PopeOnABomb's Xanga

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:14:53 GMT

Note: This is a lengthier post, because it has to last until I get back from Israel. At that point, I'll respond to all the comments I've neglected while preparing for the trip.

My sister Beth, her husband, and their two children moved to Germany the day after I moved to San Francisco. So, before I moved to SF and they moved to Europe, we spent the last week of May at our parent's house. One afternoon while swimming with my niece Kiera (8 years old) and my nephew Aidan (5 years old), it dawned on me "They know nothing about Germany!" Now, being an ever awesome Uncle, I couldn't let such an opportunity escape. So I'd bring up weird conversations with them (the following is an actual conversation we had)...

Me: You're going to leave your swimsuits at Grandma's house right?
Kiera: Why would we do that?
Me: Well, people do things different in Germany. They don't use swimsuits.
Kiera: Naa-huh. You've never been there.
Me: Actually, I've been there several times. I was there with your aunt Becca one time.
Kiera: Then what do they swim in?
Me: Pajamas.
Aidan: Really!
Me: Yea, why not. You've got water proof pajamas, right?
Kiera: I don't know.
Aidan: * runs off to find thier mom *

Aidan: Mom, mom, mom! Are we going to leave our swimsuits here?
Beth: Why would we do that?
Aidan: In Germany they swim in their pajamas!
Beth: Has Seth been telling you about Germany?

iWalking

Last Saturday the line at the SF Apple store was absurd. So, as I strolled by I made sure to say loud phrases such as...

"The line wasn't nearly this long when I got my phone."
"I'm glad I got mine in advance."
"The line was half as short yesterday."

And I'm going to coin a new phrase: iWalking - verb - the act of walking in to traffic and almost getting hit, because you're too busy making sure everyone around you can see your new iPhone.

Bottl3D Water

I saw "Journey to the Center of the Earth: 3D" a few days ago. The movie is great for what it is: a fast paced, easy-to-predication action adventure movie. It won't win an Oscar. But it is a neat experience (note: if you can see it at an Omnimax theater, do so).

I laughed during one point of the movie when I realized that... every day we see things in 3D. But we're still willing to pay $8.50 to go see 3D on a 2D screen. It is the movie equivalent of paying for bottled water.

ps - Radiohead's "In Rainbows" reminds me of a few Pavement albums.

Fly Me to the Moon

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:38:34 GMT

Today I entered Virgin Airline's Galactic contest. The winner will venture to the Mojave desert, meet Sir Richard Branson, have a best 2-out-of-3 jousting match with him (he is a knight after all), and then see Virgin's newest aeronautcial investment. I think they might be retrofitting their airplanes with hot tubes. Or hot tubs. But I have no idea what a hot tube is - it could be better; It could be worse. (Remember: always make the best of your typos).

For the contest, they asked participants to "In 50 words or less, please let us know the first thing you would do in weightlessness." I answered, "The first thing I'd do is turn invisible. I'd already be weightless. Why not be invisible too?" After I submitted the response, I wished I'd read the fine print. For all I know, the winner of this contest will be strapped on to the front of a rocket and shot in to the moon to provide entertainment to a loony old billionaire. When you have a billion dollars, that is the kind of stuff you do. Trust me.

I entered the contest, because on Tuesday I fly from San Francisco to New York on Virgin Airlines as I head for my adventure in Israel. Apparently the flight from SFO to NYC is incredible. Good drinks, little TVs in the back of each chair, chair-to-chair text messaging, and video games! Maybe there will be a Skee Ball machine and Dance Dance Revolution

I'll go from SFO to NYC, eat lunch with my friend Suvi, and then head from NYC to Israel. 12 days in Israel will be a grand change of pace. The largest change will be the weather. In San Francisco the temperature is a constant 65 degrees. I picked the dates of my trip based on how hot it will be. Currently, Tel Aviv is a calm 81 degrees, but I'd like it to be in the high 90's on my trip.

Faith in Product

At the grocery store, Laura and I saw a guy purchase the following items...

Hair Gel
Axe Body Spray

According to the commercials, that guy was about to embark on the greatest evening of his life. Earlier in the day he probably purchased a velvet-draped couch, silk sheets, and a bottle of SKYY Vodka.

Interesting Moments in Soccer

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:01:41 GMT

Last weekend the Eurocup 2008 ended as Spain defeated Germany 1-0. By pinball machine scoring standards, the victory was 90,782,340,579,243,043 to 10. That is because pinball machines give you 1,000,000 points for hitting any object with a flashing light, 500,000 for any object with a burned out light, and 250,000 for anything else. Perhaps soccer would pick up more popularity in the US if the EPSS were adopted (Extreme Pinball Scoring System).

Pinball scores are so inflated that even the US dollar is strong against them. In our current economic state, the only thing worthwhile that you can buy for a quarter, other than those ninjas in quarter machines, is a game of pinball.

Here are some of the more oddd looking pictures from the Eurocup games.

1 & 2 & 3 & Jazz Hands!

Of course he looks happy.

He has a delicate left hand.

Sweden's official motto is "There is no defense like a good offense. Oh, except for when we skip and point. That works really well too."

Light of my Life

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:34:31 GMT

I purchased a lamp at Bed, Bath, and Beyond on Tuesday evening. I mention the day of the week that way you can compare how much more exciting weekday life in San Francisco is to wherever it is you might be living. Here is what the front of the lamp's box looks like.

I show you that, so that I can show you this. On the side of the box is a list of contents. Imagine how surprised you'd be to find any of the following in the box with the lamp. When is the last time you found an ottoman with your lamp? It might be the only time I could have looked at a lamp box and said "Well, we're not getting this one. It doesn't come with a snack table."

Coldplay's new album = Good.
It isn't the rock revolution that Chris Martin predicted. But the album is excellent. I've listened to it over twenty times since I purchased it last week. It makes up for the sub-par delivery on X&Y. When you listen to the album, you'll realize the difference between Viva la Vida and X&Y is that the band wanted to make Viva la Vida. Whereas they had to do X&Y because of their fame.

A Day in the Lush Life of IT
My new job is good. I am more busy than they had predicted, which that means I get to be impressive by fixing things all day long. A pro of the job is that I get paid to keep up with, explore, and fiddle with technology. A con is that someone asks me a question every fifteen minutes, which means I don't have time to focus for long periods of time.

The company is a very small advertising, branding, and logo design company (less than 30 people), but we do work for some of the largest clients you've heard of. Some of the biggest names of our time. Because of this, everything we do is covered by Non-Disclosure Agreements. For example, the standard contract states that if our company leaks the name of a new company, product, or device, we have to pay between $7 million to $15 million.

Here are perks of the job...

A MacBook Pro for designers (or for the IT guy... hehe, lucky me) or a nice Dell for non-designers.
There is a liquor cabinet.
The refrigerator has a bountiful supply of top notch beer (Heineken, Widmer, Guiness, White-Stripe), wine, and a few bottles of champagne.
It is okay to drink beer after about 2 p.m.
I drank a margarita in the server room once.
Around my desk and to the left is a massage chair that one of our clients purchased for us.
Around my desk and to the right is a nice quality pool table.
Between the massage chair and the pool table are a handful of golf balls and a few putters.
If I work late on a weekend, I practice putting clear across the office while I wait for the server to do its stuff. I've not sank an 80-foot putt yet.
Every six-weeks we have an at-work happy hour, complete with fancy cheeses, lots of wine, and other great assortments.
We have a music server.
Fresh fruit, vegetables, and a few groceries are delivered one or twice a week.
Everyone has to be nice to me, because I make up the entire IT division.
Several of my co-workers are from foreign countries and have nice accents to hear.

Go See Wall-E!

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:23:08 GMT

The best things happen on weekends: new Pixar movies and (for some people) sex. And this weekend I only had to pay $8.25 for one of those. Friday evening I joined the rest of the civilized world and saw Wall-E, Pixar's newest release. I've been excited about the movie from the moment I first saw pictures of Wall-E, and I've spent the last three weeks saying "Waaaallllll-EeeEe" in the best robot voice that I can. To understand how good the movie Wall-E is, I compiled two lists, and it turns out that everything is on both lists!

Non-Transmittable Things I Like aka Things Featured in the movie Wall-E

Humor.
Robots.
Lasers.
Welding
Explosions.
Photosynthesis.
Fire Extinguishers.
Sounds that Apple computers make.
Lists that are ordered by length of items.
Hundreds of hidden references to other Pixar movies.

Where the movie Indiana Jones 4 destroyed your hope in humanity, Wall-E will restore your hope, make you laugh, justify the large $6.00 bucket of popcorn you purchased, make you adopt a Roomba vacuum robot, keep you from stalking George Lucas for an evening, cure your hiccups, relieve your migraine, and bring you closer to nirvana. The last is of particular importance to all of the Buddhist Xangans out there.

Hold That Thought

I've written a lot of blogs since I started at Xanga. I decided that I wanted to create an archive of all my postings that allowed quicker browsing and a comprehensive search option. Tonight I finished archiving all of my posts (clear back to April of 2003). Feel free to go to Popeonabomb.com for quick access to my brain.

Note: All of the comments are archived with each post. However, not all comments have the correct user name attached to them. Also, I need to change the title for each post to something other than the date, and I need to add tags to each post. This will all take place, but it will be a while before I'm finished.

The Oklahoma Hijira to San Francisco

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:24:43 GMT

Instead of playing sports in high school, I played academic bowl. Any athlete can get laid after scoring the tie-breaking touchdown in the final seconds of the big homecoming game, but it is far more difficult to "get with a lady" (as they say on the streets) after reciting the periodic table of elements. In fact, I submit it is impossible, because it didn't work for me. And it has never worked for anyone. Look at Alex Trebek. It is obvious that he has never had sex. If he did, it must have been terrible. Only bad sex or joining a local emo band makes a person wake up and think "I'd like to wear an out-dated sports jacked with patches on the elbows." And I don't hear him singing.

The only relation between the previous paragraph and the following paragraphs is that my friend Christina attended a rival school and played on the most dreaded academic bowl team in the region. We grew up in neighboring towns, both learned German from my mom, both studied architecture at OSU, and we have quite a few mutual friends.

Last Thursday she stumbled upon the video of my apartment tour and sent me the message "Are you really in San Francisco? I will be here until September. Give me a call tomorrow at lunch."

Friday afternoon I ate lunch in the park at Levi's plaza (where I work), flipped open my phone, and called Christina. When she answered, I realized I could hear her voice. I turned around, and there, unplanned and fifty feet from me, stood Christina! Turns out she works across the street. We'd been eating lunch in the same miniature sized park all week!

What a small, incredible world this place is.

Tomorrow I'm going to purcahse the new Cold Play album. I'm excited about it, but normally when a band starts to claim that they've "written the greatest song in rock history" it means their ten seconds from a complete meltdown, a month away from staring on "I Love New York," and are already dating an Olsen Twin or two.

A Midget and His Uncle

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:27:45 GMT

I spent today waiting for Comcast to arrive and set up my internet, telephone, and cable. I don't want to use Comcast, but there aren't any other viable options. The installation guy showed up, but thanks to the dolts at customer service, who messed up my address, none of the services could be installed.

Mind you, this is after I contacted Comcast THREE times prior to today in order to fix the address error. I don't have Comcast service yet, and they already anger me much as George Lucas does.

Enough with the negativity though! Other people complain better than I do, but no one else makes a better video clip of their apartment than I do. So, without further delay, I present what a $1450 a month apartment in SF looks like.

Note: In Oklahoma you can't purchase alcohol on Sundays, grocery stores cannot sell alcohol, and convenience stores can only sell beer that is below 3.2%. If you go to a liquor store, you can buy anything you want, but they can't sell you cold beer because you might drink it. Yea. I'm not kidding.

California on the other hand seems to hand out liquor licenses to everyone at birth. Every store sells liquor, a lot of it, and plenty of cold beer.

And here is the video of my awesome alarm clock (the one mentioned in the video clip).

George Lucas Sucks

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:26:51 GMT

Spoiler Alert: This is a spoiler alert in that I'm telling you how fucking awful the movie is.

I lucked out and got my favorite seat. The one right in the middle of the theater - not too close, not too far, and right in the sweet-spot of the theatre's sound system (the British spell it better). I say that in order to say this: at the mid point of the movie, I pondered (with serious consideration) the option of standing up, unzipping my pants, and pissing on the crowd below me. That way, when they got home there would be something slightly entertaining to tell friends. I didn't want their evenings to be a complete loss.

Yes, getting pissed on by a stranger is better than this movie. Other activities better than this movie include jumping in to a dumpster of syringes, contracting Ebola, or passing a kidney stone the size of an NFL linebacker.

Afterwards (after the movie, not the urination), my girlfriend said, with honest emotion, "Are you okay? I kept looking over at you, and I'd never seen you look more disappointed or sad. By the way, nice arc"

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the movie equivalent of George Lucas visiting his beloved grandmother, and then ripping her head off and shitting down her neck. It is a terrible conclusion to a much loved and ever improving trilogy (one of the few trilogies that hadn't gotten progressively worse... until now) that definitively proves three things:

1.) George Lucas is a fucking retard. I'm not sure what happened to him, but somewhere in the last 18 years, he has managed to contract Down syndrome, move in to the advanced stages of syphilis, retroactively be shaken as a baby, and suffer an acute lack of oxygen.

2.) George Lucas needs to hire me, because I am the only person on the planet not too busy kissing Lucas' ass to tell him when he has had another terrible, awful, good-for-nothing, no good idea. Same goes for his BFF Spielberg.

3.) The word "Lucas" is now reserved to mean an idea for which there are not enough words to describe how bad it is. Here, I'll use it in a sentence: "The second most famous example of a Lucas is when Hitler tried to kill all of the Jews."

Let's take a moment to discuss the writers of the movie:
A.) George Lucas - He lives in San Francisco. If I ever encounter him, I'll try to not puke on him / kill him in a fit of justifiable homicide. When "the Big One" strikes San Francisco and kills Lucas in a grotesque fashion, people will call it Divine Providence.

B.) David Koepp - Though this man has done some almost decent work in films such as "War of the Worlds" and the original Jurassic Park, he also brought life and a complete dirth of excitement or content to movies such as "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Mission: Impossible". Anyone dumb enough to sign up for a second installment of Jurassic Park doesn't deserve to write again, let alone reproduce or breathe oxygen. And don't get me started on "Mission: Impossible".

C.) Jeff Nathanson - Speed 2, Rush Hour 2, Rush Hour 3, The Terminal. I don't need to say much here, because you spent the entirety of that list puking so hard your esophagus collapsed right after you spleen came out your mouth. Production companies bring Jeff in when the rest of the talent has been killed of in a bizarre and terribly exciting accident, such as a napalm accident at a strange fetish party.

D.) Philip Kaufman - This man has a solid track record: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Quills, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He has a shining record compared to anyone else that worked on Kingdom of the Lost Skulls, but his talent has been slowly draining since his 1978 work on "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Problems with the Movie:
1.) It had the same color quality and plastic feel that your mother's first camcorder did. You know, the one where you have to plug it directly in to a VCR, which means when you need to film outside you hook the camera to the VCR, put the VCR in a backpack, and string an 100 foot extension cord from the house to the garden.

2.) Karen Allen (Marion) used to be young enough and slender enough to be hot. The kind of woman feminine enough to seduce you and independent enough to not make you lose your sanity. Now she has become the older annoying woman who sits by you on flights, smells of feet, and insists on talking about bunions while she shows you pictures of her daughter giving birth at home on a tarp.

3.) Giving Indiana Jones a side kick - The second we saw him, we all knew that he had to be Marion's kid. I prayed that it wouldn't be true, but alas George, you have ceased to be human, and your lack of intelligence and self-control shows.

4.) Psychic Russian Woman - First, we all know there are no women in Russia, let alone psychics. George, including this character in order to save the life of your first born child would still constitute a bad idea. If the fate of man kind rested on the creation of this character, a real man would have said "Well, we had a damn good time!"

5.) The Jungle Scene - To make roads through the forest, they needed the machine at the front of the convoy to cut down trees. So they blow up the machine and magically the forest has hundreds of miles of dirt road through it? Did they fly all the way down to the South American forests and forget to bring a map that has the most recent roads listed on it? Or did Jesus come down and lend a helping hand?

6.) The Jeep Fight Scene - Yea. We all believe that a person can balance between two jeeps speeding through the forest while being repeatedly being hit the nuts with local flora and not fall off. The conversation on set went like this "I'd like to remove all choreography, timing, decent dialog, and good ideas from this movie." "You've got it, Mr. Lucas."

7.) Aliens - Because everyone walked out of the previous Indiana Jones movies saying "If only it had aliens."

8.) Roswell - No one in the entire Lucas empire was able to think of a better idea?

9.) Dumbass Family Jokes - It isn't an ABC made-for-TV movie. It is an action adventure movie. No Marion. No stupid kid.

10.) The Plot.

11.) The scene where Indiana Junior swings through the trees with monkeys in order to catch up with the speeding jeeps. This is a good idea in the same way porn of Jar Jar Binks is.

George Lucas,
This movie is offensive to the entire human race, intelligence, God, Allah, Border Collies (mine shows much more intelligence than you), and
anyone or anything with an IQ above 70 (when using the WAIS-R).

--

If you liked my review, then go vote for it as a favorite at CraigsList.

Weezer - Still Emo, but the videos are getting better

Wed, 28 May 2008 21:46:42 GMT

Box Orgy

Mon, 12 May 2008 01:15:05 GMT

Quote: "The stand-up comedian and the girl in the monkey suit are who make out. I don't think I've ever said that before." - Laura, on the opportunities of speech that the Tila Tequila reality show provide.

I am back in my home town, roofing for my father, until I leave for San Francisco on June 2nd. (I've been busy, and today I managed to setup my computer. Goodness, I miss Xanga when I'm busy). Anyways, I'd head to SF sooner, but at the end of May my sister is moving with her husband and two children to Germany. They'll spend their last few state-side days in Oklahoma, and I want to see them before they head off.

I reach three startling conclusions each time I move. First, the box is the single greatest achievement of mankind (perhaps of the universe). Let's put it this way: you can do anything with, in, or on a box. It might be an inherent property of prepositional phrases, but it might be that the box is that fantastic. Boxes are so incredible, I suggest that the word box replace the word orgasm. Geeks would rejoice, because the term multi-boxing would take on new meanings. And moving-to-a-new-place related sentences will be more fun: "The liquor store said we can take all the boxes we needed," "My room has a lot of boxes in it," or "Wow, a box in a box."

Second, bookends are the greatest failure of mankind. We can put a man on the moon; we can put a man in a box on the moon; he can have a box in that box; but we can't produce a bookend that works without a giant dictionary being placed on it. The second you touch a bookshelf, every book falls in to disarray. The results of moving a shelved book are so disastrous that I'm almost led to believe that the damage in Myanmar (Burma) resulted from a bookend catastrophe rather than from a cyclone.

Third, I own too much. I'm hoping that I can take this opportunity to reduce the number of materials good I own. Ideally, I'd like to be able to fit all of my belongings (except for oil paintings) in to the back of a small sized car. In a perfect world, I'd own a Mac Book Pro, an iPod, three boxes of books, an X-Box 360, and a few boxes of clothing.

On to serious business, a few weeks ago I played Scattegories with a group of friends. Nothing creates life long feuds between couples and friends like a friendly game based on personal subjectivity mixed with an individuals creativity for semantics. Here are two suggestion of mine that got vetoed.

Letter: B
Item: Things on a Map
My Suggestion: Bottom - Every map has a bottom.

Letter: F
Item: Villian/Monster
My Suggestion: Fictictious - this is the weaker of the two, but none of my opponents even offered a word.

On a side note, a friend once played the greatest Scattegories word ever.
Letter: K
Item: Things that are black.
Suggestion: Kenan and Kel. - double points!