I agonized posting this picture for a day or so because Picayune is really meant to be an open letter to my friends but then I recalled that I never promised it would be a kid friendly. This bumper sticker was too funny and I had my digital camera with me so I couldn’t resist capturing an example of Austin’s puckish nature.
One of my favorite actors in science-fiction movies. Not only has he appeared in many of these great and no-so-great flicks, but he has the awesome distinction of being the only performer “killed” by the Terminator, an Alien and a Predator. However, he’ll always be the scene-stealing jerk, big brother Chet in Weird Science.
I bet many of you never knew this bit of trivia about him. Back in the 1980s, Bill released an rock n’ roll (or new wave) album as a member of Martini Ranch. His band only made the one record and I lucked out scoring it on CD since it has been out of print for years. To this day I still laugh at his vocals on the song “Reach.”
Keep up the great work Bill! Looking forward to your next movies. Maybe he can team up with Bruce Campbell to stop an alien, undead horde.
Pretty fitting to see this movie on its 25th anniversary because I remember all the buzz around the playground back in 1981. Personally, I think Animal House launched the teen-sex-gross-out film trend but Porky’s kept up the momentum and is one of templates many others emulated. Even the shower scene is parodied in contemporary shows such as Family Guy and The Man Show (I didn’t say good shows). Oddly, I never got around to seeing it until now.
When I was in seventh grade, some kids I knew got to see it in the theater and their reports seemed to make it sound funny. Of course they were only re-telling the key scenes (the girls’ shower, the streaking, measuring body parts, etc.) and when you’re 12, tales of naked women automatically have your attention, even if the humor of the scenario was embellished.
It’s hard to believe this movie was ever a hit and had two sequels since its appeal wanes once the audience is over 25 (it had a low budget so it probably made a profit more easily than its competition). The overall story arc involves a bunch of high school students (actors in their 20s) getting even with a nearby strip-club owner, aka Porky. Meanwhile the main plot is held together poorly through intervals of other R-rated hijinks and dramatic interruptions of Fifties anti-semitism or parental abuse. It then culminates with the genre’s expected victory of the underdogs but it’s the helpless over the powerful and corrupt, not the classic slobs defeat snobs.
For those of you who were born after 1985, watch the uncensored versions of the movies that were the bright spots of a very vulgar, yet hiliarious genre:Caddyshack, Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds. Pre-1985 citizens, don’t bother revisiting this flick. Your tastes have evolved and improved, hopefully.
Finally! A worthy successor to my iBook G3. I figured that the iBook’s successor wouldn’t be out much later. How much later? I don’t really know, the whole Intel transition for Apple is an ongoing matter that I’m not privvy to know until it’s public knowledge through official debuts, press releases, media events, so on.
These MacBooks look pretty cool with their black or white plastics and built-in iSight cameras. They’re about an inch or more wider than their predecessors. I hope to see one in the next few weeks. Then I know I’ll want one if it fits comfortably in the backpack Somara made for me (it has an inner pocket that used to store my 5300c, now my iBook yet it was too small for the PowerBook G3).
Some may say the 60G hard drives are rather puny if you want to install Boot Camp on it. For me, a portable is an electronic dayplanner, checkbook, ledger, rolodex, correspondence device and web browser. In an emergency it’s a photo editor. I can’t think of any Windows-based piece of software I must have on it to carry out these functions. It’s the other reason why I dismiss my friends and co-workers’ whining over the video-chip set being underwhelming on any portable. Desktops and PS2s are for games, portables are for productivity.
I couldn’t help that joke from Superman II. Here’s some progress on the front yard we’ve made. That’ll keep the HOA junta off our backs a bit. The sod in orange would be the two pieces we bought last week that survived and has new buds poking through. The sod with the black triangle is the piece that bit it. It wasn’t in great shape yet I thought we could water it health like the other two. No luck. A waste of $1.29 at Lowe’s. The red areas are the sections we’ll be expanding upon over the weeks. We’re just not take a blanket approach over the whole yard because it’s expensive. We’re going with a combination approach. Sod for the large, dead patches. Watering, plant food and weeding for the areas we can coax the existing grass to expand into. It won’t be pretty nor easy, then again, a $200/month water bill is worse for the Earth in my opinion.
The happy couple after Natalie says yes.
The final member of my Marquette Circle of Friends is getting married in the near future. I guess that’s the inevitable goal when one is engaged. I received this photo and mail on Saturday morning but waited for permission from José to post it. He never answered it. Too bad, so sad, I’m doing it anyway since I scanned his personal site, nothing new since the premiere of The Sopranos.
Helen, Paul and I discussed it at some length. We have to work out the logistics of being there for the wedding. Course we don’t have any details yet but the Silders have two sons under 10, this will require some coordination. I am personally hoping the shindig will be in the Orlando area, where José and Natalie live. Then we can stay at the Nickelodeon-themed Holiday Inn! I think it would be a great in-person introduction for TJ and Jack (the Silders’ sons) to Uncle Maggi and Aunt Somara (or Sam, not sure what will stick in their memories). According to Helen’s explanations, it will finally prove to the boys I am their parents’ age.
Back to José and Natalie. We’re all excited for him. I know getting married has always been important to him since our days at Marquette. I for one was never keen on it but the joke’s on me I suppose. Oddly Phil and I got married before José did, not like I was ever in any race with this expensive and tricky endeavor. (I treated it more like a game of dodgeball, then again, there weren’t prospective brides knockin’ down my door when I was in my 20s.) He met Natalie some time after our 2005 Vegas trip. Or maybe he had an initial meeting with her before then. I know he didn’t mention her. There were more discussions about another woman in Tampa who wasn’t working out. That’s the PG version of the conversations too.
Anyway, I remember marriage being a bigger deal to José than me. It used to worry me too because he used to be very overweight. Let’s face it, very overweight people rarely get their first picks with relationships, unless they’re terribly wealthy (Roseanne would still be living in a trailer park with her original husband and Newt Gingrich would be another angry Republican with three chins). I feared he’d marry the first woman who really paid attention to him. Again, another PG version of what we in the clique would usually say. José deserves a 21-gun salute for having discipline, losing the weight (since 2003) and staying focused until he met Natalie. Believe me, there were a couple close calls named Isabelle and Darlene. There was even a tentative wedding with Darlene!
Have any of us met Natalie? No. But José never met Somara. Sonia and Lee did so there was an approval from others I trust. It would’ve been nice to seal the deal with a hat trick nailed by a Marquette friend (more of my friendship with Lee is Austin driven). I hope to meet her because she’s awfully interesting on paper; a professor at UCF and in new media thingies (he told me about her students making a video game). Somara had a couple phone conversations with José, maybe I’ll have such luck with Natalie. Being an Apple employee, I have plenty of questions for her regarding her field. I think I can sell her a kick-ass Mac, ditch the Smell (aka Dell) she brought into José’s house. Besides, José said she keeps trying to make excuses of why she should be allowed on to his G5. Ha ha ha ha ha! I had Somara weened on to a Mac well before we moved in together. Now that I think about it, I was the bigger problem since I couldn’t afford a good Mac for a while.
Update: As I was wrapping up this story, I checked my e-mail since I hadn’t all day Sunday (very tired from working at the coffee shop). José said I have permission to spread the news and picture. Orlando is the tentative destination. They’re paying for the wedding themselves. Obviously he proposed Las Vegas but that has been shot down by Natalie. She wants a church wedding so no legalized gambling for the bachelor party.
From the EPSN story here.
Even a big hockey fan such as myself had no idea this place existed. Even if it did, I would conclude that it would be in a larger city where hockey is very popular such as Boston, Minneapolis or New York.
Hopefully the new home for the US Hockey Hall of Fame will work out. It will never exceed the NHL one in Toronto and to many Americans, such a place is as important as a US LaCrosse or Socialist Politicians Hall of Fame. But if it only needs 30,000 visitors a year to break even, then I think it’s a worthy cause to have some kind of tribute to American accomplishments in hockey; the Miracle on Ice Team of 1980, Brian Boucher’s five consecutive shutouts, Phil Housley’s points, Joe Mullen’s 502 goals, so on. I could stomach the future section dedicated to Mike “Lady” Modano in time.
Yesterday was my friend Jeremy’s birthday. It’s up to him to disclose his current age, I think I will only state it for celebrities, children and the dead, because they can’t fight back!
It’s a special and exciting time for my friend, D&D player and computer tech superior. He recently left his position from Apple (he was a MacGenius in Houston and Austin) to start his own businesses. Not a typo, plural. His first one is pretty cool. A data recovery service called Heroic Efforts. I know people are rather cavalier with their data and then volcanic when they lose it. Seems to be a lucrative thing for him. He even recently saved the data trapped on another friend’s iMac. The other venture is starting to gel with our mutual friend (and D&D player) Adam. They’ve started their own software company.
Meanwhile, we all celebrated at Fuddruckers. He received the new Players Handbook II, cards and general teasing.
When we were at Lowe’s picking up the low-wattage bulbs and ceiling fans, the paint department grabbed my attention with this Nickelodeon section. Pretty cool yet timely. I know my friends Lazz and Nelson’s children would like this. Not sure if Paul & Helen’s kids have outgrown Spongebob. It would be cool in my house but I think some of my guests would have difficulty using the facilities with the garish colors or Spongebob’s vacant expression staring at them.
Ta dah! That picture of a new ceiling fan in my living room serves multiple purposes for the site. First, it’s a demonstration of Somara’s skill with tools, electrical equipment and reading the manual. I could’ve done it but it would’ve taken longer, she’s the one with more experience on the home repair front so I defer to her with those matters. I still write the checks though. I also helped by assembling the blades while Somara hooked up the other elements. Second, the fan is there (and another will be installed into our bedroom later today) with those better light bulbs that last for years and use less energy to lower our electric bill (they give off the light of a 60 Watt bulb but only use 13!). I already signed up for Green Mountain’s 100% wind powered-based electricity but now those bulbs should lower our monthly bill, which also dovetails into improving out carbon neutrality score. Third, we had to turn off the power circuit to the living room for several hours to do this. Picayune and KMAG’s server is in the living room so the site and stream were done Monday afternoon and early evening. Oh, you didn’t notice. I guess you won’t notice when I have to take it offline again for the additional fan in the bedroom this Tuesday. (Maybe I should sprinkle my site with entries referencing body parts to gain traffic as the author of Mythstory jokingly stated on May 4th.)
I know I should’ve reported the outage sooner. Monday was too exhausting. By the time we completed the fan’s installation, we rushed out to install three pieces of sod on the front yard while there was still sunlight. It’s progress on my lawn to shut up the Jacobian HOA. After the sod, carpet-bombing of the fire ants (my least favorite invasive species to Central Texas after Republicans and Developers) and cleaning up the mess; we rewarded ourselves with Rudy’s BBQ for dinner. Definitely an unholy temple for the vegetarians. All the fresh air, exercise followed by great food meant watching the rerun of Futurama put me to sleep. I did manage to answer a couple phone calls before passing out on the couch!
Anyway, the ceiling fan was part of my larger plan to lower our footprint on the planet. Earth Day came and went plus Al Gore has a new documentary coming out. Talk crap all you want about the guy. At least he can actually write his own books without a ghost writer unlike JFK and the current chimp in the White House. (I know I promised neutrality on my site, forgive me but Al’s not running for office so he’s free to promote the causes close to his heart which his 2000 handlers wouldn’t let him pursue.) Back to my point. Around Earth Day, Somara pointed me to a web site that did a rough estimate of how many Earths were needed to sustain the 6.5 billion people based upon my lifestyle. Admittedly, it’s not to the letter in accuracy. Even the site admits it, their math is more forgiving of how much you may actually be gobbling up. I’m to the left of the curve but still scored pretty badly for how much I used (almost five earths needed, compared to the average American’s six and a half). A couple of the things I was dinged on can’t be avoided in my opinion: if flying to Las Vegas once a year is bad, would driving there be much better with the emissions from my 10-year-old VW Golf? The closest city the site offered was Phoenix which is in a desert. I think Austin would have a better score. I did better on the Carbon Neutrality score from the Gore site (it’s concerned only with Global Warming, not the bigger sustainability picture). This prompted me to replace every commonly used room’s bulbs with the long-lasting ones which use less power while giving off the same amount of light. Now to wait and see if we can get our power bill to be more reasonable.
Next step? Long-term saving for either getting a new hybrid or a used diesel car to run on biodiesel.
According to the logs for my stream, as of 12:23 AM, KMAG played its 500,000th song!
I knew it was coming up and had been monitoring its progress ever since I missed out on it hitting 400,000. I updated KMAG last Monday with new songs so I saw that it would happen before the weekend. I just lucked out by remembering to check the log earlier in the evening. It had less than 60 songs to go to achieve this. There were a lot of great songs leading up to 500,000 too. A solid mix of tunes in my collection from the years sprinkled with new releases from Elefant, Vines, Missy Higgins, Subways, Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs and Jules Shear.
What was song number 500,000? Drum roll please.
“Surfin'” by William Orbit, from his new album Hello Waveforms.
Pretty anti-climatic for most of you since he’s not very famous, unless you know that he co-wrote/produced Madonna’s hits “Ray of Light” and “Beautiful Stranger.” Don’t hold that against him though, it probably made enough money for him to do more of his intelligent, impressive Electronica.
On to 1 million songs played. How long will that take? Based upon the current pattern to get to here, between three and four years give or take a couple weeks thanks to Central Texas having a lame power grid and hopefully the Mac Mini the stream is on won’t suddenly die like the iMac it started on.
This is a quick history lesson for my friends who don’t live in areas with high Mexican populations, and numerous Taco Bells don’t count. What is Cinco de Mayo exactly? Contrary to its popularity and title looking like the Fourth of July in English, it isn’t Mexican Independence Day, that’s in September.
Back in 1862 the French invaded Mexico to put their guy Maximilian in charge, but that’s another story. The US couldn’t do anything about it since we were pre-occupied with American-upon-American violence during the Civil War. So French forces arrived and made their way to take over in Mexico City unopposed until May 5 (1862). Somewhere along the way, the invading army was defeated in battle by a ragtag group of Mexican forces (translation, peasants conscripted into fighting). This didn’t really make much difference afterwards as it proved to be only a setback for the French; Mexico was still defeated later and the French ruled the country through a puppet until 1868.
This victory is celebrated because it was (and still is) their only victory against a foreign army.
Due to more exciting entries, this event had to a wait a while but I would like to share with all of you readers to let you know I’m trying to do my part in the War Against Noise. Once again some schmuck posted spam into the Picayune. It wasn’t easily seen since I stumbled upon it in the Gaming section which seems to be a constant target. The best theory why is from my friend Adam; the word gaming is commonly used in Google searches so that’s how my site it getting pestered. The more baffling part is why do these people bother and why did they waste the energy to post a bunch of gibberish in the Comments section? In the past it was porn, sexual-aid drugs and real-estate scams. Then again, it could’ve been some Pentecostal spammer writing in tongues!
Out of irritation, I finally dug around to discover where the heck Commnets are really stored. Seems they’re in an invisible folder per subject. Once I found them I purged the junk out with the UNIX skills Apple paid ACC to teach me. I thought about putting in a plug-in that will do comment moderating (in English, it means I would see all comments in advance to review and approve before they are posted) but doing the housekeeping seems faster.
For all practical purposes, the 2005-06 NHL season is over for me. The Flyers managed to win the Friday game, tie the series at 2-2 to foil my prediction of a 4-1 series beating but they returned to their usual form of letting the Sabres control the next two games; a 3-0 shutout in Buffalo concluded with a 7-1 asskicking in Philly. The team was lucky that the fans didn’t storm the rink for a public lynching with how poorly they played. Thanks to the screw up between Dish and Center Ice, the final insult was on OLN so I missed the horrendous first period which gave the Sabres a 3-0 lead. I had pretty much given up and started watching Sunset Boulevard (recorded earlier on TCM) instead. My team began the season looking so great but the injuries (Primeau, Johnsson), their lack of speed on defense and this ongoing malaise of “showing up” 30 minutes late in the game doomed them to their first round playoff exit.
Now it’s time to use the PS2 with NHL 2K6 and/or NHL 2006 to revise the outcome of the season for my own personal reasons.
Meanwhile, what will the Flyers do until training camp in September (a mere four to five months away)? Hopefully Ken Hitchcock will remain as coach. It wasn’t his fault and isn’t a case of the team no longer listening to him like Vancouver’s big casualty Marc Crawford or LA’s Andy Murray. Next season does look better with all the youth (Richards, Carter, Umberger, Niitymaki, Dimitrakos) and strong experience (Gagne, Knuble, Johnsson, Pitkanen, Handzus). What to do with the albatrosses we’re stuck with: Hatcher, Rathje, Forsberg (yes, him, he’s just a Swedish version of Eric Lindros or Bill Walton), Therien and sadly Desjardins (his game was off all season). I can only hope Forsberg retires like Kapanen plans to. The salary cap will give Clarke a few million more to maneuver with but we have to find a way to ditch these lead-footed defensemen. We also need to regain multiple scoring lines. It was exciting to see Gagne and Knuble have career-breaking goal totals but the opposition can focus their defensive efforts there and then you’re crippled.
The other dilemma is now who to cheer for to the Cup. I think I will wait until the next batch of teams are eliminated because there are too many pros and cons for such a decision. I just don’t want it to be a repeat of the last Stanley Cup which had two teams I disliked. Tampa for beating my Flyers for the Eastern championship and Calgary for a lousy clutch-n-grab playoff series.
Today would’ve been my grandmother’s 100th birthday. I decided to dedicate my site’s banner to her which is the least I could do, she was pretty good to my brother and me. Even if we weren’t her only two grandchildren, she’d still think the world of us. I only wish that I got to know her when she was younger and I were older. Huh? I wish the current (or older) version of me had a chance to speak to a younger version of her. I have much better questions to ask her about her life during the decades I’ve read about, especially matters pertaining to the Roaring 20s when she attended university (was The Great Gatsby a popular book then?). The last 20 years of her life were a medicated-induced haze accompanied with the dementia from aging. This made Grandma a real pill to be around. Being a teenager/college student only compounded the friction.
It was also pretty fitting that Grandma’s zodiac sign being Taurus, she was stubborn (or bull-headed) all the way to the end of her life. Despite the stereotype of a silly astrology matter, she was very generous, supportive and financially clever in her own Pre-WWII mindset. We couldn’t have gone to college without her and Grandpa and for that, I will always be grateful.
