And it’s hard to hold a candle…

Some things about today:

-It rained for most of the day. When I left work for lunch, it wasn’t raining heavily, but it was one of those things I was thinking about- and as I stepped outside, for some reason, I had November Rain in my head. And I was just about to start singing it when I noticed there were people around. So I kept my mouth shut.

-Even more embarassing than what I almost did: Al Sharpton’s latest entry into the annals of Great American Discourse. If you’re too lazy to click, the challenger in the New York City mayoral race has unveiled his latest commercial: Al Sharpton dancing. Yup, that’s it.

I don’t know who to feel sorry for, Sharpton, the loser he’s attempting to campaign for, or New York television viewers who have to watch Sharpton shake it. At least the Reverend isn’t wearing one of those purple sweatsuits he used to wear.

-Picked up the Revenge of the Sith DVD today. Haven’t really watched much, but there is one good sign: No Ben Burtt on audio commentary. I’m sure Burtt’s a nice guy and he’s definitely great at what he does, but I’d rather listen to Jethro Tull than Burtt on an audio commentary. He just yammers on about how he came up with sounds while other people are trying to contribute to plot points. Did we really need to know that he got a sound from a three legged dog in April 1973 while George Lucas is trying to talk about Vader being Luke Skywalker’s father?

At least there’s no Burtt commentary to the Sharpton commercial, I guess.

Blank Slate

Haven’t been on here lately because of my computer. Had some kind of virus/system error and got a new hard drive. Took a while to reinstall Windows, but now I’m back up and running, which may or may not be a good thing.

Anyways, it looks like the U.S. Air Force is benefitting from some visitors from the 23rd century:

http://aimpoints.hq.af.mil/display.cfm?id=7223

Engineers here are testing a new kind of transparent armor — stronger and lighter than traditional materials — that could stop armor-piercing weapons from penetrating vehicle windows.
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s materials and manufacturing directorate is testing aluminum oxynitride — ALONtm …

Transparent aluminum? Isn’t that what Bones and Scotty gave to that engineer guy so they could bring the humpback whales back to the future?

We’re gonna have a time paradox on our hands here if someone’s not careful.

The name is Bond. Jabroni Bond.

So Pierce is out.

I’m not sure that’s a good move. And I’m not sure replacing him with some unknown serious actor is a good move, either.

The other two times they hired unknowns- Connery, Lazenby, it worked out well. Solid actors, for the most part- just too bad Lazenby got an ego trip and couldn’t stick around.

But the last time they hired a “serious actor,” Dalton’s two movies were train wrecks. They hired Brosnan, who helped resurrect the franchise and now they’re tossing him like a bag of moldy tangerines. It’s like the producers have the Lazenby syndrome.

I’m willing to be wrong, but they’re going to have to pull a rabbit out of Odd Job’s hat for this one to work.

And in his immortal words:

“aah-hah.”

News and Views with King Tom

Hey gang….

-So it’s a half game, but the Yankees are in first. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and at this point in the season, I’ll take it.

-I was looking through my computer for some appropriate image to include here to celebrate the Yankees’ return to first. Couldn’t find anything that fit, but I did find this, from the great brawl of ’98:

fight! fight!

Looking closer at the image, I have to ask, what in the world is Graeme Lloyd doing here:

fight! fight!

Looks like he’s trying to use the Von Erich claw on Arthur Rhodes. Don’t remember what Von Erich it was that used the claw-but didn’t they all? Fritz? Kerry? Curly Joe Von Erich?

-That Rivers Cuomo is one interesting fella. But if he’s happy and at peace, who am I to judge?

-For the first time, I watched an episode of Lost live. The pacing was real different than the DVD and I can kind of understand why they’re drawing everything out. I’m avoiding spoilers, so it was nice to feel what Jack was feeling when he was seeing whatever the hell he was seeing. I did notice though a number of clues and other things to made me go hmmmmm throughout the episode. Gonna be an interesting season.

Stranger in a strange land

I have to remember that on weekends in the fall and winter months not to wear anything that’s grey or red lest one of the humanoids that follows the local college football team think I also support said team.

On Saturday, I was wearing my C.G.N.U. t-shirt, and unfortunately, someone asked me if I was planning to watch the game that night. After I informed them that the game that mattered to me was over (even though the Yankees lost that day), they kind of just backed away.

The weekend was good overall, except for the fact that for the fifth straight summer, the air conditioner in my apartment just died. The damn thing has never conked out during the week when they can fix it the next day. Instead, it always breaks on a Friday or Saturday so I get to spend a summer weekend wishing it was winter.

The weekend

Went down to Cincinnati for the second half of the weekend. Caught the Riverfest fireworks shindig (well, the upper half of it anyway). For some reason, fireworks interest me more now than they did when I was a kid.

Three things:

1) Heard from my mother. Everyone’s okay. Every place, on the other hand, is a mess.

B) Like always, I tried avoiding tv news. But I had to watch a little. The levels of stupidity uttered on cable news continue to amuze me:

CNN Haircut: Chief Justice William Rhenquist died last night. We’ll bring you the latest developments in that story.

What “developments”? Last I checked, he was still dead.

“Developments” is always something that annoyed me from my time in news. It’s one of those words used when you don’t have anything new to say about a situation but still want to make it sound important.

3) Earlier this year, I attended a Star Wars convention. This is a pretty accurate representation of the experience. Click on the period at the end for more.

Getting Dramatic For A Minute

On here, I’ve kind of been ignoring the big story that you can’t get away from anywhere else.

Maybe because to an extent, I really didn’t have anything new to say about Hurricane Katrina. It’s been a horrible event and one of America’s great cities will never be the same. The lives of hundreds of thousands of people have been ruined. It will take years and a lot of money to recover.

I have family in the area, most of them out of the city, but some still feeling the effects. My grandparents live about an hour north of New Orleans and haven’t had power or water all week.

Yesterday, I found out that my mother, who was in Texas on a business trip, got a rental car, filled it up with water, food and gas, and drove to my grandparents and intends to stay with them a few days. She and my grandparents are not in the immediate area feeling the brunt of the hurricane, but it just feels wrong that in this age of global telecommunications that I can’t contact them.

I know everything will be fine, but until I hear something, I don’t know what to think.

Mea Culpa

I want to apologize for a grevious error.

In my barely-awake state writing this morning’s entry, I neglected to list among the many examples of the incompetency of Bud Selig his robbing the people of Montreal of Baseball.

To make up for this, I rip off an image provided by our network’s flagship station:

Youppi!

And for our French-speaking friends:

Je veux faire des excuses pour une erreur grevious.

Dans le mon nu-réveillez l’état écrivant l’entrée de ce matin, j’a négligé pour énumérer parmi les nombreux exemples de l’incompétence du bourgeon Selig le sien volant le peuple Montréal de base-ball.

Pour compenser ceci, je déchire outre d’une image fournie par la station du navire amiral de notre réseau:

Youppi!

Finally…weezer tix

After trying multiple times since Friday night, I’ve finally gotten through Ticketmaster’s crappy online ordering system and have tickets for the weezer show in Cleveland on October 8.

It’s part of the Foo-Weez tour, and word on the street is that they’re trading off headlining for each show. Let’s hope the Cleveland show is one that weezer headlines.

Doesn’t look like the band will be playing Columbus this go-around, so unfortunately, Weez-a-palooza ’05 may not happen.