Moving!

And knee-deep in it, too. So, for anyone who might have been wondering what happened to my regular posting habits, now you know. I'd be happy to come back and write some more stuff for y'all if you could nominate someone to come down to Tulsa and move the last of my stuff for me (not to mention helping Gary get all of his down here from Springfield).

Anyhoo, things should be back to what passes for normal in Todd's life by Friday evening or Saturday. Yay! I'd kill to spend a day laying around on the couch right about now.

Absolute silliness...

...in a late-night TV commercial? Say it ain't so!

I don't even know what to say about this one, so I'll just tell you that you can watch it for yourself here. It's not one of those 30-minute infomercials, just a little two-minute spot, so I'm not asking you to sacrifice a lot of time. As a teaser, I'll let you know that it starts with "Wouldn't you love to have sonic hearing? Well, now you can!" and goes downhill from there. Sonic hearing! That's awesome! I mean, how can I get by with my normal hearing anymore? It only allows me to hear sound, whereas sonic hearing will allow me to hear... um, sound!

And to believe that I once thought the "do not attempt" disclaimer in the commercial where a Jeep gets blown off the top of an erupting volcano and then drives off untouched after landing miles away was the height of stupidity.

At least it's not raining

Hey, is today National Move Lots Of Shit Around Day? Because if by some chance it is, I observed the heck out of it. Woke up this morning and took my first truckload over to the new apartment (and signed the lease and stuff). Then I went to work, where about 90% of my job on the whole consists of 1) "move this pile of boxes over there," 2) "take these books (or comics or DVDs or CDs or whatever) here and put them on the shelves where they belong," and 3) "take this stuff over to the warehouse because there's no room for it in the store." At least I got to sit down and price/put out graphic novels for a couple of hours, because once I got off it was right back to moving things from my old place to my new one. One more load tonight, I think, but first I'm gonna watch the late basketball games finish up.

(And if you're wondering why I don't just rent a U-Haul and do it all at once, it's because I hate doing that if I don't have to. And since I have a week of overlap where I've got both places, I don't have to. I'll use Gary's U-Haul when he comes down here next week for the last few things, mostly the extra-large stuff that I can't fit into my Explorer).

A couple of amusing things I noticed while driving back and forth:

• This one I've noticed before - well, not this particular one, just in general - but I noticed it again today. While driving down 11th Street in Tulsa, I passed the "Something-or-Other Church of God." As opposed to... the Something-or-Other Church of Fish? The Something-or-Other Church of Spiro Agnew? Do we really need that qualification?
• Right around that time I also heard a commercial on the radio for the City of Tulsa Parks. Which is cool, I'm all for parks. Especially the ones with golf courses, huge tornado slides, or playground equipment shaped like giant rockets. This commercial was all about the things that the Tulsa Parks have to offer, and at the end of it there's an older lady talking about how she loves the park programs because she gets out and has things to do and so on. Then she says "and I'm even taking a walking class!" A walking what? Honey, if you gotta take classes for that...

Oh, and I hate North Carolina. A lot. And I hate them even more on nights that Duke loses and they win. grrrrrr.

UPDATE (11:30 PM) - I cannot BELIEVE that bullshit call. Now I hate Carolina even more! I hope Wisconsin beats them by 7000 points, and then after the game the Badgers grab the folding chairs from the sidelines and beat the effin' Tar Heels into unconsciousness.

Who needs cable?

Do you know what cosmic background radiation is? If you don't, don't worry, because I'm about to tell you.

Basically, when astronomers look at a part of the sky that appears to be empty, even after they take the effects of interstellar matter and interplanetary dust and scattering and so on into account, there is still radiation coming towards Earth from that point. It's there throughout the spectrum - infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, etc - but the most famous component of it is found in the microwave region. What you find there is actually photons that are left over from the Big Bang - the billions of years and bajillions of miles that these photons have crossed to get to our planet have redshifted them into microwaves. It was the discovery of this radiation (the accidental discovery, by the way, which is an interesting story in itself) that helped to turn Big Bang Theory itself from an intriguing notion into a commonly accepted "fact." (Among scientists, anyway, and if you want to talk religion go see Hank.)

"Great, Todd," you're saying now, "thanks for the science lesson. But what does that have to do with me?" Well, I'll tell you that too. Turn your TV on. Fiddle with it (change the channel, shut off your cable/satellite, whatever) until you're on a channel full of snow. Go ahead and make the obligatory Poltergeist joke, get it out of your system. Now, look at that snow. About 1% of that interference is caused by this very same cosmic background radiation.

So next time you're bitching about how there's nothing on TV, remember that you can always just change the channel and watch the birth of the universe.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair. ~Sam Ewing

Yes, I got a haircut tonight. And yes, I'm losing my hair as well, but that's not what I'm here to talk about, because the world doesn't need another balding man crying about the cards life dealt him. It's just hair. Get over it and move on.

What I want to talk about is tipping your hairdresser, or barber, or stylist, or whatever it is you call your particular hairperson (I call mine Aimee, because that's her name, but that may not work for you). Tipping for a haircut bugs me. Now don't get me wrong - I'm not one of those cheap bastards who doesn't like to tip. No, I spent years as a waiter, and so I'm a fat tipper who never thinks twice about it. In restaurants. For a haircut, though, it's a bit of a different story.

First of all, as far as I know there's no "accepted" tip scale for haircuts like there is for food. And there really can't be - I've known (and continue to know) a few people in my life who cut hair for a living, and some of them have made crappy wages and relied a lot on their tips while others have made a pretty good salary and so their tips are really just an extra unexpected bonus. So that makes it a crapshoot to begin with. I don't want to be thought of as cheap (especially by a cute girl/fun friend/good kisser like Aimee), but I also don't necessarily want to throw a wad of money at someone who's already making a lot more than I am when they just spent about 5-10 minutes on me (I'm a no muss, no fuss hair guy). You know?

Then there's the fact that no matter how good your particular person is, they just flat will not do your hair the same way that you do. So when you look in the mirror after getting it cut, you're not really seeing what it's going to look like the next morning when you climb out of bed, shower, and do it yourself. What looks great when they do it may not look so hot when it's up to you and your mirror - or, conversely, what you may not think looks that good upon getting out of the chair may be perfect once you fiddle with it yourself.

But the kicker is this - your hair never looks its best right after a haircut anyway. A haircut is just one of those things you have to grow into a little bit, unless you're rich enough to get it cut exactly the length you want it and keep going back every week or two to maintain. Which most of us aren't. So if you're trying to tip based on how good a job they did, it's hard to judge. Well, maybe if you have long hair it's easier, because an inch more or less isn't as noticeable as it is on a short-haired guy like me. But in my case, I see it as being a lot like tipping your server before your food even comes - you kinda have an idea what to expect, but you just don't know for sure.

Thankfully, I know the girl who does my hair pretty well - which you might have guessed from the "good kisser" comment - so right now it's something I don't really have to worry about. It's just something that was on my mind on the way home tonight, so I thought I'd share. Which I have. Now if you'll excuse me, me and my itchy neck have a date with the shower.

Richard Cheese is cooler than you

Yes, boys and girls, it's time again to find out "who's cooler than you?" And the winner this time is Richard Cheese. Now, some of you may not have ever heard of ol' Dick (your loss) and are thus wondering why I'm making this call. Well, I'll tell you.

• He plays Vegas-lounge-style versions of songs such as Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Brain," Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up," Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher," and the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia."
• He heads a band called "Lounge Against the Machine."
• He and the band sell t-shirts, panties, boxers, and more, festooned with such catchy slogans as "Behold the Power of Dick" and "I Y Dick."
• He has a song (Disturbed's "Down With the Sickness") on the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack, and that's one kick-ass zombie movie. If you haven't seen it yet, what are you waiting for?
• He lives and works in Vegas, which I'm sure is a lot more interesting than the lives most of us lead.

Still not buying it? Go to his website, download a clip or three, check 'em out, and then come back and tell me I'm wrong. I dare you. Go ahead, I'll wait...

Back already? See, I told you. More fun than three midgets in a tub of pudding. I rest my case.

crash boom bam

dark thundering beasts
stampede across the night sky
on their backs comes spring

...

And Robot Chicken is the coolest thing on TV okbye.

A Saturday Afternoon Reminiscence

When I was a kid, I had two great friends named Travis and Chad. The three of us lived within a few houses of each other and did just about everything together for a good number of years - we started growing apart in about eighth or ninth grade, and by the time we graduated we were down to just-say-hi-in-passing status. But before then we had a lot of fun, and one of the things we used to do was play night wiffle ball.

With three of us, it went like this: there was a batter, a pitcher, and a fielder. We used my driveway because it was the flattest one, and the batter stood right in front of the closed garage door. The pitcher stood at a mark on my driveway that was also used as one of the three-point-line markers when we'd play basketball, and the fielder stood out in the street. Three strikes to an out, three outs to a side, three sides to an inning with the players roatating, five innings to a game. Other than the good old-fashioned strikeout (which was always accompanied by a great deal of razzing, because it's just flat-out weak to strike out in wiffle ball), the only other way to make an out was for the pitcher or fielder to catch the ball on the fly. A batted ball that didn't get by the pitcher was the same as a foul ball, one that got by the pitcher but landed before the street was a single, one landing between the near curb and the middle of the street a double, one landing between the middle of the street and the far curb a triple, and one landing on the other side of the street was a dinger - but these could still be caught no matter how deep, because we found that the regular robbing of home runs added a lot of excitement to the game. There's nothing like taking certain runs away from a friend, especially if he had just absolutely hit the snot out of the ball.

The way we determined what was fair and what was foul was tied in to the way we had enough light to play at night. The light on the front of my house was good enough for the batter and pitcher, but out in the street it was pretty dark. So what we would do was get two ladders out of my garage and set them up on the far side of the street in the grass to act as foul poles. Then we'd run big fat bright yellow extension cords out to each ladder, and those showed up quite well enough against the grass and pavement to act as foul lines. To finish it all off we'd plug in a couple of those adjustable garage lamps that people use on their workbenches and to work on their cars, attach them to the top of each ladder, turn them on, and voila! Wrigley Field West (although this was back before Wrigley had lights, if you want to be picky about it).

Looking back, it's a little surprising that nobody even once complained to us or our parents about the bright lights and us yelling in the street in the middle of the night all summer long. Of course, most of the neighborhood had kids and so they were probably just used to it all at this point, because all of us used to get into all sorts of shenanigans at all hours - our wiffle ball games were nothing compared to, say, the simply epic games of flashlight tag we played. A dozen or more kids running around in the dark, some of them with flashlights, well-planned assaults on "homebase" to free captured prisoners, loud boisterous ambushes, trees and even rooftops regularly coming into play when the chase was on... those weren't nearly as regular as the wiffle ball/twenty-one/horse games, though. You'd think that sooner or later, somebody would have yelled "just give me some freaking peace!!!1!" and shaken a clenched fist at us before retying their bathrobe and walking back into the house muttering under their breath about kids these days, but it never happened. I had a pretty crazy cool neighborhood back then, and I'm sure I'll talk about that sometime. It was like growing up inside of an archetype.

Anyway, I was thinking about old school nighttime wiffle ball earlier today, and it made me want to play again in the worst way. Maybe this spring I can figure out somewhere and someway to set up a game, because we always had a blast. I guarantee you Gary would be up for it. Find a third who has a house, and I think it's gonna be on.

Five things I did today

...that you probably didn't.

1) Had sushi for breakfast.
2) Dug through a box of newspapers from April of 1912 (the sinking of the Titanic).
3) Found the very first issue of Playboy in a box at work - not the same box as the Titanic articles - and read it on my lunch break.
4) Stopped at the driving range on my way home and just crushed the ball - I mean, some of them were getting out there about 310-320.
5) Washed a load of laundry consisting entirely of chef coats.

All in all, that's a pretty good day, even with the stupid laundry thrown in. And it's not over yet, as once the coats are out of the dryer I've got a hot date with my couch and we're gonna watch a bunch of episodes of 24 together. Go get 'em, Jack.

yummy yummy yum

It's funny sometimes how life can hand you a little break just when you need one. Of course, life slaps you in the face with a dead eel just about as often as it hands you a break, but it's still nice when that break happens. I could use a few extra bucks right now, what with moving soon and maybe missing some work in the process of helping Gary bring his stuff/car down from Springfield. Not to mention that I'm still not totally caught up from my expensive winter (new transmission, week and a half of vacation). And lo and behold, the bank calls me up and says "come play chef!" and I get some shifts this week and now I have plenty of money to move. And to buy a bunch of stuff I need, like another bookshelf and another DVD rack and new towels and soon a new computer. Awesome. Thanks, life.

So, this week at the bank we offer for your enjoyment:

Appetizer
Italian Sausage and Portabella amuse bouche

Entree choices
- Smoked Tenderloin Napoleon - grilled polenta round topped with braised arugula, grilled tomatoes, and hickory smoked tenderloin of beef, served with Oregon truffle sauce
- Lobster Ravioli - cold water lobster tail meat minced with smoked gruyere cheese and encased in homemade pasta, served with wild mushroom sauce
- El Dorado Cobb Salad - diced avocado, bacon, carrots, cucumbers and tomato with Maytag blue cheese, hardboiled eggs, and grilled chicken atop a bed of lettuce with champagne vinaigrette (spa/healthy entree)

Dessert choices
- Chocolate Molten Cake - warm, gooey-centered chocolate cake with creme anglaise and white chocolate straw
- Fresh mixed berry plate - sprinkled with Grand Marnier and powdered sugar

Good stuff. Especially the napoleon - hoo, boy, is smoked tenderloin a weakness of mine. Of course, with all this good food sitting around, for our own lunch today we were boring and made sandwiches and munched on Pringles. Go figure.

Selection Sunday

You’ve got everything except one thing: madness!
A man needs a little madness, or else...
–Anthony Quinn in “Zorba the Greek”

The field is set! The seeds are in order! Printers across the country are spewing out reams of brackets! Millions of people are filling them out! Tens of millions of dollars are preparing to change hands! God bless the NCAA Tournament.

First of all, as an Iowa fan, I have to give a big shout-out to the selection committee for inviting the Hawkeyes to the dance. Iowa did a fantastic job in the last few weeks of the season of regrouping after the loss of their star player and showing that they could still compete, winning five in a row (including the upset of Michigan State) before finally losing to Wisconsin in the Big 10 semifinals on a ridiculous, off-balance, buzzer-beating three pointer. I still believe that this is Alford's last gasp, however, and unless something amazing happens and he leads the boys on a Cinderella Final Four run I think he'll be looking for work come April. He's had six years, and they've all been uninspiring. The program under Alford just isn't at the level that it should be, given Iowa's resources and long history.

I'm not going to go all Dickie Vee here, because there are plenty of talking heads out there who will spend the next four days analyzing "bracketology" to death. And I'm not going to give you a list of my picks, either, because those are for earning me money. You're big enough now that you can make your own decisions and then deal with the consequences. But after watching most of championship week play out and looking over the brackets, here are a few quick impressions:

• Keep an eye on Washington. They're the best team that you know nothing about.
• Don't count on Illinois. Seriously.
• Don't count too much on the Big 10 as a whole, really. I don't expect a total collapse, and I'd sure like to see Iowa make some noise, but the conference just isn't what it used to be.
• The ACC, however, is as good as advertised. They're almost a NBA division. You could do worse than relying on a few ACC teams to make a run at the title.
• The SEC isn't too shabby either. Florida, LSU, and Alabama have been sneaking under a lot of radars. They'll make some waves.
• As will the MVC. Don't underestimate these guys, it's a quality conference and they have a habit of screwing up brackets on almost a yearly basis.
• The Syracuse region is just sick with depth and talent. Whoever comes out of that alive is going to be battle-tested and ready to face the pressures of the Final Four.
• Oh my gawd, are there going to be some upsets this year. Parity is the name of the game in college basketball, and the first round is thick with intriguing matchups. And after the smoke clears from that, the second round could be even worse.

And, well, OK. As a service to you, faithful reader, here are five "little guys" that bear watching:

• Penn (13). Finished the season on fire (16-1) and they've been here before. Boston College, their first oponent, is struggling of late.
• Wisconsin-Milwaukee (12). Also on fire (17-1), also with tourney experience.
• Creighton (10). Another team with loads of experience, this one from the dangerous MVC.
• New Mexico (12). Finished with nine straight wins, and Danny Granger is a force to be reckoned with.
• George Washington (12). Took Michigan State and Maryland down on successive nights in December.

With that, I'm off to fill out my brackets and then surf the online pools. I know quite a few people with money living in their wallets that's just dying to come live in mine instead.

roll dem bones

I'm not usually much of an internet quiz-taker, but cool people like teapotgirl and Binah and Verlinda are doing it so I figured it had to be worth doing. Or maybe it's just a starved and desperate cry for attention. So anyway, yeah, it's a fun quiz that will make you laugh. Unless you happen to be dead inside like my good friend Porkchop.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

You are the rare, the overlooked, yet incredibly useful dodecahedron: the d12. You are a creative, romantic soul. You often act without thinking, but make up for your lack of plans with plenty of heart. You easily solve problems that stump others, but your answers tend to put you into even deeper trouble. You write long, detailed backgrounds for all your characters, and are most likely to dress up as one or get involved in cos-play. You can be silly at times and are easily distracted by your own day dreams, but are at the end of the day you're someone who can be depended on.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled day.

Take that, Michigan State

The word is fight, fight, fight for Iowa
Let every loyal Iowan sing
The word is fight, fight, fight for Iowa
Until the walls and rafters ring. (Go Hawks!)

Come on and cheer, cheer, cheer for Iowa
We're gonna cheer until we hear the final gun
The word is fight, fight, fight for Iowa
Until the game is won.

Speaking of Iowa kickin' ass, by the way, check this out. Whoa. Respect. How strange.

In other news, I got the first season of Carnivale on DVD today! Yay!

Wow, that's a lot of blood

Movie Review: Dead Alive

I have company coming down from Springfield tonight! Yay! However, that means that I'm not going to be able to get as deeply into this movie as I had possibly planned on doing, because if I don't get this out of my system this evening then who knows when I'll ever get back to it. Tomorrow's Friday, you know, and it's supposed to be an amazing weekend here in Tulsa. And the ol' short-term memory just ain't what it used to be, let me tell you, so I'd better get after it now.

First of all, I'd like to apologize to Peter Jackson for waiting so long before seeing this movie, because it's been floating around out there since the early nineties. I've seen it in video stores and heard it mentioned about a thousand times, but it seems to me that somewhere along the course of my life I was told that it wasn't worth wasting time on. Usually I don't pay attention to comments like that unless they're coming from someone whose taste in movies I really trust, so I dunno. Maybe he was high. Maybe I was high and just imagined he said it. Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. Whatever the case - sorry, PJ. I shoulda trusted you.

Basically, what we have here is yet another twist on a zombie movie. The "Rat Monkey of Sumatra" is brought in from Skull Island and placed in a zoo, where it promptly bites a woman. After what may be the most tasteless dinner party ever put on film, she dies. Apparently, however, she's not too fond of being dead, because a few short seconds later she's rising up from her deathbed to tear the head off of her attending nurse. Now the insanity begins in earnest. A gang member gets himself Bobbitt-ed, a couple of zombies make out, their mutant baby runs rampant through the park, zombies get hypodermic needles shoved up their noses, a pile of disembodied entrails tries to get in on the flesh-chomping action, the kung-fu priest kicks some ass, and so on. (Although it's hard to say "and so on" when chances are you haven't seen anything quite like this before.) Finally, it all culminates with an enormous party gone horribly awry, which leads to the Greatest Lawnmower Zombie Massacre In The History Of Ever. Five gallons of fake blood per second at times. Seriously. Look it up if you don't believe me, but I'm always right. :op

Sounds horrible, doesn't it? The thing is, somehow it's not. For one thing, it's such an in-your-face obvious attempt to offend (while still making you laugh - think Family Guy with lots of blood) that you can't take it too seriously. For another, it's an amazingly black parody of the whole horror/gore film genre, and if you're a fan of the genre you'll discover that it's a pretty intelligent one to boot. And it's so ridiculously over the top (as most of PJ's movies end up being in one way or another) that in the end you just have to grin and let yourself become one with the madness. It's like... well, imagine if the Evil Dead movies had a baby with Heathers, and then that baby grew up to be a zombie. On crack. That's as close as I can get, folks. You have to see it to truly believe it, and see it you should.

Four popcorn boxes out of five.

Peter Jackson is cooler than you

"Congratulations!" you exclaim. "You've just posted the eleventy-three billionth blog entry about the Lord of the Rings movies! You win the Ronco egg juicer *and* the Ginsu steak peeler! Call to claim your prize within the next twenty minutes and you'll also receive a free case of Lee Press-On Hair!"

Well, this post isn't about the Lord of the Rings movies. So shut up.

Nor is it about Meet the Feebles, although that movie is one of the greatest displays of sheer tastelessness ever - with puppets! I mean, come on, a knife-throwing frog addicted to smack? A bulimic hippo going postal with a machine gun (firing live rounds, by the way, because PJ couldn't track down any blanks)? A homosexual fox bringing down the house with his rendition of the song "Sodomy," complete with statue phalluses spraying bubbles? That's beautiful. Jim Henson is still rolling in his grave.

It's also not about Heavenly Creatures (amazing), King Kong (stoked), the rumored future production of The Hobbit (waaaaaaay stoked, if it happens), or any of his other works in particular. It was prompted by last night's late-night viewing of Dead Alive, and I'll probably toss a review of that up a bit later, but it's not about that either. And people need to stop calling it Braindead. It's Dead Alive. Get it right. But I digress... no, this is just a friendly reminder. Like Ben Folds says, "there's always someone cooler than you," and Ben always knows what he's talking about. Today's person cooler than you is Peter Jackson. Sorry.

See? I told you this wasn't about LotR. Legolas may be teh hot, but you'll just have to get your fix elsewhere.

Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper sucks

Or, at least, the 12-pack I bought this weekend does. It's flat! What kind of person wants to drink flat pop? What kind of company sells flat pop? Nasty. So if anyone out there wants about 10 cans of this disgusting stuff, you're more than welcome to swing on by and pick it up, free of charge. Although I wouldn't mind if you brought me some pizza in return.

And yes, I said "pop," and I said it because it's right. Take your "soda" or "coke" or "tonic" or "cola" to another blog if you don't like it. And if you're one of those people who uses the hideous redneck monstrosity that is "co-cola," I swear to God I will turn this internet around and drive you straight back home.

Well, I guess it's not Captain Trips

So, I stayed home from work today because of this freaky little bug that moved in on me at some point yesterday afternoon. Nausea (but not to the point of porcelain worship, praise Jebus), lethargy, achiness, etc. Even my hair hurts. Gah. The damn thing probably snuck up on me while I was distracted by that incredible showdown at Doral, which was pretty much your textbook example of an instant classic. (For an example from another sport, feel free to check out the 2005 Capital One Bowl. Go Hawks!)

I'm not complaining, though, because:

• it feels like I'm over the hump - I guess spending the day on my ass wrapped in a blanket and drinking apple juice did the trick;
• I had the chance to set this blog up, which I had thought might have to wait until after my upcoming move;
• I got to watch the Cubs' first televised appearance of the spring, a 9-4 drubbing of the Texas Rangers, which started my viewing for the year off on the right foot;
• that Phil-Tiger matchup was almost worth getting the funk to begin with.

It does mean that I'll have to work longer days for the rest of the week if I want a full paycheck next week, and maybe even work a few hours on Saturday, but that's ok too. I mean, when you work in the world's most funnest used bookstore, it's not like being there is something you dread. "Oh, woe is me, forced to spend all this time amidst two million books, half a million comics, thousands of CDs and DVDs and videos, and boxes upon boxes full of hidden treasure." Yeah, that really sucks.

Hello, world

And so another baby blog is born.
More later. I have to play with some settings.