Best Artvoice Cover Ever!*

• Assuming they're actually women

Last night I saw Shrek III with match.com girl. We wanted to see pirates, but we arrived too late from dinner. She had never had La Nova pit-fired wings before, and one of those metaphysical experiences is just not something that one can rush. Shrek III was funny, though I liked the first one the best.

During:



After:




Today on my way to drop her off to the bus station for her Memorial weekend trip to Rochester (way too early at 5:30 AM), I noticed that an entire section of main street was blocked off, the part not blocked off by Buffalo's decades long beer binge urban planning party. There were fire engines and police cruisers and traffice cones (oh my!) and I was wondering what kind of traffic accident, chemical spill, or terrorist attack was happening as no event would be staged so early in a town that prides itself so much on getting trashed till 4:00AM the night before. But the way people were walking was too orderly to be some tragic disaster. I found out from one of the spectators that someone was blowing up a building downtown, so I decided to become a innocent bystander spectator myself. I wish I had a better digital camera on my phone that could snap better photos of the building in mid-fall, but this whole event took me totally my surpise. And yes, it was awesome, as I had never seen a building fall in person. The explosions were the loudest part; the building collapsing into itself actually was far quieter than I had imagined.

Had a great weekend. I took match.com girl to the Queen City roller derby and she thought it was really cool and I got major brownie points (by the way, nice performance, dragonlady7). Things went really well on the date, especially after she came back to my place and we had several beers. I don't know where this is going, but it sure is nice to be able to snuggle next to someone in the morning.

(uncutsaniflush, last night the text of my journal was not showing up and I didn't know why. I had thought that putting the word "Date" in the title might have been some specially reserved estrip word that was messing up the parsing of something or other, so I changed the title to some silly name like wangdangdoodle that I knew would never be a specially reserved word to test things, but forgot to change the title back. It turns out the problem was actually was the e plus colon plus dragonlady7 in the text that caused the entry not be appearing, which is why you don't see dragonlady7 in standard estrip username notation).

Talked with match.com girl again tonight via phone. She does have a cute voice and her laugh reminds me of the laugh that a really awesome ex-girlfriend from my Ithaca days had. One of those "that's so stupid but I'm going to laugh anyways" kind of laughs. She was open to the idea of seeing roller derby this saturday, so most likely we'll be going there saturday after dinner somewhere (I know that the knockouts aren't skating, but I wonder if (e:zobar) and (e:dragonlady7) will be there?) I have absolutely no idea where this thing with the girl is going. I must remember--no eggs in one basket, at least not until after I've made the flan (which reminds me, I really should literally make flan sometime soon). She does like whiskey and mythbusters, so she can't be all bad.

On a different note, it's kinda funny, living on Richmond. It's really like an urban jungle. Which is not to say that it isn't a nice place to live, but it resemebles the kind of jungle you see in the movies where everything is quiet at night and then all of a suddenly the random, loud howling of a monkey disturbs the tranquility. Except on Richmond, it usually isn't howler monkeys but emergency vehicles, esp. police cars; it'll be 4:00AM and all of a sudden I'll hear "whoop-beep-squalk-whoop-beep-whoop". Of course, tonight there are real live monkey's, howling and disturbing the peace and playing with their own feces, except these monkeys have blue fur with yellow streaks. In another month or two, one way or the other, my jungle will be back to the way I like it.

While I can find many things funny, I rarely laugh very hard, and the few times I do it's usually at stuff other people don't find funny. I was researching stuff about usb flash drives when I came across this



I laughed at this for damn near two minutes. I think it was the imagery of the coffee table that did it.

It's finally on the market. My most favorite piece of art. It's actually going for a lot less than I thought it would.



If it wasn't for the fact that I've been searching for a cheap poster version for years, it probably wouldn't be my most favorite piece of art, though it might be a close second to Raphael's School of Athens.

Possible scenarios:

1. I somehow spend all the money I was going to spend buying a laptop on this piece of art. I laugh in the face of necessary professional expenses, (cue maniacal laughter) mu-ha-ha-ha-ha.

1a) #1, plus I find somewhere that scans ultra-high res versions of it and distribute it on the Internet via Bittorrent. Rare art that's in the public domain that might never receive attention due to poster companies not seeing a market for it should be made available to the public. Make up some bullshit story about "it's an investment and probably safer than mutual funds" to tell to friends and family who think that I've finally gone completely bonkers.

1b) #1a, but I don't have the facilities in my sweltering/freezing apartment to preserve it well, so I buy it and loan it to Albright knox where they can safely store it. I can always visit it to see the real thing.

1c) 1a for my own personal copy, but completely donate to Albright Knox, and find some way to write the $3000 off on my taxes, so I end up spending nothing as a net result and get an ultra-high quality scan for myself and anyone else who wants it.

2. Realize that at this point in my life, I'm really not professionally and financially accomplished enough yet to be buying expensive and rare works of art instead of buying things I need to buy to do my job well. End up being responsible and buying the laptop I need for work.

Last night's episode of Heroes was the most disturbing ever.

Not because of the main plotline itself, but the portrayal of Syler's mother and her relationship with Syler. It so uncannily parallels my own experiences with neurotic and overly-controlling jewish mothers who are out of touch with reality. To the point of being frightening.

The whole not-listening-to-you, telling-you-what-you-want, the lack of understanding of challenges required in obtaining a profession and the overestimating of the usefulness of barely useful or reliable professional contacts. The overwhelming feeling that their trying to "help" or "protect" is really more for their psychological benefit than that of their child and the reality they are doing a better job of hindering and making more vulnerable than helping or protecting. And then there's the violent (only verbally, in my case, thank heavens) reaction when they find out you aren't really who they were telling you who you were. And the sad feeling you experience of "why can't you just understand that I need to do what I need to do and accept that?" (the profession part, not the killing people part).

I've experienced that kind of stuff first-hand. And boy, does it suck.

If someone hasn't yet created voodoo dolls you can buy that represent programmers whose code you inherit, then someone really should. I bet they would be a best seller.

No, I haven't had a difficult day at work. Why would anyone think that?

This post was originally a comment on (e:anne)'s post (e:anne,39151) on Buffalo Movie. But the overwhelming nostalgia it digged up turned into a full-length post.

The Buffalo Movie playwright was one of my script-writing/acting partners in crime back in Ithaca College when I was a television-production major working on college TV shows. One show we wrote/acted on together was a sci-fi sitcom called "Tales Of The Rounded Pie" about a pizza joint in a college town and all the things you'd never imagine happening to a pizza joint in a college town. TOTRP is how I met (e:bugmuncher), who was the producer of the show and my roomate junior year. And (e:bugmuncher) was how I met (e:lizabeth).

Jon's writing was funny, although a little obsessive at times. A play where he uses the word "Buffalo" 160 times does not suprise me. Then again, Jon wrote the character I played on TOTRP, a vicious mobster in the style of Mr. Blonde, as waking up to find out that he got sexually molested by a whole fraternity (cue the screams of "FRAT BOY SCUUUUM!"), so I have a pretty hard time being surprised.

Those were the good old days. If you had told us back then that one day people would be buying digital camcorders for $300 and editing them on relatively cheap computers that came with software a hundred times better and easier to use than what we were using, and that we could do all this from the comfort of our living rooms and find a ready audience for our stuff (i.e. YouTube) without having to go through the whole TV industry to do so, we would have jizzed in our pants.

I'd like to be naive enough to imagine that all this virtually free access to technology has made Roy H. Park School of Communications a far more democratic society where taping of shows doesn't have to revolve around "we've got to tape a football game this weekend" and where cool niche shows are allowed to thrive instead of being killed off in popularity contests. I'm sure it's changed the dynamics of the school, but humans always tend to find new and different and interesting ways to make caste systems when the old ones are on the verge of being removed.

It's a shame I've never been able to get in touch with Jon. He was a good friend at IC and I had fun hanging out with him. When I first came up here, he was the only person that I knew lived up here. But aside from the fun I had at college, I also fucked up in a lot of ways that alienated a bunch of people (probably including Jon). While I'm a different person now, my guess is that any bridges that could have crossed the gap of years had been burnt long ago.

Damn, now I'm even having more of an urge to go on a road trip this summer to Ithaca. It's been almost 10 years since I've last seen the place.

As for what I'm doing today, it'll probably be finding out the best places to go in Buffalo for Cinco de Mayo. I want to see (e:soma) perform at Off the Wall, but I also need to put down one or two half-way decent margaritas to celebrate.

I had what was, at least to me, a really funny idea today.

I was reading (e:lilho)'s journal, and she used the world blo as the shortened form of Buffalo (a la b-lo, etc). And this got me to thinking. What common, household words start with blo? For this exercise, I'll sound out the first several individual letters of the word and then repeat the completed word in it's entirety, as done in the ancient times of Electric Company.

Add a 'a', and you have

b-l-o bloat "Buffalo bloats"

Add a 'b', and you have

b-l-o blob "Buffalo blobs"

Add an 'n', and you have

b-l-o blonde "Buffalo blondes"

And so the exercise continued, adding additional letter to b-l-o, and then adding additional letters to that. This seems like a long, drawn out process, but with my strange way of thinking it usually happens automatically and happens within milliseconds, so I don't pay it much mind. I think that the experts term this phenomena dyslexia.

And so the process continued, finding new letters to use for the "buffalo" abbreviation. Until I got to 'j', and then I had a good laugh. "Well, I guess you can't really create a Buffalo job website with that, now can you? The domain name must have been taken at the very start of the Internet" I said to myself.

Well, actually...it is available--only .com is taken.

So, the really knee slappingly funny (at least to me) idea I had today to create a community run Buffalo job website called blojobs.org and actually try run it was a legimate job-searching website where everyone involved in creating it would act completely ignorant of the fact that the name of their site implied anything beyond searching for jobs in Buffalo. Real employers would actually post jobs on there and real people looking for jobs could actually use the website for that purpose. And because it would actually be something legitimate with some actual value to the community, you couldn't immediately have it instantly written off as obscenity. Especially if it was a success.

The funniest part about this whole scheme would be the look on people's faces as they would pass a blojobs.org promotional table at one random generic summer festival, or see some ad in local paper or on the TV (if it could be sneaked past censors) or even better, to see the priceless look on a HR representitves face when they'd be handed a business card.

It sounds like immature, bathroom humor only a 10-year-old would find amusing. It's just that the way I picture it in my mind, it just seems so incredibly worthwhile. Well. onto the next stupid thought!