As if having one blog wasn't rough enough, I have just created a blog to track news about the V for Vendetta movie.

Since the announcement that Natalie Portman had signed on to play the female lead, I've been keeping track of various news the old-fashioned-web-way: hard-coding The Vendetta Shrine's movie news page. But in the last few weeks I've been busy with other things and just didn't have the time to add in the latest news that's been circulated. So I'm streamlining the problem by using a blog. Since Blogger has a handy-dandy feature that lets me take any webpage on my browser and post a link to that page on my blog, it'll make updates much easier for me. This will undoubtedly be a good thing as the Summer rolls on and more and more news starts circulating the 'Net.

Of course, the design for the blog looks like shit at the moment. In fact, you'll note it looks identical to the original layout of this blog. This was done for expediency's sake--I wanted the blog active lest another few weeks go by--so I'll suffer the eyesore of a design for now and somewhere inbetween my business projects I'll find time to format the blog in a design similar to my Vendetta Shrine. Knowing me, this is either going to happen before the end of this week or sometime around August.

Why am I doing this? I wish I knew. It's a perverse habit, I think. This movie will blow. I mean, really. Go to my movie blog and click on the entry about the Ain't It Cool script review. The script sounds atrocious. It'll be nothing like the comic. So why waste my time tracking information and press releases? Because I love the comic. And part of me still hopes that if somebody comes to my site because of the movie, they'll stick around lohng enough to be convinced they should buy the comic.

It's twisted logic, I know. But look who you're talking about. On the bright side, with a specific Vendetta-themed blog running, you'll now be spared various entries on this blog related to the comic and the movie. (Unless, of course, the entry winds up being rather inspired, in which case you bet your ass I'll be pointing it out on the Wire. But I digress....)

OK, enough of this. The entire evening is gone and I gots ta get some sleep.

Here's a helpful little tip for you:

When you decide to go out for a walk/jog, do not do it first thing after waking up, without eating even a single fruit, and without drinking any water. Because after about ten, fifteen minutes, your body will not be a very happy camper.

Meanwhile, any weight loss my exercising has granted me I've probably recouped in abundance this weekend. Between the Kentucky Fried Chicken feast on Friday, the barbecue fun yesterday, and today's Memorial Day lunch-cum-dinner, I'm one stuffed turkey. It's amusing--I've always heard people talk about how holidays are bad for their diets and that they'll be "back on the diet on Monday (or Tuesday)" and I always thought it odd and never quite understood what they were talking about. But now, gorgeing as I have, I begin to see the light. My God, with all the damn food we consume, it's a wonder there's any skinny people in this country at all.

I've just gotten home from Mike and Erin's new place. Those two decided to leave their old apartment in immaculate condition. When Sean and I left our apartment, I remember sweeping the floors, and giving a half-ass wipe down on the walls to remove some excess scuffing. But the hardwood floors were ripped the shreds and we didn't polish them; and I don't thin any serious cleaning was done of the bathroom (I think Sean may have done the kitchen). But, ultimately, we didn't do much. Mike and Erin (and myself and Mike's mom) scrubbed every damn inch of their old apartment. The tub was scrubbed, holes made by nails were spackled, the carpet was shampooed . . . the place looked practically brand new by the time we closed up. Nice work-ethic, those two have. If it was me I would've done a quick vacuum and made sure the holes in the walls weren't too noticeable and that would've been it.

So it's about twenty after five, now; about the time I'd be getting home from work if it was a workday. And, of course, after three lovely days of fun, the prospect of work tomorrow just doesn't seem fair. Weirder still, it's the first Monday evening since January that I have no TV to watch. Welcome to the summer doldrums. Now I'll actually have to be productive.

So here we are at the Official Unofficial Start of Summer--where the hell has the time gone? Have I really been down here for five months? Is June a measly two days away? Have I run out of things to say so fast that I'm already reduced to pointless questions about the speed of Time?

God dammit. . . !

Something was bugging me this weekend. Nothing truly major, but just this feeling that there was something I was supposed to be noticing. I thought it was May 23, or May 24, something about those dates, but no, that wasn't it. It wasn't until I checked my blog and scanned the last few entries that it dawned on me:

Last Sunday was the fifteenth anniversary of my entering Fair Oaks.

So it's a bit belated, and don't I feel ashamed, but, Happy Anniversary to Me.

I don't know who Shannakin Sayidwalker is but I finally got around to clicking on his (her?) name and it brought me to this mondo bizarro song about the Lost character Sawyer.

Figured what with tonight's finale--and the amount of drool some of my co-workers spend on him, it was worth posting.

Sawyer, Sawyer
Sawyer, Sawyer....

So my car's in the shop. Meant to write about this yesterday, but I got lazy.

Long story short: Sunday afternoon, when Aline stopped by to visit on her way to her relatives, I drove to the nearby diner. And I noticed the "check engine" light was one and when I took my foot off the case, the engine would run real low, the RPM's practically down to nothing. Needless to say I was not happy.

On Monday I took the morning off from work to go to the mechanic. I don't know any mechanics down here, so I took a chance on the Pep Boys on rt 38. Twenty bucks and two-and-a-half hours later they told me I had to take the car to a Honda dealer to have it serviced. I drive to the Honda dealership. They tell me I can bring the car in on Wednesday.

So I spent two days driving around with my right foot constantly giving the engine gas and learning how to break with my left foot. It was actually rather fun, notwithstading the worry thay my engine was going to explode or something similarly amusing. Fortunately I work a mere six miles from my apartment, so it's not like I was doing any heavy driving.

Now, before all this went down, the driver-side window broke. The glass must've gone off the track or something, because it no longer closses completely. Almost--there's maybe a quasrter inch gap at the top, and that gap is protected by the rubber siding around the windowpane, so my car has not been flooded from the rain we've had over the last few days. But I figured, as long as I was gettting the engine looked at, I might as well get the window fixed. And, come to think of it, I'm about 500 miles overdue for a grease-and-oil, so I might as well make it a hat-trick for the Honda mechanics.

I dropped my car off at the dealership this morning. I give the service rep the rundown of the work to be done. He asks me what time I can pick her up today. I blinked. That fast? He seems pretty confident. And they're open late, so I wouldn't have to cut out of work early to pick up the car. Nice bit of good news, that. I get a rental from Enterprise and off to work I go.

Noon comes and goes and no word from the shop. I call them at a quarter to one; the rep says he'll check with the mechanic and call me back in about half an hour. Around three I call back; they say they're still having some trouble diagnosing the problem. It's either one thing or the oxygen sensor. But they're looking at the window and it's either A or B. I ask whether they can still have the car ready today. He says as soon as they hear back from this mysterious Mechanics Hotline that apparently Honda mechanics use to figure out what's wrong with their cars, it shouldn't take long to fix, so he thinks there's a good shot of it being ready today.

(Let me digress for a moment. Honda mechanics have to call up a help line to diagnose repair issues? Shouldn't this be something they're capable of doing on their own? Isn't the whole point of dealerships having an in-shop mechanic is that they'll be able to repair their cars than some independant shop that isn't directly tied to the company that makes the cars? I dunno, maybe it's just me....)

'Round a quarter to five the shop calls me up. They've isolated the car window problem, and that's going to run me three bills. Shock of shocks; I was ready for that. However, they still haven't figured out exactly what's wrong with the engine.

Now, I know cars are complicated machines these days what with all the electronics and computers and what-not. But don't you think, when a car company makes the car, they'd build it in such a way that when you bring it to them to be fixed, they'd know how to do it? I mean, I can understand if fixing something takes time, but you figure they'd at least know what it is they have to do to fix it! An independant mechanic, sure, I can see it, but the friggin' dealership!?!?!? Yeesh.

Anyway. I'm trying around in Toyota something-or-other for at least one more day, and I'm keeping my finger's crossed that whatever's wrong with my car will still be under warranty (I think I'm running a 50/50 shot at the moment).

Meanwhile, tonight is the season finale's of "Lost" and "Alias". I thoght last week was the "Alias" finale but apparently I was wrong. With "24" ending this past Monday (and if any of you saw it--did you also get that weird "Incredible Hulk" vibe watching Bauer walk off alone down the destered road? I saw that shot and had the endtheme to "The Incredible Hulk" stuck in my head for the rest of the night!) tonight will officially end my TV season. And good riddance, I've got two jobs to finish up for Bright-Matrix and two more on the horizon, so I'm gonna need all the free time I can get.

Plus I'm supposed to give my first speech for the Toastmasters on the 14th, so I've got two weeks to come up with a three to five minute speech about myself. Shouldn't be too hard given my Powers of Babbling, but seeing how this is supposed to be something neat and structured and rehearsed, I actually have to devote some time to it. Jesus, even in my free time, I'm working.

Onward and upward.....

Darth Vader has a blog. And it's really really really painful to read.

Seriously. You people think I'm verbose? Just try to get through the first entry on the page. Go ahead. If you can make it to "I have foreseen it," enunciated Sidious crisply. then you're a better person than I or just a big ol' glutton for punishment.

You want to know a secret? I actually want to see Revenge of the Sith. I'd like to think it's morbid curoisity more than anything else--perhaps it may actually be a good movie (it isn't, but it may at least be a good Star wars movie, if you know what I mean.) But, also, given how this movie is supposed to tie-in so closely with the original trilogy, I want to see it purely for that reason alone.

Sad, isn't it? I swear, if Pavlov were alive today he wouldn't use a dog and a bell, he'd use twenty-something males and the Star Wars movies, and his experiment would still show the same conclusion. (And, yes, I am a dog. I've known this for years. The truth is, Craig died years ago, and this blog has been written alternating by Dusty, Custer, Cinnamon, and Joey, and now Kayla. Woof woof, motherfuckers.)

Where was I?

Oh, yeah: suckers.

You know what Lucas' real accomplishment is? It's not special effects, it's not the "telling old myths in a new way" bullshit. It's getting an entire generation or two of people to willingly, happily, pay him to make shit movies. I wonder if Lucas is really aware of his power, because if he was, do you really think he'd stop at three movies? He'd just crank one out every three years and the money would flow like mana from Heaven.

(Oh, Christ, here's a terrible thought: what if Lucas doesn't want to make more Star Wars movies because it takes too much time? I mean, just imagine: you sweat and toil and put all your effort into making a movie . . . and your best effort is nothing more than medicore. You think he realizes it? Eh, nothing a few hundred million dollars can't solace...)

But you know, here's the truth: If Rush put out a shit album (and, in my opinion, Test for Echo was a shit album) I'd be pissed. If they put out two consecutive shit albums (which, in my opinion, they have not), I'd be seriously pissed and be ready to declare the Greatness at an end. But you know damn well that I'd still buy their third album, "because it's Rush".

So if I can be that much of a sucker for Rush, I guess it's not hard to understand how people can be that much of a sucker for Star Wars. It's all in what still speaks to you. Of course, the music of Rush is a far superior, more emotinal, more intelligent, and a better myth-adapter than the Star Wars movies could ever hope to be, so at least my devotion to Rush makes sense--in a strictly non-biased empirical comparison of the two, of course. But let he who is without fandom cast the first critique, etc. etc.

The Gilmore Girls finale . . . ended about two hours ago. I just got done with it myself, post-poning my viewing so I could play Diablo II with Dave for a few hours. (There's another blog post to explain why playing Diablo II--which we euphamistically refer to as "killing things"--trumps my weekly dose of Stars Hollow happenings, but this is not it.) The bastard show trumped me . . . I saw the ending only a split-second before it happened, only I don't think I believed it would be the case because when it actually did happen, I practically fell out of my chair. Wonderful little "everything goes to Hell in a handbasket" episode, and seeing how I finished watching the third season DVD set this weekend, it now sucks that I will have no "unseen" episodes to enjoy for another four months.

On the bright side, my Tuesdays are now freed up--which is good considering I've joined the Toastmasters, but that's another blog entry--and this will come in most handy now that Bright-Matrix has landed a new client that I will be working with. In fact, with "Alias" wrapping up tomorrow night, "Deadwood" ending on Sunday and both "24" and "Lost" finishing up next week, I get to be free of the accursed babble-box for the forseeable future (the exact length of which will last only until I find out when the third season of "Nip/Tuck" will start).

Yay Summer.

If I was still in Bloomfield living with Sean, tonight would have been a Lace night.

Lace is a go-go bar in Wayne, just off Route 46. Sean and I spent many a night there when we first were rooming together, and I spent far too many nights there on my own chasing Pandora (Who I eventually became friends with--and yes, I know her real name. On the one hand, it's rather nice to think that I was actually friends with a go-go dancer, but considering this all came about because I paying for lap dances, well, I suppose that's for another blog ramble.)

Anyway, after a while Sean and I got tired of stuffing singles down the g-strings of women who weren't going home with us, but we still would have the occasional forway to Lace, mostly when one of us was having a really bad day.

I had a really bad day. I mean, there are worse days; no one died or lost their home or anything. But work was pretty rough as it was the kind of day where you struggle to get one thing done and in the meantime thirty other issues pile up on your to-do list to the point that you just spent eight hours busting your ass and can't find anything to show for it.

Workdays like this have the double-edged sword of ignornace, because so many problems I'm supposed to resolve require knowledge that is utterly beyond me. Now, this is how the system works--no one expects you to know everything, as that would entail having intimate knowledge of hundreds of customers highly-customized computer systems. But when you're the guy trying to help these people and you don't know how, and the people that do are busy with their own issues . . . well, the helplessness is pretty damn palptable.

And such is my life.

The worse thing is, it's 10:30 at night and I haven't felt like I've decompressed at all. I came home, went over to Mike's for our walk, talked Bright-Matrix business, joined him as he picked up Erin which led us to going out for dinner and some more business talk once we got back to their apartment. I walked into my own apartment just as the clock struck nine and I've spent the better part of the last nintey minutes making my moves on Itsyourturn.com and catching up on the latest posts on the Velvet Forum.

I can't unwind and be active. True unwinding doesn't really happen when I'm doing something--now that I've started walking a few times a week, that helps, but it's still an activity. True unwinding required complete vegetation, usually spent in front of the TV and letting my brain melt. Anything else that required thought or physical exertion merely prolongs the need to decompress.

What can I say, I'm a weird guy.

Ah well. I think at this point I shall pop in another Season Three episode of "Gilmore Girls" and hopefully let some of this stress melt away.

Wouldn't ya know it? I finally get around to mentioning "Eyes" in my blog, and that I enjoy watching it, and I finally learn that the show is effectively cancelled.

I knew the show was doing poorly in the ratings, and when they aired that stupid American Idle Expose last week I figured that "Eyes" would get more than whatever initial comitment the network gave (turns out it was for 13 episodes). But when the show didn't air last night (so much for five hours), I knew it was a gonner. And sure enough, it is. Maybe ABC will air the remaining episodes during the summer doldrums, but I won't hold my breath.

And, true to form, there's an internet campaign to save the show. I'm sure, somewhere, there's an internet campaign to bring back 8-tracks. That said, the campaign does list the snail mail ways of contacting the network, and as I rarley have anything better to do, it might be fun to write something up.

I'd like to think a DVD set of the series could get released, as that seems to be in vogue for many short-lived shows; but with the show averaging just seven million viewers a week, I doubt it. The guy who created Eyes, John Mcnamara, co-crated "Profit", a short-lived FOX show from the mid-ninties that was a critical hit and still has a bit of a cult following and that show hasn't been released; my guess is if ABC doesn't air the rest of the episodes, that'll be the end of the show.

Ah well. At least that's an hour of TV I gain back.

I'll be very glad when this TV season is over. This is the most TV watching I've done in years.

I hadn't intended this to happen. And, really, back in September and October I was barely watching anything--I had gotten into "Lost", and I was watching "Gilmore Girls" regularly, but there wasn't any other show I was devoting extended time to like I had back when "Buffy" was on, or even when I first started watching "Alias".

I had no intention of watching "Alias" when it returned--I stopped watching the show about four episodes before the last season ended. And I completely missed the third season of "24" so I wasn't sure if I'd bother with the fourth season.

But then ABC made the brilliant decision to put "Alias" right after "Lost". And I did start watching "24". Bringing in "Gilmore Girls" and I was up to four hours of prime-time TV watching. Then "Deadwood" started up in March and suddenly I was devoting at leas an hour of TV watching four consecutive nights, Sunday through Wednesday.

Even worse, since I moved down here I began watching the syndicated re-runs of "Charmed" (truly a guilty pleasure if there ever was one--Rose McGowan = yum) and "Law and Order". This formed a two hour chunk of time from six to eight every day, on top of anything else.

Then, to make things worse, I got hooked on the ABC show "Eyes" which was considerate enough to air on Wednesday's following "Alias" . . . but that now meant there was three solid hours of TV watching in one night. The last time I purposely sat down to watch that much television was back in college when "VR.5", "X-Files", and "Picket Fences" aired back to back. Ten. Years. Ago.

But that's not the worst of it. It occurs to me that, were I still watching my evening doulbe-feature of "Charmed" and "Law & Order", then on Wednesday it would be perfectly easy to watching five hours of continuous television.

(Hmmm. Holly Marie Combs was in "Pickett Fences"; ten years later she's on "Charmed". Still in my life after all this time. She must be stalking me. How sweet.)

The mind boggles at the concept. I'd could down on my couch when it was light outside, and leave it only to lie down in my bed to go to sleep. Do you know what you can do in five hours? I mean, the amount of productivity lost simply to sit down and be entertained by the boob toob is staggering. Consider: a standard television season is twenty-two episodes. Twenty-two times five is 110. 110 divided by 24 is just over four and a half days. Four and a half days! Of my life! Every year! That would be lost to the Great God Television! And let's not forget the other three hours of TV watching I do each week, not to mention who-knows-how-much time I spend just idlly dialing 'round the station on weekends or the occasional week day when I'm not watching my regularly scheduled programming.

On the bright side, obviously I'm not really doing this marathon run of television every Wednesday. If I was, I wouldn't be blogging (though it would explain why I haven't been blogging in nearly a month--although TV-watching has nothing to do with it.)

This would normally be the point where I'd try to broaden the theme a bit a launch into some ridiculous missive on the nature of Television and blah blah blah. But the truth is it's ten after seven and I still haven't eaten so I need to go cook my dinner so I can sit down in time to watch "Lost", "Alias", and "Eyes".