Jesus Is Tragic

So I'm feeding my boss's cats and one of the system administrators' cat this holiday weekend, and they both have HBO On Demand, so I've been catching up with Season 2 of Deadwood. Tom Nuttall's got hisself a bicycle, about which he says, memorably (approx.)

My bicycle can traverse boardwalk and ravine with equal aplomb; anyone who disagrees... sucks cock by choice!

Ain't that the truth. And then Bullock's step-son dies. So. The guy who plays Wolcott (also known as the guy who played the coward Jack McCall) sure is a motherfucker of a motherfucker-player.

Had a pleasant Thanksgiving with the family last night (though a postprandial cup of coffee at like 10:00PM gave me nightmares and panic attacks all night). My dad has this story that he tells about when he was in boarding school, in which this friend of his orders a teach-yourself-hypnotism kit off the back of a comic book or something, and the guy actually learns how to hypnotize people effectively enough that he's able to have some fun with some of their friends in the dorm (incidentally, this has gotta be the only time something purchased through the mail like this has not been a ravenous disappointment). So he hypnotizes a guy to believe that he's got a pair of sunglasses that'll let him see through girls' clothes, and the guy follows this one girl around for a few weeks wearing a goofy pair of sunglasses, and, you know, he hypnotizes some dudes to bark like dogs, etc. But the piece-de-resistance is when he hypnotizes this big dumb jocky guy to think that he's a log, and then... that's it -- he can't snap him out of it, presumably, as my dad explains, because a log can't see or hear or anything. The guy had to be brought down to the infirmary and eventually to the local hospital to get zapped or gassed or whatever to bring him out of it. And eventually he's totally fine and everything, but it was a tense three or four days, apparently. So I always bought that bit about a log not being able to communicate, but last night I was thinking about it a little more and it seems a bit implausible that this meathead is so deeply in tune with the concept of "logness" that he becomes completely comatose. I bet it was something deeper and creepier that happened, like some neural switch that my dad's friend accidentally toggled in this guy's brain. Anyway, moral of the story: Not. Getting. Hypnotized.

So it's looking like I might be getting a cell phone -- my mom gets some kind of special deal if I piggy-back onto her Verizon plan, so I think I'll probably be doing that pretty soon. If that's the case, I'd need to start paying for my own Internet, so I might want to sign up for one of those trifecta dealies that Time Warner does where you get cable modem, cable TV, and VoIP for like $100 a month. If you work it all out that's basically what I'm paying now, but without the cable TV. I'm oddly excited -- up until a few weeks ago, I was pretty goddamn sure the cell phone was bullshit, but I've been paying attention to how much fun my friends seem to be having snapping photos and hooking up and storing each others' numbers and all that, and I do understand that when in Rome, etc. So I'm giddy.

On the RMS-fanboy front, in case M-Biddy or someone missed this on Slashdot, Bruce Perens relates an incident of beardo hellraising at, I think, some UNESCO function:

I humorously remind Richard that he and I both have immunity as delegates, and he responds "You mean, I should have shot that guy Kramer?" Kramer is the CompTIA representative who comes along to these things to relate an pro-software-patenting and generally anti-Free-Software viewpoint which gets Richard very steamed up. There's a laugh, and I explain that our immunity probably doesn't go that far.

I saw the Harry Potter movie with Devin on Tuesday, and it was okay, you know. Not as much vision, let's say, as the one that Cuaron directed, but it's fun and exciting, and Ralph Feinnes sure does a fucking good job. That guy who plays Harry Potter, though: Not. A good. Actor. Tonight I'm going to try to see the Sarah Silverman movie with Tom and K-Rod. Also trying to throw together a dinner party tonight with The Rase and some friends. No luck as of yet; we'll see how that goes.

Good Morning, Heartache

You're like an old friend,
Come to see me again.

I went to The Game this weekend! It was me, Devin, Maggie, Tom, Ted, Katie, Dan, Emma, Katharine, Previn, Nate, and some cetera. I'd never been to this or any other football game at all, ever, and I hadn't been back to campus (as far as I remember) since graduation.

We arrived in New Haven at around 9:00ish, I think, and stopped off at Rudy's (across the street from 123 Howe where I lived the summer after junior year) for drinks. It was a real mad-house, and New Haven was absolutely goddamn freezing. I think there's something wrong with my boots -- my toes were like ice the whole weekend whenever we were outside, and my socks would be wet whenever I took the boots off, even when there it hadn't been raining outside. Maggie said, helpfully, that I should get myself checked for diabetes. But I digress. Devin and I broke away from the group for a while to take a walk around campus. We talked about what it would be like if we sort of jumped back into student life after having been in the working world for two and a half years; I still find it hard to believe that we (or I, at least) made it all the way through. It's sort of like a four-year pressure cooker. At the same time, though, I think people can pretty much adapt to anything; I never really felt like I couldn't handle it at any point of my college career, even when I actually couldn't handle it. Anyway, we all got totally blasted and eventually returned to Ted's house and conked out.

The next morning at around 10:00 AM we headed out to the tailgate, which is this big binge-drink that happens before the game actually starts. I tagged along with Previn while he said hello to a bunch of his friends at the Harvard half of the tailgate; I was hoping I might run into some of my Harvard "friends," but none of them seemed to be there. We ended up grabbing some gross little hamburgers from the Yale Dining Services tent -- the staff recognized us, which was nice and unexpected. I miss having an unlimited supply of gummy (yet fiber-rich) cafeteria food. The tailgate was a little dispiriting, since it was so chock-a-block with assholes; the Yale Heavyweight Crew team, for example, was having a "homeless party," replete with a trashcan fire and a bunch of douchebags from Greenwich, CT who'd slashed up their leather bomber jackets and sewed patches into their corduroy pants. I took a picture for evidence's sake but it didn't come out.

A cold morning in the Elm City

At around 1:30 we hit the stadium. Half-time was just finishing up and Yale was ahead 14-3. I tried to follow the action on the field, but I was so cold and it was so far away that I ended up just watching the clock wind down. No funny pranks or anything this year as far as we could tell, though some Harvard kids managed to lure Handsome Dan over to their side of the stadium, and the campus police had to go retrieve him. The fourth quarter finished in a tie, 24-24, and during overtime Yale fudged two or three plays and Harvard was able to score another point or something; we left before that happened. Pictures follow:

The new Handsome Dan inflatable: Wrinkly

The Yale Bowl, 180 BC

A happier group of fans have I never seen

At one point, this guy in front of us a few rows down just put his head down and started puking. He and his buddy were eventually herded away by security, but afterwards people would keep walking through the puke like they weren't seeing it was all over the goddamn ground. We kept yelling at them, "You're walking in puke! You just stepped in vomit!" But they never learned. Turns out that guy wasn't the only puker -- the tunnel we used to exit the Bowl during Yale's last-second choke session had like four pukes in it. Boola boola!

It was already getting dark as we walked back to campus from the Bowl; we headed over to Master Krauss's residence at Silliman for a little alumni reception. I crapped in the dining hall bathroom, which brought back some memories. Dean Flick stopped by for a chat while we were all reclining in the Master's common room. Apparently he thought I'd been dating The Rase all this time; I set him straight on that one. After Master Krauss kicked us out, some people wanted to "see the new couches in the dining hall common room," so we went over there, but there were no new couches. Some people went to this sushi place called Miya's to drink "sake bombs," which I think are shots of sake mixed with a half pint of Japanese beer. Katharine and Emma and I ditched out and went back to Rudy's, though I did take a picture of a swordfish at Miya's.

Don bites the bullet

Real or really really real?

Later on, in front of Yorkside Pizza, Katharine and I saw this girl sitting on the curb who looked borderline vomitous. We were going to offer her some help, but Ran, who'd showed up out of nowhere, alerted us to the fact that the Ford Explorer that the girl looked ready to puke on had D.C. plates and was actually packed with Secret Service. "If she throws up, they can handle it," he said. I'd hope so.

We played Mafia at Ted's house that night; the Mafia took the initiative by eliminating one of their own during the first night, which totally threw Ted for a loop. It was a very long day. I still feel kind of strung-out from being consecutively pickled. But, you know, when in Rome...

I got home late and drunk from a work-related party last Thursday and found the following message on my answering machine -- I couldn't even make it out completely at the time and I just decided it was a wrong number. Well, I just sat down and transcribed it:

Hello, how do you do? Do you notice that a lot of Spanish still have that itching powder, like, in the schools, they have 'em a lot and they don't like the teacher or something. They'll throw it on 'em, that white itching powder. Like in Dodge High School in uh... and John F. Kennedy in the Bronx. They don't like the teacher or the substitute or something, they'll just throw it on 'em all day long, they think it's funny. Anyway, this is a random phone call. Have a nice day. Bye.

Hmmm. Not clear what this means.

On the way home from CT we stopped off at a rest stop on the Hutch and we bought some gross things for lunch. While I was waiting on line to pay, though, I caught a glance of myself from behind in the security camera monitor, and it turns out I have this huge bald spot right in the back of my head. Not like a thin part that's exposed by combing my hair a certain way, but an honest-to-god bald spot. Jesus. I don't want to put any of that hair tonic shit on my scalp; if this is what Mendel had in mind for me, then so be it. But maybe Mer was right when she said I should find someone to marry me before I lose all my hair.

Cheese Lice

Devlin brought over two choice little ironic movies last night. The first was called Funky Monkey, and it was about a trained chimpanzee assassin that's rescued by his handler (Matthew Modine, who plays Alec McCall with remarkable skill, considering the character is apparently, not kidding, a black ops commando with the IQ of precocious 7-year-old) and teaches a fatherless little boy how to win at football. Not kidding. Highlights of the movie include

• The chimp actor's propensity to finger its nipples absent-mindedly whenever it's not doing something else
• A bumbling security guard's off-hand joke about having to take a job at ZIT (Zoology International Technology) because he didn't have a college degree -- if you have a college degree, chances are you're not gonna think that's funny; if you don't have a college degree, chances are you're not gonna think that's funny
• Matthew Modine's character literally crippling / murdering a whole bunch of dudes in fairly gruesome ways -- skateboard to the teeth, thrown into a bunch of buffet tables and chairs, whacked senseless with a fiberglass surfboard.

So that was good.

The second had been shipped to him along with the first, for pretty much no reason that we could discern. It was an animated version of the movie Ben-Hur, refocused, by Good Times Entertainment (of Quigley fame), so that it dwelt a whole fuck of a lot more on the Jesus shit in the original novel by General Lew Wallace. Best of all, though, Judah Ben-Hur is voiced by Charlton Heston, who sounds a whole goddamn lot older than the little Jew on the screen. Heston gives an interview that's included on the DVD that consists of a bunch of responses to what must be questions by some interviewer (though you never hear what they are), edited together in a series of disorienting 30-second takes. A choice segment (approx.):

This story is a classic. Whenever they produce a film or a stage show out of it, it plays around the world; millions of people see it... Why do I think this story has endured? One reason... apart from many others: Whenever they show the film, it plays around the world. And it keeps coming back.

Another great part was late in the interview he's talking about how great it is to work with the middling assortment of voice talent they'd assembled, and he cuts a noisy, heedless old-man fart. Like, "frrrrrp!" Tom and Devstar thought it might be somebody shifting around in a squeaky chair on the set, but I'm gonna stick to my guns. T'was a fart.

On Tuesday, T-Bone's friend Alex had gotten me and Ted tickets to a taping of The Colbert Report, so we checked that out and it was super fun. We had to wait on line for a real goddamn long time, but once we got inside, Colbert was real nice and the taping of the show itself was a marvel of efficiency. They literally do a single take for practically everything, and there was a bit with audience participation (the Bring 'Em Back / Leave 'Em Dead face-off) that they taped during the warm-up that was ready to go and on the monitors at the time they taped the actual segment like 10 minutes later. Since we were in the front row (the theater's tiny; only about 100 seats), I saw that Ted was visible in one of the shots. Tom claims that he could see himself, too, which, I think, would have meant that I'd be there, too, given the order we were sitting in (actually, come to think of it, maybe not...). I wanted to check when the put the clip on the web site, but it doesn't seem like that was one of the ones they picked. Stephen took some questions from the audience at the beginning of the show, and my only regret was that I didn't ask, "Can you give Marc Maron a job?" The production staff was real serious that we be really high-energy, lest we kill Stephen's "buzz," so I was worried about putting him off his game. Probing questions from the audience included, "What do I need to do to get a job writing for your show?" and "I heard you used to be in an improv comedy group. Is that true?" Jesus fuck, people.

So Stallman mentions his (former?) girlfriend on his 'blog sometimes, and I think I found some pictures of her. She's not half bad-looking, considering she's a Bride of Beardo, eh?

Yesterday, on a whim, I bought the Misfits album American Psycho at Best Buy, and it has this great song on it called "Hate The Living, Love The Dead." I'd forgotten how much the Misfits sound like HEAetc., esp. with regard to the sort of fast, straight-ahead drums and well-articulated guitar. There was a different Misfits album (think it was Famous Monsters) playing on some speakers at the store, and when I asked the clerk he said they didn't have it in stock, but he also mentioned that Michale Graves has a solo project he's working on that I should check out, so I did -- I'd forgotten until I got to his site that he's a real contemptible Republican nut-job. So, you know, there's that.

!Mi hermana y mi hija!

I'm watching a murky, rambling Spanish movie with The Rase called Sex and Lucia. The back of the DVD box says it's supposed to be "the most erotic movie ever made." Now, I'm not saying I didn't "pop wood" during the mother-daughter porno-actress jerk-off scene, but come on. Seriously. Another critic called it "intensely erotic," which, like I told The Rase, is the last way you'd describe something that actually was intensely erotic. Those film faggots.

Making a lot of progress in Call of Cthulhu, though I pay for every step forward with a hissed curse and a thrown controller. Someone on their bulletin boards was complaining that the game doesn't stack up well against Eternal Darkness; they called it Mythos-Doom, which I thought was pretty funny. I do agree, though, that Eternal Darkness is probably more faithful to the Lovecraftian ethos of futility, madness, and incomprehensibility, even though it comes in a brighter, shinier package. CoC gets all the historical details correct -- and visually, it's spectacular -- but its treatment of the... viscera of the subject matter is a bit shallow, basically a selection of relevant passages from some well-known texts. One gets the sense that the designers and voice actors didn't fully grok the material. There is, however, a fairly awesome scene in which Jack awakes to find a shoggoth slurming and slorming across the ceiling towards him: "Oh, fuck," says Jack.

Maggles flew out this week from L.A.; we homphed things and chugged things. She flew back this afternoon, but she'll be back next week.

Working on projects, feeling good. I ran with Tom today and didn't stop once; talking makes the run go better, for sure. Seriously thinking about getting some new-fangled phone-cable-internet dealies; a cell-phone, too, since everyone's on me about that. Everyone's riding me.

The Fire Next Time

So the Halloween Parade itself was kind of a drag -- against Tom's urging, we walked over there from my office, and it turned out that Ted was on the other side of the street, unreachable because the cops had closed off the entrance to the West 4th St. subway. The place was totally thronged with people -- pushy, awful, ugly people -- to the extent that you couldn't see the individual people marching in the parade, only the giant-size floats and costumes. Granted, those were pretty sweet: lots of Burton-esque papier-mache skeletons; this Mothra-like thing made an electrifying appearance; and Webster Hall had a float full of naked ladies, none of whom appeared to be chicks with dicks. After about an hour, we got tired and bored and forced our way across the street into the West Village. I had a terrible burrito at Burritoville. Just awful. Getting home was difficult, too.

"JAYNE COBB HAT" arrived as promised, but a few days too late. It looks ridiculous. According to a laminated card included in the shipment, I am Jayne's Hat Brigader #89. Or #39. Can't remember.

Tom's begun an epic game in which I am a contender. The rules are here.

On Sunday I went to go see the movie Paradise Now, starring Palestinian Clive Owen and Palestinian Holly Hunter. The movie was great -- a little depressing, mind you, since it is about religious zealots waging intractable war against each other over an utterly undesirable repulsive piece of land -- but everyone is quite good, with and without beards. Katharine bailed after the movie, but I swung by Degraw and Ted and I went out to eat at Los Pollitos Dos, which I'd written off as not being that good because their burritos (my barometer of quality for Mexican restaurants, for better or for worse) are not super good. But it looks like everything else on their menu is super good. So Ted and I talked, laughed, wept (a little), then went home and drank grapefruit juice and gin, which is pretty tasty.

And then this weird little thunderstorm happened.

Katharine'd planned and executed a killer birthday party for Emma on Saturday at an OTB that was practically located on 53rd & 3rd, though on the inside it looked like every other OTB in the world, which is to say, a cross between an airport and a hospice. We rented out a room and ate chicken things and bet on horses for like three hours, which is really fun, though I lost every single goddamn time. The final race of the evening included a horse named Sleazebiscuit. Surprisingly, he neither won, placed, nor showed.

Last Thursday I went to go see Emma's dad Jon Katz do a "reading" from his new book on dogs (no Hellmouths in sight) at the Barnes & Noble near my apartment in th' Slope. He's got a great presence and it's always fun to hear him talk, but it looked like there were people in the audience that kind of thought of him as a dog guru, including a woman sitting directly in front of me who was wearing what looked a like a blue prison jumpsuit and had a real serious wispy moustache -- the kind where the hairs are sort of translucent but they're fuckin' long, bra! She looked a bit like Scorpy.

The Rase is away on business basically all week again. I hope you guys will come over and hang out so I don't go crazy with loneliness and fear. Still having trouble with the truckbed segment in Call of Cthulhu. Send food / water. Kthx.