khaaaaaaaaaaaan

This was going to be a post, keeping with my theme of essential kernels of knowlege, pretty much as an excuse to link to the short video of Jack White recording a song for the new White Stripes album but is now about how Blogger is a bully.
I clicked on the Old Blogger button, but it kept taking me to the Make Google Account section, and when I tried No, Seriously, I Want The Old Blogger option, it took me to the Ha, You Cannot Access Your Account Unless You Sign Up With Google screen. So here I am, with New Blogger. I feel like the big kid at school made me give him my lunch money, but let me think I had choices.

Jerks.
In retaliation, I'm going to keep using Blogger, just to show them.

And here's the link I was talking about.

And the new Bright Eyes video, because I keep listening to the song over and over.

because i don't actually have anything original to say...

...here's that excerpt I talked about before, from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War; this is told by a guy who made movies to boost the country's morale. Although the film, Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges, bombed initially, it was found to lower ADS (Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome) and he made several other movies before the war was over. It's a very good book, I really liked it. So here you go:

"Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges --Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of the Great Panic, when everyone else was running, literally, for the hills, three hundred students chose to make a stand. The turned the Women's College at Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall. While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten thousand, over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified. We were lucky to get there just at the tail end, just in time to see the last of the undead fall, as cheering students and soldiers linked up under the oversized, homemade Old Glory fluttering from the Pomona bell tower."

Sorry, Mary, they didn't have anything about Stanford.

color me EXCEEDINGLY DISAPPOINTED

The Mountain Goats Show (Is All Sold Out)

Am E Am E Am C G C

Since I found out, last October, that you'd be in my state
I counted the days until the show, I couldn't wait
But it was all in vain
That's been made all too plain
I spent fifteen minutes on hold listening to muzak
And though it got old I somehow still stuck with it
Casting my mind back to the morning
When tickets went on sale without warning

I was unprepared, I admit that now
Why should I have known a date and time?
How should I have known you'd get sold out?
If I could have found a payphone maybe I'd sing a different tune
But there're no payphones from here to Singapore
No one carries change for them anymore
I found a booth buried in the snow on the lawn
Little did I know that the phone was gone

A voice came on and I told her tickets were my want
And oh! I found that all my hope was all for naught
From the desperate waiting list I hope to hear
And make note for better planning, for a cell phone, next year
When the throngs sing No Children I won't be among their number
Though I thought I would, I was sure I would, last October

there's a monkey in the basement. how'd the monkey get there? how'd the monkey get there?

Because it's been a while since I've last posted, I figured it'd be just about time to blow my own horn. Although there's really no saying the horn will be blown, because anyone and everyone who wants can enter and everyone and anyone who enters has exactly the same chance of winning.
You're probably thinking: where's the link? Or explaination?

Right here.

So, yeah.
Actual update later? I've got something from a book I want to share, but the book is at work?

NOTE: Mine is (currently) the top left one. And today's entry title is taken from The Monkey Song by The Mountain Goats. Jus' so's you know.

this is going to be short, because it is late. and i am tired.

AT THE BRAINSTORMING MEETING FOR BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE:

Executive One: Have you seen that Underworld movie? We should do something like that.
Executive Two: We produced it, and I totally agree with you. Let's do it.
Executive One: Well, we've done vampires and werewolves. Vampires are always popular.
Executive Two: I like werewolves more.

THEY SLAP AT EACH OTHER FOR A MOMENT.

Executive Two (panting): I win! I win!
Executive One (also panting): N-uh! I win!
Executive Two: We could just use the same plot as Underworld.
Executive One: Brilliant! And how much should we budget for the werewolf transformation effects?
Executive Two: Nothing! We'll save millions by just using trained wolves and colored contacts!

THEY HIGH-FIVE. AND MISS HORRIBLY, SENDING AT LEAST ONE HURTLING THROUGH THE WINDOW. (It doesn't matter which. And what's with that title? It's gawdawful.)

sounds about right...

In an effort to liven things up, here's my current list of ten (actually 12 because I couldn't just choose one Okkervil River to end it with) songs to take to a desert island in no particular order.

The Fall Peter and the Wolf
Tonight Sibylle Baier
Grendel's Mother The Mountain Goats
If You See Light The Mountain Goats
I Wish That I Could See You Soon Herman Dune
Strange Machines Peter and the Wolf
Fake Palindromes Andrew Bird
Whistle of a Distant Train Ed Harcourt
The Vice and Virtue Ministry Happy Bullets
Song of Our So-Called Friends Okkervil River
The Velocity of Saul at the Time of His Conversion Okkervil River
The War Criminal Rises and Speaks Okkervil River

What are yours?

oy

I've got to make up for last night's depressing post. I'll just give you the URL for the unfinished site? Maybe you could tell me if things are all crazy or illegible or oddly phrased so I could fix them? Except for content, it's more or less how it'll be when it's done. The links should work, which is always a plus?

Click Here!

you see that slogan at the top? ignore it this once.

It's late.

I'm watching Seinfeld, and putting off writing a short story that's actually a rewrite of one I did last year and turned in to my professor (I hated turning it in because it was rushed and I hated out it turned out) so that I can show it to him come January in an attempt to get into a graduate fiction workshop he's teaching. This is the mindset I come to you with.
Just so you know.

Seinfeld, or television shows in general, are weird in that I don't notice the age difference too much: making a sort of never-never land. The difference in real life however, is that ten years seems like a tremendous amount of time. Changes that people go through in half that time can be astronomical. I don't want to get older, I really don't.
I'll know different people, I'll live somewhere else. Maybe even this blog will be a distant memory. I looked at my grandparents the other day --while my Grandma was lecturing me on not having an outline for my life, which did NOT help, faithful reader(s)-- and saw myself in their age. My hands knobbled with age, etc.

But I've got no resolution to this. It's inevitable. On a lighter note, I hope to finish my website around the middle of January. I'd give you guy(s) a link, but I just have an Under Construction page at the URL.
And things will look better in the morning, they always do.

at least the title for the new harry potter is cool

I think that I've missed my calling. I should've been in a soap opera or been a basic cable television judge. I can look shocked. Moreso, I can do it very poorly. I can also pull decisions out of a hat, regardless of any sense of the "law."
Why yes, I have been watching a half hour or so of daytime television.

three horrifying things

1. A "Global Haze" to reduce the earth's rising temperature.
2. The draft possibly being reinstated
3. Zombie apocalypse

already, he's sealed his victory as pop-culture ass of the century

Do you remember, in the Naked Gun movies, how OJ Simpson's character would constantly bumble and get terribly injured usually by fault of Leslie Nielsen? And it was often pretty funny, right? Remember?
And do you remember how he drove home, innocent as he is, very slowly on the highway while being pursued by the police? And how he killed his wife and her lover? And how the glove didn't fit? Right?
Well, most people would happily fade into the farthest part of the collective consciousness. They'd think of their two kids, who still have to go to school with other kids. They most certainly wouldn't create a sketch wherein they try to sell a used Ford Bronco because that would be in terrible terrible taste.

I read something this morning that spurred this post, and all of the above is to get you in the right frame of mind. Or something.

However awful that was, surely (SURELY!) OJ wouldn't do anything on national television. Not during prime time certainly. Because you'd think that deep down, somewhere in a part that wasn't sold to Satan, OJ would think of his kids. This is, of course, assuming that he didn't do it.
Most of all, he wouldn't reconstruct the murders, explaining, step by step, how he WOULD'VE done it. If he had. Which he didn't. No, like Michael "I will not rest until I find the real molesters" Jackson, OJ "I will not rest until I find the real murderers" Simpson didn't do it.
But the fact of the matter is that's exactly what he's doing.
The next thing you know, he'll just dig up his wife with rusty shovels that he's scratched "INNOCENT" into and demonstrate how he would've killed her. But he wouldn't do it on TV. He'd do it in the park, every hour, on the hour.

Because he classy.

just so that when book seven comes out, i can say i said it before it did

R.A.B. is Regulus Black.

easily the most absurd thing he has ever said

There's an annoying guy in my Brit Lit class who, aside from turning around in his seat to stare at whomever is talking, says inane and incomprehensible things. Today he, during a discussion of Shakespeare, suddenly put forth that the Bard was gay to which the teacher (who deserves a medal for not killing him already) replied that those sorts of reports have been made although there is little concrete evidence. He also noted that there were several biographies of late that said similar things about other historical figures; such as Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. The latter was based primarily on a photograph where he is shown in a "gay" stance, and is thus hardly basis for an entire biography. All of this is set-up for the comment for which this post is named.
So, of course, the kid said that Hitler was gay because "he kept his moustache in such good condition."
Needless to say the class couldn't let this pass as we have for so many of his other comments and people began incredulously talking amongst themselves, which unfortunately made me miss his other reasons.

I was also busy laughing with Steve.

NOTE: I would've found the picture, but I don't really want to type "gay" and "Hitler" into Google Images.

like in terminator 2!

If my hands were hit by a hammer, they would shatter and then melt and reform into my hands. Except they would be on the ground and not on my wrists where they belong. So that would suck pretty hard.
I'm trying to say that I'm outside, waiting for the bus, after getting out of Rosemary's Baby for film class and listening to the Sufjan Christmas EPs. It's very cold.
Today's been about mid-way on the "Crappy?" scale for no particular reason. Just one of those days.
I guess that's about it.
I'll probably blog again later this evening, woozy on needing to sleep. It's the last day of my nineteeth year, which is mind-boggling to me.

UPDATE:
Day=Now going all right. In 20 minutes, I will be 20. I don't really have much else to say. I'm watching Scrubs? Good times there.

EDIT:
I just now noticed the link doesn't work. Well, it does now.

how cool is that?

I just want to give a little shout-out to my friend Bob, whose movies are getting closer to actually being flimed. If you have an hour or two, I'd suggest reading Elsie Hooper in its (so far) entirety. Even if you only read a little, you'll be able to see how awesome it is.
There's no comic for his other movie, The Man Who Killed Bigfoot and then Hitler. But it has a pretty sweet title and was published, in script and serial form, on his website for a while until he had to take it down.
So yeah, I'm pretty psyched about it. It'll be fantastic to see it on the big screen.

you know what hurts a lot?

Biting your tongue really really really really hard. And not the side or the tip either, somewhere in the middle, but closer to the tip. You'd think that after almost 20 years with the same tongue I'd be used to it. Or at least I wouldn't bite it so hard it bled.
First thought upon biting tongue: "Holy crap, I just bit my tongue! What?!"

oh man oh man oh man

So. In the next week or so I'm poised to declare my majors, which is, let me tell you, pretty much terrifying. According to my advisor, I'm also supposed to start applying for grad school and graduation during my Junior year. Which is next year. Except I don't know where I want to go, and I only vaguely know what I want to do.
(Well, I know what I'd like to do and pretty much where I'd like to go, but the chances of me being able to do either is, at the moment, nil.)
This is madness, I'm not ready to be in the World yet. Who do they think I am? Some sort of person who is prepared for this?
Bah.

oook

So I was flipping around the televison and I came upon the Medical Marijuana Festival thing in Portland (or Seattle?).

I'll say this about the Medical Marijuana people: They are the reason their cause isn't really taken seriously. Yes, long-haired man with no shirt, even you. Yes, Sublime ripoff band, you too. And the speakers who appear to have dipped into their prescription before getting on stage, if you know what I mean, you're not helping either.
Actually, it's kind of sad. The guy up there now is either severely intoxicated or mentally challenged.

waiting for a customer with half a brain

SCENE: A bookstore, around three. There are many people in the store, milling about; there are several large boxes on the counter, filled with books in various degrees of disrepair. WALT is behind the counter, sitting Cratchet-like, and being pretty awesome. KATHY is off, stage right.
ENTER TWO WITCHES.

Witch, wearing sunglasses: Are you taking in books?
Walt (rising, while giving a purposeful look at the billions of other books waiting to be done): Yes, but only thirty at a time.
Witch (shocked): Thirty?
Walt: Thirty. We can only look at thirty a day.
Witch (to second Witch): They can only take thirty! (to Walt) I have more than thirty. They're from my mother-in-law's estate.
Walt (sigh): How many do you have?

The WITCH points to the largest of all the boxes.

Witch: I've got four of these in the trunk.
Walt: Well, we can only take thirty at a time. You can bring in one box and I'll count out thirty.

Enter, THIRD WITCH.

Witch (to third Witch): They'll look at a box.
Walt (with a hint of desperation): Thirty. We'll look at thirty.
Witch: Bring in a box.

Third Witch begins to exit.

Walt (strangled cry): Thirty at a time!

Enter FOOL, carrying largest box yet, overflowing with books, accompanied by THIRD WITCH. Because the counter for books waiting to be checked has absolutely no room, the FOOL puts the box on the cash register counter.

Walt: That's way more than thirty.

No one takes any notice of WALT.

Walt: So when do you want to pick these up?
Witch: What do you mean?
Walt: Well, there are (gestures to the piles of other books) quite a few people ahead of you. It's going to be a while until I can even get to these, maybe even not until tomorrow. So when do you want to pick them up? Tomorrow? The day after tomorrow?
Witch: Tomorrow.
Walt (setting paper down): Okay, I'll just need you to write your name, address, and phone number here.
Fool: I know how it is, man.
Walt: ...

FIRST WITCH, after writing her information down, removes her 2nd Look Books card; which baffles WALT, as he assumed that their flagrant disregard for what he was saying was a mark of a new customer. WALT begins cursing them all.

Walt: Okay, it'll be done tomorrow. (reaches for box)
Fool (smiling): Careful, it's heavy.
Walt (grinning, because you pander the insane): ...Thanks, I'll remember that.

EXIT, FOOL, WITCHES through the door and likely to the fiery depths from whence they came.

END SCENE.

...school?

Today gets a shoulder shrug. Part of it was okay, part of it (the unbearably pretentious film professor, who, rather than saying "watching movies" says "have screenings"; the bus schedule changing for the worse) was not. Thankfully my other professors don't seem bad, which is always a blessing --nothing makes a class harder to go to than a terrible teacher.
Today we "screened" Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I always enjoy; except the last fifteen minutes which succeeded in reminding me that not only do they seem supplementary, but they also meant I missed the 3 o'clock bus. What sort of madman ends a class at 3:15?! The next bus isn't until 4! I'll tell you what kind: The kind that wears all-black suits, has a shaved head (with bald-stubble), dual earrings, and assigns ridiculous (for that kind of class) amounts of reading. But it might be par for the course? How much did your film teachers assign you to read?
And the days I get home at 5 are the days that I have off. Not the days that I get home at 3. No, those days I get to go straight to work.
(The owner died yesterday morning; though it was no big surprise, it does put things a bit higher in the air. We'll probably hear from her daughter, who took over the managing a week or so ago, in a day or two. Payday's not for another 10 days, so I'm not concerned.)
But it is the first day of school, so things may look brighter in a week or so.