mushinnoshin

so here we go;

sorry I haven’t written much here lately. I have no greater excuse than simply not having been in the right frame of mind.

Well. Don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’m here. And it’s Saturday night, after Christmas. It’s been a decent one. Thursday with the dad, brother, and brother’s family, at Granny’s house, which Dad has now inherited. I think I hit a home run with the Fart Machine I gave my nephew. And another, with a most politically incorrect documentary in which the esteemed civil libertarian boundary-pusher Larry C. Flynt chronicles the accomplishments and exploits of an Alaskan pin-up queen gone rogue. We’ll leave the rest to your imagination or google-fu.

Saturday, pizza, party, and presents with the sister and her husband, which rocked. Never doubt the badassedness of four fresh diced jalapeños and a smattering of mushrooms taking a Digiorno to the next level, especially when you wash it down with a steady flow of a brew-kit bitter and a back supply of the same brew-kit’s dark ale. We backed the food with the Mr. Hankey’s Chrismas Classics dvd, and the beer with Weird Al’s videos dvd, which culminated in the main event of Christmas at Ground Zero. Then to the living room for presents, with Koyaanisqatsi muted, just for the visual, and the TSO playing on on the PC/stereo. Good Times. As far as the gift, my & my sister and I have this long running calendar gag, and I won’t bore you with the details but I think I rocked it this year.

So then today I guess is xmas for me. Cleaned up from the party, then spent the day in lazy, beer-sipping play and exploration. I finally opened up the School of Rock dvd that’s been sitting on my coffee table for months. I can’t tell you how much I love the hell out of that movie. It’s stupid, it’s sappy, but goddamn it it rocks and I love it. Of course I’ve seen it too many hundred thousand times on TBS, so I didn’t need to watch it, but watched it with the commentary from Jack Black and the director, then went back and just watched the “one hell of a rock show” chapter. Man, for a stupid movie song, they nailed it. Just enough Yes, Kiss, Bowie, and Floyd all mixed up and dished out over a plate of AC/DC — fuck yeah. And yes, I fucking cry every time when Turkey Sub struts up to the mike and belts out loud and clear how happy she is to be who she is in a glorious declaration. And though I’ve got my issues with the keyboard kid — I would have liked to have seen a little less Rick Wakeman, a little more Ray Manerik with a helping of Jon Lord (that just would have been more rock and roll to me) — I understand better after the commentary that yeah, Wakeman was probably the perfect archetype given the actor/pianist’s true to life classical upbringing and utter unfamiliarity with rock. And even still I did always like the somewhat-Wakemanesque, but almost more Come Sail Away-era-Denis DeYoung sounding portamento-drenched monotimbral solo he does there. My kinda shit, actually.

Had an awesome dinner (yellow saffron rice, with red onions, fresh jalapeños, and mushrooms, well seasoned and sautéed with a Morningstar Veggie Italian Sausage, if you give a damn), then put on Naqoyqatsi, another dvd I’ve owned for a while but been waiting for the right time to watch. Except that I still haven’t watched it, I’ve just been listening as I typed this post. Well, it *is* Glass, it needs at least one listen by itself without the visual.

And it just ended. Guess I should grab another beer and watch it for real this time.

Mike tagged me for the seven deadly sins random things meme. Right-o, lets see what we come up with.

1. I’ve been known to sometimes (and by sometimes, I mean often) go *weeks* without really talking to anyone, beyond the unavoidable “transactional” speech needed sometimes with a cashier, etc. Weirder, this generally doesn’t bother me, except when I reflect on how weird this makes me.
2. Mike and the other guys from work already know about this, but — I have a weird thing about my lunch schedule. See, if left to my own devices, I would probably eat the same thing almost every day. Which is probably bad for my soul at least, if not for my health. So, to ensure some degree of relatively even distribution, I adhere to a well defined rotation schedule. We’ll start with Tuesday: sub/sandwich shops, rotate weekly between Blimpie’s, Subway, Quiznos, Jimmy John’s, Jersey Mike’s, Lenny’s, Schlotzsky’s, and Which Which. Wednesday is burito day, with turns taken by Moe’s, Baja Fresh, and Blue Coast. Thursday we go for cafe/deli sandwiches between Bread & Co, Jason’s Deli, Panera, Wolfgang Puck’s, Atlanta Bread Co, and McAllister’s, and Friday is for Asia and the Mediterranean — Royal Thai, Miss Saigon, PF Chang’s, and the Greek Cafe. Back to Monday, that’s cheap day — Subway every week, except for when it’s Subway’s turn on Tuesday, giving me one week at Wendy’s every two months. I’m not psycho-inflexible about all this mind you, I’ll change it up for the occasional social invite or free meal or whatever, but this is my default schedule.
3. Many eons ago I performed in a somewhat successful play called “The Brady Show From Hell”, in which we took real episodes of the Brady Bunch and performed them on stage re-written basically as a variation on The Aristocrats. I was “Alice” in this incestuous try-sexual family of drug addicts and fecal fetishists, the androgynous dominatrix maid who offset her fishnets with combat boots. She didn’t mind cleaning up after the orgies so long as the family members were all good little slaves during. It was, of course, a comedy.
4. I wrote my own word processor when I was in 6th or 7th grade or so. OK, well, it was planned to be a word processor, but it really never got farther than a notepad-esque text editor. And being written in BASIC on an Apple IIe, it was slow as hell, almost unusably so. Still I was thinking big — I had this crazy plan to output everything in the high-resolution graphics mode, drawing the text so I could show fonts and such on the screen. I wonder if anyone ever ran with that?
5. I never was much of one for political norms. I was selected to go to Boys State around 10th grade or so, where I ran for Senator on an anarchist platform pledging that if elected, I would do absolutely nothing. I didn’t win. [Oh! But I did take second I think in the talent show. Played an old improv in A minor, and stuck a pack of burning incense where a candelabra might sit. I'm trying to resist a cheap Sarah Pain flute joke here. ]
6. I played a mean tuba back in junior high.
7. I was quite obese through most of my youth. I don’t mean chubby or husky or big-boned, I mean my 6th grade self probably had sixty pounds on the adult me. Needless to say my sense of self-esteem never fully recovered from it, despite having stayed mostly thin to average for not quite twenty years now since. Being the perpetual butt of the joke at lunch time in particular has left me still generally uncomfortable eating around other people. Not enough to keep me from doing so, but enough to set all my neuroses firing when I do.

Oh, right, now I’m supposed to tag. Hmm, dunno. Most of the people who I figure would do this thing probably already have. Well, let’s try Logan.

This is pretty cool. Mother Jones told us about The Typealyzer, which probes your blog and computes your Myers-Briggs type based on content:

INTP – The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

UPDATE: I took this quickie online quiz which calls me an INTJ. I’m sure it’s not the most scientific quiz ever, but this does feel more accurate:

I lack the discipline to get into weekly theme posts like the “feel good Friday” thing, but Halloween on a Friday calls for some celebrating. Perhaps a double shot, even.

It’s just not Halloween without Danny Elfman:

Or that master songsmith of gothic macabre, Weird Al:

(Sorry I couldn’t find a version where the video didn’t sort of suck or even remotely match the music, but whatever, right?)

I don’t really have much to add on the new Ted Stevens mess, but Rex pointed us to this Gawker post which introduced us to:

which is just awesome in its own right. Of course I think it’s the lolcats that make it ring true. Well, that and His Noodly Appendage, of course.

• Success! I sampled the first bottle of my homebrew tonight, and it turned out quite tasty. Well, the shitty thing is that it’s a standard issue golden pilsner-style lager, since that’s the mix that came with the kit — will have to brew a good stout or something for the next batch. At which point I’ll be able to properly dub it “JonathAle”.
• Saw Ghandi tonight, and well, just wow. I mean it’s not like I didn’t already know what he did, but seeing it dramatized can really, perhaps ironically, sometimes make you better grok the reality of something. One interesting tangent was seeing him in a meeting with some of the Brits, and hearing them explain that Britain couldn’t possibly withdraw because India needed them to protect the religious minorities and that chaos would ensue if they left. Gosh, where have we heard those excuses among more recent events?
• w00t! It looks like Prison Break is coming back for another season. That last episode really felt like a “we’re going to clumsly wrap things up so we can end the series” thing. Happy to find out otherwise.
• From the “you know you spend too much time on Teh Internets when” files, I saw a breathtaking trailer for a new film about Antarctica. And when they showed a clip of some walruses, all I could do was try and imagine a caption regarding their search for a “bukkit”.
• I think I had more, but I don’t remember them. I think I’m just going to call it an early night and wrap up the holiday weekend on a quiet note for once.
• Oh, wait, another thing that popped into my head while watching Gandhi — it’s striking how often those people who have been important agents of great social change have been assassinated. Which made me wonder, has Obama really been acting like a douche lately just as a matter of political triangulation … or does he figure that if he reveals himself to just be yet another scumbag politician, his chance of survival goes up exponentially?

Except of course “Darkness = 100%” should have been worked in there somewhere…

What Famous Leader Are You?

It seems that even “Socks” Clinton has crossed over to endorse Barack Obama:

Probably at least partially in retaliation for the gross indignity of being named “Socks”.

Well now that we’ve determined that Kate is a Romantic Corporate Goth (I had to rearrange it, “goth” must always be the last word. It’s more depressing that way.), I figured I should try to find out what sort of goth I am. Luckily the internet has about fourteen zillion quizzes ready to judge me.

What kind of goth are you?

Bet you practice Wicca or Paganism or possibly more liberal Christianity. You probably love Dead Can Dance, anything ethereal, and might be vegetarian. You probably also like to hug people.

Ehh, not too far off the mark I suppose. I do likes me some Dead Can Dance.