Category Archives: Idle Chit-Chat

I guess Internet Radio counts as well

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For the record, I just stopped listening to the Charger game on Internet radio. I turned it off with about two minutes to go in the third quarter, right after the Raiders intercepted.

The Chargers only score happened during a server timeout.

Follow-up:
Apparently it was at about one minute to go in the third quarter that the interception occurred, at which point the Raiders had the ball deep in San Diego territory. I turned off the game, deciding at that point that sleep would be more fun. I awoke the next morning to discover that soon after I turned off the game, San Diego had intercepted the ball right back. They went on to score two touchdowns (benefitting from a bizarre rules interpretation by the referees) and won the game.

I now attribute the server error that prevented me from hearing their first score to “curse interference” — it was such a slam dunk for them to score that the universe had to stop me from listening for a moment to allow it to happen without inviting untold destruction.

Thanks!

The New Bond movie – 10 seconds too short

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Those of you who have seen the new James Bond movie, “Casino Royale”, probably already know what I’m talking about. There is a sequence where 007 pops over to Miami, follows a Bad Guy into an exhibit called BodyWorld, violence ensues, and then our hero is off again to the airport to drive a tanker truck remarkable for it’s spryness while loaded with aviation fuel and which is also a convenient exception from “Bond’s Law”: anything that can explode will, if a bullet comes within ten meters.

Whew! As most of the critics have pointed out, that sequence was just too much for too long. What they needed was a little break in there. One critic (I forget which) went so far as to say, “what that scene really needs is a shot of a couple of guys looking at the plasticized dead people.”

But there is no such shot. It’s quite possible that I’m in that scene somewhere, but my featured “guy looking at things” foreground role now lies on the cutting-room floor. While I’m disappointed, I imagine that the actors with speaking roles in that scene are far more disappointed. I think the original intent was to really take advantage of the plasticized dead people for atmosphere, and so they filmed a lot of stuff to give a good feel for the weirdness of the exhibition. Actors portraying a local news team were interviewing the creator of the plastic people as he walked through the exhibit, and things like that. (You can still hear a bit of Gunter’s voice in the background.)

In the end, in an already long Bond movie, there just wasn’t time for all that. In the middle of a long Point A -> Point B -> Point C -> ad infinitum sequence, there just wasn’t time to stop and smell the latex.

As a side note, in the airport scene there is gunplay and terrorism going on on the runways — police cars with flashing lights, etc, and apparently the tower controllers didn’t notice, as planes were still taking off and landing. The last time airport personnel were so incredibly stupid was in one of those Die Hard movies, but at least here it was just to pull off a moment of cheap drama. The Die Hard flick’s plot depended on hundreds of people in responsible positions being mind-bogglingly stupid. No, thousands. In fact, every pilot on the east coast, every person in the FAA both past and present, and every member of every security agency must have had the IQ of a rutabaga. That movie sucked.

Breathe, Jerry. Think happy thoughts. The bad movie is gone, now.

I enjoyed “Casino Royale” quite a bit, actually, once I got over the ridiculous opening title animation. It is grittier than previous Bonds, more modern, and cinematographically more adventurous. There were a couple of long sparring conversations between Bond and Vesper that could have been shorter; eventually they wore that subject pretty thin. Bravo for putting meaningful dialog in a Bond movie, but it was undermined by the urge to beat it over our heads (“Hey! Look! We put meaningful dialog in a Bond flick!”). Giving Bond a scrap of emotion is good, but trying to make a tuxedo out of a scrap doesn’t benefit anyone. (This was not helped by the British pronunciation of “Vesper”, which made me think of an Italian scooter, and then Princess Vespa in “Spaceballs”.)

If only they could have trimmed those cat-fights a little bit more, so they could have put in that ten seconds where it was really needed.

Thanks!

Gambler’s Alert

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Tomorrow the San Diego Chargers play in what looks to be a good matchup, and it’s one of the few early games they play this season, which means it’s also on at a good time for me to watch. The oddsmakers are giving the Bolts the thinnest of margins as they travel to Cincinnati, but you may want to think twice about where to put your money this time around. If possible, I will try to alert you ahead of time whether I’m watching the game, the better to document my curse.

Thanks!

Mo and Mo

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Man, it’s a good thing I didn’t sign up for NaBloPoMo. (Link too much work (greater than zero) to dig up. we’re looking to gizo here.) I certainly did not need any other responsibilities this month. Buggy pointed me to another NaNoWriMo-derived activity over at Defective Yeti, NaNoReMo, where the author is spending the month reading Moby Dick and is blogging about the adventure. He is an entertaining guy, so you might enjoy popping by and checking on his progress. You might want to check his election guidance over at McSweeny’s as well.

My days have been spent writing and coding. While I am (generally) satisfied with the results of my NaNoWriMo effort, producing a complete and finished work of 50,000 words is a hell of a lot of work. Granted the language I use is loose and conversational, which helps reducing editing and tweaking, but some days finding 1800 words to put in the “done” bin is not easy. Fortunately there are several themes running at the same time (in the absence of a plot, pretty much), so I can work on whichever one strikes my fancy at the time. The time is not right, I think, to point you to the aforementioned done bin, but I’m not sure when the right time will be. It’s out there, an Internet land mine, waiting to blow the leg off one of the unsuspecting goatherds who wander cyberspace.

I will say that there have been some turns of phrase in the Big Pile o’ Words that I particularly like, and most of them are occurring in parts that are otherwise shameless filler. What does it say about the frozen burrito you’re eating when the textured vegetable protein is the best part? (Actually, I miss those frozen burritos that you could buy three for a buck, smother with cheese and salsa, and live for another day.)

Also please note the increased difficulty factor this year is a good thing. NaNoWriMo was starting to fee routine, and while I will always appreciate it as a chance to work on an idea that otherwise would never see the light of day, this year I really have to mean it.

I just thought of a great passage for an Eels episode. I’m going to have to jot that one down, even if it does qualify as planning ahead. The creative juices have been flowing pretty well, fortunately. What’s languishing (even more than usual) is the business end of writing. I’ve really got to get more stuff out making the rounds. In contrast, the business end of Jer’s Software Hut is making steady progress.

Repeat the mantra along with me, please: Writing: career, engineering: hobby. Writing: career, engineering: hobby. Writing: career…

Thanks!

Odds and Ends

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The sun has flown south for the winter, and a very pleasant autumn had given way to long dark. There was a dusting of snow on the rooftops yesterday morning, and the temperature was looking upward longingly at freezing. When the landlord came by to collect the rent, he spent a little extra time trying to find out if there was anything I needed. It seems he’s not comfortable with someone who has no complaints. He went out of his way to ask if I was warm enough. It’s fortunate the itchies have mostly cleared up, because it is certainly time to bundle up, but overall I’m quite cozy. No need for the toasty tent yet.

I got my first haggle swag today. It’s a bound galley of a novel by one of the Jer’s Novel Writer faithful. I haven’t started reading it yet, it was waiting on my step as I headed out today. I’m looking forward to it, though. One happy side effect of creating the software is that I have come in contact with a whole bunch of thoughtful and articulate people who love the written word. They are by no means all professionals, but there is a camaraderie that I enjoy immensely. I felt the same thing back when NaNoWriMo was only 1100 people or so (don’t quote me on that number).

On the subject of JersNW, I had a really good day of coding yesterday. I explored a different architecture for part of the database, and the thing clicked into place with ease. I learned a lot while doing it, and the possibilities are really exciting. I just want to tip my hat to the kids at Apple who came up with NSPredicate. (Experienced cocoa programmers are rolling their eyes right now — yeah, big discovery there, Marco Polo — but I could never use the stuff before, because I was trying to maintain compatibility with older versions of MacOS.) Now, things I’ve been dreading coding I can’t wait to get to.

NaNoWriMo. This is by far the most challenging year for me. Not just 50,000 words, but 50,000 publishable words, and the story complete at the end. In other words, a finished product in a month. I have two word counts, one already way up there, the other behind the curve. Finished words take a lot longer. I believe I’ll devote another episode to go into more detail about my NaNoWriMo project, and to share the parts already published.

To my Arky cousin David: if you read this, the Little Café Near Home needs you. The chairs that inspired my thoughts about triangles in architecture are failing. Welds flexed too often are failing, the steel tubing itself is giving up. We need your welding skills stat (what does that actually mean?)! The things just aren’t safe anymore. Bring some triangles.

Right now the TV is on. They’re showing Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with Brad Pitt and that actress with the lips that would be sexy if they didn’t feel so unnatural. Mt. Pitt is a talented actor, but a skill more important than acting is choosing the right script. I was surprised at how much I liked that movie, and knowing the plot already, it’s easy to follow in Czech.There’s a concept that must have been easy to sell: Two super-assassins, and they’re married, completely unaware. Each accepts the other’s cover story. Maybe someday I’ll write something that easy to explain. I’ve come close a couple of times,

Thanks!

Internet Explorer 7 is officially out.

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Better, but not that great. It renders this page mostly correctly; the deficiencies are minor and overlookable. So that’s good. For Instance, the bottom of the ampersand in the logo is cut off, but while it’s not as stylish, it looks a hell of a lot better than it did before. That is where my adventure began. In the end, my first day with the new version of the software left me befuddled.

Then I noticed that my “Now Playing” section wasn’t working on IE. The way that content is generated is a bit hokey, so I thought it might be a good time to clean up the script. I figured that would probably fix the problem with IE at the same time.

Allow me to interject that the worst language for programming computers ever invented is AppleScript. They try to make it read like “real English”, like you’re chatting with your computer. As mentioned here many times, real English is about nuances, about color and shade, not black and white. As such, it’s not well-suited as a programming language. What Apple ended up with was a syntax that has the same old rigid rules, along with a hell of a lot of verbal clutter and words that don’t always mean the same thing. But I digress.

I cleaned up the script that generates the script that the browsers load to show what music I’m listening to at the moment, and I learned a couple of things along the way. The code is better than it was before, and I will be able to improve it further rather easily. So, that’s cool. I was mildly disappointed that the result still did not work on Internet Explorer 7. I suspected I knew why, but I wanted to see the IE error messages to make sure. I couldn’t find them. I was looking for some sort of window with a list of errors and any other output from the script. I went through all the menus, but could find nothing. I dimly remembered having to set a preference in previous versions of explorer to turn on the Javascript Console, so I…

Wait a minute… where are the preferences?

As far as I have been able to discern, there is no preference window in Explorer. Now, in one sense that’s a good thing. It’s been a design philosophy I’ve been using in Jer’s Novel Writer: put the settings next to the task. But what about the settings that apply to the program itself? Maybe the preferences are there and I just missed them. There were lots of cases where controls were in unfamiliar places.

Which brings me to a lament that is more about other software developers. There was a time when every program’s controls were different. One of the most revolutionary things that the mac introduced was providing a standard way to interact with software. Love the mac way or hate it, it dramatically reduced the learning curve for new applications, and you didn’t have to remember where everything was for each application. The Windows world followed suit, and for a long time computing was just a bit easier. That is breaking down now. I first noticed it on media players for Windows. They look slick, but in many cases important controls aren’t even visible until you move the mouse to a specific area. Menu bar? Forget it. Now it seems even Microsoft is sacrificing simplicity for slickness.

Right, then. One option I did find was to look for extensions for Explorer. The light came on over my head. Somewhere there would be a tool that would let me look at console output from a script. I went to the site, and there was Developers Toolbar. Hooray! I downloaded it, installed it, and discovered several useful tools, none of which were a script console. It was a nice addition, and absolutely free from Microsoft, but not the addition I was looking for. (Having this as a separate download is another design philosophy I agree with. Provide the core and let people add on the parts they need.)

About then I noticed the little error message down at the bottom of the window. Silly me! It was there all the time. I clicked the error icon. Nothing. I right-clicked the icon. Nothing. Now that is just bad design. Microsoft themselves led the charge to make “if you see something you want to interact with, right-click to see your choices” a standard. I concluded that the icon was for informative purposes only, and that somewhere else I would find the explanation of the errors. Only later did I double-click the icon to cause an error window to pop up. More bad design. Double-click is to perform the default action on a selectable item. This is simply a button, and nothing more. You don’t double-click buttons. (You also don’t put right-click menus on buttons, but once the single-click didn’t work I assumed it wasn’t a button, and tried to treat it as an item with more than one action. When the one-action behavior failed, then the multiple-action behavior failed, I assumed there were no actions.)

The window opened up and said there was a problem on line 2 of the file. Line 2 is blank. The “next” button in the little window was dim, so I didn’t realize for a moment that pressing “previous” brought up an error message dealing with line 700. “Object Expected” the error said. There was a “hide details” button, but what passed for detail wasn’t. Could I please just see a list of errors (instead of a little window where I have to click through them) and any debug information I might want to send out? The root error is ultimately my fault, but is it asking too much to make it easier to find, especially since the scripts work on all the browsers whose error reporting doesn’t suck? (Yes, I searched for other downloadable extensions. If anyone out there knows of a solution, I would be grateful.)

I guessed that there must be something wrong with the way I wrote the script tag. Luckily, one of the cool features of the Developer’s Toolbar is a validator. You can do this easily enough anyway, but right there was a way to submit your site to w3c and get back a full report card of your compliance.

I ran the report and had a bucketload of non-compliant code. I wasn’t that surprised, as the original blog template was done a while back by someone else, the comment system is someone else’s code, the Amazon links weren’t compliant, and so on and so forth. There were plenty of errors of my own doing as well, including some stray markup in a paragraph complaining about Microsoft’s non-compliance to standards. When I saw that error my mind was made up. Time to clean house! I went through the template, modifying (almost) all the markup to match standards, paying particularly close attention to script tags. Almost all of them were using syntax that was at best out of date. Not any more, baby! I brought them all into the modern age, something I would not have done were it not for Internet Explorer 7.

The result: users of Internet Explorer will have to use Firefox to post comments telling me what I’ve done wrong, because now all the Haloscan script tags are broken in IE. “Object Expected.”

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Thanks!

More about the itch

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This episode is one big complaint, which is not my usual style (at least, not so overtly). For those of you tuning in for the first time, I had (I hope) an allergic reaction to some cheap Czech laundry detergent and every part of me that is touched by clothing is now a mess. I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before.

I haven’t left the homestead in a while — the day I watched the Chargers lose was the only other time in a week, but today I had no choice if I wanted to eat. I’m at the little café right now, and I’m itchy.

At night, I go to bed, and often manage to fall asleep, only to wake up a short time later with one nerve somewhere on my body screaming bloody murder. In my half-awake state I will scratch it. From then on I’m no longer just half awake. Whatever I scratched burns like someone is holding a match to it. I lie awake, trying not to think about the burning, trying not to think of… the other itch, and the other one, and the one after that. I lie in bed, rigid, resolutely not scratching, chanting my “no scratching” mantra.

Must. Not. Scratch. Must. Not. Scratch.

Then there is the moment of erosion of will. A new itch will arise, angry and demanding, from a new awkward and uncomfortable location. I thought I had run out of such spots several nights ago, but no. “Oh, crap, not there too,” has become my eternal lament.

Eventually the itch becomes too powerful, and I will watch as if from a distance as one of my hands scratches the most urgent of the itches. There is a tiny moment of blessed relief before the burning starts. I try to restore discipline, but there’s no turning back now. I claw at my skin, from neck to toe, trying to draw as little blood as possible, but there is only one priority. Scratch. My mantra changes as well — last night I caught myself muttering:

Scratchy. Scratchy. Good, Good.

Eventually my brain is so flooded with endorphins that I can fall back to sleep. For while it’s painful, it’s easier to sleep through the general discomfort of ones entire epidermis burning than it is to ignore the urgent, actionable discomfort that is the itch. Once the itch is banished and there’s nothing I can do to lessen my mysery, I am released from my scratchy frenzy and sleep can come again — until the next itch starts.

If you really want, you can see my skin here, but it doesn’t really capture the purpleness or the puffiness. My hip was just an easy region to photograph. I offer this image in defense of being called a whiner.

Thanks!

Sorry about that.

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I was in the Little Café Near Home when I got the call. “Come on! Let’s go watch some football!” I would have said no, but I realized I did not have my AC adapter with me. My time there was limited anyway.

I went to the bar. When I got there, San Diego and Kansas City were knotted at zeroes. We worked our way into one end of a table, and I talked to the guy next to me, then I looked up to see Kansas City score their second touchdown. I hadn’t been there very long at all. I laughed and rocked back in my seat, and reminded myself that this is just statistics. It’s got to happen to someone. Which just proves that I am someone.

Thanks!

Post-apocalyptic superheroes

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Leaping tall buildings isn’t so useful when there aren’t any. Invisible jets are cool and all, but when airports were taken out with the first strike and ‘jet fuel’ is a euphemism for home-distilled hooch that glows in the dark, jets just aren’t that practical. So what, then, are the abilities that will give the post-apocalyptic superhero the edge when fighting (or simply out-surviving) super-villians? Here is a short list of candidates.

Buzzard Man
Super-power: Born with the immune system of a buzzard, he is able to eat food that would kill anyone else. Carrion several days old, crawling with whatnot, is the mainstay of his diet.
Super-weakness: He still has the taste buds of a regular human.

Camel Woman
Super-power: Able to store large amounts of water in her impressive, uh… humps. She can make it from oasis to oasis across the shifting desert sand, and will never be driven by thirst to drink from contaminated sources.
Super-weakness: chronic back pain and constantly pestered by men offering her glasses of water.

Radiation Boy
Super-power: Not only is Radiation Boy able to withstand nuclear fallout, he thrives on it. Cesium isotopes are his favorite. He can go where no others can, and there’s no worry about finding his way in the dark.
Super-weakness: Loneliness. Since he is, himself, radioactive, he has a bad habit of giving his friends cancer.

Orbital Girl
Super-power: Actually a holographic projection generated by the AI of an orbiting weapons platform, she is quite literally untouchable. Plenty of backstory potential when it comes time to explain why an orbital weapons platform would choose the guise of a teenage girl (unless the satellite is Japanese, in which case it goes without saying).
Super-weakness: While seemingly invulnerable, she is also unable to directly influence events — except with high-power lasers and a few remaining nuclear warheads. She is hot-tempered and you wouldn’t like her when she’s angry. She can never go indoors and can only appear when the satellite is overhead, and is only bright enough to be seen at night. She’s also not that bright in the mental sense.

The Mysterious Person from a Faraway Land
Super-power: Weaves spell-binding stories of a place far away where life doesn’t suck so bad. People will follow the Mysterious Person anywhere and defend Mysterious person to the death.
Super-weakness: Mysterious Person is a complete fraud. (What part of global thermonuclear war did you not understand?) If anyone finds out the truth, Mysterious Person is toast.

Mole Man
Super-power: forget the ozone layer, forget all the troubles on the surface. Mole Man can tunnel deep into the earth — so deep that mankind has not yet found a way to screw it up.
Super-weakness: There’s no food down there. Mole Man must on occasion creep back to the surface. Even a bright moon is blinding to him.

Ozona
Super-power: I have no idea. I just like the name.
Super-weakness: See above.

In the next day or two I will mount a new poll, asking you all who you think is the most awesome of post-apocalyptic superheroes. In the meantime, you can choose a favorite and start campaigning, or you can suggest others as well.

Thanks!

Itchy!

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File this one under ‘more things you really didn’t need to know’…

It started a few days ago. I started feeling itchy all over. Then the bumps started showing up. I am now covered with itchy red bumps. Writing about it makes me think about it even more. Itchy, itchy itchy.

You’d never know by looking, however, and when I figured that out I had the likely cause of my malaise. I only have bumps where my clothes touch me. Two weeks ago I bought a new batch of laundry detergent. I have heard the complaints of others (some who read this, in fact) and I have always counted myself as fortunate that such afflictions do not affect me. Until now. I can’t imagine what would happen to someone who actually had sensitive skin if they used this stuff.

Of course, after I bought the detergent I washed all my clothes (had a bit of a backlog waiting for the detergent) so suddenly I was left with practically nothing to wear that wouldn’t make things worse. My hawaiian shirts escaped, but the weather isn’t really favorable for those. The worst, of course, is the underwear. Once I figured out the problem I put the remainder of my clothes that were still clean through another wash cycle with no detergent, hoping for some intensive rinsing action, but I’m still itchy and bumpy. I’m not sure what it’s going to take to fully expunge whatever chemical it was that I reacted to. Whatever it was, it was nasty.

Hopefully it’s just that the irritation is slow to fade and its not that the problem is actually something else entirely.

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Thanks!

You may not be able to read this.

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I just got word from my service provider that something went wrong when processing my payment for this site. My current payment expires today, and if I don’t get it resolved in time there will be a blackout in the Media Empire. So if you don’t see this message, that’s why.

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Thanks!

All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku

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Some of you already know that on occasion I take time out from my busy schedule to watch Japanese cartoons. There are many reasons for the rise of animated series in Japan, and at the top of the list is the same reason there are so many reality shows in the US: They’re cheap to produce. The similarity ends there, however, as some (not all) anime can be watched without first cauterizing the pain centers in your brain. (It’s like comparing levels of hell, but Czech reality shows are, from my limited exposure, even worse than the American versions, and even more popular.)

Sometimes I come across a title that says “watch me”. That happened this week, when I stumbled across a 14-episode series called All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku. Sometimes you have to ignore the warning bells in your head and remind yourself that cat girls are generally pretty hot, even in cartoons.

The story is a familiar one. A super-genius scientist has created a super-strong androbot, using a cat brain. Naturally he crafted his super-robot to look like a schoolgirl, and enrolled her at the local academy, so she could learn to have human emotions. The scientist created her to combat the evil cabal intent on taking over the world. Said cabal supports Nuku Nuku’s school in exchange for being allowed to use it as a place to test their evil inventions.

I’m told that Japanese are cliquish and hostile toward outsiders. Judging by the fact that it is nearly certain any “transfer student” arriving at a school will almost always lead to untold destruction, I can’t say as I blame them for being a little slow to accept outsiders. (I am now imagining a story in which an American student transfers to a school in japan, but much like in Galaxy Quest, this is a world where all the stereotypes are all true. American has no idea. On the first day he will be detained and arrive to class late, after everyone else is seated. “Class,” the clueless teacher says, “meet our new transfer student…” Pandemonium breaks out as half the class dives for cover while the other half point to the empty desks next to theirs. (Good things happen to the first person to befriend the transfer student/unstable superweapon.))

Where was I? Oh yes. Nuku Nuku. I watched episode one, and found myself laughing out loud. This was a show that didn’t take itself too seriously, and had fun with the same stereotypes I enjoy commenting on. In each episode, when a character comes on, the action goes to letterbox to allow room for the subtext: “Snobby Rich Girl” or “Nihilistic heart throb”. The show is oddly lacking, it occurs to me as I write this, in a Ninja Girl. All I can figure is she transferred to another school to raise some hell of her own.

It is silly, but they use the silliness to create a couple of nice twists. When we are first introcuced to the evil cabal we see employees of Mishima corporation receiving the message “Secret Call.” in various funny ways. (One employee is sitting on the john and when he pulls out the paper, there is the message. The bathroom stall, conveniently, is an elevator, and down he goes to the prominently-labeled “Evil Meeting Room.” Eventually all the members rise through the floor, dressed in outlandish evil outfits. Hell Mishima appears and addresses his troops.

Some of the troops are more enthusiastic than others. Many in the Evil Meeting Room would prefer that company staff meetings were run in a more traditional fashion, they way they had been when Hell Mishima’s father was in charge. In the end, all the evil plans, while convoluted and doomed to failure as all evil plans are, lack one key ingredient. Evil. Mishima Industries is just another multinational out to increase market share, or as Hell Mishima says, “Take over the WORLD! Bwa ha ha ha!”

“I hope he grows out of this,” one employee mutters to another.

There are a lot of jokes going past that I know enough to spot, but not to get. Nuku Nuku continuously calls the snobby girl by the wrong name, a different one every time, and I’m pretty sure all those misnomers mean things. Not flattering things.

They say that “well begun is half done,” (Ben Franklin is oft credited as being one them) and in the case of this series, I think that’s about right. After the first episode, with thirteen more to go, they’d used at least half of the jokes. Some jokes get funnier with repetition — to a point. Nuku Nuku reached the last of those points around episode three, when the Evil Women (aka marketing department) flashed back to the the laundry machine run amok landing on them — just before the microwave oven run amok landed on them.

Nuku Nuku had one flaw, that I noticed right away but have waited to mention. The opening theme is most decidedly not ridiculous. I’m sorry, but if you’re going to name the show All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, you damn well better have lyrics that match Cutey Honey or Club-To-Death Angel Dokuro-chan.

Thanks!

Should have issued a gambler’s alert

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Right now the Charger-Baltimore game is at the 2 minute warning. I popped over to an Internet sports site to follow the game. When I remembered to look, there was about seven minutes left, the Chargers were up by six, and had the ball within field goal range. A quick glance at the stats showed that they were playing a good game. The first play that came over the ticker: 15-yard penalty. Now, four or five penalties and what appears to be two botched punts later (info is sketchy on these web update things), baltimore is within four and just completed a long pass. I have turned off the game tracker now.

I used to think that my San Diego Team curse was a joke, until last year when I issued this alert. The Chargers were expected to completely crush Miami. Note that the Padres have gone to the playoffs two years in a row for the first time in franchise history — the two years I’ve lived nine time zones away. The Chargers went to the playoffs last year, and are contenders again this year. They may have just played the lousiest five (game clock) minutes of football this season, and it was the five minutes I was paying attention to the game.

I’ll let you know ahead of time if I try that again, or (God forbid) go to one of the bars in town that shows American Football.

Meanwhile my eyes are clenched tightly shut until the game is over. I hope that’s enough.

Thanks!

Don’t get mad, get Glad!

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I had an audition today for another commercial. I really, really, don’t think I’ll get this one, but it would be nice if I did. Why? Because this ad would play nationwide in the good ol’ US-of-A, that’s why. I’d never see it, but anyone over on that side of the puddle who watched daytime TV would get to see me robbing a bank in order to sell plastic bags. For the same reason, the gig would also pay a lot. One day of work would pay the rent for half a year, minimum.

Alas, this gig will not come to me. We auditioned in pairs, and while I was not particularly sparkling, my partner was particularly flat. Now, in hindsight, I know exactly what I should have done to make the situation work, but that’s what hindsight is all about.

Many of you will see this commercial, and I will not be in it. Oh, well.

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Thanks!

It’s an episode… about nothing.

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Sorry for the lack of episodes lately. It’s just that life has carried on in its terribly ordinary way, the wheels of time and space turning on well-oiled axes with nary a squeak.

Of note, perhaps, is that my pants are falling down. Either they have stretched or I have shrunk. While I don’t feel any healthier, and can see no diffference in the mirror, is seems unlikely that all my pants got larger at the same time.

One reason I’ve not had much to say is that I spent more time than I should have in the last week playing a computer game. This is the sort of brain-eating activity that leaves one without an original thought to call one’s own. I finished the game today, and I have no plan to order any of the sequels. Not because it wasn’t fun, mind you, quite the opposite.

Now I am in the Little Cafe, and there is a birthday party goinf on. Birthday girl is very pretty, adn is dancing on the bar as I type this.(pardon the typos, but for authenticity, i will leave this as I firty tuyped iu while watching her dance.) She is particularly happy because her ex-boyfriend showed up for the party, and they are not ex anymore. I am happy because she is very, very, good at shaking her moneymaker. Perhaps they were reconciled before tonight, but I don’t think so. The breathlessly hopeful look on her face when he arrived, the careful way they acted until they fell into their old familiar habits, the disappointment of the other males present, all spoke of this being a birthday she will long remember. For me, in my corner, part of the universe has gone back to being the way it belongs.

And so the world moves on, quietly, calmly (with the exception of the dancing on the bar), and there is little for this correspondent to report.

Thanks!