Every Time a Synapse Fires

Um, Last One to Leave, You Know the Drill

2007-01-09T02:02:00.000-06:00

Yo. If you're reading this, rest assured that I haven't given up the art of blogging. Far from it, although I suppose my output has dipped slightly in the last couple of months. No, I've been keeping up with this stuff back at my LiveJournal, where you can catch my opinions on all manner of stuff (although that ends up being mostly ancient and medieval history, ice hockey, my grotesque Anglophilia [complete with a downright colonial interesting in things Welsh], and video games).

I made an attempt at this, and I appreciate some of what was offered here, but it was silly for me to be double posting all of my entries, and in that fight, the older LiveJournal wins ever time.

Yeah, I probably should've put this here months ago, but I have a feeling that it didn't really affect many of you poor souls wandering around on the Internet. If it did, my LiveJournal has extensive archives, so you can catch up on all of the delightful prose you missed while you thought I was neglecting my duty. Look deep enough, you might even find some hockey poems I wrote, and that ought to be reward enough for any man.

Let's All Gripe About the Wikipedia

2006-09-18T06:16:00.000-05:00

Hello, Wikipedia's List of Family Guy Characters.

Wait, I'm sorry, would you prefer Pedantic Explanation of Every Joke in Family Guy?

Or perhaps Longest Article in the Damn Wikipedia? That's 118k of html file.

But, hey, if you want to know what Cookie Monster said that one time he showed up for a joke, this is your resource. It's on page 22, by my count.

Meanwhile, Constantine IV has only one page, despite saving Constantinople from the Muslims and solving the Monotheletism problem.

Moving on to Other Foreign Elections!

2006-09-17T22:29:00.000-05:00

Lest you think that publicity stunts are limited to American politics or Paris Hilton, the Hungarian Prim Minister "leaked" a recording of him berating the government for lying and not doing anything.

The really scary thing is that we're so used to this sort of thing that it's nearly impossible to tell whether it's a terrible mistake or a ploy to make him look like a reforming firebrand/maverick. Honestly, it could be a real leak and he could be scrambling to protect what's left of his political life, but this is exactly the sort of thing that someone like McCain pulls out of his hat when things aren't looking so good.

On my side, I find this PR nonsense is the absolute worst part of politics. It's gross and repellant and, ultimately, quite boring. It's Compassionate Conservatism and Al Gore's earth tones and all of that crap. I don't think I'm alone here, either. This is what turns people off of politics, not the issues or voting or something. People care about the issues, especially the really complicated ones. What makes people stop caring is how both parties, whatever their positions are, seem to have exactly the same PR firm (and not a particularly good one). They're both transparent and indistinguishable.

But, then, I'm bitter and unemployed. In my heart of hearts, I'd prefer any candidate who spoke Latin or had a passionate love for medieval history. Hell, at this point, I'd take anyone who had a passionate love of anything. For this very reason, if I was able to vote in West Virginia, I'd vote for Robert Byrd in a heartbeat. Say what you will about him (and goodness knows there's plenty of bad things to say about him), but he clearly cares deeply about the Senate and its history, not to mention the Roman Senate. I find that very appealing, and not just because I also like the Roman Republic. That passion is a part of the real Robert Byrd. It's not moving any polls for him, it's not winning him any votes (except mine, I guess), but it is still very important to him, and it gives him a much more interesting public personality than, say, John Kerry or Trent Lott. It might not be ideal, but I'll take what I can get.

Especially when the major players in the next presidential election are people like Hilary Clinton and Bill Frist.

Gak.

I Like Booze and I Like Mario, So . . .

2006-09-17T22:07:00.000-05:00

Clearly, the best way to punch up your video gaming experience is with beverages that extend the experience to your bloodstream.

Also, Mario Party becomes exponentially more fun once you start drinking.

Hell, so does Mario Kart. Really, all of the Mario 'n Company games improve with some alcohol.

How else do you think Waluigi makes it through the day?

The Swedes Have Made Their Choice

2006-09-17T17:46:00.000-05:00

The Moderaterna Party won the Swedish elections today.

Looking back, that's the one my quiz results matched up with best, so I salute you, Sweden, for doing what I would do.

Pretty soon you'll stop sleeping and refuse to think about anything more than 2 days in the future. Plus, I have a feeling that being the model for the Swedish hive-mind would put me in pretty good stead over there. They've got all the herring I could ever want.

And this all comes just as I thought I was going to spend a year working a crappy job and filling out boring applications. Screw that, I'm moving to Sweden!

Prussian Blue is on the Clock

2006-09-17T14:49:00.000-05:00

Only 1201 days until Prussian Blue is legal.

That picture looks like it's pretty old, though. They're 16 now, and that picture makes them look like they're about 12.

Either way, anything concerning Prussian Blue is hilarious, because Prussian Blue is almost as hilarious as it is creepy.

I'm told there are music videos on YouTube, but I'm not feeling up to watching 16 year-old racists sing about Nazis at the moment.

Hey, It's the Guy From Wings! No, Not That Guy From Wings

2006-09-15T20:06:00.000-05:00

I was flipping through this little gallery of old stars with new shows, and I saw that the guy from Wings is back on TV.

Not the other guy from Wings, although he's on Studio 60 now, so he's back on TV, too.

Not the mechanic guy from Wings, he won an Oscar or some shit.

Not Tony Shalhoub, he's got his own show on USA and has won Emmys and shit.

No, this time, it's the guy from Wings.

It's good to see them all doing so well, though. Maybe the woman from Wings can come out of hiding now.

Watch TV Over the Internet Like All the Cool Kids

2006-09-15T20:05:00.000-05:00

I know it's skanky, but you can watch the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on AOL's TV thing, for free.

It's a good pilot, really. Much better than Sports Night's, that's for sure.

I'll admit, some of this might well be a fondness for Judd Hirsch that's been around since Nick-at-Nite started showing Taxi, but that's cool. He gets a good part and then leaves. The two stars are predictably good. Whitford's been doing this for years and Matthew Perry had a couple of fun guest appearances on The West Wing as Ainsley Hayes's replacement.

I'll stop listing trivia and instead give my hearty recommendation to the pilot. I'll find a way to watch the series when it starts up.

Fond Remebrances of Days Gone By

2006-09-15T19:32:00.000-05:00

Remember those e-mail jokes you used to see all the time 10 years ago?

They're back, and just as funny as they were then. Precisely as funny, down to the last marginal speck of humor.

But, wait! We're not going to leave you with just jokes about Dan Quayle or beer vs. women, we've got so much more for you today.

JFK and Lincoln coincidences!
The most offensive ethnic humor I've ever read about Irish people!
Gripes about Windows '95

As in, 95 is how many disks it will take to intall. Or how many megabytes it takes up on your hard drive. Or how many megahertz you need to run it.

We've come a long way, that much is clear.

With Any Luck, the Rapture's Coming Any Second Now

2006-09-15T03:07:00.000-05:00

I just watched a YouTube video of someone watching another YouTube video bashing a 3rd YouTube user.

I don't know what to think or to say or to do.

Internet, you fucking win. No one can destroy your dark power.

70,000 people have watched a man's face for 2 minutes as he watched YouTube drama unfold. It doesn't make sense. Nothing makes sense.

There is no you, or me. There is no Earth. There is no love or hate or indifference.

There is only Internet, the one true god of time and space. We are powerless to stop it now. Escape is no longer possible. Internet controls all and sees all.

The future is only Chuck Norris jokes and 15 year-olds whining about vloggers bitching about their bratty children complaining about some guy at their school who was totally a jerk who said mean stuff about their MySpace.

Daily Tab Cleaning

2006-09-14T23:19:00.000-05:00

If you like SciFi Pulse's shitty flash interface, you'll love Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip's even more offensive Flash gewgaw. (Who loves constant chatter? That's right, everyone!) This does, however, contain possibly the greatest moment in Behind the Scenes Feature history. Timothy Busfield is wandering around the set. He finds Matthew Perry, and says, "You might know him from 'The Whole 10 Yards.'" I chuckled a little at his quip, I'll admit. Then he finds Bradley Whitford who, "You probably remember Brad from 'Revenge of the Nerds 2.'" As someone who has seen 'Revenge of the Nerds 2', I did remember Whitford from RotN 2, and I can tell you that anyone who hasn't seen it is incomparably poorer for it. The real comedy, however, is that Busfield was one of the stars of the Revenge of the Nerds franchise. It's always nice to see someone who remembers their past fondly.
Canadian teen dramas are a weird land. The star of Edgemont went on to Smallville, while both Boomer and Jammer from Battlestar Galactica play big roles. The funniest thing is that they were still filming this show through 2005, when two of the female leads had gone on to starring roles in other shows. It's also odd because I get the sneaky feeling that I've seen most of those other kids before, too. Damn Canadians, sneaking into our television.
I can't really explain why I felt any need to share Metal By Numbers with anyone, espeically since it's clearly doing pretty well by its lonesome. It's amusing enough for a parody metal song, though. Um, I guess if you really like Bob Odenkirk, there's some of him, too. Or maybe the other Odenkirk, I can't keep them straight.
In the vein of amusing videos, there's also "Cubicle War 2006", which has all of the tie-stapling action you will ever want. Ever.

Whew, that was good. I need to clean out my saved up Firefox tabs sometimes. Some of that crap could easily sit up there for days. Don't laugh, it's happened before.

Speaking of Hobos,

2006-09-13T20:05:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the project to illustrate all 700 of the aforementioned hobos has not only been completed, they've got a couple hundred extra hobo pictures.

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry, frankly.

Since it is the Internet I'm talking about, I guess I could always masterbate.

But then, I've been doing that via blog for more than a year now.

A Journey to Hell and . . . Deeper Hell

2006-09-13T19:54:00.000-05:00

Sometime I scare myself. Like when I'm listening to the radio station sponsored by an MMORPG I play with stick figure graphics, and I hear a song about a memo sent by a zombie to his non-zombie co-worker. I enjoyed the song so much that I investigated further works by the artist and was momentarily stunned by the fact that he has a song about Kennisaw Mountain Landis, my favorite baseball commissioner.

Looking back on my newfound fandom of a man whose oeuvre is songs about neurotic squids and supervillains, the only option is probably suicide.

To make matters worse, he's good friends with one John Hodgman, who wrote a book with a list of 700 hobo names. Hobo names, people. It's all too terribly true to lie about.

Someone help me, I'm trapped in a world I never created.

Let's All Get Even More Excited About the Swedish Election!

2006-09-13T03:31:00.000-05:00

Fun or not, this is a pretty well done little electoral opinion test, with lots of languages and the ability to choose issues and some pro and con arguments upon request.

I got 68% Center Party and 66% Christian Democrat Party. My lowest ranked option was the Green Party, which is what I encouraged everyone to vote for in my last post about the Swedish election. I guess in the context of Sweden I'm a borderline fascist. That's OK, though, because any chance I get to whip out a fasces, I will. I might not fufill anyone's other expectations of a fascist, but I'll have goddamn fucktons of fasces strewn about my iconography.

Vote Fasces in '06!

Swimmin' in Wimmin

2006-09-13T01:20:00.000-05:00

Covered in Oil has an amusing guess at what Edmonton Oilers rookie Rob Schremp has to look forward to this season, plus some other stuff about other Oilers rookies if you're really jonesing for some info on David Schultz or Devan Dubnyk (if you are, go back to the hell whence you came).

"Oh, and just as a final thought, judging solely by the reaction of the (presumably) University-girl crowd, if Rob Schremp actually does make the team this year, the Oil will have to put one of those shock collars around his penis and give him a solid zap every time a blond in a crew neck squeals "Hi Robbie!", or he's going to have more one-night stands than powerplay points. The man will practically be swimming in fake tans and push-up bras the whole season."

Special Appearance from John Travolta as Hayseed Scout

2006-09-13T01:09:00.000-05:00

If you hang around in the baseball statistics world, you know about Moneyball. For those not in the know, it tells the tale of how the Oakland Athletics were able to exploit specific weaknesses in the talent evaluation system to come up with a playoff team on the cheap. It's really quite interesting stuff. It is not, however, a good movie.

I realize that some yahoos made a movie out of Fast Food Nation, but the fact remains the same: books without plots make stupid movies. They're going to have to dump a plot in, and it's probably going to be about underdogs overcoming oppression and it's not going to have a lot to do with the As (who haven't won a World Series since 1989), at least in the real world, and it's terrifyingly likely to include credits like "Jamie Foxx as Joe Morgan" or "Al Pacino as George Steinbrenner".

This senseless trend must be stopped in its tracks.

Modern Day Numerology

2006-09-12T03:40:00.000-05:00

Pick a number between 1 and 100.

Don't worry, it's for science!

I think. It could be an evil science.

Oh, God, they're carpet bombing the city with 27s!

What have I wrought?

Vote With Your Umlaut!

2006-09-12T03:24:00.000-05:00

Boy, this has got to be everything you could ever want to know about the upcoming Swedish elections.

Well, except for the Pirate Party, but that's somewhere between a joke and a bunch of borderline anarchists anyway, so it's not a huge omission. If it keeps the torrent sites open, maybe we'll all be happy.

As far as the major contenders, my highly technical system of "Pick the one with the funniest name" is put into a Full Nelson by those crazy Swedes. Lars Leijonborg does pretty well (bonus for alliteration), but Maria Wetterstrand is funnier in an English context. Lars Ohly is also looming. Hell, Göran Hägglund has 2 umlauts, and if that's not funny enough, I don't know what is.

In the end, I was forced to look at the party names, where Wetterstrand's Miljöpartiet de Gröna is a force to be reckoned with. 2 umlauts and and and an "lj" combination? Off the charts. The only problem with the package is Peter Eriksson, whose name is merely dull.

All told, the umlauts are enough to push them over the top, though, especially in tandem with the fact that they're part of a Red-Green coalition. How silly.

So there you have it. Vote Green in the Swedish elections, or be saddled with a leader whose name is Anders Petersson. I'm snoring already.

We Can't All Hate Enterprise Equally

2006-09-11T19:47:00.000-05:00

Boy, this music video reminds me of that quarter I spent in Athens.

Sing it with me!

I've got faith, in my heart!

Or don't. That's cool, too. Not everyone has to like the Enterprise theme song.

I have a feeling the whole thing is just a sick joke, anyway.

Hockey Sticks and Madcap Escapes

2006-09-11T18:59:00.000-05:00

The NHL is increasing its amount of stick blade curve next season. While this may seem like a minor note about a miniscule rule change in a 3rd-rate league, much more is at stake here than hockey sticks. We are being robbed of further comedy involving Ilya Kovalchuk throwing illegal sticks to equipment mangers who run down the hallway in a mad attempt to escape the game with the illegal stick, and we are all poorer for it. Much poorer.

I Dream of Medievalists

2006-09-11T18:31:00.000-05:00

Somewhere, in a beautiful, beautiful dream I have, the holyoffice guy and the Got Medieval guy meet in a park to have lunch and make fun of Dan Brown. If there was ever anything to indicated that posting 4-10 random thoughts every day was inferior to working up 1 or 2 really great posts every month, it's these guys.

Anyway, the latest post on Got Medieval makes some really great points about the use of the word 'medieval' to describe Islamic terrorists and goes on to riff on an incredibly tortured analogy some guy made involving the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Fall of Constantinople, 9/11, and Gettysburg.

Also, next time I'm in Talinn, I'm totally seeing one of those medieval strippers.

Take a Good Look at the Men and Women Who Stand Next to You

2006-09-11T18:28:00.000-05:00

If you're looking for pretyt much any video from Battlestar Galactica, it looks like Battlestar Galactica SitRep has a pretty extensive collection. It's certainly better than screwing around with YouTube.

Unless, of course, you're looking for fan-made music videos. In that case, may God have mercy on your soul.

My Will is Breaking

2006-09-11T18:12:00.000-05:00

I try so hard to hate mods for my favorite computer games. The designers are professionals, I say. They rigorously tested their games and produced a result that I enjoy, I say. People on the Internet are raging morons who are only modding games because they feel a need to prove they're better than their heroes.

And then, tragically, I come across Arthurian: Total War. Now, the concept is a bit cheesy and I'm not even going to get into the impossible-to-pronounce Celtic names. But look at these screenshots. Goodness me, look at that map of the British Isles!

How many provinces did they cram in there? 60? 70? Oh, it's glorious.

I'll stop swooning and start downloading momentarily.

Vodka is for Drinking, Not for Rubbing

2006-09-11T03:55:00.000-05:00

There's a long and storied tradition of making fun of stupid athlete injuries. The Russian hurdler who burned herself with vodka poultices is in another category, though.

Most of the dumb injuries fall into 2 categories. First are stupid but unpreventable accidents. Glenallen Hill was sleeping on the couch when he dreamed he was being attacked by spiders. He fell into a glass coffee table, and people laughed for years to come. The second category is injuries stemming from stupidity. The guy who injured himself trying to rip a phone book in half falls into this one. Clearly, he shouldn't have been doing anything that stupid, but he wasn't actively trying to injure himself. I'd put motorcycle injuries in this category. Jeff Kent shouldn't have been driving his motorcycle around (it was in his contract, I think), but he did and he got hurt. Had he not been stupid, he wouldn't have been injured (and his explanation would have been a lot better than 'I was washing my truck and fell'), but there was nothing malicious in it.

This vodka thing, on the other hand, is a whole new kettle of fish. Why on Earth wouldn't you stop doing something that's burning your skin? Did she think that applying more would magically make her skin heal? This isn't just stupid because she was doing something foolish that might have gotten her hurt. This is stupid because she was doing something that was causing damage to her skin right in front of her eyes.

There are things I will never understand, and this is clearly one of them.

Be Me Before I Was Me

2006-09-10T23:51:00.000-05:00

I added a whole bunch of links to the sidebar. Most of what I post is going to come from one of those or from a couple forums I read on the Internet, so you could probably scan those and figure out what I'm going to write down here before I've even seen it.

You could even crack my complicated password scheme and post what I would have posted while I'm sleeping or something.

Hah! Got you!

I don't sleep. It's bad for the constitution.

Freedom!

2006-09-10T23:28:00.000-05:00

Did I really need another blog?

Well, it's not so much that I'm dissatisfied with LiveJournal as that my format was never really a LiveJournal. It's always been about posting every single little thing that amused or interested me and which I hoped might amuse or interest others.

So, in the interest of prevent others' friends pages from filling up with my thoughts about minor league hockey logos or Ohio congressional races or the populations of Nunavut and Greenland, I'll give this a spin.

I also think this new format might give me a chance to break free of some of the silly little things I've kept around for ages. For example, while I've always made every entry title an exclamation, suitable to continue Admiral Ackbar's legendary, "It's a ____!", I think I can stop doing that all the time. In tribute, my first post here carries it over, and I'm sure I'll forget once or twice, but I think that the time has come to retire the venerable Admiral.