Grammy Thoughts

  • Sting can no longer sing the unsingable parts in "Roxanne". Suck.
  • Prince was wasted introducing Beyonce.
  • Dixie Chicks?! Gads.
  • I love me some Wyclef. He and Shakira were actually a highlight.
  • The tiny in-audience stage was a horrible idea. At least as far as giving/receiving awards goes.
  • Gnarls Barkley did a boring slo-mo version of "Crazy", but it's worth mentioning for the apparent choir, which seemed to be made up of astronauts. OMG LOL!
  • Far too much Eagles by Carrie Underwood and Rascal Flats. Dear lord make it stop.
  • RIAA: "We will destroy these children if you don't stop pirating our music!" What? He actually didn't mention piracy? Huh...
  • Who the hell was that dancing for the James Brown thing? And I guess that was Mr. Brown's original cape dude...?
  • The "My Grammy Moment" thing wasn't even tragic. I suppose all the contestants were already in the record industry pipeline.
  • The DIXIE CHICKS?!?!? Huh...
  • Never really pictured Chris Rock as a RHCP fan. Then they won best rock album for that snoozer of theirs. Guh.
  • Oh, come on now... The Dixie Chicks?!?! SERIOUSLY?!?!?

Scatter Shot

Man, I keep wanting to do a conherent post one of these days, but whatever...

  • Brozo turned me on to the Amy Winehouse, and holy shit is she good! (She uses the lyric "What kind of fuckery is this?" How genius is that?) She may also be a train wreck, which adds some flavor. Lots of vids on teh YouTubes.
  • The Rocky Mountain Rollergirls have announced their 2007 schedule. Good times for cheap, right there.
  • Rod and I still swap snarky emails about the 24, but it's just not the same as our old Tuesday IRC chats. I still think I need to set up a BBS or something. I miss my boys (and my Boo).
  • That football games was crazy, eh? Good for Peyton. He can stop whining now. The commercials sucked eggs, generally, though I give the win to CareerBuilder. And Prince doing Hendrix doing Dylan for the halftime show... Surreal.
  • My BU Ice Dogs are in the Beanpot final again. They shut out Northeastern yesterday and will meet arch-rivals, BC, next Monday.
  • Check out this Desperate Astronauts soap opera. The details of it are awesome.
  • Ryan O'Neal has quite a soap opera going on in his family, too. The money quote: "He hit his own girlfriend in the head."
  • Hang on... The name of Turner Broadcasting's ad agency is "Interference, Inc."?! No wonder they dig on the guerilla marketing!
  • As far as iPod cases go, these little honeys are super hip.

There's probably more in the buffer, but that's all I can be bothered with for now.

Hugs & kisses.

Shotgun

OK, so... Sorry about the week an a half of nothing. I wish I could say I've been busy or some such, but no. Mostly I've been sitting around alternately playing World of Warcraft and watching TV while trying out new and exciting pillow-influenced hair styles.

I suppose I can blast out a short list of tidbits for you though:

  • The big news is that not only did Rod and I jump ship from my old place of employment; now Brandon has followed suit. He's working for an interesting new company, too.
  • Oh, yeah, I start my new gig today. I'm psyched.
  • Related to that, I had the best intentions to try and learn Ruby on Rails this past week that I've had off. That didn't really happen. I've got time, though. ;)
  • I did try to get right on switching my 401(k) plans to an IRA, but only got as far as opening the IRA because the 401(k) people didn't know I'd quit yet. Super...
  • Last Thursday, The Wife and I took in a matinée of Pan's Labyrinth -- totally frickin' awesome. Funny how Fascism and faerie tale allegory goes hand in hand so often.
  • Rod got my hooked up with a private torrent tracker site... Now I'm obsessed with keeping my upload/download ratio above 1.
  • Last night we mixed up a pitcher of martinis and took in the Screen Actors Guild Awards. It was generally an inoffensive evening of festivities, though I can say that some of my favorite shows (24, Weeds, ... that may be it) got robbed, but whatever. They did show Dennis Weaver in their "fallen soldiers" tribute, reminding me of the time he popped into a gas stop cafe in the middle of nowhere (aka Western Kansas) while Miracle Ed and I were having breakfast and trying to get our collective shit together at the tail end of a 31 hour single shot drive from Boston to Denver. Let me tell you, having a bunch of flatland hicks (remember, I'm somewhat of an expert in the field of recognizing and categorizing hicks) freaking out about how "that was the feller that played on that show!" really turns the surreal dial to 11.
  • Ever heard of "Toddy" coffee? Neither had I until the other day. I don't think I buy it.

I guess that will have to do for now.

Merry Ho Ho Ho!

Here's hoping everyone had a happy and fruitful holiday. I certainly did. Highlights:

  • My darling mother got me a solar powered atomic watch, so not only does it never need its battery changed, it never needs to be set either. This is timekeeping heaven for me. Now I just need to read the manual to figure out how to use its other functions. And of course, I need to get it sized waaay down for my girlish wrists.
  • The moms made out well: Mine got a cobalt blue Kitchen Aid mixer (she'd been eyeballing ours lately) and The Wife's got an iPod Nano (which is ridiculously small).
  • I got The Wife a Bella Umbrella. Without her realizing it, I noticed that she'd been talking about getting a parasol for the past year or so, so this was a home run for me. ;)
  • I also got my better half a Mac Mini, as her old iBook was having a hard time keeping up. That means I get to play with the iBook: So far I've reinstalled OS X 3 times and I plan to install Ubuntu as well (the third round with OS X was to get a partition for the linux).
  • As for me, I got some woodworking and home improvement accessories, some DVDs (namely two big time personal faves: Pete & Pete and The Greatest American Hero, and a CBC history of hockey that looks awesome) and lots of other stuff.

So yeah, materialistically, we all did pretty well. Better yet, though, we had some nice time off at home thanks to the blizzard, and yet we were mobile in time to make it down to my mom's house on Christmas Eve.

God bless us, every one, eh?

Cognitive Neuroscience And You

Who Wants to Be a Cognitive Neuroscientist Millionaire? A researcher (from my alma mater, Boston University) uses his understanding of the human brain to advance on a popular quiz show.

Another cognitive process essential for winning on Millionaire is intuition, or more precisely, knowing how to make decisions based on intuition. What if you have a feeling about an answer? What should you do with your hunch? Folk wisdom holds that on standardized tests you should go with your first impulse. Research tends to support this idea: a first impulse is more often correct than a second, revised decision. But what if $250,000 is at stake? "More often correct" does not seem certain enough to serve as a basis for a decision. How can you evaluate the true likelihood of a hunch being accurate?

This is a great read. Especially when you get sentences like this:

My neurohormones whipped from black misery to shining ebullience, saturating my brain in a boiling cauldron of epinephrine and endorphins.

Dork.

Good Things

A categorized list: Hip Hop

Geek

  • Firefox 2.0 is out and seems worth the update. I do suggest getting the Tabbrowser Preferences extension, because I hate those tab close buttons on every tab. The inline spell checking is worth the price of admission, though.
  • Outside.in (from Steve Berlin Johnson) is interesting, but I'm not sure it turns me on just yet. Not a whole lot of content for my neck of the woods so far.

TeeVee

TV Tidbits

One of my brother-in-law's best friends from Brockton is a television writer. He'd just gotten his first big gig writing for a show on fox called Happy Hour on Fox. It's a sitcom from the creators of That 70's Show and while it wasn't quite the genius show that 70's was right off the bat, we could see definite potential and each show had at least a couple laugh-out-loud jokes. (It looks like critics generally panned it, but real people thought is was OK. Typical.) Now Brilliant But Cancelled is proclaiming the demise of the show. My first clue was when my TiVo said the next episode wouldn't be recorded because it was no longer in the program guide, now I find news of its "hiatus" online and I'm more than a little bummed. I was just talking to Shawn in LA a week ago, and he was truly psyched to be working on the show and with the team involved. I'm not too worried about him -- he finally seems to be getting real footholds in Hollywood, but I was really looking forward to watching the show evolve. I guess there's the waaaay outside chance the show will actually be back in November, but nobody seems to think so. In more positive news, I watched the premiere of Heroes on NBC tonight and man, am I excited about that one.  It's right up my alley, for sure. Looks like everyone else digs it, too. Highly recommended.

Weeds

McCollum: For smart comedy, find a way to watch Showtime's 'Weeds'

In its second season, which begins tonight at 10, the show really begins to dig into emotional and social issues, from single motherhood and suburban morality to parenting in the modern world and the culture wars. In its first, very good season, it only scratched the surface of such things. There's a depth, a richness to the series now that was only suggested then.

I love this show, and enthusastically second the recommendation. The article has a recap of the first season, should you need it.

Inked Sucks

Inked's Clark North Speaks Out

I'm very bummed with what they did with the first season, as were we all, and we would not work again with the same producers on site. That's why the second season was done with an entirely different group. I don't know what they'll do this time but I hope this filming will be more positive to the art form. If not, I think I'll give up and leave.

Nice to see at least some the artists on the show realize how bad the thing is. Not surprisingly, Clark was the only person I actually liked from the few episodes I watched.

Domestic Fool

Hey Jake, what'd you do this weekend? I'll tell you:

  1. Friday, I called in sane and ended up spending the day moving a sprinkler head and getting my sprinklers fired up. Sadly, I'm already well behind the Joneses as far as the green lawn competition goes. ;)
  2. In the evening I met up with Holzie and some folks from work for one of his many sendoffs. (He joined the Marines...)
  3. Saturday, I tried really hard not to die from the allergic attack I suffered after spending so much time in the Spring air Friday.
  4. Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, I worked on a pair of desks for our office.
  5. We also found a paint color for our office (so someday soon, we'll have to remove the desks we just set up in there).
  6. Did I mention allergies suck? Gotta say the Benadryl Dreams were entertaining, though.
  7. Caught up on seven or eight TiVo'ed episodes of Veronica Mars. I don't care if it makes me a girl; I love that show.
  8. I think I went to Home Depot four times over the course of three days.

Ed was right...

When Miracle Ed came to visit he bought us Firefly and Serenity. To get me to watch it, he told me "You'll like it. You're in it." Meaning the Captain Malcom Reynolds character reminded him of me.

It turns out he was right:

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.

Serenity (Firefly)
 
94%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
 
81%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)
 
75%
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)
 
69%
SG-1 (Stargate)
 
69%
Moya (Farscape)
 
69%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)
 
69%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)
 
63%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)
 
63%
FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files)
 
44%
Enterprise D (Star Trek)
 
38%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)
 
31%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

For the record, Ed's in it, too (in the form of Jayne). At one point I turned to him and asked "How did they make a show with both of us in it?" He answered, "How could they not?"

Take a bite out of Scientology

Matt Stone and Trey Parker rule my world. Even though Isaac Hayes quit the show due to the whole making-fun-of-Scientology thing, they aren't letting that spell and end to his Chef character: 'South Park' Cooks Up Plan For Chef In Season Premiere

Details on the episode were scarce as of press time — Chef returns to town, but his erratic behavior worries Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny — though Comedy Central did confirm that contrary to previous reports, Hayes will provide the voice for Chef, however all his lines will be taken from previously recorded material.

I love it! You just know the "erratic behavior" will consist of every phrase sounding like it comes from a completely different context, making the cut-and-paste job completely obvious.

The very best part, though is the press release from Stone & Parker:

Stone and Parker are refusing to let the whole thing go, issuing a statement to Daily Variety that pokes fun not only at Hayes and Cruise, but Scientology as a whole.

"So, Scientology, you may have won this battle, but the million-year war for Earth has just begun!" the statement read. "Temporarily anozinizing our episode will not stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!"

Absolutely heroic! Personally, I feel a need for the boys to do an Orgazmo-style movie based on all the info at Operation Clambake.

Update: Isaac Hayes may not be the bad guy here.

Tattoo Tidbits

First, an ever-so-vaguely tattoo-related entertainment tidbit: Prison Break makes its comeback tonight!

The return of ''Prison Break" after almost four months is a welcome event, and the next three episodes are good enough, if not great. The hour due on April 3, which flashes back to the pre-prison life of a few of the convicts, is the best of the trio, as it provides a much-needed sense of history and breadth.

I watched a large portion of the FX marathon yesterday, so I'm all jazzed for it. Especially since it's now the lead-off hitter for 24, the best damned show on the tele right now.

For the juicy bits, Marisa has been giving us lots of good tattoo love at Needled lately...

  • First, two posts illustrate conflicting attitudes regarding inkwork in the workplace:
    • On one hand, we have Boston.com's "Visible Ink", which paints a fairly positive picture of acceptance in the white collar world.

      It is part of an ever-increasing openness toward ink that has exploded over the past 15 years. When Dr. Myrna Armstrong at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center began studying tattoos in the late 1980s, attitudes toward them were wound tightly around stereotypes of convicts, sailors, and carny folk. More recently, however, she's found that tattoos have crossed firmly into popular culture. The studies she has conducted have found that nearly 25 percent of subjects are sporting some kind of tattoo, and those numbers are not restricted to bike messengers and indie rockers.

    • But maybe that's just a coastal point of view. Closer to the Heartland, things seem slightly different, as the Daily Herald's "Tattoos in the modern workplace pose culture clash" article shows.

      In a 2001 study done by Vault.com, a research and employment information services company that profiles U.S. companies, almost 60 percent of employers said they would be less likely to hire someone with visible tattoos or piercings. Almost half of those surveyed said they would have a lower opinion of someone they work with or meet who has visible body art.

      The key word in the tattoo issue seems to be "visible." Forty-five percent of the same employers said they had a tattoo or piercing other than pierced ears. When body art is concealed, only 11 percent of employers said it would affect their decision to hire someone.

    This is something I've considered fairly carefully. Currently, the majority of my inkwork falls into the "visible" category -- I have large tattoos on both forearms, with only two others that generally get covered up by everyday clothing. When it first occurred to me to get ink below short-sleeve level (I'm kind of building my sleeves in the opposite direction of most people...) I took a moment to consider the impact it might have in the workplace. Ultimately I decided I'd be willing to wear long-sleeved shirts if I ended up working someplace that had an issue with it. At the same time though, I was making an implicit statement that I'd rather not work for that kind of employer. I've decided to make tattoos a significant part of my life and who I am. I'd much rather work for someone who understands that.

  • Marisa also points us to this article about the Sailor Jerry brand and the trend of tattoo imagery in fashion.

    Until now, Sailor Jerry has sold largely through word of mouth in the fashion community. But with the trend on the upsurge, Grasse says he has turned down licensing agreements with Nokia and a company that wanted to make Sailor Jerry temporary tattoos because, he says, those could never be authentic Sailor Jerry items.

    You all know I love me some Sailor Jerry schwag.

Whuzzup?

Just some randomness:

  • Man, it seems like Google has de-listed the BlahStuff (or at least ranked me down a ton). My traffic has dropped by more than half starting last Wednesday. If any of y'all that get regular Google hits felt like mentioning BS in a fresh post in the hopes to re-upping my Google-juice, I'd appreciate it.
  • Hey, look! It's Mars!
  • Monkey pictures are fun.
  • Started working on a new double desk set-up for our office on Saturday. Got some nice 3/4" maple veneer plywood and glued some half-inch MDF on the bottom to strengthen it up a bit. Got to use my flush-cutting router bit for the first time, but then it got all cold and snowy. Gonna treat the edges with some strips of this cool laminated oak I have, so it should give a cool effect. Photos when there's something to see.
  • My tattoo has a few spots that will require touch-up. I wonder if it's just me, in general, or the forearm location, specifically, or a combo that cause me such problems in healing my tattoos.
  • Saw Murderball on A&E. Good stuff (except for all the Dog the Bounty Hunter commercials). Zupan's the man.
  • The BU Terriers swept UMass and will meet UNH in the Hockey East semifinals.
  • My friends at the Exchange Tavern managed to shoehorn a dart board into their fine establishment. I'm excited. Now if only they'd update their web site.
  • What with Miracle Ed's visit and the fresh tattoos, we've been out of the hot box for over a month now. Time to get back on the horse real soon. Luckily I haven't slipped much (yet).
  • The biggest crawdaddy you'll ever see (thanks Brandon).

Waits on Fernwood

Once upon a time I was up late watching Nick at Nite when I tuned into the old Martin Mull and Fred Willard master series known as Fernwood Tonite. For those of you who don't know, FT was one surreal little TV show, but maybe that makes perfect sense if you consider the gents on the thing. Then magic happened: Tom Waits came on the show.

I've told so many people about this that I had begun to worry I had made it up, but now I have internet proof!

(YouTube has a ton of other great Tom Waits videos, too. Search around.)

Matisyahu's New Joint

The new disc from Hasidic reggae sensation Matisyahu, YOUTH, is available for pre-order now.

Matisyahu's new studio album, YOUTH, hits stores March 7th, Pre-Order it HERE and receive the YOUTH DUB album FREE!

(Note that they now have a USPS Priority shipping option, Da Kine, not just FedEx. Or you can order it from Amazon and skip the free disc...)

You might also want to set your TiVos:

Monday, January 16th, Matisyahu will be the musical guest on the Late Show with David Letterman.