Like I mentioned in the last post, I had a bunch of pictures sitting on my camera, most of them from when I was back in Pittsburgh over Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I felt like sharing a few. Go to the extended entry if you're interested.
All pics can be clicked for larger versions.
First, the aftermath of a Sidney Crosby hat trick on free hat night (November 28):
"It's fuckin' hat night!"
- Matt Cooke, to both Crosby and anyone watching the FSN broadcast who could read lips
Also, it's been too long since I posted any cat pictures, so here you go:
I apparently took that last pic just as Snowball was charging her eye lasers.
So, I've mentioned before that my apartment has a bit of a centipede problem. I decided to take the fight to them this year and put sticky traps in the areas of my room that they frequent, and until today, I had only managed to catch two this way (as well as some ants, silverfish, and woodlice). Number three happened a little while ago, and I decided to document the event (click for larger, if you really want that):
Now, upon examining this picture, I noticed that this particular 'pede looked different from the ones I've caught before. The ones that give me the most trouble are the Lovecraftian abominations known as house centipedes, and even though I've seen quite a few like this one, I figured they were some variation of the aforementioned species. However, I decided to do a little research, and I discovered that my immobilized little buddy up there is actually a stone centipede.
I didn't even realize there were multiple kinds in this area. Like I said, I've seen plenty that looked like this, but it never occurred to me that they were a separate species. Frankly, I prefer these ones. They're smaller and slower than house centipedes, and they don't make as much of a mess when they die.
Incidentally, this brings the total kill count so far to 30. And that's only the adults (I've gotten 4 or 5 pedelings in the last 24 hours alone).
Also, I was reminded when getting that picture onto my computer that I had some other pics still on the camera, so I've decided to make a separate post for them. You probably know that already if you're reading this.
...Yeah.
You know, I find it kind of funny that Obama and his supporters are still trying to pin The One's utter failure to do anything on his predecessor.
Listen, you arrogant retard, you promised Hope and Change™ repeatedly and claimed you would deliver us from "eight years of failed policies" or whatever bullshit you were spewing, so you don't get to blame Bush for your fuckups. I mean, even if we accept for the sake of argument that the country is in worse shape now than before January of 2009 solely because of the previous administration, that doesn't let you off the fucking hook.
Think about it. If your campaign platform is basically "I will fix all the problems the last guy caused while healing both the planet and your wounded souls," then people expect you to actually, you know, fix shit. Don't write checks your incompetent ass can't fucking cash.
So, all our problems are Bush's fault? Fine. That still means that you're not doing the job you promised to do. Everything you supposedly "inherited" was going to go away because of your unprecedented awesomeness, right?
However, your situation is much more serious, because I'm pretty sure that Bush, even at his worst, was a much better president than you ever have been or will be. In addition, Bush actually knew something about economics, foreign policy, and a little thing called governing, which you've never had to do because you've spent your entire life surrounded by people who have told you and everyone else how great you are without ever asking for evidence.
This actually brings me to another thing that's been bugging me lately. Certain people, faced with Obama's embarrassing actions in the wake of the oil leak, etc., have proven in their search for an explanation that they still accept the fantasy version of him as reality.
"He's clearly brilliant, so why is he taking so long to make a decision? He's clearly a great leader, so why won't he lead? He clearly cares about the American people, so why does he seem so detached?"
Here's an idea, you magnificent dumbshits: Obama isn't brilliant, he isn't a great leader, and he doesn't care about anyone who can't refill his narcissistic supply. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and you ponder the mystery of why it isn't acting all graceful like the other swans, you may not be as smart or perceptive as you believe.
In conclusion, fuck Obama.
Have you ever noticed that Marxists, despite their claim to represent "the people," show a stunning disregard for the actual desires and actions of those people, preferring instead to consolidate power within a group of unelected, unaccountable "elites" and micromanage the people's lives?
Bonus thought: When I hear a Marxist talking about "false consciousness," I get a mental image of said Marxist muttering "wake up, everybody!" in his sleep.
Have I mentioned that I fucking hate Marxism?
(Inspiration for this post here.)
UPDATE
While I'm on the topic of Marxism, it's interesting to me that its proponents believe human nature is malleable and/or perfectible, and that all we need is the right government to help us reach the promised collectivist utopia. And yet, every time Marxism is implemented on a massive scale, it results in death, destruction, misery, and no change whatsoever in the fundamental nature of the citizenry.
From this, we can come to a couple of conclusions:
1) Human nature does, in fact, have its limits.
2) Even if human nature can change, most Marxists are just incompetent, power-hungry twats who wouldn't know a good idea if it violently fucked them in the ass, so we'll never know anyway.
What do you think?
This may just seem vaguely funny to me right now because I'm bored and out of Concerta, and I'll probably read it in a few hours and wonder what the hell I was thinking, but I couldn't help myself.
I have come up with a movie that should've been made, and it's probably too late now.
Picture this: It's the late 80s, and action movies are all the rage. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in an exciting film about a terrible stand-up comedian who takes a second job as a police officer for some reason, and violent hilarity ensues.
Can you imagine the "so unfunny it actually becomes funny" one-liners and awesome moments that "Stand-Up Cop" would produce? I mean, a lot of them have been done before, but gathered in one place...think of the possibilities (these are funnier if you read them in Schwarzenegger's voice)!
- SUC stabs a guy:
"Take my knife, please!"
- "Knock knock!"
"Who's there?"
SUC kicks the door open
"A bazooka!"
Massive explosion
- SUC has to chew through a guy's neck a la Jack Bauer to escape a hostile situation. His partner walks in and surveys the carnage:
"What happened here?"
"He told me he hadn't had a bite all day!"
- "How many light bulbs does it take to screw up your face? Just one!"
SUC jams a light bulb in the guy's eye and shatters it with his fist
- SUC disembowels a guy disguised as some sort of service employee, then looks down at the body and notices a "Hi, my name is Michael!" tag:
"It must be open Mike night!"
- SUC somehow blows up a particularly fat henchman, coating the walls and ceiling with blood and gore:
"Wow, you really do sit around the house!"
- SUC is questioning a belligerent suspect:
"I saw your act, and I didn't laugh at a single joke!"
"Maybe you missed the punchline!"
Punches him in the face
- "Two guys walk into a bar..."
SUC hits two guys in the face with a crowbar
- In a climactic sequence, SUC commandeers a tank, pursues the main villain's getaway car, and blasts it into a ditch. The villain stumbles out of the car and tries to crawl across the street:
"Why did the dickhead cross the road? To get to the underside of my tank!"
Runs him over with the tank
- Finally, in the epilogue, SUC has gone back to full-time comedy. A newspaper review describes how he bombs every night. We see a shot of the critic's house exploding, and then the credits roll. Because this is a silly action movie, the audience finds this hilarious and not horrifying and/or psychopathic.
...Holy fuck, I have a strange mind.
My Site Meter has reminded me of something...
SIT is result #1 of 2,640,000 for intelligent thoughts. Even in quotes, it's still #1.
I can honestly say that I did not foresee this when I started blogging in 2003.
On kind of a whim (okay, I was reading a forum thread where people had started arguing over the necessity of touch typing), I decided to give Typingtest.com a spin, just to see what kind of speed I could achieve using the touch typing powers that were pounded into my head between 6th and 9th grade.
Well, on the "Test Instructions" test, I pulled off 85 WPM, and on "Tigers in the Wild," I managed 88. This was despite the fact that I was sitting in a horribly awkward position, and I haven't clipped my fingernails in a couple weeks.
Now, I've always considered myself a pretty average typist, as evidenced by the fact that when I did interview transcription at my internship, I had to slow down the recordings to keep them from getting ahead of me, and even then, it was hard to keep up. According to this thing, however, even my lamest typing effort is up to 144% above average.
Seriously? Are there really that many people who do that retarded "hunt and peck" bullshit instead of learning one of the most useful skills you can have in the Digital Age?
Wow.
UPDATE
I managed 104 WPM on this test, but it's just words and not sentences, and punctuation and capitalization tend to slow me down a lot, so...yeah.
For more accuracy, I clipped my fingernails, sat up straighter, tried "Test Instructions" again, and got 97. I'm going to go ahead and stick with that for now.
Typing! Bragging! Aren't you glad you read SIT?!
Like the post title says, I've been having some more fun with Craigslist. In addition to the TV/film/video/radio section, I also check a couple other sections each day to see if I can make some extra money writing or proofreading, since I'm actually better at both of those at the moment than film editing (though editing is much, much, much more fun when it goes well).
Anyway, I happened to come across this ad in one of the writing sections. The gist of it is this:
I'm having a creative writing contest for my bicycle, which I'll be giving away to the winner of my choosing June 7th....
I thought about selling it here, but the more I thought about it the harder it became to name a price. This bike is my very favorite possession. I find it painful to imagine thinking, "Well, all those good times and feelings I had were worth $300."
The conclusion I came to is that I will get much greater satisfaction giving it away to a deserving winner. I want a starving artist to benefit from their skill. Please do not enter if you already have a functioning bike. I would, however, appreciate if you suggested the contest to someone you know who could use the bike.
So here are the rules.
I want a short written entry of 500 words or less demonstrating your skills as a writer.
Submissions must include either an email address or a phone number which you will respond to. Including both is better.
It can be any type, style, format, etc.
It does not need to be originally written for this contest.
If poetry, multiple pieces are allowed.
I am the final judge on the winner.
Sure, it's a noble idea, but I have a feeling that if someone other than a "starving artist" really wanted that bike, and they managed to track this guy down, they could find a way to convince him that writing ability is less important than money.
I mean, the rules are so broad that even a haiku could win. For example, one written on the back of a check:
Here's five hundred bucks
Now please give your bike to me
Thank you very much
Feel free to contribute your own rule-bending ideas in the comments.
Also, as you can tell by the UPMC building and the Heinz logo in the background, the picture in that posting was taken in Pittsburgh. Interesting.
Does anyone else find it really creepy that liberals have basically abandoned their previous attempts at giving a positive spin to their belief that they know what's best, and we should all just shut up, bend over, and take it? I mean, it's refreshing that they're finally being honest, but the fact that they can even get away with it in the United States of America...something just isn't right about it.
I don't think I have to go into a lot of detail here, aside from mentioning that the repeated characterization of the Tea Party movement as "selfish" (and racist, but that's applied to any conservative movement) is what's really setting me off. I've seen the TP philosophy summed up by its opponents as "fuck you, got mine." Apparently, "fuck you, got yours" is more desirable. Why is it that wanting to keep what you've earned is bad, but wanting to take away what other people have earned and give it to people who haven't earned it is noble?
Something tells me that in a true liberal utopia, the tax rate would be 100%, and everyone's earnings would be distributed as the morally superior philosopher kings in D.C. saw fit. Of course, there would be a little extra for certain people so they could go see a movie once a month or something...assuming it's been approved beforehand. After all, it's important to give the benighted segment of the populace the necessary bread and circuses, but we wouldn't want their impressionable minds to be influenced by the wrong messages.
I'll touch on this in more detail if I ever get around to writing that essay I mentioned a few days ago, but I'm not sure when that'll happen.
On a related note, I always promise myself that I'm going to start responding to comments more and then forget about it, but rest assured that I read each and every one that isn't spam, so feel free to share whatever thoughts you may have on whatever I happen to be wasting my time writing about.
I've kind of hinted at this before, but if nobody was reading SIT, I wouldn't keep coming back. Once I've actually earned some free time by making some damn money, I'll try to be more attentive to the blog.
So yeah.
So, I was going about my normal skimming of entertainment/production articles as part of an attempt to keep up to date on my intended industry, and I came across an interesting story that kind of reminds me of the old "crime down despite rising prison population" thing. Check it out:
A quieter Memorial Day Weekend capped an unusually sleepy summer kick-off month at the domestic [box office], as May revenues came in only slightly higher than totals for March.Twentieth Century Fox's "Avatar" carried over into 2010, earning $456.8 million during that period, while Disney's March marvel "Alice in Wonderland" grossed $293.5 million during its first month of release. "Avatar" has cumed $749.1 million domestically; "Alice," $333.2 million.
With a total of $190.5 million, four-day weekend numbers were the lowest since 2001.
Hmmmm...Hollywood isn't doing as well as it expected. What a shocking development. It's almost as if nobody has any money, and the retards the Left Coast helped send to Washington are making things even worse.
But it can't be just that, right? Let's analyze some more clues later in the article:
Paramount's comicbook sequel "Iron Man 2" launched May 7 and earned $128.1 million for a cume of $279.7 million. Par and DreamWorks Animation's 3D toon "Shrek Forever After" debuted with $70.8 million on May 21, and after topping the Memorial Day frame with $43.3 million, has cumed $146.8 million.The holiday frame's wide bows, Warner Bros. and New Line's "Sex and the City 2" and Disney's "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," opened under industry estimates with $36.8 million and $37.8 million, respectively.
Universal's "Robin Hood" repped a considerable disappointment for the studio, given its $155 million budget, debuting with $36.1 million for a cume of $86.1 million.
How could there possibly be a problem with a lineup like this? Why, people can go see a sequel, another sequel, yet another sequel, a movie based on a video game (which, if history is any indication, virtually guarantees that it will be a masterpiece), and a movie based on an idea that's been done lots of times already in various forms!
Surely there's something even better coming up later in the season, right?
Even the month's top players, "Iron Man 2" and "Shrek Forever After," haven't lived up to their franchise predecessors.With middling results from several of Hollywood's early summer offerings, some insiders suggest red-hot tracking for June's slate could provide a B.O. boost.
Sony's "Karate Kid" reboot bows alongside 20th Century Fox's "The A-Team" on June 11, followed a week later by Disney's 3D toon "Toy Story 3." The latest toon installment enters fertile ground left by the first two offerings, which have cumed a collective $437.4 million.
Rounding out the month on June 25 are Fox's "Knight and Day," starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, and Sony's "Grown Ups," starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James.
Summit's "Twilight: Eclipse" should perform boffo business on June 30.
You stupid teabagging rubes! How can you deny Hollywood's utter brilliance?! What gives you the right to spend your hard-earned and exorbitantly taxed money on something other than sequels, remakes, and reimaginings of ideas that have been done better by people who actually respect their audience?
And look, you can even choose from a whole two movies that are based on vaguely original ideas! That's unprecedented!
Anyway...
How can anyone not see the fucking problem here? There are maybe four decent films coming out of Hollywood every year, and yet they wonder why they aren't getting the returns they expected. But does it ever occur to them that if they spent less time creating lame duplicates of their previous work (which wasn't that great to begin with, in most cases) and more time actually making good movies, it might bring more people to theaters?
Of course not.
But remember, they're the Hollywood elite, and they are much smarter, richer, and better looking than you'll ever be. And if you forget, they'll remind you.
Over, and over, and over, and over again.
Is anyone out there wondering why I decided to go to New York instead of Los Angeles, by the way? Because if you just read this post, you shouldn't be.