Funny Lost Videos

So tonight, at last, is the final episode of Lost. Who will live? Who will die? What questions will be answered, and which threads will be left to dangle forever? Will anything in the last six years turn out to make any actual sense? Damned if I know! I'm very excited to find out, though. And if you are, too, well, here's some videos to pass the time while you wait.

Needless to say: SPOILERS!

First, this hilarious (and, I guess, NSFW, in a strange, strange way) thing from Jimmy Kimmel:



Then, an example of what not to do when you're in TV withdrawal:



And finally this (also from Jimmy Kimmel), which amused the heck out of me, although you might have to be a member of a certain demographic to fully appreciate it:

Adrift, Timeless, In A Sea Of My Own Garbage

Trash day is on Wednesday. It has been since I moved in here. So why is my trash still here? Was there a strike? Did the garbage truck break down? Did they accidentally skip my street? (The neighbors' is still here, too.) Did they change the day without telling me? Man, with the weird hours I work, trash day was the one thing keeping me anchored in the week and vigilant about remembering what day it is. What will I do without it? More importantly, when are they gonna pick up my damn trash?

So, How's Your Day Going?

Ugh. I woke up this morning with what I would swear was two simultaneous headaches. There was an obvious sinus pressure-related thing, which has been regularly bothering me on waking up lately (although it usually goes away after I've been up and around for a bit). It was worse than usual today, though. And then, there's this dull headache that's been bothering me off and on for the last few days, which I am attributing to my current pattern of alternately over- and under-sleeping. So, one centered on the face and one on the top of the head, and just so no parts of my anatomy felt left out, my stomach joined in, too. After vomiting my morning coffee all over the bathroom, the queasiness is all better, at least. But, seriously, body, was that necessary? Stupid over-zealous non-overrideable safely protocols.

Both headache components seem to be fading now, so I think I'm okay, which is good, because I have to work tonight. But geez. I do not need this kind of crap from my own flesh and blood.

Linkages Of Randomness

So long, nerds! Syfy doesn’t need you: Yes, it's yet another rant about the Channel Formerly Known As Something I Might Actually Want To Watch. I appear not to have gotten tired of them yet. Also, I gotta say, this person has come up with the only idea that would get me to willingly watch wrestling.

The Gashlycrumb Losties: Terrific Edward Gorey-style riff on dead Lost characters. Of which there are, y'know, a lot. Needless to say: SPOILERS!

Fake Science: Fun made-up science "facts"! My favorite: "Why is coffee addictive? The coffee bean has a distinctive smell that makes you forget how painful it is to be awake." I think that might have to be my new .sig quote.

PHD Tales from the Road: New Mexico Tech and the VLA, Part 2 of 2: Part two of the PHD comic I linked to last week. For the record, a) the first panel is misleadingly phrased, as our dishes don't observe x-rays, and b) the answer to the ramen question is: "convection oven."

I Have Been Known To Practice Bibliomancy, Too.

I am, in general, kind of a haphazard gift-giver. Everybody in my immediate family, plus spouses and kids, gets a Christmas present, and my nephew always gets one for his birthday. But on other gift-appropriate occasions, I'll buy one if I encounter something I know you'll really like or can use, or if I'm in an especially generous mood, but otherwise you're getting a card and, if you're lucky, a phone call. Which is what I'd planned on getting my mother for Mother's Day, but, well, Powell's bookstore was having this Mother's Day deal where if you sent someone an e-gift card, you'd get 10% of the value for yourself in store credit. I know Mom's been shopping at Powell's a lot lately, plus, hey, kickback! So after a bit of dithering, I said what the hell and sent her one, figuring it would be a nice surprise.

"Nice" wasn't the word she used when she called me yesterday, although I'm sure it was nice. The word she used was "spooky." It seems she found the gift certificate in her e-mail when she sat down at the computer with the precise intention of going to Powell's and spending the exact amount I sent her, as a Mother's Day present to herself. (Of course, as we all do, she then ended up spending twice that amount, anyway.)

This tickles me immensely, not just because I apparently did real good with the Considerate Daughter thing, or because of the kickback, but also because, should I ever lose my scruples on the subject, I think I could trade on this to build up my reputation as a Book Psychic, and how entertaining a career choice would that be? Also, it's an interesting and somewhat reassuring demonstration of the power of genetics and/or environmental influence; it's good to know I come by the crazy book obsession thing honestly. Apples and tree, folks. Apples and trees.

And speaking of (metaphorical) trees and possible gift-giving occasions, today happens to be my dad's birthday. Hope you're having a good one, Dad! I'll try calling you later.

Cap'n, She Cannae Take Any More! She's Gunna Blow!

Household discovery of the day: toaster + microwave + electric kettle = intervention by circuit breaker. Good to know.

Keeping Currently

Current clothes: Khaki-colored shorts; black Star Trek t-shirt with a picture of Kirk, Spock & McCoy on the transporter pad and the caption, "Beam me the hell outta here!"; black sport socks.

Current mood: Pretty good. Relaxed, even. This is the weekend for me -- it's Wed/Thurs/Fri this week -- and I am enjoying it.

Current music: Just more random-shuffle stuff, most recently. Before that, I listened to part of Weird Al's Alapalooza.

Current annoyance: I just went to order some tea from Stash and discovered that they have changed their website to be much prettier and much more frustrating to use. Aargh.

Current thing: After working 65-hours plus in the space of seven days at one point last month, my current thing is enjoying every minute not spent at work. Alas, I'll be running short on those again soon, as I've got another couple of 12-hour shifts coming up this weekend.

Current desktop picture: This picture of one of Doctor Who's Weeping Angels. I can't look away from it!

Current book: Just finished Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories, then paused to read the current issue of Science News. Next up: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Current song in head: "The First of May," by Jonathan Coulton. For some reason, that tends to get stuck in my head every year around this time.

Current DVD in player: Disc 1 of season 1 of The Invisible Man. I remember seeing ads for this series back when it was on and thinking it looked uninteresting and kind of cheesy. But after being assured from a couple of different sources that, no, really, it was entertaining, I decided to give it a shot. Having now watched the pilot, my reaction is, dude, if I'd known it was funny, I might have tuned in back when.

Current refreshment: Nothing. But I just recently had me one of those "complete breakfasts" you hear about on TV.

Current worry: Most of my worries seem far too trivial to dwell on at the moment. Well, except for those encompassed by the creeping existential angst of imminent middle age, but I try not to think too hard about those.

Current thought: My mind just went blank.

Welcome to Socorro!

So, of course I had to link to this PhD comic after finding a copy of it in my inbox. (Thanks, Captain C!)

I do wish to point out that 1) The VLA is actually about an hour west of Socorro, not in the town itself, 2) the movie theater (with its one whole screen) did eventually re-open, but the rest of the description of Socorro is pretty accurate, and 3) that last panel is so true it hurts.

Everybody Complains About The Weather, But Nobody Does Anything About It.

Wow, it's gettin' hot. Which happens every year at about this time, and yet somehow it always sort of takes me by surprise.

Cat Food Diet

So, I went to the vet today to pick up some more of Vir's expensive super-low-cal prescription-only diet cat food, and remarked to the receptionist that I thought maybe he was losing some weight, but I hadn't checked in a while, for fear of disappointment. I figured I really ought to, though, so I just hauled out the pet scale. The result, if the read-out can be believed: 22 pounds and change! That's down from a ridiculous high of 28 pounds plus. Man, that almost makes it worth listening to him complain that I'm not feeding him enough all the damned time! I'm thinking maybe I should get me some of that cat food...

Thumbs UPS

I try to maintain a tradition of balancing my occasional rants about bad customer service experiences with a recognition of the good ones, so I just want to say that APC's customer service, based on my experience, is pretty freaking amazing. I've been having some problems with my UPS, so I sent an e-mail to their customer service/technical department asking for advice on what the problem might be, and, in particular, if there were any troubleshooting steps I ought to take to figure it out. The website said to expect a reply by the next business day, but they got back to me inside an hour with a long e-mail offering specific, non-boilerplate troubleshooting advice and asking several relevant questions. And then the same person proceeded to reply to each of my follow-up e-mails almost instantly.

It looks like the problem most likely is simply that I've got too much crap plugged into the thing for it to handle properly, which perhaps does not surprise me all that much. But it's very good to have that verified before I tried something expensive, like replacing the battery. I may decide to upgrade to a more powerful model, which is something I'm willing to consider only because nobody put any pressure on me to do so.

April Showers Bring... Weeds

I was outside yesterday whacking down weeds, a job that desperately needed to be done. Now my yard looks at least slightly less post-apocalyptic, but my wrists and biceps are all achy from swinging that damned heavy weed whacker around. Also, my allergies are much worse today, possibly due to some sort of retaliatory move from the plant kingdom.

Sigh. You know, I'd really like spring if it weren't for everything growing.

Deserted. No Island.

Wait a minute, there's no new Lost on tonight?! What the heck? Great, now what I am going to do with my evening?

Another Installment of Random Links: Doctor Who Edition

Doctor Who regeneration was 'modelled on LSD trips': And here I thought the Doctor was just high on life. I also kind of love this article's discussion of how people have reacted badly to various regenerations. Ah, the more things change...

Ages of Doctor Who actors on their debuts: Are the Doctor's actors getting younger? The answer is "yes," but some of the old ones were younger than you might think.

Everything You Need To Know About Doctor Who: A newbie's guide to what the show is about, including who the heck this Doctor guy is and where he came from. I might have a tiny nitpick or two, and I think anybody who's been watching the new series has probably already picked most of this stuff up by now even if they've never seen the original, but it's not a bad introduction, anyway. Warning: this contains spoilers through the end of Tennant's run, including the specials, which I know several people reading this still haven't seen. Specifically, you should probably skip the last couple of paragraphs in part 3 if you haven't yet seen "The End of Time." Otherwise, you should be okay.

Doctor Who slays Saint George: The Doctor for Patron Saint of England! You know it makes sense.

Pass The Popcorn!

I've also been watching a bunch of movies on DVD lately, so here's a few mini-reviews:

Zombieland: Not exactly a groundbreakingly original contribution to the zombie apocalypse subgenre, and not a patch on Shaun of the Dead for humor, but entertaining enough in a quirky, low-key kind of way. Woody Harrelson is particularly fun.

9: A very odd little movie about a group of rag doll robots in a post-apocalyptic world. It's incredibly visually interesting in pretty much the ways you'd expect from something co-produced by Tim Burton -- enough so that I really feel I missed much of the effect by watching it on a small screen. (Alas, I don't even have HD.) The little robots have a certain bizarre charm, and the atmosphere is great, but the actual story is sadly just not very satisfying.

King Kong: I was vaguely interested in seeing the Peter Jackson remake when it came out on DVD, but thought I probably ought to watch the original first, so I stuck it on the Netflix queue and then, typically, took forever to actually get to it. But I'm really glad I did. I can see why this is considered a classic. Yes, the unabashedly sexist damsel-in-distress story invites a certain amount of eye-rolling from modern viewers (and the less said about the embarrassing fake "Chinaman" the better). And I'm always amused by the acting in these very old movies. It's terribly stilted, with people projecting all over the place at random volumes, as if they're still not quite sure how to go about performing for this new medium. But never mind that. The story's actually pretty good. And the cinematography is astonishing. Yes, it's all extremely primitive, but, honestly, I've seen movies made decades later that don't look as good. Kong may not exactly be visually realistic, but he's never laughable, and watching him in action is genuinely, unironically thrilling. Which is more than I can say for most of the modern Hollywood blockbusters I've seen. I can only imagine how fantastically exciting this must have been at the time. I think if I ever get myself a working time machine, I'm going to go back for a first-run screening, just to watch the audience reaction. And I'm not sure I'll bother with the remake, after all. It seems pretty pointless now.

Also, My Inner Eleven-Year-Old Wants To Kick People's Asses

Went out with some friends last night to see Kick-Ass, which may be morally reprehensible, but which I found quite entertaining, nonetheless. Or perhaps "nonetheless" isn't quite the right word there. Humans being the perversely wired creatures that we are, sometimes -- perhaps even often -- things are funny precisely because they're also appalling, or would be if they were real, and I think that's true, at least in part, for this particular movie. (Your moral/sense-of-humor mileage, of course, may vary.)

Flashforward Burnout

I'm in the middle of watching Thursday's episode of Flashforward, and it suddenly hit me that I just don't really care about any of it any more. It's a pity... The show has a nifty premise and a decent cast, and if none of the characters ever grabbed me, I was at least interested enough in how the plot was going to play out to keep watching until now, but at this point it's just losing me. Maybe it's that it seems to keep spinning its wheels faster and faster but never really getting much of anywhere. Maybe it's that last week's episode far exceeded my tolerance for improbable plot twists. Maybe it's because the current Major Plot Point seems to me to involve some unforgivably sloppy writing. Whatever. I hate to leave a story without finding out the ending -- it's one reason I never abandon books in the middle, even when they suck. But I'm thinking maybe it's time to reclaim that hour from my week.

And Random Links

Choice of the Dragon: A fairly nifty little multiple-choice text adventure game, in which you get to be a dragon.

Geek Art Gallery: Nerdy Easter Eggs: OK, so it's a little late for Easter, but these are still cool, in a nerdalicious way.

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games: An announcement about downloadable Doctor Who games which will be available for free from the BBC. Which is awesome, except that I won't be at all surprised if they're only available in the UK.

Bad Translator: Run some text through repeated machine translation and watch the surreal wackiness ensue! I can't remember whether I linked to this one before, or just to something similar, but what the heck. It's fun.

More Completely Random Thoughts

Yet another reason to pay for things with plastic: paper cuts on your tongue from licking envelopes to mail off checks.

Trying to whittle my giant pile of unread books down is almost as difficult as trying to lose weight, and for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Willpower? What is this thing of which you speak? But at least reading books is more fun than working out.

The new Doctor continues to make me grin like a little kid. I am liking him a lot. Also the new companion. And Stephen Moffat. A+++, would fangirl again.

Life In The Here And Now

Current clothes: Blue jeans. White socks. Black sneakers. A brown t-shirt with a pattern of ancient petroglyph doodles of the kind that are common here in the Southwest. (I got it at Bandelier National Monument, ages ago.) Blue long-sleeved denim shirt over that. I don't really need the long sleeves right now, but I probably will when I go into work later; that building's been kind of chilly lately. Plus, it'll be much colder by the time I'm walking home.

Current mood: I've been in a fairly relaxed state this morning, somewhere between "mellow" and "apathetic." Though I think I'm starting to come out of it now, which is good, because I have things to do.

Current music: Nothing for a while. I think most recently was Gutter Anthems by Enter the Haggis. I went to see these guys when they played here in town a few weeks ago. I'd never even heard of them before, but they sounded like something I'd enjoy, plus, hey, something to do on a Friday night in Socorro. Turned out they were pretty good, so I bought a couple of their albums on iTunes.

Current annoyance: A Certain Cat seems to have taken it into his mind this week that I ought to be up by 7:30, at the latest. Today, he broke out the baseball bat. Damned cat.

Current thing: Well, lately I seem to have become a teeny bit obsessive about the idea of getting my massive To Be Read Pile under control. My stated goal for the year is to get it down to 400 books. At the beginning of the year, it was at 428. Now it's 424. This is not very exciting progress, even before you figure in the fact that I've already got a bunch more books coming in the mail. Sigh. No Friends of the Library Sale for me this month.

Current desktop picture: Still the same space shuttle picture from last month. I've been too lazy to change it.

Current book: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.

Current song in head: "She Moves On" by Paul Simon, which seems to have become one of those songs that repeatedly pops into my head for no good reason and hangs around for days. Which is really weird. I mean, I haven't even listened to that song in forever.

Current DVD in player: Still season one of Deep Space 9. It's taking me a while to finish watching this, because I keep getting distracted by shiny televisual objects. I've only got one more episode to go, though. Well, and six seasons after that, but I don't think I'm going to get to those for a while. Also sitting in a player, disc 2 of South Park season 12, which is my current watching-on-the-treadmill show.

Current refreshment: Nothing, but I'm hungry. I should have had breakfast.

Current worry: I'm not in the mood to worry about stuff.

Current thought: Why is blogger telling me I have an unclosed tag? I thought I closed all my tags! Oh. There it is. Yay! Now I can post.