A Poem from Roe Rae - my Spam Laureate

who hails from the far-flung domain "abaco-ifinor.com":

someone study live

close fit sign

No speak understand

computer put say

wrong fill turnon

eat complain see

Or open sing

use give draw

To speak begin

awake live listen

Go allow explain

Ebony & Ivory

A Japanese snake & what was presented to him as lunch are now settling down in perfect harmony together as domestic partners, with the snake refusing to devour the hamster even when he's hungry.
As I type on my key-board¹, (I think)
"Oh lord, why can't we?"

And don't think I didn't notice the temperature..Heh heh.

¹Best read when sung

The Lady in the Overstock.com commercials

Who would have thought that the woman featured in the Overstock.com had such a following?

I found the commercials irritating initially. They came across as budget (production), somewhat unclear in message, and somehow trying to be provocative but not really getting there.

The accent of the spokeswoman intrigued me, though, and being a man of some leisure, I explored further. She's German and once flew a plane solo from Los Angeles to Montana.

Huh.

PS Is it me or does she remind you of the chick in 'She's Having A Baby', credited as "Fantasy Girl"?

Rashstache

You Can't Make It Up [blog & image lifted from it]


This woman is effing funny..

Please, please don't let this be a sick political version of Punk'd! on us

Hot off the wire..Let's hope it's accurate and develops.

Impeachment Hearings: The White House Prepares For The Worst [from Disinformation]

and

Some activists, politicians speaking openly about impeachment [San Jose Mercury News]

4 local teens accused of hate crime in Wisconsin

(Article here in .pdf because the Chicago Tribune requires an annoying registration/log-in and I want to spare you that*)

Boys, boys..Looks like the police detective investigating the case is onto you:

"The fact that they went back to the room three times [that night], that says a lot," said UW-Madison Police Detective Carol Ann Glassmaker. "They were truly victimizing this person."

Yes Carol, it does say a lot. It also says that when these 4 buddies get loaded, they get somewhat preoccupied with the thought of M4M action and those that engage in it. WTF's up with that, boys? You must have been pretty hot and bothered about the thought of a living, breathing homosexual in your vicinity to go back 3x in an evening. Now the common thing to do next would be to insinuate that you're all pretty blatant textbook cases of latent & repressed homos yourself, but I won't go there for 2 reasons:

1. Accusing you of being fags yourself is not an insult. It's not the homosexual part of you that is insulting or derogatory - it's the sheer stupidity and lack of self-awareness (that you are closeted & repressed) that is.

2. From the look of your mugshots, I don't want you to be closeted homos. You're too ugly and would fuck up the ratio of gay men:attractive men.


Boys what you don't realize is that those who act out against gay people - be it through picketing, beatings, insults, etc. - reveal much more of their psyche than they intend. I for example, don't run around vandalizing/abusing people at straight weddings, titty-bars, or frat houses, because I really don't give a damn about them. (Well that's not entirely true - I do give a damn about straight people and their weddings. I'm a lover afterall.)

'Phobes: it's called apathy. Look into it.

Active, seething hate is so passionate and kind of girly when it comes from a grown male.

*For future reference, I recommend BugMeNot.com which provides you with user id/pw's to log-on to sites that for no good reason, require your personal information..

I'm glad I don't own one of these for a number of reasons

Ladies & Gentlemen, I present to you, the latest in cold weather monk/sloth wear:
The Slanket. [via The Wow Report]

West Coast Response to 'Lazy Sunday'

I thought the original SNL short was funny. For a minute.

Then people got all whipped up about it as if the entire season was a hit or something, (which from this past Saturday's pathetic episode with Peter Sarsgaard is blatantly not the case) and it got real tired real quick.

This smack-back below may actually be better and funnier. (Yeah, it is.) Now that I've been out here in LA for some time, I think appreciate it completely. [Notice the jacked up chopper handlebars on the dude's bike on the left. Snaps to that.]

Sort of adorable, sort of sick

Despite the cuteness of this kid, this disturbs me incredibly.

Another point for RJ Reynolds and company.
[from Boing Boing]

An Open Letter to the Douchebag at the bar in my town this afternoon,

[my apologies for the uninspired and somewhat tired 'open letter' format, but my spirits were pretty low after the incident and i wasn't feeling original.]

Dear Former Fratboy Chunkhead,

I had been having a really nice day before I was subjected to your pathetic attempt to score points with your drinking buddies (I'm guessing "Hammer", "Smitty", & "Boner") while watching the Seahawks vs. Panthers game this afternoon. By the looks of your bloated, glassy visage, you were too.

What I'm curious about is why you chose to wait until we were exiting the bar -- actually outside the doorstep -- to begin ridiculing us for having a Scrabble board in our 'beach tote'. Is it because your spelling skills are so lacking? Are you intimidated by 2 hip, relatively attractive men together in a scummy sports bar carrying pastimes of the intellectual sort? Maybe it was just the fact that your stumpy dick was chafed from the sporty khaki shorts you were wearing. Was your baseball cap (backwards, of course) too tight, causing you discomfort?

I know we live in a small, lame, bland, boring, cracker, uninspired town at the beach, but I don't think that gives you the right (or the reason) to shout loud enough for every bar patron (including those outside smoking) that the "Scrabble boys aren't here for the GAME?! HAHAHAHAHAH..."

I promise you Fatty, that the next time I see you, if you have the balls (borrow them from your guy friend) to throw shit my way, I will personally find glee in smashing in your top teeth with an iron fist.

Wait a minute, I think I understand your insecurity and resultant taunt. Scrabble is a game of words.. Yes, those things that are strung together in books. (Kind of like what you see under the pictures in Maxim but the ones we tend to employ are polysyllabic. That means "longer".)

Eat it.

iPod Video: Update - All that glitters ain't gold

Coming off the buzz of recently procuring a video iPod, I've embarked on the seemingly common task of converting digital video content to a format that will be accepted and played by the device.

And here, dear reader is where the problems began. You see, you can't simply add any video to iTunes and have iTunes do the work (cause iTunes is free right?). No, you must purchase a registration key to activate QuickTime Pro which will then allow one to export a movie to the accepted standard of MPEG-4, which the iPod uses.

"Well no problem," I thought to myself. "My many years in multimedia production have endowed me with a working copy of QuickTime Pro." Wrong. You see, the latest version of iTunes - the one that a user must download and install to operate a video iPod requires the purchase of the most current version of QuickTime Pro (7.0+). So I dropped another $30 at the Apple Store (online) and got myself a new registration key to activate QTPro 7.0.4

"Great, I'll be watching all the television that my computer TiVo's in no time," I naively thought to myself.

Wrong again.

You see, Windows uses this stupid ass format (.dvr-ms) to save any television content the Media PCs record. So I had to find a program that would first convert the Windows DVR content into something that QuickTime Pro would understand. (Are you still with me here? It gets better, I promise.)

I downloaded DVRMSToolbox from Download.com (shareware, natch) and thought, "Okay, I'm on my way..Although this 2-step process is kind of a pain in the ass." DVRMSToolbox was touted as an application that "allows you to convert DVRms to more accessible formats."

I (quickly) converted an episode of "Little Britain" into an mpg movie. No problems there.
I then attempted to open the resultant .mpg in QuickTime Pro (ha! What a misnomer) only to be notified of the following:

Hot.

After hours scouring the web, tech forums, and even hitting up my useless graduate program's alumni list (thanks for nothing), I discovered from the apple website:

QuickTime has the ability to play back MPEG-2 content via the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component. It is available as an add-on to QuickTime 6 or QuickTime 7 for $19.99 in the Apple Store online.

"Huh?"

So ultimately, I dropped another chunk of change on the mpeg-2 converter so that QuickTime Pro would allow me to open the converted DVR video and then export it "for iPod". Whew! Well at least that got sorted out.

Sort of.

I mean, I guess I should have read more carefully about whether or not the television programs I was interested in viewing on the iPod needed audio with them, because after a long, slow export

I added the file to iTunes, 'updated' my iPod (named iNinja, nice right?), and sat back ready to watch hysterical British sketch comedy on a teeny tiny 2-inch screen.

Silent.

So, my faithful reader (yes you), I am now re-outputting the mpg (that's mpeg-2 class, and you will be tested on this later) in the hopes that I can actually hear the fucking video.

Mind you, this process has taken upwards of 4 hours total. Thanks crApple.

It's a good thing I've got a lot of free time.

Update: I've installed and run *3* different programs (DVRMSToolkit, Videora, & 3GP Converter) in a pathetic attempt to accomplish this. Check out this article [Engadget] and the comments that follow - the task is not resolved and you'll see a number of posts towards the bottom where users have followed all the recommendations only to have their iPod resized/compressed video not have audio. . It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Update #2: I think I've sorted it out and it's actually a sweet solution..
1. Use DVRMSToolkit to strip out commercials (from the pulldown menu)
2. Use 3GP Converter to convert those to MP4 for iPod and BAM! they show up automatically in iTunes when the conversion is complete.
Suck it Apple. You to Microsoft.
Email me if you're interested in this.

Finally, the long overdue Brokeback Mountain entry

In a marathon week of movie going, I finally saw Brokeback Mountain (days after Memoirs of a Geisha).

Simply put, this is definitely one of the best American films I've seen in a long time. [I'm still burnt and embarrassed by 'A.I.' from years back.]

I didn't even find it overtly gay. I mean, I need to see some significant amounts of ManLove for a movie to qualify as a 'gay' one. The story and backdrop of the film are really original and compelling. All the lead actors were good - even Ennis' wife (played by Heath's realworld wife, Michelle whatever-her-name-is).

Without dropping spoilers, I saw this film with very little information and was completely caught off guard by the turn of events.

(begins to choke back sobs)

Suffice to say, that you should see this movie. It's important and well made.

And fine, I'll admit it, those 2 boys are easy to watch as they rough-house and spend time together. If you want me to get all school-girlie about it, check this out.

This is a good review. [Pajiba - Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People]

Eye catching subject headers

I've received the best Spam subject ever:

To: ctrl-freak
From: TishaHensleybicarbonate@arnovitz.com
Subject: You can save few hundreds every month naked

Do Tisha a favor and email her to find out how you too can save 'few hundreds' every month naked. I assume she doesn't mean by not buying clothes. That would be too easy.

A High Class Jackass

A High Class Jackass
Upon first scan, this chica's blog looks um...engaging. Compelling? How about this chica's blog resonates somehow.

Whatever, I babysat all day since 6.45am, coming off a late night that involved Brokeback Mountain.

More to come on this, irregardless.

Breeders Can Be Annoying: Case #1

Candace Dickinson is an idiot who should be slapped with a lawsuit for wasting people's time.
Apparently, this woman tried to use her unborn fetus to count as a second passenger in her car while illegally driving in the HOV lane. If I were the police officer who pulled her over, I would have punched her in the uterus.

Here's the deal people. Babies are what happens when straight people fuck without birth control. It's not really an accomplishment in itself, being pregnant. Being a good parent - that's an accomplishment. But uncrossing one's legs once, resulting in an implantation isn't and does not entitle you to anything extra or special in life.

See, if or when someone decides to have children, they would be well served to remember that the rest of the world doesn't care. Unless of course, you're an uncle or aunt. Then it's cool.

Winter Sunset in Sunny SoCal

Winter isn't so bad here.

News! Most magazines are crap! Severe image manipulation occurs!

images nabbed from copyranter, blatanly

While most of us know this is the case, it's not often you can see how pervasive image editing is in an individual picture.

This site gives a good demo of how crap most of the beautiful people we see are. [from notonlybutalso.typepad.com]

Another good place for before/after rollovers can be found here.

We interrupt this Winter to bring you SUMMER!

It's been over 80 degrees, hot and sunny here for the past two days.

Essentially, winter has been pre-empted by Summer and I love it.
My down comforter is draped over the balcony outside airing out in the blazing sunshine.

Winter, I may miss seeing you but I'm hell glad we don't live together anymore.

2006: iPod 30Gb Video

The new iPod 30Gb with video is cool, in theory. It's slim, sleek and plays video at an impressive rate & quality.

In practice, it's a bit pudgier . Actually getting videos onto the chicklet is non-trivial (and I's gots me a degree y'alls) and the extent to which iTunes (the music store) sells the videos as product is embarrassing. Would someone really pay $1.99 for Jessica Simpson's "These Boots Are Made for Walking Video"? Really?! I must be getting old, cause last time I checked, there were entire channels dedicated to streaming these (bad) videos for free - well if you consider them being interrupted with shiteloads of advertising, 'free'.

In any case, being the tech-ster that I am, I immediately set out to explore beyond the confines of the iTunes (electric)fence. First, I peer-to-peered for files containing 'ipod.video' in the extension. Gorillaz, Madonna, & Jessica Simpson came up quickly. [ed. note - you read it here first: advertising & 'music' videos as we know them are immediately and forever altered as a result of this new means of transmission. Look out for larger, more prominent product placement in the videos themselves, with the plot of the video including/referring/involving said product perhaps.]
If I were (ahem) to have saved them to disk, I would have had a hell of a time actually getting them to show up on the iPod's library. But I didn't, cause.. that would be um, bad, right? Anyway, thing is, the host application for the iPod (iTunes) is not the most intuitive for a staunch PC user like myself. (I'm going back to the IBM PCjr here, kids.) Yeah, I 'added file to library' and yeah it showed up in the library under 'videos' that little icon . But one has to change a number of non-obvious options in order to get the Pod to actually update and possess the desired video. I'm still not sure I've got it right. Each attempt seems to be guided more by luck coupled with praying, sweating, promising God, and cursing than it does via a set series of clicks.

Long story short, I watched Madonna's 'Hung Up' video on the pod the other night while enjoying some wine. It was a warm evening for January -- even in Los Angeles. The effect was pretty amazing. Holding something so small & light in form factor that's displaying full-frame-rate video -- with no feeling of a hard drive spinning outside under the palm trees.. Well, it was..magical to say the least. Borderline erotic, let me tell you.

I still expected to see her waving a teeny weeny can of Coca Cola around or something, though.

Next chapter in this saga: "iPod Porn". Timely, no?

Santino Rice

Santino Rice, the tall sleazy looking (but talented) diva on Project Runway 2 has his own blog. Big fucking deal. Having only scanned it, I can tell he's under contractual obligations not to disclose much about the show. He did make a nice outfit on the first episode though. I'm getting over the histrionic people the mass media is shoving at us.

Happy New Year

I think I've overdosed on Family.

I do love them all, but 2 full weeks of non-stop, hardcore family get togethers, overnight stays, and long drawn out meals has left me a shell of the man I used to be.

In other words, I fell off the Quitted Smoker Wagon.

In my defense, i'd like to say I picked up the first butt upon arriving in New York to a transit strike (what the fuck was that all about?) that was announced while I was in the air. Thanks Union. I didn't get to see my friends because you need to retire at 55. Suck it.

So I smoked. Cause I was stressed out. And besides, everyone in New York smokes. Everyone.

I enter the new year already running to catch up. sigh.