Interesting printbyte from a Philip Rosedale Rolling Stone interview.

I'm guessing by now you're either fully immersed, or have chosen to ignore any buzzing static on Second Life. Perhaps you're even blissfully ignorant. But I'm guessing that group will start shrinking soon.

I don't like to explain my allusions, I figure people pick up on them or they don't, and being clever has sort of worked out for me, at least somewhat, so whatever. Perhaps that's something I can include in my upcoming10 Reasons You Don't Read my Blog post that according to consensus (of one, namely me) will never materialize, but as you're not reading anyway, you won't miss it.

Architect. Rosedale. Matrix. Get it, or don't. It's a free country. Mostly.

Perhaps Rosedale should move to acquire The Matrix Online since his world's "not going to turn out that way".

Lest I forget what generated the most traffic to this blog, I link to the Rockstar Games trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV. Perhaps calling it a teaser site would be proper. But proper and GTA kind of make for strange bedfellows. It looks like a return to Liberty City. Maybe they'll take a cue from San Andreas and expand the territory and have some road trips through the Northeast, or at the very least down the Jersey Shore.

Despite what McCain says, it's not getting any better. I've heard similar things from clients that have loved ones over there.

This Wolf Blitzer clip compares John McCain's Baghdad with the real Baghdad, as described by Michael Ware.

Reality bites.

No sir, No sir, not with yams.

Not tomorrow, not today.
Not according to the FDA.

Will they label the cloned meat?
No sir, no sir, not this week.

Not tomorrow, no not ever.
FDA may not be clever.

Is it safe? Wait and see.
Try some, no, not I, not me.

I do not want cloned eggs and ham.
I don't. that's just the way I am.

A little Seussical fun with a serious topic. You can send comments to the FDA regarding your feelings on cloned meat. Here's the link to the docket. Here's the link to the comment area.

If this stuff is going on the market, it should at the very least be labeled so the consumer can tell the difference, and make their choice. Yes, they say cloned meat is safe. Yet, there's no history of humans eating cloned meat over time to determine if it really is safe. And they'll still feed these cloned cows the same GMO-corn and hormones and whatever else they can concoct, so Lord only knows what the entire concoction will yield.

This has been a public service announcement from thisblogismblog.

I'm ending the drought. I wasted enough of my time on this, considering I don't have a square to spare. I pass it on to you to eat away your precious minutes. Maybe I can find a few of mine lying around in the aftermath.

5 Minutes to Kill (Yourself)

found at Kotaku

Don't get this confused with the Def Jux dj RJD2. I'm referring to Ryan vs. Dorkman 2, so there should be no confusion. Type in 'light saber' on Ye Olde YouTube, you'll get close to 10,000 matches. And there's a good chance these arch-nemeses (is that right?) will appear at the top of the results.

Arguably the epitome of Star Wars fan film light saber battles, my son and I had the good fortune of viewing the sequel at the end of the NY Comicon, courtesy of the folks of nyjedi.com. RvD2 premiered on the 'tubes' March 1, so the rest of the world can view it in its infinite goodness. Enjoy.

I went to a couple sites to find some perspective into average home size in the United States to possibly shed some light on the concerns regarding Al Gore's electrical bill.

Google Answers responded to a question about average home size in 2002. The average U.S. home size in 2001 was 2,300 square feet. I realize this is five years ago, but it takes some time for the majority of the country to upgrade the size of their homes, so I would suspect the 2006 number to still be below 3,000. Google Answers also listed their sources for determining the answer.

I actually escaped chatter about Bald Britney and Deceased Anna Nicole for a whole five minutes, and heard about something that may have some relevance to something else. It was difficult, but it actually happened.

Some no-name right wing group attacked Al Gore over his electricity bills, saying they are 50% higher than the national average.

Yet they don't say how Al Gore lives in a 10,000 square foot house. I could count on one hand (with fingers to spare) the number of people I know personally (do mySpace friends count? cus' I haven't been to too many of their homes) that live in such homes.

I think this blog is too small for the smear machine to try to extract from my brain all the people I know personally to cross-reference their names in some super computer that will match this info up with their property tax bills and compute the square footages (footages? feetages? overall square footage was better, but this sentence was on a roll like I haven't had in awhile, so let's get back to it, shall we?) of their homes just to get to the number six and call me a liar. I doubt they would do their due diligence to be certain I don't have six fingers on my hand, because a bell curve would probably show that the likelihood of me having five fingers on the other hand would fall within two standard deviations.

I am not going to do my due diligence, cause I'm sensing the inherit truthiness in claiming that Al Gore's home is at least 70% larger than the national average. Elementary school students could make the clear determination, that indeed, even while making steps to ceonserve energy, Mr. Gore would still have a bill much higher than the national average.

Can he not be an advocate for green energy because of this? Rush Limbaugh apparently believes environmentalists want to downsize the American lifestyle. If Rush makes a claim that Gore should live in a smaller home, he would contradict himself? Walking contradiction occasionally do such things, by the way. I'm just sayin' is all.

I'm pretty sure Rush doesn't live in a glass house.

And, I'm just wondering, are our electric bills public knowledge?

Blogs I've read reporting on this include:
The Anonymous Liberal
Seeing the Forest
Crooks & Liars

It's tough enough trying to make a living on retail wages. It's despicable to see how many places shave employee hours. Yet somehow I'm not surprised to see Wal-Mart in the list of offenders. And that they even had a name for the "one-minute clock-out". It makes you think it was a known moniker for a shady practice, one of those shady practices that continues until there's lawsuits and wrist slapping.

How many times did you hear "I can't believe it's February already" today?

How many of these people already derailed from their diet, and have written off that New Year's resolution already? I don't know. I bet quite a few, but Vegas is busy with Super Bowl odds right now, so they're not takin my money.

Wow! I think I found an answer and it was similar to my expectations. Although the CNN article is three years old, I wonder if the percentages have changed very much.

The last two paragraphs have nothing to do with January's quick cup of coffee and back to wherever January goes for the next eleven months. January is possibly the Monday morning of the year. A month in which many continuously check e-mail, linger longer at the coffee pot or watercooler, listening to voice mails, all the while still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, wishing for the warmth and comfort of their comforters.

I've actually been quite busy this January, and mostly if not completely in a good way. Perhaps it's a bellwether for my year. Or perhaps it's just happy happenstance.

February 2nd must be the day that the Groundhog realizes it's the end of the elongated Monday, peeks out of its hole, and wonders where January went. Sometimes he looks around for it a little bit, sometimes it goes back to sleep until Wednesday, when nobody gives a fuck about what it does.

This just in. (An article that is only one year old.) February 3rd is the date the average dieter gives up. Those struggling need to hang in just another 48 hours to break the curve. But you might not want to stop there if you'd like to reach your goal.

Apparently, I've been sleeping on this. I clicked on the RocketBoom link on my blog, then decided to play Where's Amanda? with Google, and found her at ABC. This is good for the tubes. I'm speaking Ted Stevens-ese.

Amanda Congdon at ABC News. Is that the best title they could come up with? And frankly, what's a title worth anyway? Without a raise it's just a bunch of words attached to more work that you don't necessarily want, especially since you're not getting the extra money to do it.

Hey, I thought I deleted my Rocketboom link. I guess all is forgiven.

The music of Kraftwerk performed on 8-bit video games. Sounds like a perfect fit.

8-Bit Operators compilation at myspace.

I'm sure Kraftwerk influenced a lot of early video game music, as well as Afrika Bambaataa.

I keep a little bit more than a score of links on the right hand side of my blog. I try not to keep more than I frequent. And I also try to edit when my mouse moves elsewhere.

Daytrotter is not one of those links. But perhaps it could be. The pulse of the mp3 blogosphere is often as interesting as a pulse. Not like the pulse of some tribal house music that locks a dancefloor in unison. But like the repetitiveness that plagues mainstream radio. What's so indie about a hive mind? Drop the "in-" prefix and your're left with "die", which is what would happen to the whole scene if the "die" translates back into its unabbreviated form. That would be "dependent", for you home gamers out there.

Daytrotter goes beyond the rest of the mp3 blog scene by providing live music sets of artists to the masses. Or really, the anti-masses. Just today I downloaded the set of laptop superstar Jason Forrest, who I had the good fortune of seeing perform a few years back. But other somewhat familiar culprits like Of Montreal, Bonnie Prince Billy, and Cold War Kids (former mp3 blog faves).

Why Daytrotter? Why here? Why now?

Why the fuck not?

In case you hadn't noticed there's a fuckload of web sites on the Internet, and if you have any type of personal activities that you combine along with gainful/ungainful employment, top off with what most refer to as family, and sprinkle it with some necessities of modern life, as well as making the fruits of that gainful/ungainful employment stretch from a berrylike stature to a girth resembling a rather large melon, then you probably tend to forget a lot of the great web sites you find. Your bookmarks have become as unwieldy as the Yellow Pages, del.icio.us is just another thing to log into, and although it should have been mentioned in sentence one of this paragraph, the information overload that can't be stopped, and that some of us (present company (which is right now me by myself) included) like to try to manage like a seasick amateur bullrider.

So I should thank the injured junior high gymnast who sold me my Wired subscription for indirectly placing Daytrotter before my eyes once again. (Wired had a piece on Daytrotter, just found it.) And I'm glad, because it contains the lovely illustrations of Shannon Palmer (among others), whose What Noisy Cats Are We blog resides somewhere to the right of this column (we're talking browser page location, not political affiliation).

All this from a guy who recently included fucking Night Ranger mp3s in a post, who'd a thunk that?

It really does. And provides a wonderful excuse for a lame pun. And a wonderful excuse to post something here. Sometimes I start writing and it surprises me that sometimes others are willing to pay for something that comes out of these fingers. (The thoughts don't stay in my mind too long. If I don't type, I may not think. Yet somehow I write in a conversational tone. Strange. especially since I don't know sign language.) (Another reason is my occasionally stream-of-consciousness posting, that I refuse to edit when it appears, somehow I figure there's that 1/1000th of a percent of my miniscule audience that actually follows/gets it/chooses to decipher or ignores it and reads anyway. Here's to you, Mr. Stream-of-Consciousness decipherer reading guy who gets it or doesn't and reads anyway.)

Ok...there was a reason I began this besides jumpstarting the grey matter, I think.

Oh yeah, Boggle. Never played it as a kid. My wife introduced me to it during our dating days. It was fun, yes. But it never seemed to particularly grab me.

Yet today I find this game highly addicting. Yeah, I freakin' love it. On the way to the bus stop. While waiting for pizza. In traffic jams. While blogging. (Sorry.) I've read numerous articles on the topic of casual gaming, and its current growth and popularity. (Yet I haven't linked to one.) So I should not be totally surprised by this new found joy. But it also reminds me about what made so many classic arcade games so great. Simplicity of gameplay.

I love my PS2 and all the highly narrative action-adventure titles with storytelling beyond much of what Hollywood may offer, and all the intricate tasks these games ask me to complete. I've button mashed my way through some early Tony Hawk games and Tekken titles. (Wait a minute...I knew exactly what I was doing. I just could not articulate to you the button combo, it was just something my fingers did.)

But after all that, sometimes it's quite cathartic to boil it all down to something simple and pure. Remove some buttons from my controller. Give me a simple goal to concentrate on, and a score (even if it's just my own) to best. Pac-Man had one joystick. That's all. One or two player buttons don't count. Eat dots. Eat more dots. Eat. That's all.

The purpose of Boggle. Make words. Lots of 'em. Clever words. Stupid words. Even plural words. Just make words. (Maybe that's why I like blogging so much.)

3 minutes. High score of 56. I can hit 60. I know it.

I'm glad to see the resurgence of classic gaming, whether it be through Xbox Live, Free games online, wireless phone gaming, classic compendiums for the console and PC market, the spirit of the homebrew and emulation community.

It's very possible that superbly designed "simple" game will be played more than the best action-adventure or RPG title. No matter how lush the scenery, or how fluid the animation. Despite truly cinematic cut scenes with the cleverest of dialog. It doesn't matter. Classic games have that "quick fix" quality, with none of the exhaustiveness of more complex games. You don't turn these games on and know that you'll need to devote at least an hour to accomplish anything. And no matter how beautiful some of today's games are, there;s always the possibility you'll finish them and never look back. Mission's been accomplished. Move forward.

The classic game can be quite like crack then, can't it? Quick game. Damn, I can do better. Ugh. One more game.

And so on.

Sure you may play just as long. But you never intended to.

And I never intended to ramble this long. But it's too late. Read or don't read. That's what's nice about the Internet.

Today the web staffing agency where I had continuous employment for at the same location for approximately 8 years sent an e-mail to check-in to see if I was still looking for work. This would seem to be appropriate protocol, except for the one year plus two week lapse of any billable hours. Perhaps it's only because it's W-2 time and look-ee look-ee, ol' Larz had a slow 2006 with us. The super-sized COBRA checks should have been a dead giveaway to my status. My beloved Garden State surely must have had some fabled clockwatcher make telephone contact with my former employer, before I could cash my first unemployment check.

I could have been upset by this, but I found themn to be a bit on the useless side whenever I asked for more money, or as to why I shouldn't have cheaper medical coverage with all the time I had put in. I could have called them for placement, but I wanted them to show me that they could do something as well.

You'd think that they'd notice that one of their revenue streams had gone dark. I'd worked nearly every week for eight years. My absence should have been felt like a disturbance in the Force, or should have at least made the heart grow fonder.Charge the employer a hefty hourly rate, skim a nice chunk off the top to cover the requisite paper-shuffling, and give the rest to the loyal worker bee.

This bee hasn't buzzed around their hive for about 54 weeks and now I get the, "Hey, haven't seen you around the water cooler in a while. What's shakin'?"

Maybe I just wanted to be missed. Admit it, if someone says they missed you, and meant it, it feels pretty damn good. Well...let's think about that...if someone missed you that much, there's a good chance that you missed them equally, and things didn't feel so good during that time, and you're really happy to be together again. The alternative scenario would be the other person still missing you that much, but you thinking, "Oh fuck, I thought I'd finally rid myself of that fucktard." In neither scenario, does it really feel great to be missed, but the former is a bit better, because it reall is nice to know that when you missed someone they felt the same way.

Fucktard. I see this word thrown about occasionally and never pepper my speech with it. But tonight, I pepper this post with it. Or at least garnished this post with it like a particularly foul sprig of parsley.

I just totally deleted a post about Rachael Ray, and the whole EVOO thing. Like totally. Yes, it's the 80's and I'm in junior high and live on the East Coast, but have just seen Valley Girl on cable again. that kind of totally.

And you know what. I totally did it on purpose. It was a combination of me thinking the post sucked, and then realizing I no longer gave a crap. Please tell me where I can get back the time I just wasted on this.

One reason why you shouldn't read my blog is a title such as the one above. Often they are really obscure references, possibly so obscure that they only make sense to me. But I really don't need to tell anyone why they shouldn't read this blog, since they're already not reading it.

I even considered a post title "10 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Read This Blog". In fact, I'm still considering it. It makes a nice paradox with the belief that any type of Top 10 list will automatically make more people click on a link to your blog.

I can't find a container, caddy, or a cup to contain those candy-coated chocolate morsels. Can you?

Interesting post over at the spraygraphic blog, at least I thought so. Some may have chosen the word obscure over interesting, but I find many obscure things interesting, and this was one. Celebrity patents will never be a Jeopardy category, but why shouldn't celebrities have patents? They might make a great living, but their real dream may be some sort of invention, and who better to be able to combine a little bit of influence and the necessary coin? A good idea would help as well.

Found while perusing t-shirts at spraygraphic. Here's how it went down.

"Oh look, they have a blog. I have a blog, too. Wow! Aren't blogs grand?"

click

"Oh look, they posted about a bizarre Eddie Van Halen-esque doodle. I posted about...something else. Hey, why don't I post about this?"

And here we are.

The Eddie Van Halen sketch sucked me in. Humorous, no? It actually looks like he's playing it like a piano. Was he trying to patent this technique? Because if memory serves me correctly (and this time it does), Jeff Watson (formerly of Night Ranger) had a patented 8-finger technique (at approximately the 2:36 mark), not so unlike what Sketchy Van Halen may be doing in this picture. (Couldn't find a patent of the 8-finger technique, but Watson's own site did not call the technique patented, instead "invented" and "popularized" were used to describe the technique.) I think EVH's technique was different, and he may be using a thumb in the picture, and really who cares. I'm typing this after finishing this post, and by now I'm over it and probably destroying any flow this post once had. I don't care, and I mean that in multiple ways.

I'm going to throw some mp3s here, because I can. I mean I have the ability to do that. Legally, well that's up to a jury of my peers, I suppose. They'll appear soon. I'm kind of on a roll here, and I don't want to stop yet. This was not the post I was looking for tonight. But sometimes any post is a good post, and this is as good as any.

Back to Jeff Watson, I used to read guitar magazines in my youth, and recall reading about his technical skill, and listening to it, too, including his performance on a Tony MacAlpine cassette that was in my collection. But while constructing this post I just discovered I've heard Jeff Watson's work on another album in my collection, Chris Isaak's Forever Blue.

I'm not done. Further digging revealed that Watson also inspired an alternate guitar tuning that Isaak used on arguably his greatest hit, "Wicked Game". (Actually I don't think even Isaak himself would argue otherwise. But I'm not deleting the 'arguably' there. Mainly because I don't feel like arguing with someone who wants to try and reason that "Somebody's Crying" was a bigger hit. (Yes, I know it was on a Party of Five episode. I once watched television semi-regularly.)

I like Wicked Game a lot, so much that I've dropped the quotation marks. As much as I love parentheses, I am not enthralled with quotation marks. They are an (un)Necessary evil, but that's just me.

This is around the time I lose all interest in posting. I found the above somewhat interesting to write, and perhaps even a bit obscure at times. Now I have to go make sure the links appear where I deem necessary, and then proceed to post with all typos, sentence fragments, and other unproofed grammatical error and inconsistencies intact.

Chris Isaak - Wicked Game

Night Ranger - Don't Tell Me You Love Me, (You Can Still) Rock in America

Tony MacAlpine - The King's Cup