Russell & Kimmy

Frak, they did it again.

There is an old saying…if you take a movie, shoot it in the face repeatedly, douse it in gasoline, burn it and bury it on hallowed ground….it will only take a Hollywood executive 10 minutes to bring it back to life; usually as an un-holy zombie. I would say that Hollywood executives give the Catholic Church a run for their money on resurrecting things, but let us face it, most things coming out of Hollywood are either crap, crap with a plot, or mind candy which is arguably crap but crap I like; usually a simple plot with lots of explosions. Evidently the writers’ strike hit Hollywood hard because they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel; Starship Troopers 3 is expected to come out sometime this year. It’s a little odd because, well I didn’t know that they did a Starship Troopers 2; it went straight to DVD, which means it sucked. I am going to go out on a limb and say this one will be a rental, I am still bitter about the first Starship Troopers completely ignoring the book. Evidently Starship Troopers 3, from the trailer I have seen, will continue this fine tradition and be nothing like the book; go figure. Since Starship Troopers was nothing like the book I can’t say I am surprised but you would think a culture that mastered FTL travel could at least come up with some awesome body armor (the book had awesome body armor) and not some form of crappy Kevlar that a super intelligent species of insects can cut like Swiss cheese; at least in this movie they have planet crackers. If there was a species that figured out how to blow a planet open and leak its juicy core out into space it would be humanity; we are just awesome like that. I guess you could say I am a big fan of gun boat diplomacy; it is in my wheelhouse.

Well as long as we are on the topic of scifi, I think i have posted this link before but it bears repeating, the top 10 Scifi swear words.

Being the loyal and hard working employee that I am, I ended up working till 9:00 PM last night. After five o’clock it gets rather quiet and surprisingly I am able to get a massive amount of work done….I wonder if there is a strange inverse relationship between my coworkers and my productivity? Being so productive burns lots of energy and by 6:30 PM I was ravenous. Luckily my hot trophy wife showed up and saved me from starvation. Since we are what we eat (and because I had a call I had to be on at 7:00) I opted for Jason’s Deli; it is easy, fast and moderately priced. Like all restaurants for some reason they have a 30 inch TV mounted on the wall. I am not sure why the attempt this futile gesture, it is just too small to watch and too noisy to listen too. Nevertheless the TV was there and it was set to CNN. To be honest I have grown disappointed with CNN, their coverage of the news has been slipping to the point that they are now comparable to Fox News. In fact one Sunday morning I was flipping through the talking head shows and watched Fox News for about ten minutes thinking it was CNN; ten minutes before I realized my mistake. Anyway, it seems that journalist are getting lazy and reverting back to the easy sensationalism that dominated the late nineteenth century. Last night CNN was no different, although I couldn’t tell what the “reporter” (I use that term loosely) was talking about, the image behind him said it all. There was a nice picture of Obama and in big red letters was the phrase Radical Ties; it is kind of like Spiderman Threat or Menace? Move over news, say hello to Yellow Journalism.

Not all news is bad news, while stuck at work Kimmy brightened the dreariness of the office by letting me know I can pre-order A Dance with Dragons; it comes out September 2008….between the Nerf Vulcan EBF-25 and this book, September is going to rock. Finally George R. R. Martin is finishing the damn book. Now I am faced with the dilemma, do I re-read the entire series or just the book. As near as I can tell I have read the first seven books of the Wheel of Time about four times which is roughly 6,200 pages; that equates to roughly 413 hours of my life reading that series. Needless to say after crunching those numbers, I am not to keen on re-reading the entire A song of Ice and Fire series but I probably will anyway…after all it is only a measly 3,744 pages.

It has been a while since I have actually done physical labor; it always surprises me how much I ache the next day. On Saturday Kimmy, the parents, and I set out to the IOOF Cemetery to do a little bit of yard work; there our nemesis…change that, our Everest waited in all their woody glory. Three vivacious crape myrtles waited to do battle with our muscles, pruning shears, and saws; most trees you can hack at with ease, not the soft wood crape myrtles. In the end we won, although it was a pyrrhic victory. The three crape myrtles were finally under control and existing in a more managed state but they were still vivacious and I felt like I was rung through a wringer; damn trees. Crape myrtles are an odd choice for a cemetery plot; most trees I have seen are tall, straight, noble and a bit stuck up. Not the crape myrtle, in the solemn silence of a cemetery and amid the gray and blacks of the tombstones the crape myrtles defiantly stand, tall (well a little less tall), smooth and brazenly pink; much like a tramp/prostitute/hussy wearing a low cut red dress in church. As much as I hated them last weekend, I can’t wait till they bloom and bring a little color to the gray and solemn IOOF Cemetery.

Speaking of color, I have two nice new YEGO USB drives; thank you CompUSA for closing your Austin store and giving me a 40% discount. They are a bit chunkier than the traditional USB drive but since I keep loosing drives right and left hopefully these two will be a bit harder to loose. Even though I like to espouse that you can never have too many USB drives, I think I am going to give the purple 2-gig one to Kimmy, it just doesn’t scream manly. The blue 4-gig one however is all man, its big, its blue, and its Y-shaped…if that doesn’t scream man I don’t know what does. So far I like them, but then who doesn’t like having 4-gigs in your pocket? Sadly CompUSA didn’t have any hard drives, and I am still in mourning for my old faithful Maxtor which is pretty much on its last legs. Annoyingly we (yep Kimmy went with me) had bought a brand new hard drive from Fry’s to replace old faithful but it was D.O.O.B (dead out of box) and I had to send Kimmy back to Fry’s to return it. Nothing is quite as fun as wasting 2 hours of your life thinking you don’t know how to mount a hard drive and questioning all your geek credentials.

As compensation for buying me a faulty hard drive for Valentines Day I am trying to convince Kimmy to buy me a Vulcan EBF-25 from Nerf. Nothing screams love like a belt fed Nerf dart gun. Unfortunately it only has a 25 round magazine and not the 100 plus I was envisioning when I first laid eyes upon it. Hopefully Nerf (or someone else) will have a mod out by Christmas for it and I’ll be able to sling a barrage of Nerf darts, the likes of which the world has never seen.

Happy Valentines Day, hopefully your sweetie bought you some chocolate and flowers to express their love and avoided the “Chicago Method”. Today I feel special, not only is Kimmy buying me a new hard drive for Valentines Day but the RNC also sent me a Valentine; I feel doubly special. Since I haven’t gotten my new hard drive yet I guess the only Valentine I can talk about is the RNC one; especially since all of you jerks have neglected to send me cash anything a token of your affection. It is pretty, nice, and pink with a lovely picture of Obama….of course they should have picked a better political message like I will eat your babies or some such because My Liberal Heart Bleeds for You implies that he cares and that caring is a crime. Last time I checked pretending to care could actually get you a lot of places in this country, but hey I may be behind the times.

The black box disclaimer also detracts from the pretty Valentine; their graphic designer should be drug out into the street and shot and replaced with a much better graphic designer (like Kimmy). Despite the ugly black box disclaimer (everything has a disclaimer- Disclaimer this website is not responsible for your stupidity, blame your parents like everyone else) the Valentine really makes me feel like the RNC cares….I am not sure what they care about (probably my money since there is a big donation button) but the effort put into making these means they must care about something (again, it is probably my money).

I miss the evil empire. I was an insightful 4th grader when the Berlin Wall fell and the empire started to collapse; I remember thinking that nothing was going to ever be the same again. The Cold War was over and the evil empire was suddenly our friend, it was going to be all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows everywhere from now on. Things were simpler then; we were the good guys, they were the bad guys; if we nuked ‘em all to hell God would be happy because they were the godless, evil empire. God was on our side, the biggest guns were on our side and the world was on our side. Now that I am older, the world is less kind, there is no evil empire, and shades of gray dilute what used to be black and white. Maybe I am just getting older and whining nostalgically for a world that never existed, I like to think instead that maybe youthful idealism is waking up to the cold harsh hangover of reality.

Yesterday I was mired in traffic. As I usually do while creeping home I cursed the suburbanites all to hell (lousy suburbanites clogging up my highway) and flipped on KUT 90.5. Luckily there were no real primaries yesterday and the reporters had all run out of election crap to speculate about so they got down to what a news station is supposed to do, report the news. I admit that a reporter actually reporting the news is shocking and a bit scary, but not as scary as the snippet I heard from Justice Anthony Scalia.

To begin with, the Constitution refers to cruel and unusual punishment. It is referring to punishment for crime. For example, incarcerating someone indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime, but a court can do that when a witness refuses to answer … as a means of coercing the witness to answer, as the witness should. And I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

Maybe I am to Kantian in my ethical code, but the fact a Supreme Court judge would even consider this makes me worry.