Month: September 2005

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.

King Tom

No more zeppelin cam, please!

Over the past two nights, the Yankees have been playing the Devil Rays. The games have been hard to watch, but not because the Devil Rays were ahead for most of the two games, but because of the YES network’s constant use of a blimp-cam.

I haven’t seen every pitch of the two games, but I caught most of them and it felt like every other camera shot was overhead from that damn blimp. And I’ll admit it was cool at first, and the last time they used it tonight, when Mariano entered from the pen (they took him all the way to the mound, then cut to a close-up of Hor-Hay handing him the ball while they piped in Enter Sandman from the stadium’s PA system). But overall, it was nauseating. I’ve often said that if I had the YES Network, I wouldn’t leave my house, but if they keep it up with the blimp cam, I’m going to go postal on that blimp.

Speaking of TV, thanks to djl, I’m now addicted to Lost. For me, it’s not on the Alias level (yet), mostly because it doesn’t have a Jack Bristow or Sloane. But talk to me at the end of this TV season after real life has had its affect on the fortunes of Alias.

And finally…back on a Tuesday in May, the director of another division at work came running (figuratively) to my group and said he needed us to start some urgent project. The due date was that Friday. We put together a workable version of what they asked for and presented it to them. But they didn’t check with their people as to what other content was needed and asked us to hold off on it. It went through some major changes and while they needed it done post-haste, they took their sweet time getting their act together.

Long story short, we sent out the project to a printer last week and got boxes of the item in early this morning. As much as I bitch about the news media, at least, for the most part, they know the meaning of the word deadline.

King Tom

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.

King Tom

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.

King Tom

Some People Have Way Too Much Time On Their Hands, Vol. I

I don’t know how this guy got all this information, but the results of every Hulk Hogan match, ever:

www.freewebs.com/hoganresults/index.htm

Just glancing through it, I’ve actually been to three of his matches:

5/8/86 v. the Magnificent Muraco
8/4/86 v. Adorable Adrian Adonis in a Lumberjack Match
6/23/02 losing to Kurt Angle at King of the Ring

Actually, if you count closed-circuit viewing, I also saw his WrestleMania 2 match v. King Kong Bundy live.

Crazy stuff there.

King Tom