ACQUIESCENT

Ahem...

I've always been a late-adopter when it comes to joining social networks that have anything to do with the words cyber, virtual, online, or face.

Whether it was signing up for Instant Messenger, joining Hot-or-Not, or creating this blog, I went through the exact same process every time - feeling like in doing so I would lose my soul, downgrading 'soul' to 'dignity', downgrading 'dignity' to 'pocket change', then finally accepting that *probably* nothing bad will come from it.

Well, I've given in once again. I've accepted my social responsibility to everyone in the world that I've ever met, and joined up with Facebook. Emma Kiele Fry is to blame.

Until she invited me yesterday, I had a good thing going - I didn't want to be a part of Facebook when I was in college, and then after I left school it was out of my hands. I couldn't join if I wanted to, since I no longer had a valid RIT e-mail address. The blame rested squarely on Facebook's own digital shoulders for catering exclusively to students. But then in a surprise move, they opened the gates to the entire internet population. I was no longer safe, and I forgot to look for cover. Emma's e-mail looked innocent enough. And besides, I was tired of running from the inevitable.

So here I am. The reason I'm blogging about this is because I have chosen to link Prose Justice's RSS feed into the 'Notes' section of my facebook profile. As evidenced by a flurry of friend activity in my first 24 hours as a member, I'm expecting that a bunch of people are going to poke around a little bit and eventually find the blog. People might actually start reading this damn thing again. I'd better be ready.

Which means greetings are due again.

So, I've gone on long enough explaining this post. Now let me get to what I intended to do:

To all you out there who found this blog via my Facebook profile, Welcome to Prose Justice!

This blog is a hybrid personal journal/creative media repository that I started just over two years ago, left completely unattended for the last year, and very recently broke back into and began contributing to again. There are something on the order of 90 posts in the body of this collection, some of which are a worthwhile read, some of which are not.

I do not encourage you to read through my old posts unless you are a stalker. I believe there are a couple really good entries in there, but since I adopted a post-titling scheme of summing the entire entry up with one million-dollar word, it's almost useless to search through my archives for an entry that stands out as significant; they all sound like they'd be important, even if they're one sentence explaining that I don't have anything to say.

Having said that, I highly encourage you to read through all my old posts, as I often refer to topics from previous posts and use certain acronyms that won't make sense unless you see the posts in which they originated. I use asterisks* often to annotate my thoughts. I find them to be a fun way to draw a reader around a page. Annotations appear at the bottom of the entry in smaller italicized text.

Oh, and another thing for you 'bookers - It seems that imported blog entries do not transfer embedded pictures. If you find yourself reading a note of mine and it sounds like I'm referring to a photo of something, click the 'View original post' link at the bottom to be redirected to the original page at Prose Justice. The pictures will be there.

9/28/06 - EDIT: The above paragraph is apparently false... embedded pictures just started showing up in my facebook notes. But text formatting doesn't seem to translate at all. Until tomorrow, maybe.

Okay, I think that's a good crash course and set of guidelines for the budding Prose Justice reader. I'm not going to be so arrogant as to believe that I'm going to start seeing a ton of traffic here, but I'm the kind of guy who likes to plan for every contingency. With any luck, this post didn't just scare off any of the potential new readers who had the courage to make it this far.

'Till next time, POFN**

~Riker

*This is an example of me using asterisks to annotate my thoughts.
**Peace Out For Now

OFFICIOUSNESS

Here's something that started bothering me this morning, for no apparent reason:

Dictionaries have entries for the word 'dictionary'. Now, this in and of itself does not bother me. It's obvious that the word does not need to be there*, as the person reading the dictionary clearly already understands its function; it would be a poor choice, however, to selectively omit entries based on recursive/redundant representation. That would just provoke some idiot to come along and prove that it did need to be there. And I don't want to endure the shame of being proven wrong by an idiot.

Here is where my problem lies - Assume that a person unfamiliar with the word 'dictionary' encounters it for the first time. How can he learn, without assistance, what it means? For all intents and purposes, a dictionary has no practical ability to define itself. The person in question needs an a priori understanding of a dictionary in order to know where to look it up. That right there, is a real-world paradox. No time travel and patricide required. Thank you very much.

Here's another quickie; it's not a bothersome one, I just want to know the answer:

If you were to fill the passenger compartment of a Boeing 747 with pennies, would it be enough money to buy said airplane? My gut (which is very well fed read) tells me that it would be enough to buy several. It also reminds me that if you had the means to perform such an experiment, you can probably afford all the airplanes you want... and would probably just pay by check.

*I realize the benefit of a dictionary entry extends beyond defining a word. For example, someone may not know the spelling of the word 'dictionary'. But in counterpoint, I'll remark that opening up a dictionary and searching for it in an alphabetical list is far less efficient than, for example, reading it off the fucking cover.

EXTOLMENT

The ever-accelerating pace of everything.

While I usually use the term 'ever-accelerating' directly in reference to emerging computer technologies, and in some cases to spirited highway jaunts in the SHO, this time I'm applying it in a broader sense to the general access to technology by anyone living above the poverty line in the United States, and its effect on the entertainment industry.

National renown was once the playground of Hollywood's elite and radio's darlings. A-list celebrities*. Movie stars and rock stars. Then a host of heiresses, heirs, self-made billionaires, and other rich bastards joined the ranks. B-list celebrities**. Fame based upon purchasing power, fueled by tabloids looking for new targets after what I can only assume was a drought in royal-family melodrama. They made it into the domain of water-cooler talk and dinner conversation in households across America.

Simultaneously, a phenomenon caught on in television that spurred the growth of yet another breed of celebrity: the reality-show participant. They took the lowly game-show contestant and found a way to inflate his image beyond sub-culture recognition and into a whole new territory. The recipe: Take ten average people, throw them into an oddball competitive scenario, film it from thirty angles and find a past-his-prime Hollywoodster to provide voiceovers and perform general hosting duties (thus seeding the whole operation with a *little* popularity), then hyper-edit the whole thing and run it through a few spin cycles of the entertainment industry corporate dryer. Throw in a once-in-a-lifetime prize package at the end, and what do you have? A planned and engineered card-carrying celebrity superstar. Made of the same stuff you and I are made of. But they get all the in-the-clique perks plus free towing within a hundred miles.

Now, unless you've been living under a rock that doesn't have digital cable, none of this is news to you. Maybe the next topic isn't either, but its significance has only recently reached my awareness, and I am compelled to speak on it. There is a new paradigm shift in the works.

Internet celebrities.

Well-known services like Google Video and YouTube, and some lesser-known-but-I'm-compelled-to-mention-them-because-I'm-friends-with-the-guy-who-runs-them websites like Vimeo allow free subscribers to post video clips of anything they want, viewable by anyone with an internet. What's remarkable is how quickly this has taken off.

All it takes is a bit of luck, a bit of stage presence, the ability to discern the fickle tastes and desires of the internet population, and a webcam, and you can lip-synch to T.A.T.U. in your bedroom to an innumerable audience. Seriously, this phenomenon has spawned an entire demographic of E-List celebrities*** who are, as we speak, on the cusp of becoming household names.

They have the potential to be as big as the Kelly Clarksons and Richard Hatches of yester-season. But here is the critical difference: everyone before this point had the help of some powerful, largely funded enterprise pushing them into the limelight. But from here on out, Jane and Joe Schmo, with the help of the internet, can reach an audience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, by themselves.

Some notable internet celebrities:

(1) The sheltered hottie, and YouTube's heroine (though almost certainly a fake... a corporate-sponsored ploy getting ready to spring some kind of viral marketing wave; honestly the best counter-argument to the argument I'm presenting in this post), Bree, better known as lonelygirl15.

(2) The elusive ninja known only as 'the ninja', from Ask a Ninja.

Well, really, that's all.

Still, it's a start.

Granted, the viewing audience at present consists primarily of preadolescent boys with no social skills... but consider this: that's who used to dominate all the internet dating sites in the late '90s, and today everyone's doing it, ugly, beautiful, shy, popular, young, old. Everyone is doing today what only the nerds were doing yesterday. The same thing's going to happen with the YouTube revolution. In five years, every single one of the collective you reading this blog will have your own free internet TV show, for lack of a better term. As will I have mine. The difference is, people will be watching yours. Such is the way of the ever-accelerating pace of the entertainment industry.

Now, if only I could manage the ever-accelerating pace of blogging in the meantime...

*You know... A, for 'actual'.
**You know... B, for 'billionaire'.
***You know... E, for 'internet'.

ENERVATION

My eyes are burning.

Usually that happens on golf day, where I opt for contact lenses in lieu of glasses. Because it's sunny here in southern California, and sunglasses are hard to wear over glasses glasses.

But today, it's from an upwards of seven hours of staring at a CRT. There's almost no work that can be done at the shop today, so I'm stuck passing the time tete-a-tete with the internet. Google SketchUp is a wicked awesome thing, let me tell you. It's the way Google does CAD. Yeah, I didn't see that one coming either, but I'm still holding out for Google InsuranceFraud (beta).

Now the flash games are playing inside my head when I close my burning eyes.

It's been a good day.

DALLIANCE

Okay, okay, I know.

Burst of activity followed by a month-and-a-half hiatus. Like every time I get back into working out. At least I'm still eating right.

This post be naught but a queueing up of ideas for future blog entries. I shall elaborate in the future:

BUMP KEYS

THE FAIRTAX

SHELBY THREE AND THE HARMONY

YOUTUBE

NEW BLOGGER INTERFACE/FORMAT

To the zero of you who know that I'm blogging again, Stay tuned...

SUBSTANTIATION

Okay, so I spent a little time describing a few t-shirt ideas in a recent post of mine. As a picture is worth way more words than however many words I used to describe it, I made up an illustration for my favorite, Idea #2.

Wanna see it?

Well, too bad, here it is anyway:




Now come on, that's some funny shit.

I'll make up images for the others after I return from New York. Piece!

P.S. The above graphic is Copyright 2006 by Kevin Savino-Riker. Go ahead, give me a reason to sue you... commie bastard.

EXULTANT

Wow, that didn't take long.

The homophone has done it again - I have now successfully merged my new Shaw Electric business cellphone number with my personal number, which makes my "The V" two distinct phones in one physical package.

So, the running tally of features is now:

• Cellphone
• All the standard cellphone auxiliary functions - Scheduler/Dayplanner, Calculator, Text Notepad, Audio Note Recorder, etc.
  
• Digital Still Camera
• Digital Movie Camera
• MP3 Player
• Portable Movie Player
• Spanish/English Translator and Dictionary
• Gaming Platform
• GPS Navigation System
• Another Cellphone

I tell you what burns me though. LG is about to release the VX9900, which will be a smaller and probably more capable version of this phone. It's like they knew they had something gay on their hands, and as soon as I bought one, they decided to correct the problem. Now watch Ray buy one this fall, just to spite me. He doesn't even have Verizon. Bastard. How could you?

DROLL II

So, I have a pal from college who is (1) Hysterical Or Maybe Insane, (2) Creative, (3) Entrepreneurial. One of the companies he and his partners run is BustedTees, a website which apparently sells t-shirts that are broken. Luckily (or is it peculiarly), every BustedTees shirt I've bought or received as a gift has been fully-functional. I guess they have a slacker in charge of quality control.

Anyway, the t-shirts invariably feature humorous graphics and captions, typically 'retro' and understatedly ironic. All of them are hilarious. Even cooler than that is that they accept suggestions from the populace for new shirt ideas, and it is on this note that I'd like to comment today.

I've had a few ideas rolling around in my head for a while for what I believe would be funny t-shirt ideas, even if they aren't busted. Since Prose Justice is back in business, and since I long ago pledged to make this place an additional repository for my creative gushings, I figure I'll put the ideas out in the open, see what people think, and when I get the chance, make a few illustrations to show a rough draft of what I think the shirts could look like.

The following are presented chronologically from date of conception.

Idea #1

A silhouette of a person tilting his head back, raising a bottle of liquor to pour it into his mouth.
Caption is something to the effect of "Drinking - lifts your spirits". I was going for the pun here, since while drinking alcohol can indeed elevate ones mood, the action of raising a liquor bottle over your head is quite literally lifting spirits. Not too funny, I know. I'm willing to put all ideas up here, not just the ones I think will get good reactions.


Idea #2

Posterized image of Castro, wearing a pair of old-school DJ-style headphones.
Caption is "Hi Fidelity". I feel this is funny because if we assume the headphones are of sufficiently high fidelity, then their being worn by a man named Fidel is an example of what is potentially the highest fidelity observable in the natural universe.


Idea #3

Communist Russian propaganda-poster styling, perhaps showing a statue, or at least a strong figure, holding a fork. Caption, written in a very Soviet-esque font, "Cannibalism - For the People". Play on words, self-explanitory. Oh, fine. It's a common sentiment that Communism is For the People. Cannibalism, which sounds (phonetically, not ideologically) an awful lot like Communism, is also, in fact, for the people.



The fact that both ideas #2 and #3 were rooted in, um, alternative governmental models, is entirely coincidental. I am as capitalist as they come; it's just hard to recognize me without all the money.

So, in self-critique, I think #2 is the best candidate for BustedTees, as its particular brand of humor is analogous to what is typically featured on the website, and in my opinion is the funniest of the three. #1 needs a little work. Okay, a lot of work. #3 Would maybe be better destined for a site like T-ShirtHell, but would need to be made even more tasteless (<--Unintentional Pun #1)*. All in all, it's a good exercise to try and be creative outside the scope of what you are used to. If anyone's reading this, let me know how I've done!


*I'm going to start keeping track of the unintended puns that appear in my writing. That is to say, I have to recognize that it's a pun only after I've written it. Oh, in the case of this one, the pun isn't in the sentence, it's because it's in reference to the shirt about eating people, which is in rather bad taste. P.S. That was the same pun right there.

WHEREWITHAL

Okay, two posts in one day... so it's a really slow day at work.

Actually, that's not at all true; I have a lot to do, in fact. I am, however, in a slump where I cannot continue my efforts until the battery recharges in my bomb-ass wire labeler. How better to pass the time than resume posting at the prolific pace I've set for myself since waking up this sleeping beast?

This post is a showcase for my cellphone, the LG VX9800. I'd take a picture of it, but my only accessible camera is on the phone itself. My reasoning behind this unabashed exhibition of material excess? Well, mainly it's a "screw you" to the people who make fun of the fact that the phone is quite a bit larger than they think it needs to be. I'm talking to Ray Ward, Darren Miles, and Joe Farnsworth here. Others may talk too, but I live with these three, so I get it on a regular basis primarily from them.

While my last few phones were sleek and streamlined, the "The V", as those cool cats from Verizon call it, is a little larger. See for yourself:


This thing is, according to my friends, so large as to exude a certain gayness, which lends it to being referred to as the Homophone.

Well, I'm going to come right out and say it: I'm rather proud of my homophone and I fully support its lifestyle. In a form of rebuttal to my gay-bashing hatemonger housemates, I will use Prose Justice to keep people updated on the growing capabilities of this remarkable piece of fruity hardware.

As of two days ago, my "The V" played the roles of:

• Cellphone
• All the standard cellphone auxiliary functions - Scheduler/Dayplanner, Calculator, Text Notepad, Audio Note Recorder, etc.
  
• Digital Still Camera
• Digital Movie Camera
• MP3 Player
• Portable Movie Player
• Spanish/English Translator and Dictionary
• Gaming Platform

As of yesterday, it gained the ability to become a:

• GPS Navigation System

And not just any, mind you. This thing will let me ask it to find the ten nearest titty bars to my present location, and it will list their addresses and phone numbers, then give me graphical and voice-prompt turn-by-turn directions with estimated ETAs that recalculate as I approach. It recalculates routes on the fly if I miss a turn or have to avoid construction.

So, the key question is this: Considering the vastly flexible and, well, vast capabilities of this device, is my homophone's larger size justified? In my case, totally. I'd much rather have all that functionality in a queerly large package than have to decide which of seven or so separate devices I'd want to have on my person in any given situation.

I plan to keep a running tally going on the blog as I download new apps to the homophone. With each new ability I will further evidence the coolness that is my "the V". Note that in technological paradigms I equate usefulness to coolness.

Of course, Ray and co. will quickly point out that coolness and gayness are not mutually exclusive, thus adding 'cool' to my phone will not subtract any homosexual attributes from it.

They will also agree that writing this post is the gayest thing I've ever done.

IDIOSYNCRATIC

Content Warning:

Okay, so I know I said I wasn't going to contribute anything worthwhile to the blog for some time now because I had all this rebuilding to do. I am not yet done with said rebuilding, yet here I am, ready to impart information. And dare I say it will be 'Content of Any DiscernAble Value to thE Reader' (first referred to in Post-Previous and with some creative capitalization and incorrect spelling, hereafter acronymized down to CADAVER). I'll just jump right in. Don't judge*.

JURY DUTY.

While oft-noted as a bane to we, the Busier Than Anyone Else of modern society, jury duty is a vital aspect of our legal system that has always fascinated me. I secretly longed for the day that I would receive my summons and be called upon to take active part in determining the legal fate of another.

Now, this romantic desire of mine was based upon what I now feel was an outdated and naive impression of what jury duty was, namely: being in a jury. How wrong I was.

You see, I finally got my summons and I have been entered into the system. The emerald curtain has been drawn and I have seen the mechanisms at work in this legal hodgepodge. That I have survived it yields a new desire to spread the truth to all you who don't know. If you don't want to know the truth, DO NOT read the following line, for it will tell you exactly what jury duty has become -





Answering Machine Practice.


"Jury duty" entails the folowing:

• Receive a document in the mail with the words 'JURY SUMMONS' in large print and a phone number buried in a sea of small print.
• Call the number on the instructed date (weeks after you receive the summons).
• Listen to the "entire message" - this was explicitly commanded at the beginning of the message.
• The "entire message" is a very long way of saying, "If you've called today, please call back tomorrow after 5pm."
• I'll let you get away with thinking this will only happen once; I did.
• Call back the next day after 5pm. Listen to the new message.
• The "new message" is the same as the last message, with the distinct difference that it now tells you to call back the next day.
• After my second callback I came to the insight that this was answering machine practice.
• After my fifth callback I realized, "You don't even get to leave a message! It's just Listening to Answering Machine Practice!"

I'd go on, but such recursion has no place in this blog. I'm here to warn you, not beat you to death with it.

That there are people out there who think we need answering machine practice, and that they are the same people who filter the innocent from the guilty, almost hurts my brain to think about.

I've used phones longer than I've had mastery of (or even an introduction to) the english language. Who hasn't been on the phone with a proud mother who loves to put her naturally incoherent infant on the line to share the babbling? We've all heard it. We at that age were likely to have been forced to do it by our parents. Some of us have done it with our (read: their) own children (implies: to me, grr.). What's my point? Phones are as natural to gens X and Y as are toilets, and toilets are as natural as butts in this part of the world. We understand phones already. We understand their associated technologies as easily. Even the complicated ones like automated customer service. We hate that one, but we certainly understand it.


I don't know how long Orange County is going to need my valuable services, and I don't know how they intend to compensate me. I just hope the poor guy, guilty or otherwise, got through this quirky little system and got what he deserves. And in the end, I'm glad I could be of help.


*If you found a cadaver in your house... go ahead, tell me you wouldn't show it to anyone.

REQUISITE

Well, I know I'm "blogging", as long as you care to define "blogging" as "making noticeable changes to the blog" and not as "adding content with any discernable value to the reader". I just don't feel like I'm "blogging" right now, because I need to use the second definition. Unfortunately, it will still be a little while before I can do anything of value. Right now I'm in Phase: Dusting Off Occluded Internals.

Buffing out the wear marks of dormancy takes a little more work than I thought it would have. Turns out lots of image links are invalid; I have to figure out the new urls for files on the server out here in Cali. I also have a few new blog features to which I need to get accustomed.

What it amounts to, is that this entry is actually one more piece of filler, necessary because I need to post a picture into the entry. This will determine the location of my new profile photo. I could just put it up temporarily and remove the pic after I find out where Blogger hosted it, but why bother? There's nothing wrong with a little redundant representation.

Regardless, here's the pic, the new poster-child face of Prose Justice. This picture really sums up how I feel right now.


Really, I promise I'm almost done returning the blog to seaworthiness. Just a little more tweaking and I'll be ready to jump in head first. Maybe typing-fingers first.

BEGUILING

It seems that blogger now supports full sensory immersion, with the addition of pix blogging from mobile devices. This of course ignores the senses of smell, taste, touch, and psychokinesis. Nerd. Oh well, here's a snippet of what's keeping me occupied at work.

ORATORY 6

Mediocrity Warning:
The following link plays an audio clip which is in no way entertaining. I just needed to make sure AudioBlogger was still a viable means of dumping cerebral payload upon request.

REVELATION

Apparently I didn't give a shit.

In fact, I seem to have not given a shit WAY harder than I ever gave a shit during the active life of the blog. My last post was to celebrate Prose Justice's 1st birthday, one year and sixteen days ago. Over half my blog's life, spent in hibernation. Since I last posted, I've moved to southern California and gotten a new job, a new car, and a wicked tan.

Well, work has been slow enough lately to indicate an upcoming trend that might just allow me to instill some new zest into this dormant beast. What was once a budding berth of infant literary genius has become a comatose and malnurished toddler, which may now become a once-upon-a-time-budding-berth-of-infant-literary-genius-has-become-a-comatose-and-malnurished toddler-with-the-will-to-overcome-its-past.*

On an absolutely-unrelated note,

Here's to the good intentions of today: May they flourish and grow into the good of tommorow.

See you next year!**

*Because, I'll be writing posts again. Now that I think about it, that's an awfully long description. Sorry, little rusty.
**Not to say I won't see you before then. Just covering my bases.

COMMEMORATION

Jesus H Motherfucking Christ Almighty, I thought I missed my blog's birthday! When I first wrote this, I brain-farted and saw that it was June, but still felt like it was May, and it was definitely later than the tenth of the month by that reckoning. So I scrambled to save face and pop up a nice little commemorative here, and as I posted it, I realized that I'm over a week early. Oh well, at least I can claim acuracy to the month. I'll put this up today anyway, thought I'm going to forward-date it for archival purposes.

As of June 10th, 2005, Prose Justice (don't you dare click on that link, you're already here) will officially become one crazy year old!

A couple notables about this fun little project here:

• I have written 70 entries, including audioblogs, and have five drafts yet-to-be-published.
• Those entries total 30,286 words written, averaging 404 words per post.
• If you printed each character that I typed onto a piece of 8.5" by 11" paper (one character per page in banner-fashion) and placed them end to end in a line, it would be over thirty miles long.
• I have learned more than 50 'million-dollar' words in my extensive search for clever post titles.
• Since I've been tracking hits (November 15, 2004), my blog has been visited 1,316 times by 826 unique viewers. If I include my own visits, that number skyrockets to 58,422. Just kidding. It's probably a little lower than that.
• Despite all this, I'm definitely not sick of blogging, and am ready to set some new records this coming year. Either that or I won't give a shit.

Happy Birthday!

COGITATIVE

Today's a good day to speak at great length on several closely-related topics I've borne in mind lately. Why did I give today such an assessment? Because I'm at my creative best when its purpose is to keep me occupied to the extent that I cannot fathomably be drawn away to do the things that really should be done (read: I don't feel like working on my car yet).

The aforementioned closely-related topics will now be presented in no particular order (which is, I think, a certain form of order in itself, since it implicitly prevents the items from being listed, in arithmetical terms, in 'numerical order'; there is an order inherent in something that prevents the exact same condition in every incidence).

#6: Andrey Hardy brings out the college freshman in everyone.

I can't think of many recent times spent hanging out with Andrey that didn't result in a 4am or later bedtime. The 'wee hours of the morning' don't exist for me in the typical fashion when in Andrey's company... moreso, they become the ass-end of my evenings (not to attribute any rectal qualities to the time spent with him, of course). The man turns potential 'good-mornings' into 'killer last-nights', and for that I thank him. I haven't felt this resilient, satiated, and joyfully careless with my own health since... um (pausing for dramatic effect, and to help break an excessively long sentence into more palatable grammatical kibbles n' bits), since I was an eighteen-year-old die-hard Engineering House underling putting in my second weekly 40-hour day toward making EH propaganda for open-house events, or toward painting the rock, or toward some other lunacy. It feels wonderful, like being able to revisit fun-times-past without the melancholy downer of knowing those times will never be had again, since the revisitation is birthed out of the continuation or repetition of such experiences.

#42,097,463: The best television show ever is '24'.

'24' brings a third dimension to what was previously a 2-dimensional world of television programming. The writing is so gut-wrenchingly compelling, so much more dramatic than 'drama' has ever been known to be. Kiefer Sutherland plays the rawest motherfucker on the planet. The tension is so thick it can't be cut with a knife; Primacord would be better. The show is so hard to watch one-episode-per-sitting; the cliffhangers that can come predictably every hour on the hour (some writers are sadistic with the pacing of the story - sick, sick, sick.) prevent that. Where am I going with all this? Well, I refused to watch Season 4 as it was broadcast because, like I said, I can't watch one episode. The pressure of having to wait an entire week for the next installment coupled with the potential tragedy of missing an episode and being unable to find one online before the next airs is just too much for me to handle today. Hell, it would've been too much for my eighteen-year-old Andrey-Hardified self to handle (however many years ago that was). The remedy? Wait impatiently for the entire season to air, then wait for online availability, then download it in six-episode chunks to gluttonize upon when I should be spending the time fixing my car.

#2: I am chock-full of ADD.

Want proof? I started this post at 1pm. It's 2:30 now. I was supposed to wake up and work on my car. I can't even procrastinate efficiently - I got up from blogging to change my cat's litter box, I came back to the computer, found some more '24' torrents to download, then started writing more of the blog and decided instead to count the number of hyphens that appear in this entry. There are 24, and I did that on purpose.

You want the number of apostrophes? Count 'em yourself.

BEHOLDEN

***This post was written over the span of several days, I will do my best to identify discrete changes between them.***

5/22/05
It's a good day. Partied hard last night. I woke up early and worked, satisfying any vestigial need to feel productive on a weekend. I returned to bed for a delightfully peaceful nap. Awakening for the second time today, I'm at the computer, there's a bowl of egg noodles in my lap, a reggae remake of John Denver's "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" is pouncing between dendrites in a far-removed corner of my auditory memory banks, and I am going to see Star Wars Episode III for the second time tonight*.

Having already seen the film in accordance with a three-times-reinforced tradition of attending the 12:01am opening show (Return of the Jedi: The Remake, and those other two we don't like to talk about - I'll give you a hint, they rhyme with 'Schmepisodes I and II'), I can spoil all sorts of stuff, but I won't. There are two reasons I'm willing to take this journey twice: (1) It was a much better movie than both Schmepisodes I and II, and (2) among those attending is Laurali Kinsella**, a favorite among my Califriends (all of whom are favorites among my entire circle of friends; why the hell do you think I'm moving out there? For the weather?), who is in town on a rare Rochesterian visit for her lovely sister Shawna's*** RIT graduation. While I missed the chance to see their parents over the weekend, I'm certainly not going to miss hanging out with them. Much fun happens around those two. Anyway, I'm psyched. Oh, and another reason to see the movie again - I'll get a better view without the opening-day faithful taking all the best seats before I get there.

5/24/05
What a lousy day. Did absolutely nothing last night, save getting unbelievably frustrated with my car as I put parts of it... no... attempted to put parts of it back together. I went to bed with every intention of getting up early in the morning to work on it and ended up sleeping through the entire first half of the day - and haven't even felt the benefit of the additional slumber. Awakening far too late today, I'm at the computer, there's instant oatmeal stuck to the roof of my mouth, a fledgling headache is plotting an attack somewhere near the base of my skull, and my wallet is still missing after the fiasco with that godforsaken movie.

Ebb and Flow, I despise you sometimes.

*Not to say that the first time I saw it was also tonight; had I chosen to better word the sentence, it would be apparent that I meant "tonight will mark the second time I've seen the movie."

**I know I look really drunk in that picture, but I promise I was just tired.

***Shawna is the one on the left.

SIMULACRA

Possible assimilated words for the following presentation:

• Photo Story - Phory
• Blog Photos - Blotos
• Blog Pictures - Blictures, Bloctures, or Blogtures

There were more, but I forgot them. I think Blotos has a really nice ring though...

So, without further ado, here are the blotos I took from the gas-leak incident highlighted in Post-Previous.

---

Lovely White RG&E truck...


...towing a lovely fireball yellow backhoe...


...to my lovely front yard...


...so it can destroy said yard...


...really badly.


REALLY badly.


Truly, madly, deeply, even, for you Savage Garden fans...


...so it may reveal an 89 year old piece of rusted house-exploding crap...


...that threatens to send me sky-high...


...unless it gets replaced by a silky plastic tube...


...in the hole in my front yard.


They've already removed the 89 year old rusted house-exploding crap that's inside my basement...


...which was replaced by shiny new metal stuff that's now being covered up...


...by the giant fucking backhoe, aided by the nice man in the orange vest...


...anybody know anything about planting flowers?

---

PERTURBATION

I know I failed to make good my promise to write more soon.

Since I've come out and admitted it, there is no cause to criticize. I will now get out of the way, in synopsized, bulleted fashion, the innumerable (or perhaps five) events of significance that have happened which would, under normal circumstances, deserve their own blog entry, and may still, pending the opportunity, just so I may fast-forward to events so dramatic as to encompass the whole of my attention and concern, events that have not even completely transpired:

• My flight to California - I vacationed in Huntington Beach during the end of March, visiting such close friends and compatriots as Ray Ward, Joe Farnsworth, Laurali Kinsella, Meg LaRochelle, Julie Wilcox, Chris Savino, and a handful of others. I had the time of my life.
• My roommate Tom's mugging - Tom was attacked by a handful of kids as he was riding home on a bicycle. They ran off the porch and chased him down, attacking him and taking the ten dollars he had on his person. I hate Brooks Ave.
• My car woes (and consolations) - Nissan Sentra II's (slight papal allusion there) health took a turn for the worse as my timing chain skipped a few teeth, rendering the car completely useless. I couldn't afford to have a garage fix it, so I'm doing it myself. My housemates are great for accommodating me with my need to be places. As soon as the car is fixed, I'll be selling it, and adopting primary utilization of Honda Accord IV shortly thereafter.
• My plan to sell my house and move to California - What can I say? It changed my life when I went out there; every possible thing that could have fallen into place to make such a move possible, did so perfectly, to the extent that it would be wasteful not to take the opportunity to the fullest.
• The massive standoff in my neighborhood, complete with lunatics holed up in a house with shotguns, and thirty-odd cops on the scene throwing around terms like 'kill zone'. I hate Brooks Ave.

Okay, that's the most of the biggest news in the last month and a half... now, as promised, I'm here to give you the late-breaking news today, with events still unfolding... I'm going to do this line by line, for dramatic effect:

My house is mere inches away from exploding.

Not metaphorically, more along the lines of 'gigantic fireball of natural gas-ically'.

Apparently my home has been threatening to blow us all to that great California in the sky for some time now. And the amazing part is...

...IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF THE ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES THAT GO ON HERE!

So Ralph's and my comfortable slumber was interrupted earlier this morning by men in hardhats knocking on my door. Meanwhile, other men in hardhats stood in my yard pointing at my porch. They quite casually informed us of a massive gas leak on my property, and apparently had already called the police locksmithing team to grant access to my basement, since it took us a whole minute to answer the door.

I guess they thought we'd all suffocated in the night? I'm not up to speed on the likelihood of natural gas poisoning... but I digress.

They called off the police, I escorted the men to my basement, covered up all the alcohol-producing apparati and other contraband, and listened as they inspected my gas main with a cartoony-looking sniffer device clad in happy dandelion (or in retrospect, fireball) yellow, that clicked like a team of South-African tribesmen playing soccer with a Geiger counter*. Turns out they need to replace the line in my basement. This also means they need to dig a small cavern in my front yard under my porch. For Christ's sake, they brought their own stalactites. This leads me to believe RG&E plans to recoup the cost of performing this operation by turning the cavern and my basement into a tourist attraction, selling tickets for guided tours underneath my home ("...and over there is where the cat shits..."). Sons of bitches. Oh well, at least I'm not being charged for the repair.

And I forgot to mention the entirely comical part about this whole thing! First off, I don't know how the HELL they knew to come over and check out this leak; I'm not familiar with any random gas-leak teams that just drive around peoples' lawns with their windows down**... something must have tipped them off. I'll not worry about that for much longer, rather, I'll worry about the place they discovered the leak. As I mentioned, the leak originated underneath my front porch... you know, that place where everybody goes outside to smoke and eventually throw their cigarettes into the bushes? Yeah, that's the place where they had to find a fucking gas leak. At this point, I'm supposed to have one of those epiphanies, where I get a new lease on life because by my best estimation, I should have died about twenty times in the last month, and that's not counting any of the stupid shit I do away from home on a daily basis.

To put it succinctly, HOLY FUCKING FUCK!

What's interesting though, is that I have the opportunity to take pictures of the whole operation in progress, which entertains me plenty, and helps me avoid working more on my car, which has become wholly tedious. Meanwhile, I'm upstairs by the porch playing with electronics and testing lady luck like it ain't no thang.

In all honesty though, it could have been much worse... I always envisioned the day when men in hazard suits came to my home as involving them drugging and dragging me into a panel van, instead of them fixing something that broke after 89 years of faithful service.

Maybe while I have them here we can talk about fixing another pipeline with another kind of gas involved - my sewer stack is smelling mighty foul lately.

* - I'm not racially insensitive, nor am I racist or anything remotely similar. The fact of the matter is that I was referencing a recently-discovered comedic performance by one Russel Peters, who spends no small amount of time musing on the intricacies of the African clicking dialect. As my dear friend Andrey puts it, "I didn't know Indians could BE that funny!" See what I'm talking about right here: Russel Peters Stand-Up Comedy

** - It turns out that's EXACTLY what they do. Every two years or so, RG&E goes around house by house checking for gas leaks, and they found ours just in time.

CATHARSIS II

Wow,

I haven't had so much to report in so long, and I have to say, thankfully, that almost all of it is positive.

I'll work reverse-chronologically from tonight back to, let's say, about two weeks ago.

Tonight: I haven't had so much fun since the night before I threw up blood in the corner bathroom stall at the robot job. I worked a very fun day at the robot job, in fact; my services were leased out to one of the other companies housed within my building, tearing apart desks and cubicles to make room for new employees, who will be entering said company through the labors of ^^^their new HR associate^^^ (EXPLANATION: emboldened triple carets flanking a phrase or word in this entry are indications of chronologically-independent cross-references. I won't link them directly, but will rather cite them all and allow you to hunt through the entry to determine which items are being linked). It's always fun to build shit, as I do often in the robot job, but every once in a while it's refreshing to tear things apart lying on your back holding a screwgun at awkward angles in tightly confined cells. I don't know why this is the case, but in my case, it's certainly true. I got to leave early and arrived home just in time to see our good previously-unreferred-to (at least in the blog) neighborhood wanderer, Terrell Holley.

Background information on Terrell, italicized: Terrell is a young man who lives near my neighborhood and due to some mental challenges, the nature and diagnosis of which is absent to me, excepting the behavioral anomalies that indicate being a few proteins short of an enzyme, is unable to obtain gainful employment. Therefore he is relegated to the task of performing unsatisfactory manual labor long the lines of lawn mowing in the spring and summer, leaf raking in the fall, and snow removal in the winter. He has not yet mastered the business skills and social interactability requisite to earning regular clients for his services, mostly because he changes his prices constantly and cannot comprehend a potential customer's disinterest in hiring him. I've had him perform work at 237 Weldon on numerous occasions, mostly out of my desire to help those less fortunate than I, but from time to time I have to tell him 'no, thanks.' This does not stop him from relentlessly harping on myself and my housemates for work, and unfortunately the manner in which he does so almost always renders one of us frustrated, frightened, or just plain perturbed. For example, if he sees a car parked in the driveway, he'll assume that it's perfectly acceptable to pound on any available surface, be it a closed window, a door, etc., for a good ten to fifteen minutes trying to rouse somebody to pay him for some work he wants to do. At its worst, he finds that a door is unlocked and pokes his head inside to yell "hello?", without exaggeration, for ten to fifteen more minutes, until someone responds to him or he's arbitrarily deemed it time to move on to the next house. He has on several occasions awoken us in the middle of infrequent precious slumber. While this sounds absolutely unbearable and intolerable, (and, it actually is in every imaginable sense), he has this innocence that can only be encompassed by the mind of a person found wanting in the realm of cognitive lucidity extruding from within him, and is therefore practically impossible to have the ^^^"I don't want you to ever return to this property"^^^ applied to him.

So, there I am, pulling into my driveway a crisp two hours ahead of schedule to find Terrell at my front porch. He asks me for an advance payment to shovel my driveway at the end of the week, as he's checked the weather reports and has determined that Friday will deal a pummeling blow in the form of crystalline dihydrogen monoxide (these are not the words he used). I craftily and politely dismissed him, still bearing the full weight of cash in my wallet prior to our exchange, and proceeded to head inside. I found all the doors in the house opened, which triggered a slightly alarmed response, since everyone in the house knows to keep the living room door shut, damn Ralph and his upstairs Haven of Feline Prohibition. I shrugged it off and headed upstairs to the attic to check on the copious amounts of expanding foam we applied the night before (PICTURE). I decided not to say hello to my housemate Amanda because her light was off and there was no sound emanating from her room... ^^^she must be napping^^^. My investigations were curtailed unexpectedly by the front doorbell, which turns out to have been rung by one of Rochester's finest on patrol. He explained that he was responding to a call from a neighbor who said that our house was being broken into. I put two and two together, knowing Terrell's tendencies to infringe on our personal space, and explained to the officer that it was just Terrell trying to find someone to talk to about shoveling, and that he was harmless. As if on cue (and I later found out that it actually was on cue), immediately after the officer radioed back to HQ about the call being erroneous, Amanda emerged downstairs visibly distraught and on the verge of tears. She proceeded to explain to me that Terrell had not just shown up as I arrived like I had assumed. In fact, Terrell performed the following recursion*: Knock on door for ten minutes. Enter my fucking home and proceed to walk around downstairs, evidently looking for us, for another ten minutes. Walk back outside and close door, knock again. RINSE. REPEAT. FOUR TIMES. That's right, my friends, Terrell was in and out of my house for 45 minutes, scaring Amanda half shitless. The poor girl was hiding in her room ^^^on the phone with a 911 operator^^^!!! She didn't come down until the cop radioed to the 911 operator that I was back home and it was safe to emerge. Needless to say, the police now have a record of his indiscretion, and if he so much as looks at us funny, I'm going to ^^^tell him what he needs to hear^^^, and if he ever again decides to intrude, he's going to face several legal penalties. We calmed down and I took a nap.

Okay, now that I've gotten the negative out of the way, I can continue to recap my recent adventures.

Shit, I can't keep going... I've been a bit loquatious tonight, and I promise I'll continue the recap soon. So for now, This is Kevin, signing off. The upcoming stories will be great.

*Recursion, in this case, I chose to use based upon the Latin definition, simply, "a repetitive event", not (as some of you computer-savvy individuals might be inclined to interpret) a call to a function from within a previously run instance of the function itself.