Twitterpated

• 12:07 @michaelianblack Only if you hold your breath while you wish. #
• 12:08 Daylight Savings Time? Mo' like Daylight SUCKINGS Time! #
• 17:12 @NowIsStrange I didn't INTEND to! I had no idea why she was just sitting there in the parking lot. #
• 17:13 We met my mom and sister at a diner today. #
• 18:16 Steampunk Alice in Wonderland tinyurl.com/bpdgan #
• 18:38 This makes the New Jerusalem over 7 million times bigger than NYC. Does this excite you? tinyurl.com/7ko9xc #
• 18:38 @NowIsStrange But I got out of it once I realized what I'd done! #

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Fifty "no"s and a "yesh" means "yesh"

Let's see what I have to report here. Well, on Saturday night, bethje, her Uncle John, and I were going to go to Red Robin, only to find out it wasn't open yet. Even though the signs are all lit up and there aren't any "coming soon" signs. I haven't been to Red Robin in a while, and I guess I'll have to wait some more to go to this one. I've heard of people getting sick from Red Robin, but I'm sure that's anecdotal evidence that's statistically irrelevant.

On Sunday, my mom and sister met us at a diner, where I had a sausage sandwich. And for dinner I had a meatball sub, so I guess I've had my share of subs for the time being. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I finally gave my mom the plants I'd meant to give her for Christmas, and she said that I'll be receiving some presents from her in the near future.

And now a quick rundown of the new cartoon episodes. In tonight's Simpsons, Ned Flanders did something nice for the Simpsons, and Homer treated him like crap. Gee, never seen THAT plot before, have we? :P I did think the prospective tenants were funny, though. I did enjoy Family Guy. It got off to a slow start with the horse bit, which wasn't that funny, but I thought it picked up after getting into the subplot with Peter turning gay. And I liked the James Bond bit, partially because it seems like not enough people acknowledge that Bond is basically a sex offender. And American Dad was once again the highlight of the night.

Beth and I also watched the Alexandra Pelosi documentary Right America Feeling Wronged, which was pretty disturbing. It was basically a "look at these crazy people" kind of film, which is unlikely to sway anyone's views, but fascinating to see. There was one kid who was afraid of Obama winning because he was a socialist, yet he could neither spell nor define "socialist." And another guy cried because he could no longer fly the Confederate flag, among other things. He also said that society nowadays considers people who hunt and go to "titty bars" (his term) to be bad. For the most part, they were the kind of people who constantly parrot slogans and buzzwords (I love when people say they they like Fox News because it's "fair and balanced," which is essentially the same as saying that you like Burger King because you can have it your way; repeating an advertising slogan is hardly an explanation) and refuse to be dissuaded from their ideas even when they make no sense, who certainly aren't limited to Republicans, but it often seems like the party tries to appeal to people who think that way. But the main thing I learned from the movie is that, for Republicans, EVERY day is Silly Hat Day!

Writer's Block: Close Encounters of the Celebrity Kind

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I've met several, if walking up to the person at a table and getting them to sign an autograph counts as "meeting." I'd say my three best celebrity encounters were with Carolyn Mark, Robin Goldwasser, and Amanda Palmer. I'm usually really shy around celebrities (and non-celebrities, for that matter), and I have the feeling I might have had more enjoyable experiences with others if I'd come up with a topic to discuss with them. And preferably a topic more interesting than, "Hey, you know that one song you do? It's AWESOME." But some others just seemed totally uninterested, like the two Johns from They Might Be Giants, although this WAS at an in-store for a children's album, and they were probably both tired and expecting to spend time with kids rather than adults. I've come across reports of other people having pleasant encounters with one or both Johns (Flansburgh, not surprisingly, tends to be more outgoing), and others who were basically shooed away by them. I get the impression that it really depends on their mood at the time. And I've had things signed by David Lowery on two different occasions, and he was in the middle of a conversation with somebody else both times.

Meanness Without Meaning

While looking around a car lot the other day, I made the not-at-all-original observation that there were a lot of SUVs. That's obvious, but it got me wondering why so many people drive them when they get such terrible gas mileage. I'm sure some people just like the amount of room and such, and buy them in spite of their harm to the environment and such. But I think some people of the Sean Hannity persuasion (Hannity is, in case you didn't know, a major promoter of the Cadillac Escalade) drive SUVs when they have no need of them, simply to piss off liberals and conservationists. And it seems to me that the only thing worse than screwing over other people for your own personal gain is screwing them over when you have NOTHING to gain. That's just being mean for the sake of being mean, right? To a certain extent, I can see the appeal of wanting to cheese off the self-righteous. People who preach about the evils of diet soda, pornography, and video games just make me want to sit around with a Diet Sunkist in my mouth, a nudie mag in one hand, and a Game Boy in the other. But this isn't so much the case when you're actually doing HARM in order to put someone in his or her place. I get the feeling that a lot of the people featured in the movie I watched last night were the sort who would do things just to piss someone else off. And it's also how I feel about Proposition 8 and other proposals to define marriage as something solely between one man and one woman. How does anyone possibly BENEFIT from outlawing gay marriage? I don't see how there's any money in it (while there is, on the other hand, plenty of money in LETTING more people get married), and it's not like your own heterosexual marriage will be declared invalid if some man marries another man. A lot of the nastier people in our society are callous toward the feeling and situations of others, but doing something just to make someone else miserable is basically going through callousness and out the other side. It's not simple selfishness, but pure anti-generosity.