...adopted.

Not that there's anything wrong with being adopted (we adopted Aidan, in fact), but if I were, I wouldn't have this exceptional gene pool to draw from!  :)

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Get ready for Captchas!

Alright, I'm being forced to switch from simple comment moderation to forcing those of you who would like to comment on my posts to enter a CAPTCHA to actually post.  You know, the things where you have to read the letters/numbers in an image and type them in.  Simple comment moderation was working just fine up until this past week.  Then, out of nowhere, my email has been, quite irritatingly, flooded with comments from Anonymous which read not unlike the following:


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The entire reason I had any moderation set up in the first place was to avoid posts like this, but I didn't realize how annoying it would be to have my BlackBerry ding at me all day long with comments like this.  Thus, you must now prove to a machine that you are not, yourself, a machine, in order to make comments on my blog.


Sorry, but market-bots ruin it for everyone. :P

...being ignored.

Are you guys ignoring me?  :)  j/k

Anyway, I'm gonna keep going with this whole question thing, at least through Christmas.  I'm busy as hell, and I'm sure you all are, too.  But gimme some feedback on these.  I find them hilarious, maybe you don't.  Who knows.

"Let us assume there are two boxes on a table.  In one box, there is a relatively normal turtle; in the other, Adolf Hitler's skull.  You have to select one of these items for your home.  If you select the turtle, you can't give it away and you have to keep it alive for two years; if either of these parameters are not met, you will be find $999 by the state.  If you select Hitler's skull, you are required to display it in a semi-prominent location in your living room for the same amount of time, although you will be paid a stipend of $120 per month for doing so.  Display of the skull must be apolitical.

Which option do you select?"

...stubborn.

I've mentioned before how my family and friends are staunch Republicans who would never agree with anything some liberal socialist pig (my words, not theirs) said.  Every once in a great while I try to tell them how they're not paying attention and, periodically, if a liberal says the sky is blue, they might be telling the truth. Usually, it doesn't work. Healthcare and global warming are the two big points of contention that have been coming up recently, and I'm not going to lecture here on how I feel about either of them, because that's boring and I don't want to start political debate on my blog, because that's not why I'm here.

What I am going to do, however, is post a political cartoon I saw today that made me chuckle and explains my point of view on global warming perfectly.  So, thank you to USA Today and an artist named Joel Pett for this one.

...a horse.

Alright, we are continuing with the questions I've blatantly stolen from one Chuck Klosterman.  Nobody's answered the first one yet, but I'll let it slide because it's the holidays and, also, I don't need to worry myself over my (admittedly low) blog readership. :)  Anyway, here we go:

"Let us assume a fully grown, completely healthy Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while his head is held in place with a thick rope.  He is conscious and standing upright, but otherwise immobile.  And let us assume that - for some reason - every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in less than twenty minutes.  You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots.

Would you attempt to do this?"

...a magician.

I just finished reading an excellent book of essays on pop culture by Chuck Klosterman called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He talks about everything from Paradise City, a Guns N Roses cover band, to Zack Morris, to porn. It's really well written and very funny.

One of his little two or three page interludes between essays involves the 23 questions he asks someone to determine if he “can really love them.”

I intend to post these questions to you, dear reader, because I am interested in hearing your answers. Also, because I'm too lazy to come up with any of my own content around the holidays.

Here is the first:

"Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks - he can pull a rabbit out of a hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades into the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can't learn any more; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he's doing these five tricks with real magic. It's not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the ether and he can move the coin through space. He's legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope.

Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein?"

Note: I wrote this post on my BlackBerry, so let's assume any grammatical errors are due to that and not my writing skills. :)

...homeless.

This gentleman is, but seriously, he's awesome. He goes by the name Mustard, and you can see him below rocking Radiohead's "Creep", which is one of my favorite songs ever.

Mustard sings Creep from Rex Kramer on Vimeo.

…haunted.

I watched a little film entitled Paranormal Activity yesterday.  It’s similar in style (in that it’s “found footage”) to The Blair Witch Project, except that it’s a thousand times better.  Normally I’d critique things like cinematography and score and whatnot, but those things are not present in this film.  There wasn’t even a real script, just a basic formula for each scene, with the actors improvising it. 

The movie follows a couple, Katie and Micah.  Micah brings home a video camera at the beginning of the film, and this is the camera through which we view the entire film.  He’s brought home a camera because Katie is experiencing weird things while she’s asleep.  The movie progresses through three weeks of daytime and nighttime footage, with most of the daytime footage being handheld and most nighttime being from a tripod in the bedroom.  This is the really interesting stuff.

The first night, all that happens in the recording is that the camera picks up a few creaking footsteps on the wood floors, followed by a rather loud running sound.  Nobody wakes up, and nothing else happens.  Night 2, like any other night with no new happenings, is not shown.  On night three, we once again hear the creaking footsteps, and we now see the bedroom door, which is kept open, swing shut a bit, stop, and swing back to the open position.

At this point, I was feeling a little let down.  I had heard this was one of the scariest movies I’d ever see, and a swinging door wasn’t cutting it.  But I stuck around, and if you’re feeling like I was, you should stick around as well.  By the end, I was covering my eyes and peeking through my fingers like I did as a child.  This is a truly frightening movie, and that fear hinges entirely on three things: the acting (which is superb), the effects (believe it or not, they are very important in this movie), and suspension of disbelief.

Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, who play the two leads, are 100% believable.  You’d think they were really a couple, rather than two strangers who found an audition on Craigslist.  Their joy, sadness, anger, and most importantly, fear come through the screen and seem to affect you directly, like you’re there with them, and a part of it.  The rest of the very small cast does a great job as well, but these two really shine.

You wouldn’t think that effects would matter that much in a found footage film.  Blair Witch didn’t have any real effects that I can think of, and it scared me pretty good.  The few effects that are present in PA, however, are very well done.  I’d love to go into it, but I really don’t want to ruin anything for you, and I can almost guarantee that it would.

Finally, as with almost any movie, but even more so here, you need to be willing to suspend disbelief.  Whether or not you believe that this kind of thing could potentially happen, allowing yourself to believe that this is really happening is an absolute must.  To help with this, watch the film in the dark, with the sound up, and DON’T DO ANYTHING ELSE WHILE THE MOVIE IS ON.  I do this all the time.  I do other stuff while I’m watching a movie.  It could be important (homework) or unimportant (just surfing).  But I heard this one was pretty good, so I turned everything else off.

And it scared the shit out of me.

...a musician.

Because, you see, if I got famous, I'd have people stealing my songs to post them on their blogs.  Or, if I was really good, I'd get covered, and the covers would be good enough to post on blogs.  This time the covers are not necessarily in a different genre, but they are simply covers I love.  And if you like the music you hear here, and it's available for sale somewhere (I'll try to provide you links, if possible), go out and buy it. :)


Anyway, per the usual, thoughts (and links) after the playlist (and the break).

...in a flying house.

First off, I've decided, as I've really only been posting once or twice a week lately, to try to do more frequent smaller posts.  There will probably be more music posts, as I love sharing music with people.

I'm running out of free time, see.  Being unemployed with no good prospects after ten months, I've decided that maybe I should try to start something up on my own.  I have some web design experience, so that's the direction I'm going.  I'm throwing together a website at the moment, as convincing others to pay me real money to design one for them would benefit greatly from having one of my own.  This has been taking up a considerable amount of my time, and I hope to have it up soon.  I'll link to it from here, of course.  Wish me luck.

I put in UP from Disney Pixar this morning, having never seen it before.  I figured my kid likes balloons and dogs, and from what I could tell from the trailers, that was essentially what the movie was about.  I come away from the experience with only one thing to say: If you have not yet watched this masterpiece of a film, go buy it right now and take the rest of the day off of work to watch it.  Not only is it far funnier than I expected, but surprisingly (for American-made animation), it made me tear up a bit. Watching Carl and his wife go through their lives (both ups and downs), silent but for a beautiful piece by composer Michael Giacchino, was quite easily the best part of the movie, but the entire thing is brilliantly put together.

Hey, I'm Posting Music!

I love cover songs.  Ask my wife, she usually hates them.  Especially if they're covers of songs she knows and likes.  But I love them anyway, and I often listen to CD's filled with covers when I'm driving with my kid or by myself.  One thing I especially love is the rather difficult art of the cross-genre or off-genre cover.  This is, as you may have guessed, where an artist takes a song from one genre (often rap) and covers it in a completely different style (often folk or piano-pop).  And so, after the break, you will find fourteen off-genre covers I find entertaining.  Enjoy!

...Nintendo.

This past Sunday (November 15th, for those of you keeping count), Nintendo released a new Mario game. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a blast. It is the first straight up Mario game that is playable by up to four people simultaneously. Sure, most of the old school 2D Mario games were two player, but you had to take turns. The new one is a side-scroller that you actually play with your friends.

It turns it into a bit of a free for all. Your characters all physically interact with each other, meaning you can be nice or not so nice to your fellow players. If you want, you can carry your less gaming-inclined friends through a particularly difficult level. Or if you want to, you can toss a shell at them or pop the bubble in which they return to play after dieing while they float over a pit. If you read any of the dozens of reviews of the game out there, you'll be told numerous times that it will ruin friendships. I can totally see it, even though I've only played it with my wife so far, and she hasn't left me over it...yet.

...sitting on a broken comment system any more.

OK. First off, I want to apologize to all the thousands upon thousands of you that I'm sure have been trying to comment since I put up the new template but were unable. I'm always logged in when I check these things, and as such, did not have to attempt the word verification when I was testing comments. Thanks to those of you that were kind enough to mention that you were unable to perform the word verification due to the layout acting funny. Rather than monkey with my HTML, I opted to remove the word verification and require comments to be approved by me. This may chance, as I just realized while visiting Junket Juice that I can have commenting happen in a popup, which might be a better choice. Either way, however, it should work now.


So, sometimes things irritate me. They aren't big enough for me to write an entire post about, but I'd like to put them out there anyway. So here goes:

...Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

I don't remember hearing anything about a GI Joe movie until a good bit after the first Transformers film came out. Which means, and I could be entirely wrong, that it took them far less than two years to create. If true, I can't say I'm surprised. I'm forty-six minutes into a one hundred seventeen minute movie about toys I grew up playing with (hell it's even got a fancy Hasbro logo at the beginning), and I have never wanted to turn it off more.

What better place to start than the beginning. The cold open, if you can call it that in a movie, comes up and what do you see? A horse and buggy outside a castle. The date pops up on the bottom of the screen: 1641. What? Wait, is this the right movie? It said Hasbro earlier. I wonder how many people got up to check that they hadn't taken a wrong turn somewhere...

In 1641 James McCullen, the seriously-elder, was caught by someone or other selling weapons to both sides of a war. That's usually a bad idea, and so they put a red-hot iron mask on his head. And, as an image of torture is exactly the kind of thing we want associated with a "Real American Hero", now seems the most appropriate time to roll the logo. Of course, we're not looking at "Real American Heroes" anymore, as the unit was put together by a group of ten countries. WTF? You don't need to instill a sense of multi-culturalism into my childhood!

...going to burst into flames.

Got a letter in the mail the other day.  An actual letter.  Printed on paper, sent in an envelope with paid postage and everything.  The letter in question was from the Ford Motor Company.  They sent me this letter because they wanted to explain to me that, despite what one might expect, they had, in fact, made a mistake in the design of my 2002 Explorer.  They wanted me to know that they couldn't be 100% confident that after "many years of service" my Explorer wouldn't just start on fire and kill anyone within twenty feet.

Well, Ford Motor Company, just how long is "many years of service"?  Is it eight years?  Do years of only accumulate while I own the vehicle, and reset if I sell it?  I mean, I've only owned it for two years, but prior to that someone else did.  How long will it be until the death-mobile that you've created for me is ignited as if by the flames of hell and begins burning people alive?

...a civil engineer.

Aidan turned two years old today.  It seems like he's been around a good deal longer than that.  Both for all the lovey-dovey feelingsy sentimental reasons and because he just seems like he's a tiny little person walking around.

He has opinions.  I didn't know you could have opinions about stuff when you were 2.  Just the other day, at nap time, we had the following conversation:

"Daddy, I don't like napping in my crib."
"Ok, buddy, would you like to try napping on Mommy and Daddy's bed instead then?"
"Yes."
So, I carry him to our bed, which is downstairs, and turn off the TV, grab his "pullow" and his "bing" and lie down on the bed.  Both of us. I lie there on my own "pullow".  I close my eyes, and he follows suit.  Everything seems to be going smoothly, until about thirty seconds later, when Daddy, who is feeling rather tired, gets a headbutt to the belly.
"Aidan...it's nap time.  Lay down, please, and go to sleep."
"Daddy wake up."

...changing domains already. [updated]

Yep, I've only been around for about 2 weeks, and I'm changing domains already.  I figure I'll work on a custom theme here soon, too.  Sticking with Blogger for hosting for the time being.  Figure I'll wait until I learn how to setup Wordpress on a different host and get that all working before I bother getting one.

Anyway, take a look at your address bar.  With any amount of luck, it says http://www.boxcarinc.com.  Do me a favor and let me know if it doesn't. :P

Update: New theme!  Let me know if you like it!

...Bob the Builder.

This is Aidan.  You may recognize him from my profile pic.  I have no words to describe how awesome it is that my wife was able to snap this, the most perfect of shots, with our shoddy little point and shoot.

BTW, if you steal this picture, I will feed you your own kneecaps.

...out of ideas yet.

Ok, while I'm not yet out of ideas, I'd like to throw this out there before that happens.  I generally browse around teh intarwebs looking for things that I'm happy to not be a part of.  As it turns out, there seems to be a lot of those things.  What's important is that I find things I can actually write a post about.  For a counter example, well, at least I'm not dead.  Sure, I'm glad I'm not dead, but I can't really fill up a whole post about not being dead. 

So I figure there's probably a number of things you guys are happy to not be a part of that I've not yet thought of.  If there is, leave me a post here and maybe I'll use it (with credit to you, of course :).  Hell, if I use your idea and you have a blog of your own, I'll even be sure to link to it from my post.  So lets get those think machines goin'. 

Another thought I had was if there would be any interest in hearing (reading) my thoughts as they happen while I watch certain movies.  I figured I'll give it a shot later today or tomorrow with GI Joe, which I've heard is pretty horrible.  We'll see how that one goes.  If you can think of any movies that are either really good or pretty horrible that you'd like to hear my thoughts on while I watch it, you can post those, too. 

Look forward to hearing your ideas!  Now I'm gonna go watch last night's series premier of V.  It looks pretty good, and it stars Elizabeth Mitchell, who you may remember as Juliet from LOST.  Juliet has quickly become one of my favorite characters on LOST, mainly due to her stellar performances in the last two seasons. 

Anyway, off to watch some fancy moving pictures.

...throwing my money away.

Oh no.  People are actually gonna buy this.  This makes my brain hurt a little bit... Ok Mike, pull it together.  You can do this.  It's not THAT stupid.  Somebody might have an actual reason to buy it.  Just give it a shot; you're just talking about the thing, after all.

Ok, so a company called Peek has released the Twitter Peek.  "What's the Twitter Peek?" you ask.  Well, if you must know, it's a phone.  That doesn't do anything but Twitter.

...the only blog out there.

So, I read a lot of other blogs, since posting here, while fun, doesn't really take up that much of my time. And, among all those other blogs, there are a few that I frequent because I am either so engrossed in the subject matter or they are simply that good. Here's a few of each:

I'm sure most everybody knows about it, but Joystiq is the place I go for anything video game related.

Some people hear "mashups" and think mixing the Google Maps and Facebook API's. I hear "mashups" and I think mixing Nirvana and Rick Astley. Now, if you liked that, head over here. If you didn't like it, I might have to hit you. In the face.

Do you flinch every time an almond nears your mouth? Do you find it difficult to be in a bar where they serve peanuts? Do you have nightmares about Mr. Peanut? You could be suffering the effects of Post-Traumatic Nut Disorder. See your physician immediately. Then read the rest of Junket's blog, cause it's just as good.

Like food? I do! Here's a blog full of spicy recipes. Make them! Eat them! Tasty!

I think that's all for now. Get a move on, there's good reading to be had!

Hey I'm posting music!

Just a little list of ten songs that make me think of my wife. :)

...posting random links.

My brain is feeling a bit off today.  So, rather than try to come up with something to post about, here's some more links that I thought you should see.

Star Wars Remake (Well, kind of...)
If you haven't heard of dooce.com, I'm sorry.  Best blog I've read.
He's not laid off any more, but he's still funny.
Gonna see this every time now...

Couple of videos after the break.

It's Halloween!

It's Halloween!  My favorite holiday, hands down.  Normally, I'd be having a party tonight, but as I live at my parents house this year, that's not going to happen.  Diane and I went out to the bar last night with a couple of friends.  As we're old, we started fairly early, around eight, and ended around midnight.  The real crazies didn't even start showing up until about ten-thirty.  One way or another, it's my favorite holiday.

I love it because you don't have to be yourself.  A lot of people out there aren't happy with themselves, and this gives them a day (or a weekend) when they can dress like someone else, and be someone else, and it's ok.  It's expected, even.  And even if you love yourself, and you are totally happy with your life, and you wouldn't change anything for the world, it's still fun to be someone else, isn't it?  And maybe you really, really like Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Battlestar Galactica, or some other show that you'd be shunned for liking as much as you do.  Halloween lets you dress up as your favorite character, because God knows there's nothing else you'd rather do, and do it in public without getting publicly ridiculed.

...Keith Desserich.

I know I've generally tried to inject a little humor in each of my previous posts, but I'm laying off of that today.  I have a two year old son named Aidan.  He is, I swear to you, the best kid in the world.  I have the uncommon (for a father) privilege of having been able to stay home with him every day for the last nine months, since I lost my job.  It's great.  I love it.

But, just recently, I've been wondering if I don't take it for granted.  For the first few months of our days together, we'd spend most of the day playing with cars, or his Word World animals, or just running around the house.  It used to be I could just sit and watch him eat his food and I'd be perfectly happy.  And I just realized that we don't do as much of that stuff anymore.  We still do.  I get down on the floor with him for at least a half an hour every day, and we'll play with his Bob the Builder toys, or his Little People toys, or we'll just wrestle around and tickle and jump on the bed.  But a half an hour is a big change from most of the day.  And I wonder why that is.  And it makes me feel a little bit sad and a little bit like I'm being a bad father.

...so easily offended.

So, there's a new DirecTV ad out.  You know the ones.  They take a clip from a popular movie and hire one of the actors to record some new footage talking about how great DirecTV is (I'm anti-satellite, myself).  Then they adjust the newly recorded footage so that it looks and sounds like it's coming right out of the movie by hitting it with a crapload of magic.  They've done Captain Kirk, Hellboy, Mini-Me, Ellen Ripley, and the T-1000, to name a few.  So when I heard there was one featuring David Spade as Richard Hayden in Tommy Boy, I was intrigued.

See, there really isn't a memorable scene from Tommy Boy that doesn't involve Chris Farley.  Chris Farley, as most of the US population is (hopefully) aware, died in 1997.  It was a sad day when the news broke.  I was a junior in high school.  Numerous people at my school wore black that day.  Chris was a hero to them.  These were the kids that had few friends, and fewer real ones.  I did not wear black that day.  It wasn't because I didn't like Chris Farley.  He was an incredibly funny, if slightly manic, actor and comedian.  I loved most of his work.  Matt Foley, who, if you recall, lived in a van down by the river, is one of my favorite SNL characters ever.  Plus, the guy grew up in Madison, which happens to be the capitol of my home state, and less than two hours from where I've lived most of my life.  He was a hometown boy, and he made good.

...posting random links. Ok, I lied.

Just some stuff I want to do my part to spread around.

How CSI works.
Time travel is dangerous.  Take this.
Bag check.
The Glass Tweet.
Like mashups?
Sweetness.

Alright, I think that's it for now.

EDIT: Last minute addition. So awesome it couldn't wait.

...a person of Walmart.

Don't get me wrong.  I shop at Walmart.  It's not so much because I want to, but more because it's the only megastore nearby.  My stupid little town doesn't have a Target.  I do have a Sears Grand nearby, but it's just Kmart with a few extra appliances.  Otherwise, I have a Kohl's department store which is fine if I need clearance jeans or clearance winter coats or clearance t-shirts, but not so great if I want anything electronic that's not a kitchen appliance.  Oh, and let's not forget Shopko.  I'm pretty sure mine is one of the three Shopko's left around the country.  Mine doesn't even have the updated logo that's supposed to make you feel like Shopko is fancy, when in reality, it's just another Kmart.

Anyway, if you head over to peopleofwalmart.com, you'll see an abundance of "Walmart Creatures" as the site refers to them.  These are people who, through their own poor choices, are out in public, at Walmart, looking like...well...um...click through for a few examples.

...Nathan Drake.

I mean after the events of the first game, you'd think he'd stop accepting invitations to come along on expeditions that will likely involve him leaping blindly off ledges, having shoot-outs atop a moving train, or hiding from a tank on the rooftops of a village, blasting it with rocket launchers dropped by your fallen enemies.  Regardless of my opinions on the matter, Mr. Drake has returned, courtesy of Naughty Dog, and he's shooting for Game of the Year this time.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the best game that I have played on my PS3. I know that's likely to draw some flak, but I can't deny it.  I simply have not had as much fun, or been so drawn in, playing a game in recent memory. The original Uncharted was a great game, and the sequel improves on it in just about every way.

...Peter Sars... wait, this is awesome!

I've decided I should try to have some regular weekly post kind of things.  Thereby, I introduce my weekly this is awesome post.

I don't know how much more awesome this could be, and I'm not sure how much better this could have been cast, but we've finally got a promotional still from the A-Team movie!

From left to right you're looking at Bradly Cooper as Templeton Peck aka Faceman, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as B.A. Baracus, Sharlto Copley as "Howling Mad" Murdock, and Liam Neeson as John "Hannibal" Smith.

As it turns out, Congress is currently working on a bill that will actually disallow you from not loving this movie.  It's just going to be that awesome.

Thanks to Movie Line (http://www.movieline.com/2009/10/buzz-break-10-23.php)

...William Easton.

I know Saw VI hasn't been getting the greatest reviews.  Rotten Tomatoes has it at 43% as I write this, and on Metacritic it's sitting at a sad little 34%.  Critics tend to be harder on horror movies than necessary, I think.  A lot of them don't understand where horror fans are coming from.  When we go to see a Friday the 13th movie, we aren't expecting it to have an ultra-compelling story.  We aren't expecting Jason to have some kind of tender moment as he's killing the last victim.  We go to a slasher movie to see murders, we go to a monster movie to see monsters, and we go to a torture-porn movie to see people put in situations that cause them pain or death, and slowly.  Blood and gore are usually an important part of this, although some things (ie ghost movies) can be very effective without them.  If the gory murders/monsters/torture are good enough, the story can make less sense and we won't mind that much.

So, was the torture:story ratio good enough in Saw VI?  I think so.  William Easton is a high-ranking executive at a health insurance company.  It seems that he's actually responsible for creating an algorithm that looks at a potential customer's health history and determines the likelihood of their dying from something under coverage.  If the probability is low enough, coverage is considered.  Maybe he should have paid more attention to whose coverage he was denying.  I'll give you a clue: it's Jigsaw.

...lacking for things to do yet.

So, while I sit here not being employed, I'm taking classes online.  Thought I'd finish my degree which, by my last count, is about five years overdue.  I just had a final today, and I start another session of school on Sunday.  I get a couple days to not think about it.  Not that I spend all day thinking about it anyway, as it's been far too easy so far.

I almost feel like I should be worried I'm wasting my time, since I certainly don't feel like I'm learning a heck of a lot, and my classes, so far, have been easier than a broke meth addict you wave a fiver at.  I guess that on some level, it's not really important that I learn a lot, since it's not that I'm not learning because it goes over my head.  My classes are simply telling me things I already know.  What's important is that I get myself that piece of paper that says I can learn things.  Once I have that, I can probably get a job somewhere.

So I have a lot of spare time.  I spend a good deal of it looking for jobs (online, because I have Aidan all day).  When he naps, I either watch a movie or play video games.  It's really the only time that I get to do these things, as I play violent games that I don't want him watching and I watch scary movies that I don't think he'd care for.

Tomorrow, I'm gonna take him to the in-laws and go see Saw VI.  I've been looking forward to this for a year, since the last one came out.  And then tomorrow night my wife and I have a date.  I don't know what we're gonna do yet.  I don't plan things very well.  I imagine we'll do dinner and a movie.  Maybe she wants to see Zombieland.  That would make my day. :D

Oh, and I just got Guitar Hero Van Halen in the mail (which I got for free, thank you).  Hope it doesn't suck.

...in retail.

I've held a lot of jobs. My longest tenure, sadly, is with Walgreen's. If I do a bit of math real quick here...I can tell you that I've spent approximately 1.14 years of my life working at a Walgreen's store. In contrast, I've spent maybe 7.5 years sleeping, 1.19 years eating, around 2.5 days watching Heroes (it's good again this season!), 64,608 hours thinking about my wife, and 1,026,720 minutes worrying, in some capacity, about my son. Sorry, the math kinda took over there for a second.

The point I was getting too was this: that's a long time to spend in a retail pharmacy. A lot of it was spent wandering, looking for something to do, or something to pretend to be doing. About 20% of it was spent working third shift, while my wife and son were at home sleeping (this accounts for a small portion of the 64 thousand hours and one million minutes). This was the worst of it.

The best of it, believe it or not, was the customers. Those of you that know me know that that's a funny thing for me to say. And while I was dealing with them, I hated life. But now that I look back, some of them were just crazy enough to be funny.

There was Victor. Possibly paranoid schizophrenic. He would come into the store and literally talk your ear off for hours. Hours! He'd follow a certain few employees around the store if he found them working and talk about how he knew Michael Jordan, about how he was moving, and about how he knew Michael Jordan. Then he'd call you Michael Jordan and ask you to help him move.

There was Old Man Eyebrows. He was a gruff, grumpy, incredibly old man with eyebrows like wings. He'd yell at you about something that happened across the street at the competition. Actually yell, like he was mad at you about it. After he'd finished yelling at you, he'd buy a five pack of Muriel Magnum cigars and go about his business of smelling like cigars for the rest of the day.

And then, my favorite of all time, there was the old Russian lady. I only ever saw here one time. It was 2003, I believe. Easter had come and gone, and all of our Easter candy was down to 75% off. Except the Easter M&M's that we'd horribly over-ordered. Those were 2 cases of 12 1lb. bags for $5. We had pallets of them. Not sure what happened there. Anyway, this tiny, frail, old Russian lady comes in and fills a cart until it is literally overflowing with Easter candy, and then fills another one most of the way full. She checks out, and the whole thing comes to under fifty bucks. As she is walking out of the store with her second cart, she turns around, as if to address the entire store, and yells, at the top of her lungs, "This would never happen in Russia!", and turns to leave.

Am I glad I'm not in retail anymore? Absolutely. The hours sucked, the pay sucked (although it was better than I'm making now), and most of the people sucked. But there were some gems of people thrown in the mix, and they always made my day.

...old.

So, I don't work. I haven't since I got bent over by the economy. It's not like I was making a crapload of money anyway. But now I'm not making any. "What do you do, then?" you might ask. I live in my parents basement and watch my son, while my wife goes to work.

Her job is pretty much golden, as is has to do with old-folks homes, aka long term care facilities. She helps get things done when the customers (ie the homes) need them done. You might call her a facilitator. Or, less possible-espionage-implying yet meaning exactly the same thing, an account representative. Her industry is anticipating something called the "Silver Wave".

See, for all you youngin's out there, there are these people called baby-boomers. They are the people that were born in the aftermath of WWII, when all the wives were really, really happy that their husbands came home alive. I guess this joy that wives were feeling lasted far longer than any joy I have ever experienced, as Boomers are, at least by the US Census Bureau, anyone born between '46 and '64. That's an awful long time to be happy about something.

Anyway, the baby boomers are getting older. The first ones (63 years old by my count) are starting to enter long term care. As more of these Boomers enter homes, there's going to be a serious increase in the number of people in homes. This is the Silver Wave. Thus, my wife's job is safe.

So, I don't work. I thought, as I've managed to get a whopping 3 interviews since February, that I'd try another route. I'll give blogging a shot. I make no promises about the quality, the entertainment value, or the regularity of this blog. But I'd like to think I can talk about a wide variety of things for length enough to fill a blog post. So come back.