goodbye career, hello sex offender registration

i used to work at a newspaper a while back. my friend casey wound up covering my old school district beat and i occasionally enjoy checking up on what's going on there, particularly with that rogues' gallery they call a school board. he broke this rather disturbing story today: Rich South teacher accused of having sex with student.

i can't decide which aspect of this story i find more unsettling; that the teacher in question happens to be the boys' cross country coach or that she bought the student a bottle of cologne.

you win again, britain

why can't we have sweet stamps like these? the dragon is obviously awesome, but i also really like the pixie riding the snail because it reminds me of "the neverending story."

i almost never mail physical letters, but i think i might be more inclined to do so if the U.S. postal service would let me use stamps with pictures of a gorgon or a hippogriff or something sweet instead of all that lame ass shit they use now.

i actually came across that one on neil gaiman's blog. i really like his stuff and would recommend him to anyone who likes reading in general. i'm reading "sandman" right now and it's incredible. i haven't read too many graphic novels, but there's some amazing stuff out there and you're depriving yourself if you think they're just crappy comic books.

i've also read "neverwhere" and "good omens" (which was co-written by terry pratchett, another of my favorites.), both of which i thought were great.

plus "coraline" in 3-d was incredibly cool and honestly quite creepy. god help all the parents who brought their kids to that thinking it was going to be like "nightmare before christmas."

BOOOOOOO!

well, there goes yet another fun thing that is never going to happen again.

R.I.P. southside irish parade.

buy me bonestorm, or go to hell!

apparently, the person who wrote this terrible piece about controversial video games thinks "little big planet" is more controversial than "night trap" and "thrill kill."

for non-video game players, that means "night trap," which was pulled from the shelves due to misguided hysteria over its content, and "thrill kill," a game so absurdly violent for its time that EA refused to release it mere weeks before its launch date, were somehow less controversial than "little big planet," a puzzle game about a smiling rag doll whose "controversy" was that a song in the game happened to contain verses from the quran... which was pulled and it made its scheduled release.

granted, this is probably just some horseshit fluff piece designed to give "resident evil 5" more attnetion... but shame on you either way, yahoo! games.

a fridge too far

behold the myriad varieties of mayonnaise and miracle whip (none of which are mine because i hate that crap) in our refrigerator:


apparently they've started spawning, as i recently found a brand new member had joined our little mayo flock:

enter the dragon

i finally set it up so i can transfer pictures from my phone to my computer. here's a picture of that five-headed dragon incense burner i was talking about the other day:

it's even better than you thought, right?

quis custodiet ipsos nerds?

i went to see "watchmen" the other day. i thought it was pretty good overall. here's a great piece of bathroom graffiti i found at a borders in san diego:

(it's tough to read, but one person wrote "who watches the watchmen?" and some wiseacre drew an arrow pointing to the quote and wrote "nerds")

i loved the novel and the movie is a pretty faithful interpretation, but it definitely has its low points. i hate ham-handed symbolism (i.e. "argh! the comedian was right! life IS just a joke!") and the movie had more than its share of that. plus, malin akerman and matthew goode certainly aren't going to win any oscars for their roles, but i don't think they're as bad as some people say.

despite my generally positive impressions, i left the theater with the feeling that i would have been confused had i not read the book. but mostly because people in the theater kept talking/laughing/making noise and i couldn't hear. we went to a matinee at a mildly crappy theater and the crowd wasn't exactly respectful.

the movie's high ratio of male-to-female nudity provoked quite a bit of snickering amongst the audience. i can understand a brief chuckle at seeing dr. manhattan in all his luminous blue glory for the first time, or at nite owl's relative flabbiness for a superhero... but it's pathetic when adults are still giggling at a completely nonsexual image of a naked person after seeing it for the sixth or seventh time.

i think my worst "inappropriate laughing at a theater" experience was "the fellowship of the ring." i'm a big LoTR fan (shocking, right?) and i had been following the production of that movie for like three years.

i saw it on opening night in a packed theater and i was spellbound, up until the scene where boromir gets shot by a bunch of arrows. a group of people somewhere in the back of the theater started laughing uproariously and i have no idea why... looking at it objectively, there isn't anything funny about the scene; no goofy facial expressions or weird groans or anything.

i was livid at them ruining that scene for me. to this day, i still have nagging memories of those boorish assholes whenever i watch it.

warp speed, mr. data!

man, i'm downloading something right now at 600 kb/s. if you would have told me i'd someday be doing that back when i was downloading starcraft maps on a 56k modem, i'd have thought you were a crazy person.

travelogues: san diego, #1 -- tales from the whale's vagina

as i said yesterday, i recently went on a vacation to san diego. it was my first time on a plane. and, come to think of it, my first time inside an airport.

jackie and i woke up around 4:30 a.m. on a sunday and left for o'hare right away. as it happened, it was the first day of daylight savings time, so it was actually 3:30. that's usually about when i'm going to bed on saturday night/sunday mornings, so i was pretty disoriented.

o'hare is huge and labyrinthine and complicated. it's kind of amazing that people can design and operate something on such a large scale and make it work within reasonably acceptable margins. especially when you consider people also do things like this.

i've heard so many horror stories about aiport security that i was braced for the worst, but it was surprisingly painless. the whole thing took maybe 15 minutes, likely due to the ungodly hour at which we were passing through.

the real horror was the airport starbucks, where a medium chai tea and a blueberry scone somehow cost $9.

we walked around for a while before boarding. i browsed an airport shop and found precisely zero items i wanted to read on the plane (other than "twilight" *swoon*). also, i never realized pornos are actually sold at airports. i always thought that was just a joke and it seems really unfunny and sad now that i know it's true.

i'd be lying if i said i wasn't a little nervous while the plane maneuvered toward the runway before taking off. but i found the tremendous speed of taking off and the weird feeling when the front of the plane lifted from the ground to be kind of exhilarating.

it was extremely cloudy when we took off and all i could see was just heavy, opaque whiteness. it felt oddly claustrophobic considering that in reality there was nothing there except open sky. i really liked looking out the window once things cleared up... it gives you an interesting sense of perspective and scope when you can see how things are laid out.

even so, flying was a weird experience. you're inside a relatively fragile aluminum tube 35,000 feet above the ground traveling at 600 miles per hour. the idea that some minor thing could go wrong and send me plummeting to a fiery and inescapable death was often in the back of my mind... but it's difficult to feel nervous when small children are calmly coloring right behind you, so i was ok.

that being said, the scariest part of the flight by far was when an older man sitting in the aisle seat reached over to shake jackie's hand and introduce himself as "don."

"what the hell is he doing?" i thought. "is it normal for people to introduce themselves on planes?"

i then noticed don was wearing a baseball cap that said "JESUS is my boss." my eyes moved down to his bright green t-shirt, which was stretched tight across his huge pot belly and had a bastardized sprite logo that said something about the holy spirit. one would think copyright infringement is a sin, but whatever.

"oh no... oh fuck..." i thought, as don turned his attention toward me. "is he going to try to talk to us? is he going to proseltyze to me for the entire four hour flight?! i'll throw myself out the hatch."

my listless handshake and frigid greeting must have broadcast that i didn't want conversation. i immediately shrank away, put on my ipod and buried my face in my book.

fortunately, don seemed unperturbed and occupied himself with the in-flight presentation of the keanu reeves version of "the day the earth stood still" and an entire box of cheez-its. i didn't hear from him for the rest of the flight, but he apparently kept stealing jackie's arm rest.

bizarre e-mails, #3

ok... i know i just said i was going to do work today, but i received this gem a bit ago and couldn't resist:


that's it. no greeting, no signature, no context whatsoever. and i know it's a bit hard to read, but the e-mail address does say "bigmeatbabe."

i don't have even the slightest clue about what this person is asking considering i've never had anything whatsoever to do with awarding any type of scholarship... with the possible exception of periodically doling out my "star of the masquerade" awards.

but i can take a guess about one aspect of applying for scholarships: using an e-mail address that contains the phrase "bigmeatbabe" probably does not help one's chances.