Stratovania

bethje and I went out to eat at the Olive Garden last night. I had the Mediterranean Shrimp Scampi, which wasn't as good as I would have hoped, but was still pretty good. For an appetizer, we tried the cheese fondue, which was quite tasty, but difficult to eat. It stuck together, so when we tried to get some out of the bowl, it all wanted to come out together.

I've recently heard tell of people lining up (or, in some cases, hiring homeless people to line up) for the PlayStation 3. It seems kind of pointless, considering that I'm sure they'll be readily available for a lower price before too much time has elapsed. On the other hand, I can understand the appeal of getting something when it first comes out. I like to do that with new CD's, after all. While I'm a bigger fan of Nintendo products, I'd probably get a PlayStation if I had a lot of money. It seems to be the system of choice for the Dragon Warrior/Quest and Final Fantasy games, which I was introduced to through Nintendo. I have no desire to get an XBox, though. Part of it is a general distaste for Microsoft products, although I tend to like MSNBC and have no objection to Slate magazine, so I suppose that distaste doesn't hold across the board. What good games does the XBox have, though?

( I wrote a letter to Santa! (Okay, it was actually a random algorithm that did.) )

Finally, this fan-made video for Weird Al's "Do I Creep You Out?" features an animated hybrid of Al and Taylor Hicks. If THAT doesn't creep you out, I'm not sure what will. {g}

I'm temporarily in a situation where I'm actually looking forward to Fridays, like your stereotypical working stiff. I DID have to get my car checked out today, though, which puts somewhat of a damper on my weekend of rest and relaxation. They didn't even manage to fix it, since they need to order some part. I'll have to go in again NEXT weekend.

On Thursday night, I watched the DVD side of Weird Al's new album. It includes videos for all six of the original songs on the record. The video made me appreciate "I'll Sue Ya" more than I did before. I'm kind of surprised that they actually showed a (drawn) dead cat in a microwave, though. On the other hand, they DIDN'T show Al wearing underwear on his head. "Virus Alert" is pretty cool, too. I appreciate that Leotard City was drawn to look incredibly similar to Spatula City from UHF. My least favorite of the six is probably "Don't Download This Song," which had its moments, but really wasn't that funny overall. It was more of a conceptual thing, I guess. But anyway, if you like the songs, it's definitely worth it to get the CD instead of just downloading them or whatever. Or maybe the videos are on YouTube, and you can just watch them there. Whatever. Regardless, they're good videos.

I really should go to the grocery store today. I should probably also sort some more of my old papers, but I don't know that I will. The day is going by too quickly.

The new Weird Al album, Straight Outta Lynwood, comes out tomorrow. For those of you who (like me) don't listen to the radio much, or if you just want a refresher, here are his parody targets this time around:

Chamillionaire - Ridin' - I'm not sure I'd even heard of Chamillionaire before news that he was going to be parodied came around, but this song is presumably pretty big (I guess Al wouldn't have made it his lead parody target otherwise). Al's own version of the video is up at his MySpace page.
Green Day - American Idiot - Okay, you probably know this one even if you don't know the others.
Usher - Confessions Part II
Taylor Hicks - Do I Make You Proud? - No actual video at this link, just a changing series of pictures. I'm not sure there even IS a real promotional video for the song, and I don't think it's been played on the radio much either (although, as I've admitted, I don't really listen to the radio that much, so I suppose I wouldn't know for sure). My guess is that, after Atlantic Records denied Al permission to include "You're Pitiful" on the album, he decided he'd just go ahead and parody the American Idol winner.
R. Kelly - Trapped In The Closet - Okay, let's all ask the obvious question together. Ready? "Does this really NEED a parody?" Thank you. Still, knowing Al's skill with rambling story songs, I have pretty high hopes for "Trapped In The Drive-Thru." Don't disappoint me, Al! {g}

Incidentally, I think exposing my brain to "Trapped In The Closet" was damaging to my subconscious, because I had a dream that I saw R. Kelly in concert (WTF?), and he performed all twelve parts. The only other thing I remember about the dream is that 3x1minus1 was also at the concert, presumably because I'm pretty sure it was on her journal that I first heard of Mr. Kelly's saga. My mind might have also been somewhat influenced by the fact that, when I saw the Decemberists last year, they started out with "The Tain," their own multi-part epic (although it's nowhere near as long as "Closet").

obsessical did a whole lot of surveys this past weekend, and I appropriated a few of them for my own purposes.
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My next post will probably include my comments on last night's Simpsons, American Dad, and Futurama episodes. For now, though, I might as well just go ahead and post this.

Weird Al now has a MySpace page, complete with the cover art and release date (26 September) for his new album. I'm assuming this information is accurate, but with Al, who knows? Also, the DVD release of The Weird Al Show is scheduled for 15 August.

And here are two Google search memes that travspence did. The first involves searching for "[your name] killed," and the second for "[your name] eats."
( Killing )
( And eating )

rockinlibrarian did an extension on the survey I did way back when (which is to say about two weeks ago), where she answered the rest of the questions for her top artists. I guess I might as well do the same thing. I'm going to skip the questions that I already answered back then, though.

( On with the show! )

While on the subject of bands, I made a comment on this post of obsessical's about how I dream of being in a band, but I can't sing or play any instruments. There's a little more to it than that, though. I think it would be cool to write songs, record them, perform them on stage, and all that. On the other hand, I have no desire to live on the road for considerable parts of the year, get in fights with other band members, or be exploited by record company lowlifes. Most of the bad stuff seems to boil down to money, so I guess I'd want to be a musician who didn't have to rely on it for a career. I guess that means my real dream in this respect would be to win the lottery and THEN become a musician. Since I don't even buy lottery tickets, I don't see much chance of this happening. More realistically, I suppose I could pursue music as a weekend thing. Of course, not knowing anything about music is still a major stumbling block, but this is all hypothetical anyway. It's just that there are different levels of hypothetical, you know?

[1] This actually makes me think that a "best song titles" thread might not be a bad idea.

The History Channel has been showing some pretty cool programs for Armageddon Week. I wrote about the Antichrist one a few days ago, and I saw shows about the Devil and the destruction of Babylon. There was another one that I kind of half-watched last night about a proposed code in the Bible. Apparently, if you look for patterns in the letters of the Bible, you can come up with words relevant to various historical events in close proximity to each other. I really think the prospect was a pretty ridiculous thing for the History Channel to devote a special to, but even if it were true, would it necessarily benefit anyone? I mean, what if someone had seen the words "Kennedy," "Oswald," and "assassination" prior to the actual event? Would they have had any idea how to put those words together to figure out what would happen? It sounds like the whole thing is only a tiny step above numerology in terms of plausibility. Or, to put it in the words of Penn and Teller, it's bullshit.

At least one person on the Bible Code special said something about how it might have been aliens who put the code into the Bible. The "it's not God; it's aliens" philosophy has been around for some time, dating back at least to Chariots of the Gods in the late sixties, and now being used by Creationists who insist that Intelligent Design doesn't have to be religion in disguise. Isn't this just six of one and half a dozen of the other, though? If there are alien life forms who are capable of creating life, predicting minor details about the far future, and/or teaching humanity how to build pyramids, aren't they close enough to gods as not to make much of a difference? As someone in that History Channel show said, I think this idea comes into vogue during periods when religion is considered uncool, while aliens are the height of coolness. And, really, if aliens have this advanced technology, where did they learn it? Did they develop it themselves (in which case, why couldn't humans do the same on their own?), or learn it from another alien race (which raises questions as to how it all came into being in the first place)? While searching for information on Fomenko (the Russian mathematician who proposed that history was actually much shorter than everyone says, but accounts of events were accidentally duplicated by careless historians), I came across this page, which proposes that a lot of the ideas about pyramid-building alien gods in Chariots of the Gods and similar works actually derives from the works of H.P. Lovecraft. You know, Cthulhu and all that? When I attempted to read something by Lovecraft, I found it difficult to get through. The theory sounds pretty likely, though.

I'm reminded of Weird Al's clever parody of the Chariots of the Gods idea from an old AL-TV special, where he showed that playing "Don't Fear The Reaper" backwards would reveal a message from the ancient astronauts. That segment was included in The Compleat Al, the fictional biographical movie of Al that came out in the mid-eighties. They should really put that out on DVD. Or, for that matter, they could just release all the old AL-TV specials, although there might be rights issues with that.

Speaking of crazy sci-fi...well, stuff, bethje and I watched The Stuff last night. It's a cheesy eighties movie about a dessert product that's alive and kills people. Sort of like the Blob, I guess, except it's edible. You could tell it was from the eighties, because the commercials for The Stuff had music sung by a Pat Benatar sound-alike.

I had some weird dreams last night, including one where I was going to be Milo in a school presentation of The Phantom Tollbooth, but I couldn't remember my lines. For some reason, I have dreams about being in school plays pretty often, which is weird, because I was never actually in them in school. I think they're usually plays for English class, though, and I really WAS in one of those. Well, everyone was, so I was obviously included. And we really did do The Phantom Tollbooth in sixth grade, but I was the Mathemagician, not Milo.

I got Christmas presents from my dad today. He gave me a scarf and a copy of Al Franken's new book (which Beth got from her uncle, and probably would have let me borrow, but it's still cool to have my own) and a gift certificate to the Olive Garden.

( Two surveys )

Amount of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince read: 25 chapters (554 pages). Almost done!

Last night, bethje and I watched Short Circuit, another Essential Eighties Movie that I'd never watched. It was kind of goofy, but still fun to watch. Now I need to watch Short Circuit 2.

Today, I bought a copy of the new Frank Black album. Apparently Frank found title inspiration in the same place as Tori Amos.

( Go find your saint )

I'm writing this on Tuesday afternoon, but it might not be posted until sometime on Wednesday at the earliest, for reasons that should become clear shortly.

Since bethje's computer is still having problems, I brought mine over to her house. Unfortunately, though, she uses dial-up, and my computer just won't work for dial-up anymore. I tried to install AOL, and when it didn't run, I kept calling tech support. Each time, they told me something that they were SURE would fix the problems I was having, yet it never did. Finally, the last guy told me that there was some problem with my drivers, and I would have to have them fixed up at a repair shop, with help from my Windows CD. I don't think I'll bother doing that, but it puzzles me why it wouldn't work. When I first got the computer, I used a dial-up connection to connect to the Internet, and I don't recall having any problems with that. Later, however, I had difficulties similar to the ones I had at Beth's house. I couldn't connect to the Internet using dial-up. Fortunately, we got DSL around that time, and I didn't really have to worry about it. Since then, though, I've gotten a new hard drive and then reformatted that drive, with Windows installed anew each time. Why I would be having the same problems after a reinstall, and why, if this was, say, a problem with the Windows program itself, I was able to use dial-up before, remain mysteries to me. Anyone have any ideas?

Anyway, the point is that I currently have no way to access the Internet, except at work. When this kind of thing happens, I always feel disconnected. I tend to get used to it after a while, but it's both annoying and depressing at first. Of course, when I finally DO get online after a long absence, I usually find that it's pretty much as I left it, with hardly anything in my inbox or posted to the forums I read.

Last night, I had some interesting dreams. One was about a movie featuring They Might Be Giants that had come out BEFORE Gigantic. It was apparently kind of rare, but known to TMBG fans. In my dream, I was actually watching it for the second time, the first having been when I rented it from a local video store that carried a lot of rare stuff. Anyway, the movie wasn't a documentary, but rather a fictional story in which the Johns played themselves (sort of like A Hard Day's Night or something, I guess). It started with Flansburgh in jail writing lyrics on a piece of paper. I think Linnell was also in jail later on in the film, and the two Johns were talking about the band Linnell had been in prior to TMBG. He was actually in a band called the Mundanes at that point, but, within the dream-movie, his former band was known as "Snickers." Linnell also mentioned how he had been rejected by some goth band. There were also a lot of slapstick parts, like when Flans ran into a fence face-first. I think the last part of the movie that I saw had TMBG opening for some other band at a theater.

In another dream, I attended some kind of convention. Just as I was getting ready to leave, I met Weird Al. He walked up to my car, said he had heard I was a fan, and gave me an autograph. Later on, when I had time to examine the autograph, I discovered that Al had misspelled his own name, making me wonder if he was a fake.

Okay, here's to hoping I can get this online shortly!

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Weird Al's parents died recently. It's sad. :(

I might as well cut and paste this from my latest blog entry. I don't know how often I'll do that, though.

Since 2003 is almost over, I think it might be about time for me to say what good came out of it, in terms of music.

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