Ultranormal

  • Digging In The Dirt – For a Decade?

    Why didn’t anyone tell me Peter Gabriel released a new album? He did, and it’s been ordered. It’ll show up with my copy of My Neighbor Totoro sometime in December. Thankfully, you can download the whole album to “preview” it. It’s great. It’s not quite worth the decade it’s taken to get out, and he gets one black mark for including the song I Grieve from the City of Angels soundtrack on it. I love the song, but come on, the album averages out to one song per year since Us came out. I know the man’s been busy greying, but jeez. Really, the album’s beautiful. It’s more melancholy than Us. For some reason, it reminds me of the Birdy soundtrack more than anything else, and I can’t really place why.

    If you’ve got a fast connection, go get it right now (it’s a 69mb download, so you modem folks are SOL)!

  • Borderless

    Not everything needs borders and a background color.

  • Add Another To The No-No List

    My boss took us all to Legal Seafood in Tyson’s for lunch today. It was awesome. Now, you remember me telling you about my allergy to shrimp and later to crab (maybe I didn’t tell you, because I can’t find the post now)? Well, you can add scallops to that list. I got the assorted grill, which was this amazing sample of three grilled scallops, and three small fillets of salmon, arctic char and tuna. I loved it. But now, I have that same headache I had when I got crab at Red Lobster, and am feeling nauseous. Why me?! I love shrimp; I love crab; I love scallops. What’s next, chocolate?!

  • How Did I Miss Them?

    Another gift from a friend, I got Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, and wow. This is an amazing album. It came out in 1991, but sounds like it could have come out yesterday. It sounds fresh and new, and combines all of my favorite bands. It sounds at times like Phish, Moby, Massive Attack and well, it sounds like everything. A great trippy happy groove album to keep you smiling. Check it out.

  • John Never Said It Would Be This Fun!

    Since I bought my PlayStation 2, I’ve bought just one game, Jak and Daxter. I’ve rented half a dozen now, and have found what will probably be the next member of my permanent collection: Madden 2003. Other than some unfortunate choice of music with profanity in it in the menus, the game is great. The franchise mode is still there (I’ve been playing the Madden series since Madden 1995 on my old 486), only improved greatly with trickier trades. My favorite part though is the improved play designer. It’s way too much fun. I created a formation yesterday with five wide receivers, lined up two to the strong side, and three to the right. The options are amazing, and you can practice the play with any offensive and defensive unit you want. It’s great, totally worth the purchase price. I think next I’ll create a whole playbook of I formation plays with four wideouts. Yes, indeed, the fun never ends.

  • The Most Beautiful Mirror

    There have been a lot of great shots at the Mirror Project, but this is by far my favorite.

  • The Running Play

    Wow. I never thought fajitas could have such a punch. We went to our local Mexican chain last night before my sister’s play (which I’ll talk about later). I got the lovely and tasty chicken and steak fajitas. Everything was fine until we were on the way back to my parents’ house. The pain in my belt area was like a kick from a small child. It gravitated south until I figured I needed to get back to their house, and more specifically their toilet, a little faster. Needless to say, I was incapacitated for the rest of the evening, and most of this morning. I think I’m better now, but I’m not trying fate. It’s rice and maybe chicken for me tonight.

    Now, on to the play. It was the Sterling Playhouse’s One Act Play Festival, with (I think) all the plays written by members of the playhouse. My sister was fine, better than the rest of the people in the play she was in, and I’m being completely objective here. They put these little skits (they definitely didn’t rise to the level of a one-act play) on in a little rotunda outdoors, a decent distance from their audience without any sound amplification. We were in the fourth row, and I had a hard time hearing most of the actors. I won’t even go into the actual material, because it’s better to say nothing at all sometimes. I had three more paragraphs here I just deleted because I’m not feeling mean today. Support your local theater group – they need all the help they can get.

  • Through a Glass Darko

    I just finished watching Donnie Darko. I kept thinking of Harvey throughout the film. If you haven’t seen it, go rent the DVD right now. This is an intense moving film. It’s dark, beautifully acted and breathtaking to watch. Jake Gyllenhaal (sorry, I know I botched that, but am too ready for bed to go check the correct spelling) did a marvelous job keeping me guessing throughout. Is he crazy? Is Frank real? What is going on?

    I didn’t even really know until I watched some of the deleted scenes; I’m kind of sad that I now know. The movie is better as the journey than the destination. I loved the subtle late-Eighties touches: the music, the clothes (button-fly jeans… oh yes), the references to Back to the Future, the Halloween Costumes (RonaldMania was my favorite). It was so well done, I want to watch it again just for nuance and those little things I missed the first time around.

    Back to the Harvey connection. This movie felt like my generation’s Harvery. We have society’s reaction to the mentally ill, and the societal twist. This is Harvery for the cynical Prozac popping Ridalin kids from the Eighties. This is our search for what’s real and true in a world of 30-second issues, fallen idols and missing authority figures. It’s a great film, and one that may keep me up till the wee hours of the morning thinking about it… and don’t watch the deleted scenes if you want to interpret the meaning of the film for yourself.

  • Jaguars Have Spots

    I feel the need for a redesign. Yes, I’ve said it before, but this time I mean it. I put Movable Type back on the Powerbook, and started last night while watching Big Brother. I’m not starting with the main site this time, but with the Geekery, and a new section that will move all the pics linked to from Max’s page to a family photo album. I never update Max’s blog, which is still hosted at Blogger, and heck, I haven’t uploaded any new pics in a while. So, I’m going to try to re-organize what’s up there now into “albums” (really just Movable Type categories), with each picture as a separate entry in the “album”. That way, it’ll be easier to add descriptions and keep them all organized. And now that I have PhotoShop 7 on the Powerbook along with iPhoto (which doesn’t even try to compress jpg’s on export… grrr), it’ll make all this organizing, exporting, uploading, etc a little easier. It took me two weeks of after-work-tv-viewing to complete my first Movable Type design for this page… hopefully it won’t take that long for this.

    Which brings me to my next topic, OS X. Yes, I’ve talked about it before too, but I just want to talk about it some more. I upgraded to Jaguar a little while ago (which is how my first Movable Type installation got nuked), and am having a lot of fun with it. I forget sometimes about the Unix underpinnings of OS X. But, last night while installing Movable Type, I was going to create an alias in my Documents folder to the Apache Documents and CGI-Executables folders. I was already in Terminal, so I decided to try symlinking to them. What do you know! The aliases in OS X are actually symlinks. They worked beautifully and well, it’s just cool. It took me all of five minutes once I had everything unzipped to install everything, chmod it, and get started. Now, I could have installed AOLserver, Perl and Movable Type on my old Dell laptop running Windows 2000, but that would have taken a good long time, and I still wouldn’t be able to properly symlink anything or use the terminal to do my normal *nix type stuff. With OS X, I have tar, chmod, vi, etc all right there installed on the system with a beautiful user-friendly system on top of it. I can use my new copy of AOL, Mozilla and PhotoShop and still use vi, ls, ln, etc. Heck, once fink has a stable version for 10.2, I’ll have ncftp, xemacs and a host of my other favorite *nix tools.

    OS X has, for good or bad, slightly weaned me from Linux. I was in love with my RedHat Uber-Box until I got OS X. Now, I log into the Linux box from OS X and do what I need to do and then get off. It’s servicable, does what it’s supposed to and I don’t have to worry about it crashing, which is really what I need Linux for. I don’t feel the need for the perfect Linux desktop now. Am I going to hell for that?

  • Toke On This!

    I’ve been thinking about the drunk morons at the Redskins game that I wrote about yesterday. It brings to mind these conversations I used to have with my friend Jim about pot, and how he couldn’t believe it wasn’t legalized. This may sound blasphemous for an guy who lives on the East Coast to say, but you have to remember I’m from Arizona, the state crazy enough to legalize medical marijuana along with California. Why isn’t pot legal?

    I don’t smoke pot. I never have. I don’t drink. I never have. I don’t smoke cigarettes. I never have. I have never taken narcotics that weren’t prescribed to me. I personally don’t get the attraction to making myself dumber than I am. That said, why is pot illegal and alchohol and tobacco aren’t? The long term effects of pot are equivalent to the other two. The personality changes in a pot smoker are a lot less radical than someone who’s drunk. I’d much rather go to a football game with a bunch of stoners than a bunch of drunks. Drunks fight. They’re obnoxious and have a habit of vomitting on themselves. They get belligerent and hostile, or weepy, or overly friendly. They lost inhibitions (which leads to the rest of the stuff already listed). I don’t think anyone ever got married or an unfortunate tatoo after smoking a joint.

    I don’t understand the hypocrisy. The critics point to pot as a gateway drug. I don’t agree with their logic. Pot’s status as an illegal substance is what I think merits its gateway status. It’s a gateway drug because people who use it often have to deal with folks who are into or deal stronger and more illicit substances. Alchohol is a gateway to chee-tos and pizza because it’s sold in grocery stores, bars, quick stops and gas stations. Alchohol and tobacco kill far more people than pot ever will, and cost this country billions in healthcare.

    So, let’s make the hard choice, either people are adult enough to control themselves with pot, tobacco and alchohol, or all of them should be illegal. They’re all addictive to a degree, all cause health problems, and are all pretty much equal in their damage. Pick… I’ll be happy either way. If there were no more drunk jackasses at sporting events, I might go to more of them. If I didn’t have to worry about second hand smoke in bars, I might go see more live music. People will die in car accidents for reasons other than intoxicated drivers. If people could buy pot in stores, the dosage of THC were regulated and we could charge taxes, I doubt we’d have a budget deficit. We could afford to keep school music, art and physical education. I just don’t get it. Am I missing something? Am I wrong?