Morty, we hardly knew ye...
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) Barney Martin, who played Jerry Seinfeld's father Morty on more than 20 episodes of "Seinfeld," died on Monday (March 21) at the age of 82.
Is he well known enough to have shown up on any of your Death Pool lists?
Reminds me of something the basketball coach / athletic director at my high school used to say: "Never trust a guy with two first names." He was usually referring to one Bill David, who I think was my year. He was a little, comment ce dit, dim?
"You people understand every language but English, so let's try this:
Yo quiero pancakes!
Donnez-moi pancakes!!
Click click bloody click pancakes!!!"--Stewie
I don't know what would I do without Adult Swim, the exception to the rule that everything in, near, from, or about Atlanta is infuriating.
At the end of the day, what is it that keeps you from flinging open the window and yelling at the top of your lungs, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore?"
(Shouldn't this be airing from 3:52AM - 4:00AM?)
I haven't blogged in quite a while, in an attempt to get some things into perspective. Several things came into play over the last couple of days that greatly help getting to that goal.
First, rather than having to post my own ideas / response to the Schiavo matter, I go and find that I agree completely not only with Instapundit, but also with another Republican Tennessean to whom he links. With no histrionics, I find an entry that mirrors much of what I've read and thought and heard over the last week. As Venkman said in Ghostbusters, "Cats and dogs living together; mass hysteria."
Second, I was lucky enough to get to go to Worcester for the first round of the NCAA men's ice hockey tournament, spending a pleasant (though arguably disappointing in its outcome) 6.5 hours sitting with Mark, someone with whom I don't reconnect often enough. Hi, Mark. Thanks.
Third, I got to drive home from Worcester in the dark, by myself, and collect myself. I rarely get that much solitude to just consider things, and it really helped me reset. For as much as an iPod can help one find personal space, it's nice to get actual space for once.
Lastly, I accidentally (subconsciously?) left my laptop's power adapter at the office today. I don't have much battery left, and to be honest, that's the way I like it.
My apologies to you if you came expecting more content than you've received these last weeks; I will definitely be posting more often and more timely now that I've reset a bit. Glad to see you all again.
...because the Daily Show's "MoZ" tonight was about Martha Stewart, about whom I've heard too much to care anymore.
Finished watching "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and switched over to the end of the Late Show with David Letterman. (The 30 minutes a night I spend watching "ATHF" keeps me sane, much as radiation kills cancer cells. The brain cells I lose watching "ATHF" are the deeply serious, grumpy ones, and if left unchecked would reproduce and overwhelm my whimsical, easygoing neurons.)
Just as I switch over, I see her giving Dave a portrait of him that she painted. Seriously.
Amanda Bynes is in her teens, right? She looks like she's in her teens but is about to jump straight to her early thirties any day now. This is not the same as Lindsay Lohan, who jumped from her teens to that ageless weird look that overprimped rich princesses get. (c.f. Paris Hilton, Tara Reid pre-collapse, etc.)
Hillary Duff still looks like a teenager, though I think she's older than Bynes. She still looks reasonably authentic, so should actually get to be in her twenties, unlike the other two. Her sister, on the other hand, is heading straight for the AWL of ORP [see above and figure it out] based on that Liquid Ice commercial. Jenny and I saw "Napoleon Dynamite" over the weekend, which made it clear that she's had a bit of work done at the least.
I did not get Napoleon Dynamite on any level. I watched it, understood the dialogue, saw what happened, but did not get the motivations or plot at all. In that I think it was supremely successful, since you could basically film any geeky 10th grader for a couple of days in any random, rural town and basically get the same film.
I got an invite to my 10th year HS reunion (yes, it was rural; follow the thread) but definitely think I'm skipping out. Saw the list of other people who are going, and have little to no interest in knowing what they're up to. Also, based on their email addresses, I now know where half of them are based on their internet providers. Translation? Not far from where I left them.
If nothing else, it would give me chance to see my cousins, both in the same year as I was, who I don't get to see nearly enough. An invite also came to a family reunion, addressed to me, though it said it was for the descendants of someone whose name was "Rudd." I didn't know I was descended from a "Rudd". Research is required here. Which of these two cousins - the one on my mom's side or the one on my dad's - also got an invite?
Still haven't gotten Karla a baby shower gift, despite her shower having taken place 10 days ago. I really really ought to address that.
And that is how I got from a talking milkshake cartoon to my unborn cousin, once removed. Welcome to my twisted path of reasoning.
Thanks to one of Jenny and my best friends, I got to see Interpol at Radio City on Tuesday.
LJ got us great seats - Row CC - very close to the stage, and also very close to the giant speakers. We got there just as the opener was finishing (a band called "Blonde Redhead", who (as far as I can tell) are trying to write songs that will get used as incidental music in indy films) so I didn't get a really good sense of the sound I'd be dealing with.
The drummer came out, sat down, and pressed the bass pedal once. My shirt billowed. Man was not meant to stand four feet from a bank of 24-or-so JBL professional loudspeakers.
All kidding aside, though, they were great in person. Many bands don't translate well to the stage, where Interpol sounds just as they do on the record, if not better. They're fun to watch (the one guitarist looks like an extra out of The Matrix, with a tight black suit, jet black hair, and the palest skin you've seen outside an inorganic chemistry lab,) have a great time, and know how to construct a playlist. One of the nicest things was that they played their singles fairly early on ("Slow Hands" second, "Evil" about half way through) so that their encore consisted of two songs I hadn't heard but really ended up liking.
Go see them now (Boston March 9 at the Orpheum, then all over through the rest of March) before their European tour. Or, barring that, use it as an excuse to plan your much-needed European vacation. Just remember to erase your wife's "badda bump" tape before you pack your camcorder, lest some unsavory French man run off with it and publish it. ["Look kids: Big Ben! Parliament!"]
Last week I drove out to our office in Reston to trade in my laptop. After a scant 4 years and 3 months, the Powers that Be decided that my Dell had finally reached the end of its life and needed to be put to pasture.
My new Dell is fast, has XP (which I do not like - the interface is cartoonish and wastes space) and a freakin' GB of RAM. Wireless networking is also built in.
The new trackpad is taking a little getting used to (see previous post) but otherwise I have no reason to complain. Actually, I have a reason to laud: System Restore.
Some well meaning buddy sent me an email with (unbeknownst to him) a fun little bit of malware attached. (Don't ask who: we worked it out.) As soon as I opened it my Norton Antivirus popped up with a virus alert. Usually this is the end of the story, though not this time:
Clean failed:Quarantine failed:Delete failed
Translation? "This is going to hurt a bit."
In a matter of seconds I had dozens of pop-ups, dozens of new icons on my desktop, and CPU usage like I was looking for aliens. I started to panic a bit, freaked out a good deal, then calmed down and remembered an IBM commercial I vaguely remember hearing in the background: something about a big undo button.
Sure enough, System Restore had taken a checkpoint of my system the previous day. Click the restore point, click "Restore," and restart.
It was all gone. All of it. Some of the files stayed (Restore doesn't move files, so you don't lose document edits) which were quickly removed by a virus scan, and I now have no ill effects.
Of course, when I consider I've had all of one Mac virus ever (and that was a Word document macro virus) I still wonder how Microsoft gets away with it. Sure, gauze and tape is helpful when you've been stabbed, but if you can avoid getting stabbed in the first place, that's all the better.
There will be no recap entry, though I wrote a nice long one. Using Firefox, I had a tab open with the entry, and a second tab grabbing links, so I copied an href and went to click the other tab.
My thumb mis-hit the "left" button and accidentally hit both simultaneously.
The tab closed without warning. I swore a blue streak and possibly pulled a hamstring.
There will be no recap entry.