fine whine

Here I was, all ready to complain about a new batch of annoying things (I got a papercut today, etc.) when I thought I stumbled upon something.

Jessica and I had visited with Scott and Carina (and Tyler and Tayler) and just as I was driving home it struck me that a good number of the toys the girls play with come out of the box already named. All of their NeoPets and Divaz (or Bratz or something else ending in -z) already have names. This struck me as somewhat odd, having not remembered names of toys I had owned.

Jessica chimed in with a laundry list of toys she had, complete with factory-given names: her Care Bears, Barbies and Raggedy Ann & Andy. What was it, I wondered, with the names of all these girls' toys? Are girls less creative with naming than boys? Is it like the whole "math is tough" thing?

Lest you think me some sort of chauvinist, bear in mind that it took me a good minute or two to realize that boys' toys come pre-named as well: all of the Transformers and G.I. Joes. I then realized that I never had any of them.

Well, I did have a Happy Meal Bumblebee. Which doesn't count for much. Neither does this little ditty.

Snowfall turned to rain
now I have a headache and
I named it Norman.

Enough damn haiku
cold March days make me cranky
I want to complain.

I want to complain about a whole bunch of stuff. I want to whine, and rant, bitch and moan. I want to get it all off my chest and then get the sun to rise and everything be happy.

So bear with me.

My cursed computer still won't hibernate, and it still crashes at random when I'm playing Vice city, particularly when I've worked at something for half an hour and could not save my progress. This is only a minor complaint.

Also minor is a complaint directed at myself: haikus? Not just haikus but highfalutin' "seasonal" haikus? For a week? I have to admit that I'm still torn about yesterday's (Snow falling on roads / who forgot to tell the sky / that this is mid-March?), wondering whether it should in fact be "clouds" and not "sky" in the second line. And then I realize, it's just a cheesy haiku. So on to the real meat and potatoes of this whole beef, as it were.

Speaking of beef, why haven't we heard anything new about mad cows and CJD? I doubt all of the prions or whatever they're called just up and disappeared. Dave Louthan is the only source of new information that I've bumped into in my searching, but so far that "searching" has only been confined to occasionally checking his pages. That said, I'm pretty much off the beef until I can figure out how to get me some prime Kobe cuts imported right to my dinner table. Then, Mr. Steak, we will have some words.

But it is not with words but sometimes a horn that I should express my displeasure with fellow drivers. Sure, I get a laugh when I see a license plate bearing  BLSS GOD  (isn't he the one supposed to be handing those out?) but I almost reach for that magical spot in the center of my wheel when I see something moronic like what somebody did in front of me just a block from my apartment. This guy, who had pulled out rather suddenly further down the road, turned right, as I did, onto a street with two lanes each way. He chose the lane closest to center; I took the closest to the curb. For a long time I was a big proponent of the school of Corresponding Lane, but lately I've given up on everybody else on the road. So to see him do that was not surprising in the least, but what he did next sure was. Within ten feet of the corner he slowed down and lumbered across my lane into a parking lot to the right of both of us. Of course my horn is only used in times of extreme frustration and accidental bumping (the wheel, not other cars) so I did nothing to show him my displeasure, but it irked me nonetheless. After all, had I been dialing a phone or checking my hair or eating a beef burrito at that very moment I could well have plowed right into the moron. I guess it's a good thing I've been avoiding the beef, no?

Now Spain. I'm not in the "I don't want to hear anything more about the train bombing" camp but fall more in with "I haven't heard enough but don't particularly care to search for it". I'm curious to know if this American War on Terrorism that has been waged is solely for terror against Americans, as I have not heard about any help being sent over the Atlantic to help track down these bombing bastards. That said, just because I haven't heard it doesn't mean it hasn't happened; my complaint is that I don't even care to check what's happening in the world outside of my quaint little city.

My quaint little city that devours so much of my car's gasoline, that is. Tonight I ended up doubling back not twice but a third time (well, part of a third) due to some bad planning and nasty weather. I dislike doubling back, even if I do get to do the majority of it around 70 MPH. It's the principle of the thing.

And what is the point of standing for principles when it really just means being stubborn? For this site to exist I pay very little to the friendly folks over at Digitalspace and have for more than several years, but all that time I've been putting up with the fact that I do not get a certain bit of information in my usage logs: namely the referrer field that shows what links, google searches and whatnot lead to my pages. For who knows how long I have just sat idly by, not wanting to cause a fuss or put too much into what is a minor matter, but have only now found out that by doing so I've missed out on that very information. By my doing nothing nobody's known that my account just needed to be reset. I wasn't sticking to any principles, per se, but just settling with a less than optimal situation. For that I am complaining.

Also on this site I've been getting more and more comment spammers, leaving their porn and growth hormone links and whatnot. They're bottom-feeders and they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel (to mix metaphors) to do it to my site, but still it bothers me to need to delete and ban them. One left today, though, made me chuckle somewhat:

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Whatever that means.
I am tired and cranky.
It's cold, too. Bedtime.

Snow falling on roads
who forgot to tell the sky
that this is mid-March?

Normally I'm not one to get all choked up over cars, but today as I was driving home along 670 a silver one caught my eye. It looked to be a BMW 8-series coupe in pristine condition, but along with a surface free of blemishes, it too was free of emblemishments. Not once on that car did it say what model it was, let lone the size of its engine or how it is intercooled or turbocharged. Only the blue-and-white BMW logo.

Man, that's classy.

I almost felt a pang of regret when the it and my lowly Mitsubishi parted ways. Someday, when I'm rich, I'll have an 8-series BMW. They just look so damn good.

Though I'd make sure mine had a trunk lid that closed all the way, not like this guy's which had to be at least 3/8" higher on one side than the other. But it was nice otherwise. Lucky bastard.

Enough of haikus
I will go back to writing
at least 'til tax day.

Incidentally, somewhere along the line it was passed to me the information that a haiku is not just a haiku because it follows the 5-7-5 syllables rule, but also if and only if it somehow alludes to the seasons; thus my somewhat stilted ones these past few days. I figured I could get away with a haiku instead of something real, though I may never know how many poetry haters my little stunt has weeded out of my readership. That worries me little, as it is so nice to have an audience I can count without needing to remove my shoes.

So back to my audience. I too play an audience much of the time, though I prefer to do so for movies more so than web pages. This weekend (and some of my haiku days too) I have watched many a movie and will now expound at length about them.

First, though, I feel I need to come clean about yesterday's "entry" regarding my cigarette email. That message in fact arrived this morning so to say that I received it yesterday is a fabrication, an untruth, a lie. Please forgive me. Last night I had intended to write something about the intentions of moviemakers but was foiled by a random mySQL socket error and this morning I felt less like blathering on about film and more like getting something posted before anybody noticed my lapse. After all, I've got something of a streak going, having posted something (if only a haiku) everyday since around Christmas.

I'd had one of those less-than-sleepy feelings and had thrown in my copy of Fight club to pass the time. Little did I know that it ran over two hours, but little did I notice that because it's such a great movie. I've read Palahniuk's book of the same name but only after seeing the movie and I still like both, and wish I could write or film something as cool as either.

Not that I'm trying to write a movie. No, no no not me, no just thinking about stuff. Really.

I've been thinking about how some of these movies to which I am subjected end up being made. Namely City of the living dead, one of a many known hack-job distributions of Lucio Fulci's gore-fest The gates of Hell. It's a bad movie. I found nothing in it to recommend to anybody, and what's worse is that it was the wrong bad zombie movie! I had been looking for another bad zombie movie with "city" in the title, but this wasn't it which meant my time was even that more wasted.

It makes me wonder how these movies are conceived. Are there truly people who sit around and say, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to show somebody's head getting drilled all the way through? And how about spraying maggots in through a window for five minutes? What kind of movie can we slap together around those scenes?"

I think this is the way David Cronenberg, Paul Verhoeven and the Troma crew all have had their bit in the head mashing/exploding/etc. genre of films.

But really, is that all it takes to craft a film? How do these people get to be so powerful as to be able to subject the rest of us with this dreck? And, more importantly, how can I do it too?

Not to say that I've only watched bad movies lately. School of rock was very good and even threw in a curveball to mess with me and my preconceived notions. Tremors 3 was eons ahead of the second, but not as good as the first, but still a labor of love and enjoyable enough to watch. Another labor of love was Paul Simon's Murder by death, though that "of love" might be a stretch as Simon has some pretty dead-on criticisms of the murder/mystery oeuvre. They were some of the same complaints I've made,
but that lucky playwright
made a movie of his and
I have just this site.

Oops, that one wasn't seasonal. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find out what a non-weather-specific 5-7-5 verse is called.