Author: gala5931

If you weren’t already aware of it, Radiohead’s The National Anthem is one of the greatest accomplishments mankind has achieved to date.

You know what I don’t have? Any clothes appropriate for warm weather. Now, before you throw your hands up and yell “shopping spree” in a sing-sing tone, think on this. I hate buying clothes. Having clothes is fine, but getting them… no so much. I estimate I purchase between four and five individual pieces of clothing in a year, and that’s if you count 3-packs of boxers as three. Maybe it’s some kind of identity thing, or something as simple as ignorance as to what looks presentable. Either way, I’m completely useless.

Maybe I’ll just start wearing my work clothes all day and eliminate the problem completely. I recently limited my selection of work shirts to white and white alone, when matching ties to patterned shirts proved more than my pre-coffee consciousness could wrestle with successfully. Why not extend this to post-work? I just remove the tie Ken-style and I’m ready for an evening on the town. I’ll keep away from stain-likely foods, buy some more comfortable work shoes, and be in business. What say you now, Men’s section? I stand in defiance of your stripey tyranny!

Having been raised amidst entertainments of a number unseen in times prior, this generation of nerds speaks in a language composed primarily of references. Where the conversations of our forenerds were sprinkled with Bible passages and Latin phrases, or where those of our nerdy parents were limited to Monty Python and Firesign Theater quotes, ours are flooded with lines from the limitless movies and television shows which made the corpus of text to which we were exposed while growing up. This being the case, we love to get someone else’s references and to have ours understood. As in all things, there are degrees to this tendency, ranging from the occasional quote by the more reserved to full scene recreations by the most unabashedly geeky.

The men who have given this guilty nerdy pleasure literary credibility are Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, writers of the Sandman and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book series respectively. In Sandman, Gaiman uses his remarkable knowledge of mythology and folklore to create a backdrop for his characters, littering his world with characters from the legends of all lands, from the goddess Bast to the drunken fairy Cluracan. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen overflows with a surfeit of references to Victorian fantasy literature. The depth and complexity of these references are truly astonishing, and no one without a PhD in Vic lit stands a chance at getting all of them, let alone most.

I just read Gaiman’s 1602, a miniseries in which the characters of the early Marvel universe are in Exploration Age Europe, living at constant risk of being exposed and killed for heresy and witchcraft. In typical style, Gaiman makes his puzzles just difficult enough to keep you wondering if caught everything. Reading reminded me of how frustrating (who is the super-fast kid supposed to be?!?) and nerdily rewarding (two riders on the same horse! I get it!) his stuff can be.

It also gave me opportunity to indulge in one of the pleasures I can refer to only as “guiltiest”: comic book annotations. After discovering Sandman and LoEG annotations online, the secrets unravelled before me. I could enjoy all of the subtleties of the works, without having to acquire a lifetime’s worth of knowledge. They taught me quite a bit, and pointed me towards stories I never would have come across on my own.

That being said, spending a spring Saturday afternoon reading online comic book annotations is about the third-nerdiest thing I have ever done.

Albeit unwittingly, Jess has posted a picture of a chocobo.

I am 100% fried. Not much to say for now, so go entertain yourself with this. Only entertaining with the sound on.

Okay. I’m out smoking. Beat-up, rusting car rumbles up, Billie Holiday music blaring. White male, late-thirties early forties, balding, 200 lbs, opens the car door and pours liquid onto the street. He gets out of the vehicle, closes the door, then kicks the door to fully close it. He is wearing the short coat of an MD in training and has a stethoscope slung over his neck. He lights a cigarette and walks briskly down the middle of the road. He walks to a sidewalk, doubles back to toss the cigarette, and walks into a house. He’s a killer, right? Aren’t all balding white males who act erratically killers? And the Billie Holiday? That’s straight psycho shit.

Just read a manga online. This became much easier once I remembered to read right-to-left.

Remember this post? The one that got the attention of the Rhapsody guy? Well, here‘s a little more food for playlist-posting thought

“The researchers found that people actively work to create an image of themselves through the music they make available to others, just as they might by buying a new car or showing off a cell phone.”

Here’s what I remember from last night’s dream. I was staying in a hotel with a large group of people, a high school trip or something. The hotel was a converted seaside manor, all narrow hallways and oddly shaped rooms. I was in a room which had clearly been decorated by a goth kid — punk posters and dark plaid. After lights out, a white cat with very short hair went around to all the doors to check that they were closed — I saw his paws push against the thin paper of the door. My room was long and had a couple entrances, one of which had been left open a crack. The cat came in, jumped on the desk and started knocking things over. I tossed him out and closed the door.

Next scene, my roommate (my wife?) and I had snuck out and were on the porch walking around in the dim pre-sunrise light. As I passed in front of a glass-panel door, I saw what the cat was protecting us from. Something that looked like one of the Dementors from Azkaban darted into the room, hovering horizontally and searching for something, his black figure silhouetted against the blue light of the large windows across the room.

As his field of vision passed over me, I yelled “get down” and dropped to the floor as the thing, which I remember calling Dracula, flew towards us at great speed. I think there was a scythe involved.

Vacation with kids appears to be something entirely different from vacation without them. For me, the big V comes rarely and is usually synonymous with “bender”. There is much sitting. With little tykes to contend with, though, vacations sound like just a different flavor of obligation. The relaxing becomes arduous, the pleasant unbearable.

One big difference is the car ride. A friend of mine told me that he took his kids to Brooklyn to visit his family there, and that hooking the Playstation up to the TV screen in his SUV made the ride easy peasy. They only made one stop, if you can imagine.

Now, I’m a proponent of letting the little tykes play video games until the blisters on their fingers pop (Do the kids these days even get blisters, what with the ergonomic controllers popular these days? It’s not like their puerile hands need to suffer the square controllers of the NES anymore.), but I don’t know if I back the PS2 on the car ride. Learning to keep quiet for the endless hours of a car ride is an important part of the development of the American child. We all remember sitting and staring out the window, making games out of nothing and not pestering the parents. Isn’t that a fond memory?