Social memes as currency for pleasant exchanges of nothingness among acquaintances. Shooting the proverbial shit.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

wednesday banality

-Found this article fascinating. Some Ivy profs studied NBA data and determined there are racial disparities in when refs dish out fouls. It must be the economic veins, because I don't even like basketball.

-A "The Simpsons" themed ride is being built to replace the "Back to the Future" ride at Universal Studios. Is BttF not current anymore? Has a younger generation replaced our childhood love for Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, and Lea Thompson? Are these actors irrelevant in today's Hollywood? Maybe so. Similarly, do you remember when TV-Land only showed The Andy Griffith Show, Golden Girls and other old-timey howdy-doody shows? Well, I found myself watching White Men Can't Jump on the Dish Network Channel 106 and realized...shit maybe I am old. I also have a taste for bad movies.

-Your mother's an astronaut.

*edit, one more link: if we could all serve our country like these men.

Friday, April 27, 2007

cool cat friday

The "-day quickie" titles imply that posts of a non-quickie nature exist. Not true. Those posts only subsist in my imagination. Sorry for the shortness. You don't really want to read eight pages of me at a time anyway.

The previous paragraph is prime example of my ADD, not going more than two sentences before becoming distracted. Or is it Alzheimer's? Anyway...

One Laptop Per Child is a fascinating company. I remember watching something on the Discovery Channel about this many years ago. Glad to see it is coming together. Maybe you ED or CS people could help them out - baby steps, right idealists? Now if only I could get that k-os song out of my head.

Monday, April 16, 2007

monday quickie

Spent another weekend in the annarbor. Thanks to chike and company again for the hospitality.

A semibusy week, not that that has stopped me from not posting before. A few quick hits for now:

-Fascinating article on Manny.
-Grindhouse is pretty indulgent and shiny. Give it a go. I hope Tarentino gets bored and actually films Machete. I'd pay to see Danny Trejo any day.


*Update - I should do more research. Well here's to Grindhouse doing well enough to get Machete released in theaters...

Monday, April 09, 2007

snoop dogg vs billO

This is too funny to pass up, apologies for the lateness. Evidently a while ago, Bill O'Reilly insulted Snoop Dogg. Snoop was not pleased and spoke his mind during a recent interview.

Here's billO's response. Give a look if you like. Or if you're lazy - he extends an invite to Snoop to appear on the Factor. Then mumbles something inane about him being a drug dealer. But what's really weird is that last smarmy line, "heh...in the ghetto" as if billO was suddenly aroused by the notion of speaking about black people. Oh how dangerous.

I don't watch foxnews anymore. That Crooks and Liars site does a pretty good job summing up what I looking for - like someone compiling just the crashes from car races.

I promise these posts will not delve into just lists of youtube clips. I won't even embed them.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

In which we are all starfuckers...

Westfailia was back in town for the weekend. So of course we all hit up the Tony's for some Friday evening fun. Two versions of a story, one true, one slightly more true:

#1 A friend comes over and tells me that Paul Sorvino is in the bar. Impressed that a recognizable actor is at one of my favorite watering holes, I go over and introduce myself. I politely ask for a photo and then let him be on his way, which was to be filming some scene, I think. We spend the rest of the night looking across at the bar imagining scenes from Goodfellas where Paul and Ray Liotta are beating the crap out of some shylock.

#2 Gimli-Akbar hobbles over and yells that Paul Sorvino is in Tony's. The Guinnesses and Jaegermisters tell me I'm in no mood to be putting up with bullshit. In disbelief I get up and stumble-shove my way through a posse of crewmembers to get right in the face of a burly gentleman in a dark suit. I demand to know if he's in the movies. He scans around with a panicked look like who is this clown? I quickly grab the nearest Asian person and make her take a picture of me and this celebrity. Walking away at the end of this 30 second exchange, I may or may not have said something about wanting to have sex with his hot daughter Mira.

Later, as we're leaving, a posse of people waited outside on the sidewalk, milling about, fawning over the brush with celebridom. One of my friends decides to yell, "Hey, I hear Robert DeNiro is at the Junction." Hilarity ensues as a mob of people rush two doors down to catch a glimpse of our bold face lie. Another polite evening marred by inappropriateness.

Photo to come, that is, if someone figures out how to use her crackberry...

Sunday, April 01, 2007

sunday quickie

In which a weekend of restraint is marred by inappropriateness, again:

-Roy Hibbert from Georgetown looks like Kevin Garnett and Warrick Dunn had a kid.

-Did anyone else notice that baseball's Civil Rights Game had only one black person on the roster? And that the Indians were playing?

-I went to a fun party Saturday night at the browntown's place. Not knowing many of the attendees, I decided to participate in a local custom of playing games while drinking. The game was Never-Have-I-Ever. As the turns rotated slowly toward me, I noticed that the statements were decidedly sexual in nature. There's a fair balance of guy to girl ratio, so I'm thinking it'd be funny and kosher to drop the: "never have I ever taken it in the butt." There's a silence, then a giggle. I looked around and all the girls were still. Finally one dude in the corner took a swig and everyone laughed in relief. Shit, this was another party where the women wouldn't be interested. It turned out to be good times though.

-"Hey babe, come check out these stairs." A cookie to whomever figures out that quote.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Tuesday quick hit

-more weekend recap: Two regrets from the weekend, the first is not remembering to take photos of paulwall face down ass up on the cement. What were fajita and I thinking? After a full 16 hours of hard work, our invested drinking resulted in immediate concern for an injured friend. Where was the callus insensitivity, the detachment from reality from one too many Macallans? Any real friend would have stopped, laughed, photographed evidence, then prodded him with a toe until he picked himself up.
The second regret is not getting to know all of chike's cool friends. The weekend was too on-the-go, after catching a first name we proceeded to be obnoxious, never spending the time to learn last names, date of births, hometowns, majors, ambitions, hopes and dreams, favorite foods and sports teams, sexual histories, and insurance information. Next time there shall be more substantive conversation.

-Sir Sidney, Sir Sidney, Sir Sidney. What is it about fatass pitchers that I just enjoy so much?

-I've been meaning to write about this for quite some time. My thoughts on steroids were that they were just another "performance enhancer." What made them different from a cup of coffee, or something as arbitrary as home-field advantage - one team having to stay up all night because of delayed flights, or a guy taking some ibuprofen because the afternoon sun gives him headaches? And what happens when we compare these enhancements cross-generationally to modern equipment, training facilities, and improved nutrition? Also, I haven't read anything about HGH being necessarily bad for your body if used correctly. Perhaps studies concerning the long term side effects of controlled use could be created before we say that these things are categorically bad. I am by no means advocating drug use, nor am I one of those all-natural veganism proponents. Just some thoughts. Klosterman presents them in an infinitely clearer manner.

Monday, March 19, 2007

In which we have a great weekend...

Thanks to Chike Miang for hosting fajita, paulwall and I in Ann Arbor this weekend for what was an amazing time. It's hard to capture those couple of days and our giddy loopy obnoxious mentality but the result was a new entry into the top 5 all time drinking spectacles. Also a big thank you to all of chike's friends - little greg, weiiii, zippy and co, evan, diana, lauren, brad, linda, chiny, and all the other asianses whose names I've forgotten - for putting up with our "fuckin' one man bands."

Friday was a "light" evening. paulwall and I rolled in to AA around 10pm, having picked up fajita from Toledo along the way. paulwall had had a few drinks and fajita joined him. I was driving and grumpy by the time we arrived. Chike's apartment was right on the strip of shitfuck stores/bars next to campus. There were people yelling and getting ready for Saturday's St. Patty's day shitshow already. My kind of crowds. Also present were 'interesting' asian drivers and that creepy homeless dude from Mulholland Drive.

After pounding a couple of homebrews (which did not taste like Guinness, per weiiii) we rolled out to Ashley's. A hole in the wall bar that turned out to be very well tapped, Brewer's Art style selection. A few pumps of Murphy's, a St. Bernardus Abt 12, and a Stone barleywine later, I was explaining to weiiii why all words do not mean anything and that the intentions of our phrases and expressions are more important. I also quietly asked Chike to inquire if one of his friend's gfs took it in the ass. Class and no class, a light evening.

On the way home, a new friend mentioned that her favorite band was Oasis. This kicked off a walking jukebox that did not shut off until around 2:30 sunday morning when paulwall broke his hand. More on that later. In the meantime, we rendered a 10 minute version of "Wonderwall" consisting of only two lines. We made up for not knowing the whole song by singing it out of tune. After some buzzkill popcorn chiken at a bubbletea place, the previously mentioned homeless guy made his second appearance. With a "GIMME THAT," he karate chopped the empty plate of pizza grease right out of paulwall's hand. We decided best to ignore and continue to ass-dance ourselves down the street. After a game of beerpong back at the apartment everyone passed out. I was ADD and do not sleep until 5:30. Thanks for the pink elephant and confetti reminder, ma'am.

Saturday morning, a bit slow. paulwall woke up on the couch downstairs and complained of his mouth tasting like balls, meanwhile littlegreg was nowhere to be found despite having passed out next to him. Me and the atown posse roll to a shithole bar and mistakenly order a Sam-I-Am breakfast. I'd just chugged a double espresso and all the queasyness of a hangover compressed itself into ten minutes. As we groggily shoveled green mess into our mouths, the bartender took pity and asked us how long we had been out drinking. Not at all, we'd yet to start was the reply. Her gaze shifted pity to confusion, why were we eating that schlock?

Hair of the dog drinks were had before we hit up a pool hall. Chike knows my weakness well. Team asia vs team whitey - final score 4:1. Very nice place, well maintained equipment, even had a three rail table. When leaving, I noticed the sidewalks outside were in great condition, maybe 15ft wide and crack free. The motorists on the streets were also impossibly nice towards jaywalkers. Chike suggested that one could walk from one end of Ann Arbor to another with a blindfold on and never be run over.

Around 1pm we attend a fish and chips party in some tall apartment. Sadly I forget the host's name. I do remember that apartment's elevator being more ghetto than the one in the Blackstone. That rickety deathtrap moved fast, the tall building swayed. The combination of fish grease, fast movement, and early morning non-drinking made me dizzy. Really dizzy. Sorry I couldn't enjoy the food there but a few Hoegarddens and a lot of poor singing sobered me up. Meatloaf, Tenacious D, and the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack were on repeat. We quickly left the party to go to some dude named Dominic's place. With best Ahhnold voices, "We have to find Dominic! It's not a tuuumor! Where's Dominic?" we chanted down the main strip. The stares we drew were met with merry laughs.

Somewhere along this walk, Chike and his friends were flagged down by two healthy looking friends. These were the only white girls we'd met all weekend. Before I could introduce myself, one of the ladies opened a package of Twix and force fed a bar into her friend's mouth, hungry hungry hippos style. fajita and I exchanged glances and walked away before anyone else noticed. We were not hungry at the time, to say the least.

Dominic's turns out to be a bar. Their specialties were large half gallon mason jars of long island ice tea style slushees. Many gallons later, chike and I are devolving into fisting jokes. "brad" spilled some of his slushy and was group forced into slurping it up from the nasty table. Further slurping would later ensue. littlegreg rejoined the party around this time as well. He's one of those curious dudes who made you feel as if everything you said was really interesting. paulwall loved littlegreg. littlegreg also had a way with the ladies, somehow convincing linda to let us throw things like beads (maybe anal, I forget) into the front of her shirt. I swear we also saw Erin at that bar. She wouldn't acknowledge our presence though. Maybe it was the yelling, maybe it was paulwall's "safety helmet" - an Irish drinking hat with a huge fake orange colored mullet coming out the sides and back. Wow was that thing ugly. Facebook the photos.

Dominic's was one of those places where every employee they hired looked like an ex-con - either missing some teeth or a large beard and too many crayolaesque tattoos. Maybe it was the "I appreciate balls but that doesn't mean I want them in my mouth" comment, but after being yelled at for the third time for being rowdy, we figured leaving was preferable to being shivved.

A few blocks later, 12 people cramped inside a sardine can sized apartment and had a Wiily good time. Tennis and bowling were meh, but the baseball was amazing. I wanted to grab a case or two, camp out there, and play a 7 game series or somesuch. Only four people could play at a time so the rest entertained themselves by passing out. chike was punished for falling asleep in the middle of the floor by receiving many an ass to the face. Linda got bored, rallied some troops, and had five people gangtackle littlegreg. Two seconds of struggling and he resigned. People sharpied his back with "I heart boys" and a large crude representation of a phallus. Clearly maturity at it's peak.

The rest of the evening begins to blur. After a while, that apartment party got kinda Wiieak and we left. Returning to the morning shithole bar, we drank the only green beer of the day. littlegreg spilled his beer here and was forced to slurp it from the table. He might have enjoyed the slurping, I was too busy asking inappropriate questions about butt sex to notice.

Bad idea Miller for making it green out of the tap. That shit is unavoidably freaky. I wonder if they just precolored the beer before kegging. Perhaps they brewed with specially engineered green grains. Is it possible to overhop a beer so much that it turns green from the planty chlorophyll? Anything to keep my mind from remembering that I was drinking fucking green beer.

Dinner was split between sliced pizza and korean food. I opted for the former. From 6-10 that evening we rocked out the chike's apartment with 21-cup beirut and quarters. A failed dance party also ensued as the place filled with more and more drunkards. Thriller baby, Thriller. During my natty light pounding people watching, I couldn't help but notice that relationships reveal themselves more over one competitive drinking game than over a 24hr period of hanging out. The happiest of couples become the bitterest of enemies and the giddiest of individuals when they have the opportunity to arbitrarily force their other to drink. Do we take satisfaction from stepping away from the norm, when there is a breakdown in the control dynamic? Am I reading too much into this? That these are only fun and games, and that heck yes, beating your significant other in any (and almost all) competition is plain enjoyable?

The shitshow continued to Main Street. Cindy had stuff to do, was sober, and drove our asses the 15 blocks. Thank you for the transportation. Seven people cramped into her car. littlegreg sat on paulwall's lap and they both enjoyed the ride immensely. "Hey dude, could you move the knee?"

chike's obnoxiousness denies us entry to the one bar on the block that does not have a 50 person line. Maybe it was his fault, maybe it was mine. He forced his way in and used the restroom before the bouncer could do his job. I was complaining loudly about why the doorman was keeping headcounts when certain patrons were obviously worth more than just one head in size. I'd caught a glance of the backside of some softball team members through the window. I might have mentioned something about them looking more like a home-run-hitting squad than the base-stealing type. I don't remember.

We wait in line for the only Irish Pub in town, I was not pleased as waiting forces me to hold in pee. fajita still insists the pub's name was "Whisky Boner." Not quite sure about that either. But the place was nicely regulated, fun diverse crowd and our server Emily was friendly. The next morning fajita happily announced, "I don't remember for sure, but I think I got a girl's number." He had written 918-2-repeating. With the line over the two and everything. It was actually the number for a cab, last four digits -2222. Nerdtacular. Anyway, we shut down the irish pub long after chike and co had gone home. Amazingly I remembered the directions he gave for the 15 block trek back. paulwall fell asleep at the bar and was threatened to be kicked out many a time by some weird emo looking bartender. Supposedly sleeping in a pub was "against code." Fuck that shit. fajita and I proceeded to have another round of oban and blacksmiths.

On the walk back, we escorted paulwall by the arms. After most of the complicated turns along the route were finished, we found ourselves outside the pool hall from that morning, three blocks away from mike's apartment. I recognize the wide clean flat sidewalk and let paulwall go. He's fine, trucking along beside us like the good little irish one man fuckin' band that he is. The next thing fajita and I see is paulwall, face down ass up, planted into the cement. His face had pancaked his sunglasses, scraped on the ground, and shifted forward with the momentum of his crumpled body.

o/|_.

Yes crude, but the fall in a nutshell: Face Down Ass Up.

The weekend had been too fun, it needed to be evened out with something bad happening. paulwall's safety helmet saved his head from a concussion. He caught most of his weight on his hand underneath his body. After trucking his ass back to the apartment I had set out to find this kid some advil. Three trips around the block and five oops-wrong-stores later, I returned with one blister pack and a slice of green pizza. I still don't know how this was accomplished. littlegreg offers to make him an ice-pack but only managed to put four cubes into a sandwich bag. That shit leaked everywhere. Everyone passed out around 330 and I'm left with ADD energy again. I clean the place slightly and line up empty cans according to height on the beirut table. 10 cents in Michigan yo.

The next morning paulwall had a fat claw, couldn't make a fist, probably a boxer's fracture. We skipped dimsum because somebody wasn't able to type phone numbers correctly into their phone. No worries, back in the Toldeo we hit up leggs and eggs at a hooters knockoff. Had a thick BLT with cheese, tasty. Rolled back into atown around 7pm, dumped paulwall off at Holzer.

Will have more details, editing for truthiness, and a paulwall update in a few days. Still trying to piece together the rock of a brain I have left.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

quick hit

-Howard Ulman, from the AP mails it in here. I'm not going to dissect the whole thing. But check out the title:
Japanese pitcher draws plenty of attention
.

Thanks for making that crystal. The rest of the article is factually correct, despite the information being two weeks to four months old. Did he really wait until two days ago to publish all this dribble?

Give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's a general article for AP use, meant to edumacate the non-obsessed baseball masses. But Ulman seems to focus on New England area related sports. I feel a thousand monkeys with typewriters unpaid blogger could do the same job.

Friday, March 02, 2007

a few spring thoughts

Quicky linkorama for the lazy Friday afternoon:

-Some of my good friends live/are stationed in Georgia. It's a fine place. There's an international food market with an amazing selection in Decatur, near Atl. But I suppose judging a state by it's food venues doesn't work as well as judging a state by it's news broadcasts. I do love them Krispy Kremes, but not that much.

-This joke is getting old. Real old. So much for fewer immature postings. Best of luck to the child though.

-That Porter fellow is now unemployed. Wouldn't it blow if somehow the Ravens ended up with an AD for JP swap?

-Not merely about Albert Gore, rather an excellent article by David Remnick. Am I still miffed by Al name-dropping his book(5x) at my graduation speech? Not at all. In fact, congratulations on the Oscar. You're now officially cooler than Three 6 Mafia in my book. Not really. Three 6 is badass.

-Daisuke, 6pm tonight. Why haven't I bought mlb.tv yet? Aside from being able to view all these games, I like mlb.tv for the refreshing announcing from each local market. I'm not saying every local announcer is a Rhodes Scholar, illuminating the world with beams of eloquent analysis. But at least they make certain assumptions of their audience, things like them actually watching the games and paying attention to the daily news reports. Rarely will some local homer pretend the audience had just crawled out of a cave and needs to be explained the infield fly rule, or talk about winter acquisitions in June, or pull a Steve Phillips:
"The key here is consistency because x-player is such a good athlete, and if you watch him play, he knows how to swing the bat and hit the ball and make plays, because making plays is what makes him great."
-Okay. So saying local guys are good announcers is specious at best. But here's a list of national guys I can't stand: Steve Phillips, Joe Buck, Joe Morgan, Tim McCarver. Please stop talking gentleman. By your voices, I feel myself becoming dumber. (Umm, I mean getting more dumberer at an increased pace.)

Monday, February 26, 2007

immature at best

"Colon progressing slowly from shoulder surgery" -espn.com

Sounds painful.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Oh snap!

New (improved!) to the blog is snap.com's overhaul of all links to include pop-up window preview of their respective sites. A great idea for search engines but does it translate well into blogdom?

Actual substance gained from seeing a two inch preview of the future site seems minimal, considering any truly interesting link would already have been clicked. Moreover, tiny windows tracing your cursor movement over links can be distracting, especially if all you want to do is truck through text. And yes, linking every other word in a block of blogness has become de rigeur, to the extent of annoyance. I will try not to do it much, nor sing out of tune.

Perhaps the marginal gain is minimal, but it does make the site awfully shiny. That should count for something.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

more brew news

That IPAish's OG turned out to be 1.054, a bit lower than what I hoped for. Primary'd for three weeks, secondary'd for three more weeks before again siphoning off trub. Now on second secondary, tertiary(?) with re-dryhopping of second 1-oz bag of splatz. also DH'd in first secondary with same.

Also ran a winter brew a month ago, don't have the exact recipe with me. Had munich, crystal 90, and others, added honey and maple syrup, hopped with cascade and warrior, then tettnang and splatz for aroma. Split pitched with WLP-german grolsh and nottingham. Will have exacts later.

This might be the only time I decide to let politics drip into this blog thing. I attended a screening of The War Tapes this afternoon. Both the film and the audience were quite interesting, to say the least. Give it a go if you've the time or inclination.

Also, resurrected from the xanga days, a brief linkorama (aka banality):
-FreeBeer
-Daisuke Blogspot
-Spy's Spice

I'll probably add these to the unused link section on the left. Not sure what to think about these and a few other new readings. Anyway, that is all. How are you?