This Budvar's for you!

There was a recent story on Time's website about the possibility of the Anheuser-Busch company buying the Czech Budvar brewery that is government-owned and has been the center of years of litigation regarding the use of the trade name Budweiser. I think I may have had Budvar (sold here inder the import name of "Czechvar") in Germany as a teenager - I'm pretty sure I had Pilsner Urquell at least once, although my favorite beer-based beverage in Germany was colaweissen, which is beer with either coke or orange soda. It's perfect for the unrefined palates of American teenage tourists. This reminds me - Oktoberfest is coming up soon. This makes me kind of wish I could visit Germany again. Actually, the idea of being an expatriot really appeals to me right now, for some reason. I'm in an "anywhere but here" frame of mind lately.

So Ridley Scott has finally come out with an official position on the great "Deckard: Replicant/Not a Replicant" Geek debate that has raged since the theatrical release of Blade Runner. I mean, I know what I think, and I know what most people sort of figured once the director's-cut version came out a few years ago but the debate still rages. Sort of. Harrison Ford says "Not a Replicant". Ridley Scott's determination: "Replicant". To which I say...Nehhhhh! Nyet! He admits to never even reading the entire book!? He didn't even give credit to the author, to whom he owes the basis of the film's plot! Look - I love that movie as much as the next geek, but the book is just better, and he doesn't even give it the due it deserves. He acts like this was his creation, and his alone. From the article, a direct quote: "Blade Runner involved full-bore imagination. Deckard's universe had to be expanded into credibility. That's probably the hardest thing I've done, because there was nothing to borrow from."
What?! Is he an idiot? Let me take out my little list of people to despise..."Ridley Scott: Director and douchebag". Check.
FYI, Ridley: the ending of the book is not clear, it only serves to beg the question raised in all of PKD's best stories: "What makes us human?". The toad (or maybe it was a frog), though...a Replicant, for sure. And Replicant flies to boot.

Well, finally.

Blogger kept rejecting my password today. It was frustrating. But now that I'm here, I have nothing to talk about. Except the rabid fanaticism that is running rampant around work the last few days (we play a highly ranked team tonight - earlier in the week people were lined up for a block to get free tickets to the game, and then people who didn't get tickets were literally begging and offering their first born children for seats, people were getting snippy because not everybody was displaying "pride"...it's JUST football people. And college football to boot. It's not the second coming of Christ, so chill out a bit.)...and people keep giving me work that's not mine, there are raises and promotions flying all around me, me not happeing FOR ME and I'm ready to scream. But, the weekend is here. So...rejoice I shall and dread the pending demise of my joy when the weekend inevitably ends.

Update: I've been getting messages about the score. We're winning. Whoopty-freaking-dooo...

A mime is a terrible thing to waste

For those who might not have heard, I'm sad to inform you of the death of Marcel Marceau. The passing of Mmr. Marceau is indeed a sad event for us mime officianados. And so I give you:




And mime school - which demonstrates why mimes will always be superior to clowns...

"Shut the f*ck up, Donnie!"

M came over Friday night, and we decided to head over to Subway to "Eat Fresh" then come home and watch some DVDs. I had picked up a movie called Winter's Passing as an impulse buy and it had been sitting on the shelf for a while. I didn't really think about what kind of movie it might be, but I thought it might be good becuase of the cast (Will Ferrell, Zoey Deschanel and Ed Harris). It's just kind of morose. Not upbeat in the least, and the character that Will Ferrell plays is kind of creepy. A good movie, but if you're looking for irreverant humor you won't find it here. I had to try and counter that downer by popping in The Big Lebowski, which M had never seen. The Big Lebowski is notoriously a favorite of people who like to watch it while in altered states, but I have found that it's the more random, non-trippy parts of the film that are the best. The ferret in the bathtub and The Dude wrecking his car when he drops his j in his lap are my favorite scenes, as well as any part where The Dude, Walter and Donnie are together. M has never seen Pulp Fiction, so that is tops on the list for next time, if we decide to do this again. I'd also like to get 300 and buy the RiffTrax commentary. The preview had me crying with laughter.

I've been going through my music "library" and doing some culling of MP3s that I have that I really don't listen to at all. In doing so, I was reminded of some songs that I either used to like, or currently am obsessed with. Here are two such songs:

Julee Cruise. I had her "Floating Into the Night" album, which had the same prevailing sound for just about every track. A good CD to fall asleep to, actually.
This is the Twin Peaks theme - for the kids, Twin Peaks was sort of the Lost of the 90's. My mom loved this show, and I kind of got into it too, although it got too weird to decipher towards the end. Anyone remember who really killed Laura Palmer?



One of my new favorite songs by Bats for Lashes (and the video is a little odd and slightly creepy, which I love):



Now I'm off to eat some candy corn and watch my recording of "Kid Nation" that re-aired tonight.

Oh, before I go off to watch some reality tv and rot my brain (and my teeth with more candy corn), here is a fascinating story from the AP Wire about an Australian who decided to follow Ghengis Khan's path through Asia into Eastern Europe on horseback. It took him three years. He also has a website. This is the future of adventure, folks. People making it where they can find it.

Basic human indecency

What is with people in public places being in a state of undress? Two times in the last week I've seen people violating the "no shirt/no shoes" rule that used to be in place - and enforeced- for most establishments. Over the weekend I saw a guy in the mall wandering around the shoe store with his button-down shirt completely unbuttoned and practically falling off, and then this afternoon I saw a lady running into the gas station in just her socks. Could she not be bothered to put on shoes? I remember as a kid going on car trips with my parents, that when we would stop I woul d have to put on my shoes before we went into any business. Of course, when you have high school and college students going to school in their pajamas, this must just be a sign of the times and I really am getting old. It doesn't help that I'm not having a very good couple of weeks, here, so almost everything annoys the ever-living crap out of me lately. But still - button your shirt and put on shoes when you're out at the store, you lazy bastages.

Speaking of lazy - I'm late for a CD mix-tape swap arranged through the CDP blog. I have no real excuse except that other things have come up that I have to do and leaving work to mail a package isn't something I have been able to manage. I'm having a hard time managing anything lately, to be honest.

Today was Talk Like a Pirate Day. I did slip in a half-whispered Arrrr at work this afternoon, but since no one ever listens to me anyway (and I think they have figured out that I do kind of talk to myself sometimes without realizing I'm doing it...I really am turning into Milton, you know!), it was totally wasted. So in honor of this fine occassion, what's your favorite pirate joke, matey?

Saaaarrrrrsgaaaarrrrrd



I thought my son's Kindergarten teacher had high expectations, but Mr. Mills trumps her by a mile! Check out the instructions for getting a tissue. Remember: Listen for Understanding.

My husband just rescued a lizard from my son's bath. It's kind of a mystery how it got there, since my son is terrified of reptiles.

In Harry Potter news...yeah, I know you thought this was done. It's not. Two more movies. So, in Harry Potter news, they've casted the part of Professor Slughorn. Not how I pictured him, but the casting has been pretty good overall. They'd just better hurry up before everyone really is too old to play their parts.

Captain's log:

Blog date 9.17.07: Today I pushed aside my not-quite seething hatred of my job and burgeoning apapthy towards pretty much everything in general to get out of bed and make the best of the day. I vowed to NOT spend so much of my day frittering away precious time on the internet. I swore to myself that I really would buckle down and get important things done. I was determined. I was resolute.

I was deluded. I spent a big part of the day mired in a continuation of last week's saga - explaining it to the manager who was out of town when it all went down, doing more research, and sending a detailed list of what the deprtment needed to know about each of the employees affected. I got a little bit of work done besides that, but not as much as I had intended.

I helped pull weeds and mow the yard when I got home, so now I'm tired and sore and grungy.

After last week, I've come to a realization. This is my boss:

I am not speaking Esperanto.

I had a minor freakout at the end of this week. Without delving into specifics, our HR department is severely pissed at one of the departments in my area for their shoddy hiring processes, and it's now blossomed into some kind of minor disaster. I spent all day Friday providing information to HR and explaining at least three times how this all happened. The big boss personally attended to getting people paid...sort of - but it's still all screwed up and they will owe the money back (it's like a loan), and I heard at least twice today that this was an "accounting issue" and the supervisor of these employee who took a whole pay period, several e-mails and two skipped meetings (scheduled by him and skipped by him) to get the paperwork back I needed "should not be held responsible". So...let me see if I have this right - even though I'm the one who sent the countless notifications and did my best to follow up and get this paperwork back to fix this before it even became a problem, and even though I don't oversee these employees or their supervisor, somehow I am accountable for this? I can't tell you how many times in the past two days I have been compelled to hold my temper and not just quit on the spot. I do have bills to pay, after all.


My job. Sometimes it sucks in completely new and undiscovered ways. I really think it's about time for a new one. I think I'll start looking...now.


The only thing I had to eat all day at work was half a cup of coffee. I'm not sure how it happened that I didn't stop to eat lunch - most of the later part of the day is remembered as a blur of semi-panic and seething frustration on my part. And there was demolition happening outside my office door today. Some work stations were removed. We are now the proud owners of a $900 table that isn't even real wood and a chair and couch from upstairs in a very ugly shade of blue. We lost two functional spaces and replaced them with a place to read a magazine and have a little chat. I can't say I see an improvement here.

Maybe if I spent all day sitting on my butt and talking - oh, pardon, I mean networking! - this would be a useful thing. But I have to attend to the mechanizations of our little machine and someone has to put out these fires that never seem to stop popping up, so that couch won't get so much as a second glance from me after today.

I still haven't been sleeping very well. I'm exhausted to the point of almost not being able to function, but I find myself unable to fall sleep until 12:30 - 1:00 at night. I've been getting headaches and heartburn again. I'm really edgy, too, and this is compounded by the fact that my son has lost the ability to discern what an "inside voice" is and has picked up the supremely annoying habit of clapping along to the syllables of his words as he talks - "Mommy can I have a juicebox, please?" = *clap clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap clap* *clap*?

I just found out that the local radio station bowling for charity event I may be going to in October will have Trans Siberian Orchestra performing bowling. A few years ago at my previous job working for a national TV shopping channel I coordinated (i.e. acted as gopher and stage hand during) a show they were doing to sell their latest CD.

David Duchovny...mumble mumble...Celebrity Jeopardy...mumble...
No Sir Sean Connery, but Trebek calls Lynne Redgrave "stupid":



Can you believe my sister-inlaw and her husband have never seen SNL's celebrity Jeopardy skits?? Who ARE these people?

*The audio in the clip below is bad, but they were all like that*

The wizard will shock us all with his skillful grace and dexterity.

You don't have to watch the whole thing - just skip to about a minute remaining in the video and then you can feel a little creeped out by Daniel Radcliffe's mad skillz.



I'm not entirely sure if I'm supposed to be impressed or disgusted. Maybe a little of both?

The jiggly bits

I know that EVERYONE AND THEIR FREAKING BROTHER is collectively tearing Britney Spears apart over her MTV video music awards show performance. I would have felt it unecessary to post my two cents as well, if it weren't for all of the comments about her weight. But first - she can't sing. We've all known that forever. The only people who ever watched her videos and bought her albums for their musical accomplishment were her fanbase of 13 year old girls who just don't know any better. And if that weird thing she half-heartedly attempted to lip-synch is the best song on the whole album? Then, well...ouch. Second - her personal life is a mess. Too much "celebrity" too soon, too little positive influence by her "people", including her own greedy mother, not enough people there to talk some sense into her when she was about to make some of the most disasterous career and personal decisions and her inability to deal with the repercussions of those same decisions...all add up to the bald, crazy-acting, emotionally wrecked Britney of the past several months. It's sad. And people just lap that up. We like to see people who should be doing so well - since they are, by all accounts (according to the glossies and tabloid shows masquerading as entertainment "journalists"), so much better than we can ever dream of being, in every way - doing so very badly.

But for people to come out and say she's fat...Seriously? And I'm not the only one scratching my head over the criticism, either. She's not the 16 year old engenue that she used to be, sure. But she's had two kids, and she's been through the emotional ringer, all in the harsh spotlight of the public eye, and that has taken its toll. I'll be the first one to make fun of her choice of wardrobe, and her choice of men. But her weight? No. Of course I can see where gossip columnists and bloggers might snipe and say that for someone with her money, and the time she would have had to prepare for this, she should have looked a little more like her old self in her career "prime". But a twenty-something with two kids is NEVER going to look exactly like their young teen self again. Ever. Celebrity or not. All the tummy-tucks in the world can't correct what babies and time can do to change your physique. I'd like to see what half of those columnists writing nasty little missives about her weight look like.

All the perfect people squeal "OMG! Britney Spears is a WHALE, har har!"

Also - Kanye West can shut up now with his "greatest album release in the history of ev-er". Over-hyped, over-produced hacks stand up and be counted.

Hi. Yes. I know you can't see me, as I am invisible.

I love how you shave time out of your busy schedule of doing very important stuff at work to accomodate someone bringing you important paperwork - that you'd asked for a week and a half ago! - and they bail on you. Not once. Oh, no. Twice. This is very freaking professional. Like I have so much spare time and I love nothing more than to sit and just twiddle my thumbs and wait for you.

Then, on top of that, they're hiring for an open position here in my office and my boss has decided that he needs no input from anyone else regarding what he needs in an assistant when determining who he will hire. The last boss did this. What did we end up with? An abrasive, overly-ambitious absentee assistant. Although she just got a promotion and nice pay raise after being here only six months, so at least this worked out for someone. I have done everything that this assistant would be asked to do (and then some), so you'd think that my two cents might come in handy. You'd think - but it seems like that as far as my boss is concerned I only exist to tell him how much money he has to spend and to solve everyone else's problems...and keep my advice to myself. And he doesn't seem to want me to tell him what is getting screwed up - just to smile and go about fixing it and just take on more and more work while I watch people get promoted for doing a fraction of what I do every day. It's a pretty sobering thought that, for as long as I've worked here now, my current boss does not really value my experience or my input. So I rarely offer it. It really sucks to wonder what all of your hard work and attempts at making a real contribution ultimately add up to...if anything at all.

Time flies when you're having rum

The in-laws took my son to a baseball game tonight, so I'm all alone for the evening. I'm sitting here drinking Iberia brand coconut flavored soda with rum. It's like drinking a non-frozen pina colada. It smells like summer: suntan lotion and alcohol. Speaking of soda - I saw an ad for Diet Coke Plus today. With vitamins and minerals. Seriously. Are we going back to the days when a soda was consumed for some kind of supposed health benefit? I noted that there was no mention of whether it had electrolytes. In alcohol news, Pennsylvania's Blue Laws are being challenged in the State's Supreme court, so I'm curious how that will turn out. We don't have that problem, here. You want to buy a case of beer, a six-pack of near-beer, and some wine in this state, you don't have to go to more than one place. They make it pretty easy to be a lush.

Last night was spent chatting online with friends and reading zombie comics. I have a new favorite...it has zombies AND vampires, and theorizes that zombies are vampires, of a sort. Which reminds me - the new George Romero film should be out before too long - supposedly it has zombie pov. Sweet, right?

Tonight will be spent tinkering with some new software, finishing a project, doing laundry and wasting prescious time on the computer. It figures that on a night when I have no plans I would have all of this time to do something social. This is the opposite of what usually happens. For example, I was invited to yesterday's First Friday (again), but since I didn't have a babysitter in town, I didn't go (again). M wants to see me next weekend, though, and we have a whole list of activities planned out for the rest of the year.

If you have some time to kill, check out TIME magazine's 100 Best TV Shows of All Time (so far). There are a lot that I think are missing (and a few that I thought in no way should be on any "best" list ever), but I was thrilled to see My So Called Life and Mystery Science Theater 3000 back to back. These are two of my favorites, since I'm a Generation-X adult who has never quite grown out of her narcissistic teenage angst who loves to give running commentary when watching movies. And once upon a time, before Jared Leto was the poser-Goth poster boy of choice, he was every MTV viewing girl's crush, Jordan Catalano.

With bonus Shakespeare sonnet-goodness (although curly-haired-geek-boy Brian Krakow does all the talking):



You can see part of the pilot episode *here* of the single season of the show - where they dyed Angela's hair that wonderful shade of red - and she has her new group of non-conformist friends, develops her mad crush on Jordan and starts to drift away from her parents. I hated how later on it became as much about Angela's parents' issues as about her experiences navigating the pitfalls of her burgeoning adulthood. And this show totally pawns Degrassi - that show is just an overwrought soap-opera for today's way too mature tweens. Don't even get me started on the whole Disney High School Musical naked picture fiasco. It's getting tougher and tougher trying to keep a kid even remotely innocent in this age of the internet and instant access to just about anything it has to offer - good and horribly, terribly bad alike.

Sit. Stay!

Here's a good dog: he'll do whatever you command. And if he doesn't understand he's ready with a snappy response to your unreasonable request. Hint: stick to things dogs know, like roll-over and play dead, bark and sing, for the best results. "Get me a beer" yields unsatisfactory results...

I don't like Mondays...even when they're Tuesdays

Here we go with the count down to Friday, all over again. I have a pile of work on my desk, one of the supervisors somehow let most of his staff terminate in the HR system then didn't get paperwork back to me to get them back in the system - so they won't get paid this payroll (I'm sure this will all become MY fault, since I didn't hold his hand and tell him explicitly what he needed to do to make sure this didn't happen, and the manager of that area acted all sorts of surprised like this could never possibly happen because he's so good at his job), I had to sit in on interviews today (one of the interviewees was quite an interesting old bird - one of her very important questions to ask was if we had a gym to work out in, and supposedly she told the manager when they were arranging the interview that she really can't use a computer...wtf, people!!), and the girl at the front desk must be invisible. A good sixty to seventy percent of the working day I don't see her at that desk. Another percentage is spent chatting with various people (read: any possibly single guy of a certain age and level of attractiveness that happens to wander in front of the door) here in the office. We sure are a functional, productive, contented group, aren't we?

Some more reasons I don't like Monday-style Tuesdays: I had a parking citation on my windshield when I left work (I left my hang-tag down for some reason - they're lucky they gave me a warning); my son left his lunch box at school (he had better hope it isn't actually LOST and is sitting in his cubby in class when he gets there tomorrow); and is it just my imagination, or is it getting dark early again? Summer just flew right by me, and we barely used the pool at all. My husband is already burning the pumpkin and apple orchard scented candles in preparation for the Autumn's festivities.

There was cake today. With oreo crumbles. I had two pieces. I am filled with shame. And oreo crumbles...

Dear co-worker with all of the junk food in her office: Please stop. I know you mean well, and it's your way of making friends. But, seriously. Please. Stop.