George Lucas is a rat bastard.

Something is eating at me. George Lucas (you know - the guy who made Star Wars, waited until it became a cultural icon, and then brutally assraped it 3 times) uses a specific argument when people criticize his films. People say that the Ewoks, and later Jar Jar Binks, are too goofy to be in the movies, and they bring the quality of the whole thing down. Jar Jar is comic relief like the guy with a funny hat and billy bob teeth is comic relief in a Mexican soap opera. He's just so out of place and his silliness is over the top. George Lucas says, basically, that anybody who criticizes Jar Jar is a pansy fanboy who needs to grow up and accept that the Star Wars movies are for kids, and that Jar Jar is an important character. OK, there's the problem. Star Wars is for kids. I'll say it again:

George Lucas says Star Wars is meant for kids, and not adults.

OK? Got it?
Star Wars contains (just off the top of my head) Death, dismemberment, strife, the potential for incest, children being killed, gruesome scenes of a bloody and charred person writhing in agony, people being eaten, and torture.
And it's for kids.
This tells me that either George Lucas is a horrible person making movies with all that shit in them and thinking the kiddies will love it, or he's criminally negligent. This is a serious thing. George Lucas is either insane or evil. One the one hand, maybe he's just a loon who made these movies full of death and pain, thinking they weren't so bad or that kiddies would shriek with glee when, for example, Luke gets his hand chopped off, or when Anakin is missing several limbs and his flesh is actually burning away and he's screaming and obviously in terrible pain. On the other hand, maybe he made these movies, knowing they were full of some decidedly not kid-friendly material, and wanted to scar their minds and leave them shaken and crying.
There is, of course, a third option.
He's full of shit.
What I personally think is that he made some movies, they were pretty good, then he tried to change them up some to reinvigorate his fame and nobody liked them, and then he made some more movies that were really just awful, and now to cover his ass he's saying this crappy thrown-together walking racial slur that is Jar Jar was just meant for younger minds. That way he doesn't have to explain why the character has no depth or complexity and why his humor is little more than pratfalls and hamfisted attempts at jokes. He's got a track record for doing this, you know. he figured people wouldn't buy that all the jedi just somehow feel when the force is strong in somebody, and they had to have some objective way of measuring how much of the force was with you, so he made up that midichlorian shit. When people called him out on his shitty cop-out, he said he's planned on doing that the whole time. I guess they just didn't have the technology to make a prop that went "beep" back when he made the first trilogy. He wanted C3P0 and R2D2 to be in the prequels. R2 was easy - he's just an astromech droid. He could have just been the droid in this ship and that ship and it's all coincidence. C3P0? How the hell do you get a robot whose primary function is translation into all 6 movies? Hey! let's have Darth Vader build him as a child! Yeah! There's no way anybody will question how this prepubescent slave managed to put together a whole droid! He just got the kit in a box of cereal or something! And maybe R2D2... forgot he had rockets?
Don't make crappy movies and then blame the fans for not liking them. And certainly don't make crappy movies full of violence and death and say they were meant for kids to cover the fact that they're crappy.

Porn: It's like sex whiskey.

I've got this theory. Porn is a sort of distilled version of sex. A more concentrated form, to help us get where we want to go more efficiently. You don't want to snuggle up and spend a nice relaxing evening with porn. You don't want to lay outside and watch the stars and make love to porn all night long. You want to do your business and go to sleep.
Here's how I see it. Your average, everyday, mundane sex can be considered as beer. All personal tastes aside, just assume you like beer. Having beer a couple times a week is great. You'd REALLY love to have beer every night, but You're just fine with having a beer when you can get it. There's nothing wrong with beer. It's satisfying and you enjoy it, and you don't wish you had something else. You like beer.
Once in a while, you have sex that is unusual or exotic. Perhaps you have roleplay or bondage, or a threesome, or anything else that deeply fascinates you but that you don't normally get. This kind of sex is like wine. You enjoy wine. You linger over the memory of the amazing wine you've had, But when you're having a beer - you don't spend the whole time thinking "Man, I wish this was some wine." Beer is great. You really enjoy some wine now and then, but you'll do just fine with beer.
But Imagine, if you had wine all the time. The French have wine with every meal. They don't savor the individual glass of wine and think about the times they've had it. Wine is just... wine. It's what they have with dinner. If you had wine every day, it would be your beer. If every time you had sex, you were in a leather boy scout outfit, and there were 3 prostitutes, a set of handcuffs, and a big bottle of cooking oil involved, THAT would be your beer. Really weird beer, but still beer.
Beer cannot rise above what it is. If you order a beer, and it comes to you in a frosted mug with salt on the rim and a wedge of lime floating in it - it's still a beer. Strip away all the fancy trappings and you've got a beer. And maybe the sex isn't exactly your brand. Maybe he didn't nibble your ear like you like, or maybe she didn't moan in that way that gets you all hot. Or maybe there wasn't enough foreplay or whatever. You still had sex. You still got to drink your beer.
Now, porn. Porn is like... whiskey. It's everything about sex, distilled, concentrated, more intense. All the aspects of sex are distorted and taken to extremes. Now, where you might enjoy some beer, or savor a fine wine - you throw back a shot of whiskey. Nobody bangs back shots at a candlelit dinner, and nobody should be shooting whiskey all night every night. It gets the job done, and fast, but it's not something to savor and remember.
Every guy in porn has a huge dick, and every girl in porn has huge tits. It's just the way porn is. When you have sex with your partner, nobody expects a skullfucking and a cumshot in the eyes. Nobody thinks it's ok to hammer her ass for 30 minutes and then pull it out and stuff it in her twin sister's mouth. But that's de rigueur in porn. if you had a pornstar as a boyfriend - on the surface it might seem very alluring. He's muscular, he's attractive, he's well-endowed, and he's a champion in bed. But think a little more deeply about it. He's going to give you no foreplay at all, he's going to ram his dick in your throat for 20 minutes, he's going to fully expect you to take it in any hole he finds, he's going to pin you in awkward positions and hammer you ceaselessly for what will seem like an eternity - then he's going to hop up, blow a load on your face, and walk away and take a shower. No romance, no kissing, no tenderness - and not concerned about your needs in the least. Him going down on you? Maybe, for a minute, to get you wet enough to stuff his sausage into you.
So You can enjoy beer every night and savor the occasional glass of wine - but once in a while, when you just need a drink and don't want the extra attachments - a good stiff shot of the hard stuff is good for what ails you.
Now, this breaks the metaphor, but have you ever had a shot of whiskey and thought about some good beer you've had? I bet you have. Porn is more of a tool. A means to an end. And to that end, every aspect of sex has been pushed to the forefront, made bigger or harder. That's why pornos don't have good acting or coherent plots - because nobody cares. People don't watch porn to enjoy the movie - they watch it to enjoy themselves. Some whiskey will get you drunk. Beer will get you drunk, but it takes a lot longer, and you generally have a pretty good time on the way there.

update.

9-year-old (in high-pitched, nasal bee voice): I'm a bee!
me: You should go pollinate some flowers and make honey.
9-year-old (still in bee voice): I'm not allowed to go outside, remember?

kids are fun.

apropos

"Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say." - Will Durant

Mototola RAZR V3, 2.5 year review.

I got a phone 2 and a half years ago. The Motorola RAZR V3. It was the coolest phone on the block at the time. All the other phones were these big ol' clunky things the size of a garage door opener that made you look like you were carrying a gun. These new RAZR's though, were ultra skinny, like thinner while closed than any other phone, even the bar phones that could be thinner because they didn't flip shut. Everybody loved them, except me. I thought "I had a cell phone the size of a twinkie and it had like a 3 hour talk time and maybe a day of standby time. This thing will suck for talk time, and I'd break it." Then somebody at work had one and I said "Hey, lemme see that." and slid it into my pocket and it vanished. I didn't feel it, in there with my wallet. I was in love. Any cell phone that could sit in my pocket with my wallet and not rip out the seams in my jeans is cool in my book. So I got one. Today, the phone failed, and needs replaced - So I'm writing this review of the phone, and how it aged, as a eulogy.

Looks
Let's face it, the damn thing is gorgeous. The spartan, solid build and matte black finish scream neo-modern, and the dark chrome reflection from the one piece laser-cut keypad is striking. It's got a very monolithic look to it, the only real detail on the outside being the Motorola logos and the impossibly thin outer buttons. It's wider than most phones, which I think is great, and when it came out, it was the thinnest thing out there. Lots of phones now are just as skinny, if not skinnier - but this svelte granddaddy was lanky first, bud.

UI Design
You know those champion Rubik's Cube players who pick up a jumbled mass of color, and with a few seconds of graceful twirling set down a perfectly aligned cube? I'm like that on this phone. But only because I'd had it for so long. The user interface of the razr sucks goat taint. You can't really customize anything, over half of the menu items send you to places on the web where you buy stuff, nothing is where it should be, and everything useful is 400 menus deep. And it responds slowly. I set up a shortcut to my alarm clock so now I press the menu button and 9 to get my alarms, instead of menu button, click over to settings, then down to tools, then to alarms. I also made use of one of the few customizable things - the 4 way button. That circle around the main button now launches my video camera, calendar, address book, and calculator. I generally enter the commands to do what I want to do and and have to wait and watch the menus at the phone catches up.

Calls
Calls sounded like... well, they sounded like phone calls. Nothing to point out, here. It performs admirably, as far as the actual sound quality of calls. The phone itself causes any issues I had with calls. The earpiece sounds fine, if you have it aimed right. If you slide it back a bit, it fires into the flesh of the ear and you can't hear anything. It's like the call dropped. This phone is real finicky about where you have the earpiece. And don't try to talk in the wind. Windy areas will cause the dreaded whoosh of call decimation and the other party will think an atom bomb is going off. The speakerphone is fine.

Other
I didn't use bluetooth much, but it seems to work ok. The side buttons are the thickness of a human hair, and as such can be difficult to press. The camera is a pile of worthless grainy shit and I hate it. The battery tends to seat just slightly wrong and makes it so the battery door doesn't latch on all the way and makes a pointy bit on the back of the phone. Talk time and standby time are pretty good. I can't quite fit the whole phone in my mouth. The screen and keypad smoosh up against my face when I talk so I have to go after it with alcohol swabs all the time to keep it from looking like I dropped it in the sewer. Pictures you take with the camera don't fit the screen, so you end up with black borders or a crop of the center of the picture, and it's hard to get a good wallpaper out of it. The design of the phone make it look like it was intended to defeat RADAR. The usb plug is unprotected, and thus a gunk magnet. The case juts out all square and nasty around the usb plug - so much so that it bothered me enough to sand it down to bevel off the corners. The little fob/lanyard attachment thingy is pointless, and impossible to clean under.

Wear
After 2.5 years, the phone shows signs of age. The little "M" logo fell off the earpiece. The plastic behind the keypad that makes the numbers glow has yellowed significantly. The gasket around the screen has pushed in some between the actual screen and the plastic front of the screen assembly. The case is scratched and dented here and there. There is awful brassing around the metal corners, especially on the top at the edges of the hinge. The keypad itself is wearing and brassing at the corners. There is gunk in every tiny little crevice that I just can't get out. If you don't get the battery in just right, it will look like the battery is nearly dead, and the phone will beep at you to charge it, even though you don't need to. Oh, and the keys don't work. Today, I got it out to make a call, and none of the keys on the entire phone work at all. Except the hangup/power key. it will power the phone on and off. I don't know why this happened, and neither do the many other people out there who had the same thing happen to them. In any case, I can still take calls, but no longer make them, and I have to replace my phone.

I've gotten very used to this phone, and I was actually tiring of it and salivating for all the killer new phone features out there ("3.2 megapixel camera? SWEET!"), but I was hoping to wait a while longer before having to bury this one in a drawer somewhere. R.I.P. RAZR. Ye shall be missed.

I hate asston kutcher.

I hate ashton kutcher. I've never really liked him, and I'm not sure why. He irritates me, I guess. Then he did that stupid punk'd show, which I never watched, but still hate. Now he's doing Nikon commercials, acting like some kind of super photography buff. Fuck him. He's not a buff, he's a guy with a contract. I'm a Canon user, so I sorta have anti-nikonian feelings anyway, but seeing that douchnozzle chimping a $1000 camera at a wedding like he was hired by the couple pisses me off. Sorry, I just hate him. Plus he stole Demi Moore from Bruce Willis. That was Bruce Willis's Demi Moore! They were supposed to be together doing goofy movies forever! And you fucked that up, asston - you fucked it all up.

Odd.

So, I've always said we're adventure-prone. Not accident-prone, adventure-prone. We go on a trip and wind up doing all kinds of weird and neat stuff we never set out to do. Like this time. We had stayed out of town, and Rebecca was feeling ill and not up for the ride home, and I was really tired, so we wound up staying at a hotel in Tulsa so we could get some sleep. So the stay was just a hotel, until the morning. I'm downstairs gathering some breakfast items for the family, alone, and this enormous gentleman with an impressive afro sauntered in wearing a not-at-all conspicuous red track suit and carrying a duffel bag with a red white and blue basketball in it. I was making a bagel, and a motherfucking Harlem Globetrotter had just walked in for some yogurt. A Harlem Globetrotter. in Tulsa. Oklahoma. At a Holiday Inn Express of all places. Wildkat Edgerson was making a yogurt cup look really tiny while I was slicing a bagel.
His hair is taller than I am.
I went upstairs and told everybody of the weirdness, and life resumed as normal.
The we were checking out, I was packing our stuff into the trunk, and who should step out of a comically small SUV, but Wildkat Edgerson Globetrotter, of the Harlem Globetrotters. I said "Hello, again." and he went inside where he saw the twins and geeked at them.
A famous person has gone all googly-eyed over our babies.
So he gave us some autographs and stuff and went inside. Then we leave and we're at the gas station, and Joshua is talking about the room keys I gave him to the lady stocking the shelves. I mention he had met a Globetrotter not 30 minutes previous, and he was chatting about hotel room keys. The lady asked "which one?" and turned out to be eerily informed about the globetrotters.
I had apparently just met Wildkat's best friend or biggest fan or something.
The likelihood of meeting someone with that much information about the Harlem Globetrotters in Tulsa, on the same day that I had randomly run into one of them, is fucking bizarre.
Like I said, adventure-prone.

Cross-blog plug!

Just a quick thing to say my other thing over at wordthing has a new thing. And things.

What I mean is I just updated with 4 new pics at my plog over at wordpress.

So yeah. Things.

Refeshing!

So I got a bottle of that gourmet water at the store.
It's squeezed from truffles by specially trained Sugar Gliders, and filtered thru an 18 foot tall hand-hammered copper cylinder full of rare Antiguan activated charcoal, which is replaced after every third gallon. The filtered water is then allowed to rest for 7 years in an open granite bowl near a pile of exotic minerals in a cedar-lined cellar, at which point it is placed on a rocket. The rocket takes the water into space where it is filtered via centrifuge - this time thru Chilean volcanic ash. Finally, it is bottled, while still in space. The water is placed in a double-walled bottle. The inside layer of the bottle is anodized aluminum, and the outer layer is carbon-fiber, and the space between is pressurized with neon. The cap is precision machined from a solid block of aluminum. The bottles are then placed in the branches of the world's oldest tree - a Bristlecone Pine named "Methuselah". After 6 months in the tree's branches, the bottles are delivered via courier to the store, where they sell for $14.99 per 8 oz. bottle.
I thought it tasted kinda musty.

LOLZ!

more animals

Juxtaposition!

Wow. I just realized that my last two posts were about replacing the word 'love' with the word 'fuck' in songs, and how much I loved the Veggietales show (called "God made you special") at a church. Man, I'm not very well adjusted.

And now, resurrecting an old feature..... IT'S RANDOM LINK TIME!!!!!!!1111!!!ONE!!!

failblog is essentially a picture blog chronicling the horrible failures of human stupidity. If you spell your sign wrong in a funny way, or if you design a product that accidentally looks like a penis, or if you do something else incredibly stupid and somebody takes a picture of it - it could wind up here.

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? You already know what this is. Look at them until you overload on stupid/cute and never return.

veggietales!

So, becoming a parent changes things. It makes some fundamental changes in the way you think and act. Case in point: About 5-6 years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to Veggietales. Mostly he fast forwarded to the silly songs and we all laughed, and a good time was had by all. Since then I have become a parent. We took the kids to Veggietales Live!, which is, in essence, a bunch of people in gigantic anthropomorphic vegetable costumes bouncing around the stage to prerecorded songs for an hour. Old Me would be horrified and maybe a bit disgusted by my behavior. At one point, I had Evan in a Snugli, and I was bouncing, and I realized he had been asleep for some time, and I was bouncing not for his benefit, but because I was having fun. Not just laughing at the funny kids stuff, but like actually truly enjoying myself. At Veggietales Live. Me. Less than 5 years ago I had skulls - like actual animal skulls I had actually gathered myself - hanging on my wall. Now I'm bouncing in my seat while Mr. Lunt sings about a cheeseburger. That is what becoming a parent does to you. Not that I'm complaining.

ALSO! They had this contest where you filled out a card and they drew names and I won the WHOLE ENTIRE VEGGIETALES CATALOG! It's like 35 DVDs and they're gonna mail it to me and I was WAAAAAAAY more excited than Joshua, the 8-year-old who is smack in the target audience for this stuff. The first time I've ever won anything worth more than a couple bucks and it's $500 worth of Veggietales DVDs.

My (fucking) theory.

I have this theory. Think of any song you can that contains the word "love". I know, it's hard to think of a song about love, I'll give you a minute...


Ok.
Now sing that song in your head, replacing all instances of the word "love" with the word "fuck".
I bet the song sounds funnier now.
Of course, sometimes it makes no sense ("hello, I fuck you", "fuck to fuck you baby") and some are just plain wrong ("Jesus fucks the little children") but for the most part, The song becomes completely hilarious. It's my version of the "in bed" thing for fortune cookies.

Newness

I just started a new photographic web log (shortened to photoblog, and then further shortened to the inevitable and stupid "plog".)

Here it is. Bookmark it - visit it - love it.

It's going to be a photo, and maybe a small caption or musing of some kind. I'll try to post every day.
Oh, and it's on wordpress instead of blogger, just to be silly.

*GASP!*

So here is the story of my sleep apnea.

I did my sleep study, the guy who monitored me said I'd need a CPAP for sure.
I went to a respiratory equipment provider and got my CPAP, and they said I had a really severe case of sleep apnea. one of them said it was the worst case she'd ever seen. I'm thinking - oh great, I'm gonna be famous for how little I breathe...
I take the thing home - it looks like a "scentstories", by the way - and the first night, I sleep like a baby. Scratch that. I have babies, I know how they sleep - for 3 hours and they wake up crying. I slept great. Probably the best sleep I've ever had. Although I apparently kept yanking the headgear off because I remember waking up 4 or 5 times to put it back on. The experience of wearing this thing is a bit odd. You know those air hoses at the gas station? Imagine if those had a soft rubber tip, and you stuck it in your nose, and were expected to sleep. You get used to it, though.
So, there is this thing called the apnea/hypopnea index. It's how many times per hour you have an apnea or hypopnea event. An apnea is when you stop breathing altogether for at least 10 seconds, and hypopnea is when your airway is partially obstructed, causing your airflow to drop by at least half. At 5 you are considered to have sleep apnea. at 15 most insurance covers getting a CPAP. at 50 it's considered severe. I scored 129. in 3 hours of sleep, I had over 400 hypopnea events, and I forget how many apnea events. I was neurologically aroused by those events over 200 times in those 3 hours. Let me say that again:
I woke up over 200 times in 3 hours.
At one point my oxygen saturation dropped to 67%.
So the guy woke me up and strapped me into a CPAP, and I had like 14 hypopnea events in the next 3 hours, and my oxygen never got below 90%, and I woke up like 12 times, and 10 of those were in the first 20 minutes of sleep. Get this - My apnea/hypopnea index went down to 6. This means that even on a CPAP at apparently a really high pressure, I've still got minor sleep apnea.
A word on the air pressure: My machine goes from 12 to 20, as far as pressure. Apparently, the numbers mean how many centimeters of water that pressure will displace. Mine's set at 17. Well, now it's set at 12, and I have to take it in to get it set up a little at a time because starting that high would apparently suck for me.
So, every night for the foreseeable future I'm going to have to strap on this weird thing that looks like SCUBA gear, and sleep while it blows high-pressure air in my nose and down my throat. But it's worth it. Sleep is actually restful now. Think about this: I essentially got no rest at all when I slept. I was nearly always either gasping for air or not breathing at all. My oxygen levels were always low, my blood pressure was always elevated, I was at risk for stroke and all kinds of other nasty things. I could sleep for 16 hours and not feel at all rested. I woke up almost every day with a headache. I NEVER entered deep sleep. Now I sleep for 7 hours and feel refreshed and renewed. I no longer wake up and sit in a daze for 2 hours, feeling groggy and wishing I could have gotten more sleep. I actually could have died in my sleep!
I think it's worth it.

CFL SUCKS!

So I went and bought a 6-pack of "100 watt" CFL bulbs. They're actually 26 watts, which is why I got 'em. We're wanting to replace bulbs in some of the oft-used lamps in the house.
Guess what.
CFL SUCKS!
The base of the bulb is too big, and the bulb won't screw in to our torchierelamps. And I'm guessing they won't screw into most other lamps like that, either. So our options are thus:
We use incandescent bulbs, or we use a less bright cfl. Here's some other news about cfl bulbs:

They have all the negatives of fluorescent light, like the bad color rendition, flicker, warm-up time, poor response in cold weather, that sort of thing.
They don't fit in all kinds of fixtures. Not just the torchiere style - our ceiling fan in the living room doesn't have a globe because the CFL in it is too long.
They contain toxic levels of mercury. Yeah - they're also poisonous. You can't just throw them away when they burn out - they have to be disposed of in a facility designed to take care of things like that - and we don't have any of those facilities around here. And when they break, it's toxic cleanup time!
Speaking of burning out - they don't last nearly as long as they say. 3-5 years my ass. I've seen lifespans equating with incandescents, for the most part.

Just as an aside - we actually had to abandon this room for a while tonight - while I was working on this post - because I broke one of those little fuckers trying to put it in a lamp. Great.
CFL SUCKS!

The Sleeper Awakes. A Lot.

I had a sleep study last night. Basically, I went and slept in the hospital with a couple dozen wires glued to my head, and some guy watched me sleep. Halfway thru the night, he woke me up and strapped a CPAP mask to my face, so now I was expected to sleep with a couple dozen wires glued to my head and a tube blowing air into my nose. I slept like a baby. The tech who monitored me told me in the morning that I probably wake up 400-600 times a night. And here I thought I was hard to wake up. So I wound up having what is called a "split night" study, with a normal polysomnograph at the first half, and a CPAP Titration at the second half. I need a lot of pressure, apparently. I know I woke up at 5am and the mask was loose, and every time I breathed out it would fart in my eye - but when I tried to breathe thru my mouth it felt like I was choking. So a fun night. And now I'm gonna wind up wearing a big silly looking mask when I sleep.

There are things.

There are things people do in life that matter.
A man named Pablo is the reason why, when you say the word "Picasso", nobody goes "Which one?" He mattered. His name mattered. It had better. it was 2 miles long. Seriously.
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz Y Picasso.
Seriously.
That's a baby with indecisive parents.

There are things people do in life that don't matter.
Like this guy.

There are things people do in life that make total sense.
Martin Luther King Jr., for example. This is a man who knows what he's doing.

There are things people do in life which make no sense at all.
Like this.

What I'm trying to say is: I'm tired and can't come up with anything funny to post, so I cheated by linking to stuff.

Oh, and check out Mr. Picassohead.

Happy new post day!

So check out my new badass template. I searched the whole world over and found this one, written in spanish or some shit. I like the whole skull theme, so I may keep it a while. of course, this will mean nothing here in a couple months when I change it again, but whatever.

And yes, this qualifies as a new post.

Dear Every tech support place in the world:

If you are ALWAYS experiencing higher than normal call volume - isn't that higher volume your normal call volume? I understand that Sully the tech support guy has an active schedule, but At least just say "we're all busy" instead of "we're busier than we expected and also we're cheap and understaffed even though we're only paying those Pakistani suckers 18 cents an hour."