Disjointed Digression

I wandered over to dubious quality well as much as one can wander in cyberspace. But I digress… Where I came across this cool video. It looks like these kids have been playing too much Prince of Persia and/or watching too many Jackie Chan movies. Actually this activity (I don’t quite think its a sport yet) is called either free running or Parkour. I’ve seen a little bit of it before in a few commercials (a kia or scion ad I think) and every time I see someone doing something like this it amazes me. The video I linked above is about 8 minutes long and pretty amazing throughout.

A photo of Free Running that I found over at screwgravity.com not related to the video link above.

This past weekend I went to Wizard World in Dallas. It’s a fairly big comic book convention. The big name stars that were at the convention were Sean Astin famous for Lord of the Rings, Ron Perlman most recently famous for Hellboy, and Summer Glau of Firefly and Serenity. I got to see Ron Perlman and Summer Glau, but I didn’t feel like paying to get their autographs. As for Sean Astin, To get to see him you had to wait in a separate line and you might get a ticket to see him. Honestly, I didn’t want to see him anyway. There is a large “showroom” where everything a fanboy would want would be on sale. I, of course wound up spending too much money buying things that I have actually wanted for a while. For example I picked up an American McGee’s Alice Cheshire Cat statue. I also bought a Maxx statue.

That was on Saturday. On Sunday, Candy took me to the Race for the Cure where we walked the course and got tired for a good cause. Then Candy took me to the Settlement Home for Children Annual charity Garage Sale. Which was payback for me taking her to the comic book convention. So in the two days of the weekend, we walked more than we have in a long time.

Well, I’ve grabbed a copy of flock. Because I’m a nerd and I like trying out different web browsers (I also grabbed Opera 9 to try it out).  Flock is aimed at people who blog and use social websites such as flikr and del.icio.us
One of the interesting things about flock is that it has a little button (a quill icon) that lets you blog form right inside the browser.  Which is what I’m doing now.  So far it seems kind of neat, but is lacking a few things. No spell check is the first thing I noticed.  And I’m not too sure how you add an image.
Doing a little research I’ve found “The Shelf” Which is “a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later.”

Let’s test that out.

Ok, I drug that picture into the shelf and then into the blog window… kinda cool.

Here is a screenshot that is also a link to a review of flock

I’ll play around with it more, but so far it looks kinda cool. 

Just so you know the flock you can download now is a developer version, so it Will have bugs.

Time magazine online (is it still considered a magazine if its online?) has a really good double interview with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon (linky). Joss Whedon is the creator behind Firefly and Buffy among other things. Neil Gaiman is best known for the Sandman comic book series and has written quite a few novels.
Of course both creators have movies coming out on Sept 30th. Wedon has Serenity and Gaiman has Mirrormask
The Time interviewer comments on this…
“TIME: That’s exactly the simile I was looking for. So you guys both have movies coming out on September 30th.”
and I love Neil’s response
“NG: It will be National Geek Day. ”
There are a ton of great quotes in this interview, I would recommend reading it all the way through, especially if you are fan of either of the two creators.

As some of you may know my buddy Beav is like my media barometer. Sometimes I listen to him (Firefly, Ong Bak) sometimes I don’t (Buffy, Lost). He asked me if I had been watching Diggnation, or Systm since I likedthebroken. The common component in all of these things is Kevin Rose who used to be on The Screen Savers with his “dark tips” that were slightly shady sometimes. But I digress…
Diggnation is where Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht sit and read the top headlines from digg.com. They describe digg.com as a social news site, which I can kinda see. Their comments are pretty funny. I’m only about 1/2 way through the back episodes but I’m enjoying it. They have videos and podcasts as well. Of course the reason I’m checking it out is because Beav described it as “Beavis and Butthead mixed with slashdot.” I think that’s a good description, not as asinine as B&B but funny. If you like nerdy stuff, actually its not all nerd stuff, check out diggnation.com and watch the videos, or listen to the podcasts.

Shirts
That’s right more goofy shirts

and…

I think it’s official… I’m weird.
Dictionary.com defines weird as “Of a strikingly odd or unusual character; strange.” I really think that applies.
A little background… A day or so ago I was flipping through channels and saw something about sloths (tree sloths three toed I think) on Animal Planet.
“I’m the human sloth!” I proclaimed “I have the loafing powers of ten men! I was bitten by a radioactive sloth as a young man.” For some reason I started thinking about sloths again today (maybe it was because I was lying in bed doing nothing, moving a few inches an hour…) and I began to wonder… Do sloths do EVERYTHING slow? You know what I’m talking about.. Hot sloth on sloth action!
I’m going out on a limb and saying sloths are slow fuckers.
To quote George Carlin “These are the types of thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools”.

In my wanderings around the net, I have come across some t-shirts that make me laugh. As you may or may not know I have the Jesus is F’in Metal shirt

I found a few others that I want and/or make me laugh…

Then there are the offensive ones from Tshirt hell…

I could go on for a while… I think you get the idea, I’m weird and like weird t-shirts…

Todays Moral: You can’t be moral without getting oral.

For those of you that read my missive about the war protestors, you might remember what it said. For those that didn’t, sorry you won’t get to read it. I have decided to remove it from the site, because to be quite frank, I’m tired of hearing about it. If you want my opinion on the war here it is: We should have removed Sadam from power in ’91, but since we have troops there already, let’s wrap this up as soon as possible and bring the troops home so they can get ready to fight off the Russian-Chinese attack coming over the north pole.

Now on to other tidbits…
Candy and I watched Wonderfalls the complete season including the 11 un-aired episodes. Most likely you have not heard of this quirky comedy that is in the same (although not as foul mouthed) vein as Dead Like Me. It’s a great show, that in my opinion should not have been cancelled, I strongly recommend you watch it. But I digress… Near the end of the series Jewel Staite of Firefly fame makes an appearance for about 4 episodes. I saw her and said “Hey, it’s the girl from Firefly!” And then got a little bummed because she portrays the opposite type of character on Wonderfalls than she does on Firefly. Which means that on Wonderfalls she’s a Bitch (yes with a capital B). Before she showed up on the show I had convinced Candy to watch Firefly with me. She’s still going to watch it, but now she has a preconceived notion that one character is a Bitch. I’ve tried to dissuade her from that, having seen Firefly and knowing the true nature of the character. But Candy seems to be having none of that. Which is just her way of joking with me about it, since she (unlike some people out there) can tell the difference between and actor/actress and they roles they play. But I still think that she harbors some of those feelings deep down. I know I did. When I saw the actress on Wonderfalls, I was used to seeing her play a nice upbeat happy go lucky character then seeing her as a Bitch, it kinda upset me a bit. Of course it’s all emotions attached to non-real people in fictional settings, so ultimately it means nothing, but I think that most people do the same thing: see an actor/actress in a role and let that role determine how they feel about said actor/actress. Now I’m really digressing.

That tidbit lasted so long, I’m only going to throw one more in. I read on a few news sites that Garth Brooks now has an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart. Meaning he will only sell his music through them (apparently). All I can say about this is that He knows where his fans shop.

I have been converted. A few months ago I scoffed at Beav’s fanaticism about Firefly and Serenity.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has been in the news quite a bit lately and today it has been announced that the ESRB (Electronic Software Rating Board) I changing it’s rating of GTA:SA from “Mature 17+ (M) to Adults Only 18+ (AO)”

At about 12:15 I’m dead asleep. I should be, I’m trying to get back into my sleep during the day schedule, so I can do my 12 hours of work on Tuesday night. I’m awoken by Zaida going nuts. Someone is at the door. I toss on some clothes and look through the peephole. I see a brown sleeve. I am here to tell you boys and girls Santa Claus no longer wears red and black, he wears UPS brown! The UPS guy had brought my new laptop. A Dell Inspiron 9300 (< --link to the specs for the nerds out there).

I’m pretty psyched about my new laptop. I got World of Warcraft on there and played for a minute or two in widescreen. Very sweet!!

Then I had to run errands. I have gotten fairly shaggy so I went to the local barber shop and got shorn. When Candy called and asked if I had gotten my hair cut, I told her I forgot, that way when she gets home she will be surprised. But I digress…
I also had to get a blank video tape so I could record Hell’s Kitchen for Candy. I swung by Walgreens and grabbed a tape. I decided to be nice and let a lady with two kids go ahead of me. It turns out the older kid was going to by her stuff with her money (all change of course.) And she had to go back and get something. While she went back, the mother realized that there were about 3 other people behind me, so she paid, then started to get her stuff up to be checked out. She had about 15 things multiple coupons and questions. What I thought was going to be a ten minute stop, turned into about thirty. I got home and had to re-wire the TV/VCR/Cable box. But I think I’ve gotten it set up and recording properly. (I know I should have a DVR or TiVO, but, remember, I haven’t watched TV in a few years, so I really had no need for one, and Candy wasn’t really into technology like that).
So there you have it a day off in my world.

P.S. Hopefully soon I will see Batman Begins, I really want to… but the forces of evil are conspiring against me.