Monday, July 30, 2007

My tea has a uvula!



No one thought this was funny at Flickr. Jerkasses.

Of course it's not as disquieting as the time I found a face in my pudding, but still, it's at least a little unnerving.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Putting the blah back in blogging

Yes, I haven't written a post in almost two weeks and haven't been commenting in my usual places. No, I haven't died or joined the circus. I just don't feel like blogging these days. Actually, I hate this blog these days and loathe even thinking about it. I haven't been spending that much time online, but recently I've been hanging out at Flickr quite a bit. Why? I don't know.

Meh. Bleh. Thosd nwhef wch h=chih[osidhc08ehc0I

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Books, books, books, and more books

Several weeks ago Sherri got me to sign up for this site called Goodreads, a social networking site for book geeks. I hadn't done anything much with it until recently when I started adding all the books I knew I'd read. The problem is that I've gotten rid of a lot of books that I've read, plus there's all the library books. Who knows what I was reading ten years ago? I don't. Ah, but I did write them down. Problem? Well, yes, there's a problem. You see, I wrote all of these books down in the old journals I used to write in almost religiously.

From my last year in high school until couple months prior to starting this blog, I kept a journal. I have a milk crate with 21 volumes in it. There's four or five thousand pages of juvenile whining written in a nearly indecipherable scrawl lurking in that crate. Flipping through these things looking for book titles I wrote down is fairly unpleasant because the contents are alternately embarrassing and depressing. Occasionally there's some good stuff, but mostly it's just junk. So I don't know when or if I'll be able to go through all of them to get the book titles. I managed to get through maybe three volumes over the past few days, but I really don't want to go through any more any time soon.

I've got around 475 books posted on my Goodreads page already. I've read a lot more than that I'm sure, but unless I remember them, it's unlikely I'll ever find out what they are unless I wade back into the depressive verbal swamp I keep in that milk crate.

Monday, July 09, 2007

I can't wait for the movie version

I think The Tale of the Mad Feces King is the greatest piece of literature ever written in the English language.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Not coming to a theater near you

Sometime last week I put up a two more very short stop motion videos up at YouTube: one is color and the other is black and white.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

10-4, Good buddy!


Yes, it's yet another post that deals with stuff I found while cleaning out the rat-hole I live in.

The photo over on the left is from a Radio Shack catalog from 1980. What fills me with glee about this item is that they basically admit that it doesn't work in the description:
Explore this new, not yet fully perfected technology NOW!

It's like they had some extra CB radio parts laying around and didn't know what to do with them, so they slapped together a bizarre computer peripheral.

The only thing online I could find about someone actually using this thing was in an archive of some old Usenet posts:
I remember working (read: tinkering ;-) on a Model 1 in High school (as it was abandoned by everyone once we'd gotten 6 shiny new Model 4 machines) and it had a TRS-80 branded peripheral called the "Vox-Box." It had a Citizens-Band microphone hooked into (I'm guessing) an A-D converter that hooked onto the expansion buss. I actually got it "working" but noticed that the recognition wasn't the best, and IIRC you got maybe 20 words max. The included program let you "teach" the computer digits 0-9 & a few other commands (Save/Load/etc.)

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Filth!

I'm still cleaning. I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel, but that may be death rather than completion since I've probably done irreparable harm to my respiratory system after breathing in loads of dust and mold.

And speaking of filth, while cleaning out a desk drawer, I found a not quite safe for work postcard of a girl spanking a naked guy. OK, fess up; which one of you filthy perverts gave this to me?

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

More archaeology

Since the previous post went over so well [note: sarcasm], for my next post I was going simply type the word poop 376 times, but I was inspired to do something else. I can always save the poop for later.

Jeff over The Phantom Tollbooth has written a post about a Science Fiction movie he did a bit part in during the mid 90's. Now I've never done anything cool like be in a movie (home movies don't count and neither does my right arm appearing on YouTube), but once I got to be on a movie set. Well, actually I had a job where a movie had been filmed seven or eight years previously.

It was summer and fall of 1997 and I got a job as a temp at the school for snooty rich girls. The movie that had been filmed there was the wretched Dudley Moore/Daryl Hannah romantic comedy, Crazy People. And despite the fact that the movie had been shot there years before I got there, there was still plenty of evidence that it had been a movie set. When we were cleaning out old storage areas I found complete screenplays, a Paramount interoffice envelope, a shot list, and even a photocopy of a storyboard:



The movie isn't all that good, like I said. Dudley Moore's character plays an ad exec and the ads that he comes up with when he's losing his mind are funny, but not enough to suffer the rest of the film. So, to save you the trouble of watching Crazy People, here's the funniest thing in it: