Archive 25
(For more Dailies, check out the Archive Here)

Note to self 293: 10/25/2006

This weekend I checked out both The Prestige and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society... My brain is still trying to sort things out. I totally ass-fucked my cerebral cortex with that double-whammy double-feature. Just as I figured out everything behind The Prestige (like "Holy crap! Tesla was David Bowie!") I sat down and watched GitS:SAC-SSS and pretty much farted any semblance of sanity that I had remaining away. SSS is about twice as confounding as the most confusing episodes from the previous two GitS TV series combined. It takes a crowbar to the back part of your skull to untangle your thoughts and rewatch the whole thing one more time in your mind in order to straighten things out... Or you can take the easy way out and have Dr. Dave hook your melon up to his old "Atomic Brainiac Stabilizer" and set the knob to "unpuree." No, it doesn't really "unsort" anything like it should, but at least now I don't want to do magic tricks while trying to jab AV cables into the base of my brain anymore.

Other than that, it's that time of year again -- I saw three more deer get killed by raging, drunk drivers as they shoot through my neighborhood. By "three more deer" I mean "twelve more little children," and by "raging, drunk drivers" I mean "me."

Note to self 292: 10/18/2006

It has been many a year since I was as disappointed with a piece of entertainment as I am right now with the anime series Blood+.

Blood+ is the 2005 sequel to the pretty cut-ass-rugged one-shot OVA Blood: The Last Vampire, which was made back in 2000. BtLV was only around 45 minutes long, but it had a sweet animation budget, a unique setting (a US Army base in Japan in the 1960s), and the most bad-ass little ho in a sailor fuku that I've ever seen as its protagonist, Saya. Saya was mean, and when she got angry, she got ugly. It was something that was just SCREAMING for a long TV series run in order to flesh out the vampire legend and folklore that was the basis of Saya's supposedly long battle with half-blooded, demonic-looking, vampire creatures. And finally, in 2005 we got Blood+ -- a 50 episode treatment that took us deep into Saya's psyche... Well, Saya's psyche after she gets reduced to a cowering, pathetic, little girly girl.

They turned Saya, the last pure blood vampire, into a whiney, wimpy magical girl. I shit you not. The only reason I'm not making a full review of this show and tearing it apart, like I did Saikano, is because I just couldn't get through it. There was no way in hell I'd make it through 25 HOURS of this crap in order to properly review the fuck out of it.

I am just so goddamn pissed that I wasted 8 goddamn Gigs downloading this fucker. This thing kept my computer buzzing for like 4 full days of download time, and then another full week of upload time in order to get my BT account back up to 100%. What a WASTE. I was able to make it through the first 5 episodes, but by then I absolutely HATED every character (except the secret agent guy who kicked that teenage punk Kai's ass so handily in episode 5), including Saya. SAYA, who was the main reason behind the original OVA's replay value. Saya is supposed to be all attitude with no apologies. In Blood+ she's nothing but all apologies and no attitude whatsoever. She's the same character in the same timeline, but she has amnesia or somesuch cliched crap, and now she's "your typical, girly, high school student who can't remember her own dark past." FUCK! NO!

Soon, with the help of a mysterious lame stranger, Saya finds she can be her bad-ass self again... for only like 2 minutes at a time... And only near the end of every other episode. Then she reverts back into Ms. Pussy. And cries. She was turned into a goddamn magical girl vampire! Why fucking make a show called "Blood" if you're not going to make a show about "Blood"? Why? It was as if they were making a satire of the original Blood and mixing in some Wedding Peach for some silly kicks.

After finding myself loathing all the characters (their faces, voices, and clothing) after only 5 eps, I found myself skipping around from episode to episode, hoping to find that the writers at least turned Saya back into her old self full time, without ever reverting her back into her pathetic, wimpy, whiny self, by the halfway point. Nope. I even skipped all the way to the end to see if she was all vamp by the final credits roll. Uh, no. Still only "magical girl" Saya then as well. And Kai was still alive too. No reason at all to keep watching. So I deleted it all from my computer and took my aggressions out on Jimmy Jammer's skull with an aluminum bat. It's what the REAL Saya would have done.

Note to self 291: 9/27/2006

You know how every once in a while you'll stop, look around, sniff the air, and suddenly something will smack you upside the head in order to remind you either of your insignificant place in the universe, or of how old you actually are? Well I had just such an epiphany myself this past week, and the Chief, Bri, and Estaflowne shared the experience with me. We are old. UGAnime, the club we started in college (well, I was just pretty much simply there, and didn't do anything beyond early crappy web design) celebrated its 10 Year Anniversary this past Monday. I can't believe anybody kept it going... Didn't they get the joke?

To celebrate the feat, the current club invited us all down for the festivities, and since I heard something mentioned about pizza, beer and French hookers I immediately RSVPd. I have to say, they haven't done nearly as much as we had done to destroy the org. The club actually seemed to be thriving. Quite a shock (I agree with the Chief when he said, "nothing that I've had a hand in has really survived a decade of existence" [I'm not counting this website since I just consider this either a figment of my imagination or a bad, intangible nightmare])!

They had a decent schedule (though I don't agree with their keeping the tradition alive of continuing to show a "cute-as-all-fuck" series every week), and only 2 people suffered any serious injuries during the meeting, and only one died. Those are the best numbers I'd ever even HEARD of for a regular club gathering! Back in the old days, if we went a week without 3 people blowing up, getting stabbed or shot, or having their necks snapped off by James while showing us "how a ninja kills," well, that was a good week. The Chief's penmanship at writing "Dear Sir or Madam: We regret to inform you of the loss of your son/daughter during our weekly cartoon-showing meeting at the hands of a shinobi assassin..." was getting really good at the end of his run.

Anyway, the old cast and crew (including me, the Chief, Bri, Capital F, Dark Schneider, Estaflowne and Mehve [Who started Anime O-Tech-U at Georgia Tech -- but we don't hold that against him]) liked what we saw. Not to get mushy or anything, but I cried. Like a woman. A woman who just got her blood test back after banging Steven Tyler. Big tears. Though mine were of joy, except when Bri told me I would die alone. Then I cried of a broken heart. What a dick.

Then after the club meeting all us old timers went downtown and ate and drank and wallowed in how ancient we were. Jesus, ten fucking years. What the hell were we thinking?

UGAnime 1.0 and some of 1.5 -- Bottom row, left to right: Estaflowne, Captain Rugged (aka "the Chief"), Bri, and Lupidog. Top row, right to left: Capital F, Dark Schneider, me, and the Jedi spirit of the MegaPlayboy, who ironically and tragically got creamed by a semi just 30 minutes before the 10th Anniversary meeting took place... Not that he was planning to attend or anything, it was just ironic since the accident was the semi-driver's fault, and not the MegaPlayboy's, since the MPB was drinking heavily and playing with fireworks at the time.

Note to self 290: 8/30/2006

Once more, only with less feeling, I celebrated a birthday this past week. I've stated it in years past, but I'll state it again here for those of you with shorter, more alzheimer's-filled, memories than my own, pretty much every birthday after 21 is not worth celebrating... Unless your buddies buy you a high class hooker. That's HIGH class. That's the key.

Anyway, I climbed the mountain again because that's what I do, had my yearly vision quest (this year I was guided by a talking coyote who liked to hump my leg), and then met Chi-Chi for some grub, booze, and the Broken Lizard production Beerfest! Beerfest was in-fucking-credibly funtastic! As good as, if not a little better than, Super Troopers. There was one scene which made Chi-Chi and I piss our pants and laugh solidly for over 2 minutes... I have to see this flick again in order to catch what I missed.

So we came out of Beerfest and strolled on down to the Sea Wench Pub where we talked about how great it would be if WE actually got to participate in a Beerfest of our own. Then it hit us in all our drunken stupor... What the hell was stopping us from making one? We then immediately got to work.

I found an abandoned section of Dr. Dave's underground lab and grotto which would be the perfect place for our secret festival of fermented alcohol chugging, and Chi-Chi started calling up all of his drinking buddies from around the world in order to make this a truly international event. Within a few days (wherein we never stopped drinking in preparation for the main event), all of the contestants had gathered and we started the contest.

The Japanese dropped out first in their drunken duel against England, and then all the Japanese contestants disappeared (we didn't find out till later that they apparently were only here to get liquored up before staking out the local high schools for some underage poon... which of course they never got due to the fact that American school girls can easily kick the ass of the average Japanese salary man). Round 1 also saw Brazil lose to Canada when the Canadians downed all their pints and then finished up the remaining Brazilians' in the speed-drinking portion. Ireland barely beat Mexico in quarters, but then ran into trouble with the Germans in beer-pong. We (Chi-Chi and I) represented America by ourselves, and we annihilated everybody in our way. In the end, just like in the movie, it was us against the Germans.

The Germans got an early lead on us, and were already finishing up on Das Boot when we were only on our 4th 2-pinter, but that's when my secret weapon came into play -- Robot Pedro broke into the mini auditorium and ripped off all the heads of the Nazi bastards after I told the metal one that they were "human pinatas -- filled with lots of gooey, human treats!" Apparently their German innards were "gooey" enough for the evil automaton as he left the place in a relatively docile mood, only killing three Italians and 2 Peruvians along the way. Because the Germans couldn't finish drinking (without their heads), we won! Land of the free, baby!

Note to self 289: 8/23/2006

Things this weekend started out pretty low key. Carl and I went to see Snakes on a Plane (after Samuel L. Jackson personally called me up and told me to... Seriously! I wouldn't lie about that!), and then afterwards thought it'd be really cool to make a real version of the movie, but thanks to some asshole jihadist terrorists the security around airports is way too strict for one to even get within 100 yards of a plane with a box full of starving, pissed off copperheads and garter snakes (all we could find in Georgia). When you start walking towards the baggage handlers with a parcel that hisses and rattles with every step they tend to call security (who were cool about the whole thing and wished they thought of it first, but then they started bitching about losing their jobs and some shit, and how we actually shouldn't do it, so Carl and I shook the box up then opened the top and threw it at the guards while we ran back to the Rossmobile. Just because.

After that I spent a nice, quiet, muggy and HOT AS HELL Saturday and Sunday in my house since the air conditioner was broken. The inside of my place was 84 fucking degrees on Sunday... The outside was 95, so opening windows would have made it worse during the day, and then Sunday night it was raining, so they had to remain closed again. I did go bar hopping on Saturday, but the hangover on Sunday morning just made the inside heat that much fucking worse! I took like 3 cold showers throughout Sunday (without toweling off and remaining naked the rest of the day), and spent the rest of my weekend lying as still as possible watching some Hong Kong and Korean movies (like Jet Li's Fearless [pretty fun, but horribly historically inaccurate -- Thanks Wikipedia!], Typhoon [big, dumb action/espionage movie], and The Duelist [silly, dumb, historical piece])... Nothing spectacular, but I was too drained to do anything else other than wallow in my own sweat. And just as a public service announcement to those of you with leather/pleather/naugahyde couches: If your AC breaks in the middle of summer and you get naked to beat the heat, do NOT lay down on your sofa without putting a towel down first. Especially not on your stomach.

Anyway, Monday morning the AC guy came and told me that my capacitor was broke (didn't know my outside fan could travel through time!) and that it would cost me $250 to replace. I told him to blow himself as I kicked his ass back into his shiny, white van, then I strode on over to Mr. Underhill's AC unit (he was already at work) and swapped his out with mine. I hope he calls a different repairman to fix his problem, or at least I hope Billy Bob repairdude knows how to KEEP HIS GODDAMN MOUTH SHUT.

Note to self 288: 7/19/2006

Robot Pedro accidentally ran over a bike in a rental car last Monday. And by "accidentally" I mean totally on purpose, and he backed up and ran over it 7 more times. And by "bike" I mean a 12 year-old child. And by "rental car" I mean my own car with me as a passenger. And by "Monday" I mean ten minutes ago. I'll be writing again from Mexico.

Note to self 288: 7/05/2006

In preparation for Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest this Friday I had the Skipper take me out to the open sea on his little dingy and teach me the ways of the pirate (normal, hetero pirate ways). We boarded a few boats, stole some whiskey, mead, scotch, and beer, set a few yachts on fire, blew up a lighthouse, trained some monkeys to sit on our shoulders and not shit on us, and beat up a few ninjas who claimed to just be minding their own business (but who were obviously trying to ninja-kill us). Arrrrr, a pirate's life be good. Nothing more to really add other than we left enough evidence to cleanly convict Jimmy Jammer of all the instances of breaking the "law" (e.g. his wallet, unopened utility bills with his name and address on them, and a Photoshopped image of Jimmy Jammer's face on my body torching that police station 2 weeks ago).

Then last night on the 4th the Skipper and I crashed Mehve's party with about 20 other people we invited... Though, come to think of it, there only appeared to be about 20 or so people there, and I don't remember Mehve being there himself... And I don't remember Mehve living on a farm. Especially not one that burned to the ground so quickly after just a few of the Skipper's custom-made "napalm bottle rockets." Oh well, Mehve'll never know what he missed (except his barn-house).

Note to self 287: 6/20/2006

This week has been really kind of fucked up. Some asshole (well, I found out later exactly who) stole my goddamn hose from my backyard. Correction: he stole HALF my hose. The prick cut my hose in half, unscrewed it from the spigot, and left the other half with my sprinkler still attached behind my house. I could not understand in the least what the fuck the vandals meant by this... Was this a gangland marking? Do they leave half a hose and bring the other half back to their gang pad to show off? "Whoo hoo! Check this shit out, bitch! I got me some hoooooose, you hoes!" I was starting to curse and kick things and use profanity like an illegal alien who just got shot with a non-lethal bean-bag bullet in the stones, when I saw the other half of my hose... sticking out from under the garage door of my recently evicted neighbor's house (yeah, the big redneck was evicted, but the neighborhood as a whole is pretty damn nice. It's not like I live in the ghetto with the MegaPlayboy or anything). Apparently some city or utilities guy came by to empty out the hot water heater on the evicted, squatter-filled abode, but forgot to bring a hose... So next best thing is OBVIOUSLY to steal, destroy (so that it can never be recovered and used again by its proper owner) and then abandon a garden hose from the next door neighbor. Oh, I swear to GOD that I will hunt you down, Mr. Garden Hose Mangler! And when I do I'll BEAT you with the part that you left behind. I will beat you with that rubber hose until you pray for me to strangle you with it in order to end the pain! This I vow.

Other than that I had some lady crash into the back of my car yesterday. She and her son are already in a shallow grave out by Old Man Withers' place though, and I now have two slightly dented cars. So it all worked out.

Note to self 286: 5/31/2006

How in the holy Hell is a human body able to produce so much vomit? I was a veritable fountain of retching for a full five hours last early-Saturday morning. Pretty much every five to ten minutes (no more, no less) I would regurgitate earlier and earlier meals. Seriously, it all started at around 4AM, and by about 6 I had lost my previous Tuesday afternoon's lunch. How is this possible? I had thought that the human digestive system fully dissolved nourishment within at least 24 hours -- yet every puke produced another full and healthy, chunky load of ex-consumables. Were aliens testing on me -- seeing how strong the human constitution was before the examinee put a gun to his temple? Did Robot Pedro feed me arsenic and motor oil again instead of my usual Guiness with dinner (honestly, it's almost impossible to tell the two apart)? Puking Pastile? Ugh, who knows, but I'm pretty sure that I've at least passed my complete misery on to you, so that makes me feel a little better (I've found that the more people I tell about my painful and disgusting memories the better I feel).

Note to self 286: 5/10/2006

So Jimmy Jammer owed me about $50, but he went into hiding and I didn't know how to get my money back from him. Being bored and broke I proceeded to download and read 225 chapters of the Gantz manga... and then I got a smashing idea! I went around town and chloroformed the shit out of Carl, Angry Amy, the MegaPlayboy, Bob From the Future, and Kiff, locked them all in a room with nothing but a giant, black, paper-machette orb to keep them company, and when they woke up I told them (through a speaker in the orb) that they had all died, but they could regain their mortality if they helped the giant sphere to hunt down the one known as Jimmy Jammer, and either kill him or report to the Rossman his whereabouts. Preferably kill him.

I don't remember leaving any weapons for the kidnappies in that abandoned apartment that I locked them into (or any clothes for that matter), but for some reason Carl was able to produce enough guns and ammo for everyone gathered; and then they got started. I had installed tracking chips in each of the hunters in order to keep up with their progress, but unfortunately all off them but Carl ended up heading straight for the Sea Wench Pub and sat down in a booth for the rest of the night (there's no dress code at the Pub, so they were still able to get served). Well, everybody but Carl and Kiff went to the Pub seeing as Kiff was the first accidental (I think) death of the night. Don't worry, nobody got in trouble since there was hardly enough left of him for the cops to find and even think that his corpse was once human.

Any way, Carl must have picked up Jimmy Jammer's scent as he made a beeline for the town square. I rushed to meet him there and got to the Ben and Jerry's just in time to see Carl reload his pistol for the fourth time and unload his final pack of rounds into the bloated one's Chunky Monkey-filled carcass (well, most of the Chunky Monkey and Cherry Garcia was already oozing out onto the sidewalk for the dogs to lick up, but you get the point). It was then when I announced that Carl was the winner and was awarded 35 points, but would still need another 65 points until I and the black orb would let him go free. Turns out that Carl had no idea what I was talking about. As I got $200 out of Jimmy Jammer's wallet Carl told me that this was just a typical Saturday night for him. He was originally just surprised that there were so many other naked people in the room with him when he first came to. I then gave him a twenty spot if he promised to tell the cops that I was nowhere near the scene when the "accidental firing" of Carl's gun into Jimmy's chest and face and stomach occured.

Note to self 285: 5/03/2006

This weekend I had an old friend's baby shower and a paintball game to go to. Unfortunately I think I got them mixed up. I left a note on my front door for the cops that I'll be hanging out in some foreign country that doesn't have any extradition laws for the next few years.

Note to self 284: 4/25/2006

Because he's stinking rich, but also a really nice guy, Mehve decided to take all of us out for some Moroccan food. In Morocco. Fuck the political dissidence and the violence in the streets, we needed us some belly dancers and communal food that you eat with your goddamn fingers! Anyway, we arrived at the Rabat Imperial Airport, and immediately lost the Baldwin to the drug-sniffing dogs (not that he had any crack or whatnot on him, I just thought it'd be funny to hide some snausages in his pockets). We took a taxi over to the Allah's Fez restaurant and almost got kicked out of the place when they saw that we were all clean and non-smelly heathens who apparently deserved to get our tongues cut off (at least Psycho Weasel did before we convinced the Fez maitre 'd that a few Benjamins could buy a couple more wives for his harem).

So we sat down on the floor around our table and proceeded to order pretty much everything on the menu and pray that none of it was monkey brains, snake surprise, or Psycho's tongue. Let me just say that this shit was GOOD. The appetizers were all in gooey, tasty piles all around the serving platter, and it was a free-for-all as to who got a handful of what at any given time. I'm pretty sure that some of my companions (or the chef) didn't properly wash after "wiping down the holy land," but that just seemed to add to the texture and spiciness of the whole meal.

After the appetizers came the booze... and the dancin' womens! True, they weren't the slimmest of the slim, and that one could have been the very person who that one fat joke about sitting AROUND the house was initially spoken about, but damn if they couldn't bust a move! In the image to the right you can see just how ferocious they were in their hip-swiveling. I mean, the Chief usually loves his bitches bendable and spry, but these ladies scared the rugged piss out of him! Almost too much motion in their ocean.... Or maybe he's just staring at all that mad cash stuffed in her cooch-cover. Anyway, that's what I was staring at. It made me wonder if I had any sort of future in the lucrative job market of beer-belly dancing.

After the booze and the belly dancers (some with actual flaming fucking swords!) were finished, out came the main course. I got a rack of lamb (like a whole shank of giant, roasted-in-mushroom-sauce herbivore!), and others got mega-lobsters and entire chickens. Tearing into that stuff with one's own hands is just the coolest sensation in the world! And if you wanted to try something from somebody else's plate all you had to do was reach over, punch them in the face, and steal their grub. I don't know if that was authentic Moroccan behavior on my part, but I'm going to start telling people that it is.

After the main meal came the dessert and the dancing girls again. After getting all sugared up on some candy-like fruit I just couldn't hold myself back anymore. I jumped up on my feet and dance dance revolutioned! Oh man, those ladies were lovin' it, and I even got to sneak a few Washingtons and Lincolns away from some of their gyrating hips. Jezus, it was like playing the board game Operation, but for real stakes. If a hand actually accidentally groped a girl that large man named Abdul came rushing out of the shadows with his sword drawn, and cut off the infidel's roaming mitts. Ask Mehve. Just don't send him any email asking him about it. It's hard to type with stumps.