I refuse to let this site die

With Cowboylaw working 90 hours a week, and the Midge trying to get his PhD, the responsibility of keeping this site alive has fallen squarely upon my shoulders. But rest easy, blog fans! I will answer the call, by posting random thoughts and stupid Videos of the Week, like this one!

If there was ever any doubt about Bo Jackson's abilities in Tecmo Super Bowl, let them be forever squashed by this video:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

I will return soon with more random brain diarrhea. Until then, keep one foot in the gutter, and one fist in the gold.

Electronic Entertainment Expo 2009

I'm gonna be at E3 this coming week, so the rest of you are gonna have to step up and hold down the blog fort while I'm gone. Midge, HCP, Cowboylaw ... I'm looking at YOU! Who will step up and end this long streak of Bling blog dominance?

Video of the Week -- Carlton, Breakin' and Poppin'

I don't know what I can add to this, so let's just roll the tape:



Thug life.

Don't buy an old house.

I've had it with my house. It's about 30+ years old, and something is ALWAYS going wrong with it. When I got back from vacation on Sunday night, there was a problem with the circuit breaker box. One of the switches wouldn't stay on, so a part of my house has no power. Apparently, the box is out of date, as the company who made it has been out of business for a long time, and replacement parts are no longer made. So, I have an electrician coming this afternoon and I'm guessing he'll have to replace it (which will be around $3,000, IF I'm lucky).

Then, last night around 2:00 a.m., my girlfriend woke me up to tell me she heard a loud noise in the front yard. Now, she's paranoid, and does this from time to time, and it's usually nothing. It's almost become a routine: I get out of bed, (sometimes with my gun, if I've been playing too much Call of Duty), walk around the house, and find nothing. But this time, she was awake and in the living room, and when the noise happened, both of our cats woke up and ran away scared. So, I got up (sans gun), turned on the porch light, and found that a huge chunk of one of my trees had collapsed. Here it was this morning:


Luckily, it didn't hit my roof or break any windows. There was a thunderstorm last night, but it was probably due to the fact that the tree is in rough shape. Multiple professional feedings haven't helped, and it's probably on it's last legs, so to speak. So, my morning has been spent breaking the tree apart and dragging it to the curb.


As if that wasn't enough, my afternoon will probably be spent bending over and 'accepting' a new circuit breaker box. Guess it's back to the pharmacy for more lube...

UPDATE: Electrical repairs only cost $270. Hoping it holds up.

Video of the Week -- 'Oldboy'

You people really grind my gears. I've been screaming 'SEE OLDBOY!' from the rooftops for years now, but some of you still haven't. It's on IFC every other week, and has been on DVD and Blu-Ray for a while. Still, too many of you haven't taken the two hours to witness its brilliance. Well, here's a trailer, so you can see what you've been missing:



And here's a clip, from what I think is one of the greatest fight scenes in years. Yes, it's all one take.



What are you waiting for? SEE IT NOW, YOU MORONS!

Conference call hell

Have you ever been on a two-and-a-half-day conference call? I'm about to, and I'm wondering which level of Dante's Inferno I've stepped into. Granted, it could be worse ... I could be in San Fran with the rest of my co-workers, trapped in that room, so there's that. I can at least open my office window and get some fresh air. However, they're two hours behind me, and so I'll be on the call until 8:00 each night, IF I'm lucky.

There is light at the end of the tunnel though. The reason I didn't go out to corporate for this quarterly meeting is because I'm taking some vacation, and am flying to Seattle late Wednesday night to see some old friends. I would've only been in SF for 24 hours, so they decided to have me conference in.

Still though, I'm gonna have massive brain drain by Wednesday afternoon.

A good action movie not 'Taken' for granted

'Taken' came out on DVD and Blu-Ray yesterday, and if you like action films, you should at least give it a rent. Luc Besson ('La Femme Nikita', 'Leon - The Professional') wrote and produced it, so that should tell you what you're in for. Plus, the director (Pierre Morel) also made 'District B13', another kick-ass film about which I made one of the first Video of the Week posts. Here's one of the trailers, where Liam Neeson gets to show off his 'particular set of skills':



I've seen it three times now, and it's been enjoyable check-your-brain stuff each time. Neeson brings a good paternal instinct to his role, and he's more than capable with the fight scenes. I do have one question though. What does that girl get her dad for Father's Day? It's not like he's Josef Fritzl. 'Thanks for traveling to a foreign country to kill tons of people in order to save me from being a sex slave. Hope you like this tie!'

Video of the Week -- Motherlover

It's the follow-up to 'Dick in a Box'...



Thanks to Miles for the heads-up.

More on Joe the Plumber....

.... Moron Joe the Plumber.

"I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children."

'Friends?' Like, bowling partners? Or fuck-buddies?

"I like Sarah Palin a lot, actually. I just don’t know if that’s where God’s leading her. I just know the Republican Party’s done its best to blackball her. I don’t know what her agenda is. If she ran, would I vote for her? Absolutely. John McCain was the lesser of two evils."

He doesn't know what her agenda is, but he would 'absolutely' vote for her. Wow. And it's nice to know that he feels strongly enough about lesser evil to campaign for it.




But wait! There's more!

"I would love to hear our leaders actually check with God before he does stuff."

Joe, I introduce to you, Epicurus. Also, 'he'? We have women who are leaders too.

"Not right now. God hasn't said, 'Joe, I want you to run (for public office).'"

If he were elected to our highest office, and God told him to push the nuclear button, would he do it?

I hope they keep putting a microphone in front of this clown. People like this need to be allowed enough rope to hang themselves.

EDIT -- There's a great opinion piece about this over at the Huff.

There Will Be Blood (starring Ahnold and Dubya)

Arnold Schwarzenegger in Oscar-nominated THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Video of the Week -- Rap Chop

I may have posted a video link yesterday, but THIS is the true, official Video of the Week. It's also another example of why I love the internet:



Epic.

MEXICO.

Swine flu. Earthquakes. I picked a fine time to go to Mexico, didn't I? Well, it's not like I picked it, as I'm going for work, but still.

Since I'm gonna be out for a while, I'll go ahead and post a link to my Video of the Week. This is a clip from an episode of the first season of Wonder Showzen. I thought it would be fitting, since this episode was sponsored by MEXICO.

EDIT: I'm not going! Our corporate executives cancelled all travel to Mexico until this blows over. So, you got your Video of the Week a little early.

Video of the Week -- Shawshank in a Minute

Don't sleep on the skills.



Props to the Amberglar, all the way across the pond in Germany, for sending this to me today.

Using your morality as an excuse not to do your job

The recent Supreme Court decision in Iowa, which recognized that denying people the legal rights associated with marriage is unconstitutional, has brought forth an issue that is one of my biggest annoyances. Mostly in small communities around Iowa, county recorders are using their personal religious objections to gay marriage as an excuse not to do their jobs on April 27th, when the state will begin recognizing same-sex unions. The article suggests that gay marriage opponents have been attempting to influence recorders to refuse to file paperwork on behalf of gay couples as an act of civil disobedience.

The idea that you can abandon certain job responsibilities that you feel are against your moral code is not a new one. Medical professionals don't have to perform abortions, if they choose not to. The problem with this type of exception in the case of gay marriages is that it's essentially based on discrimination. The county recorders apparently have no problem marrying straight couples who have a 50% likelihood of remaining married after 5 years. Gay people, however, do not deserve the same protections spouses receive legally, apparently.

I think there's a huge difference between marriage for legal purposes and marriage in your church. If your church wants to deny gay people the right to be married there, I'm fine with them keeping their hypocrisy and "sanctity of marriage" crap to themselves. The idea that straight people uniformly respect the institution of marriage is laughable, but if you also happen to believe that Zombie Jesus came back from the dead for your sins, believing that straight people have respected the sanctity of marriage really isn't that big of a stretch.

Legal marriage is a whole other ballgame. To say that because your church doesn't agree with gay people getting married, that your state shouldn't let them is using your own distorted morality to dictate what people who may or may not believe the same thing can do. And if you tell me our forefathers were Christian one more time, I'm going to slap you upside the head with a history book. They were deists, who wanted anything but religions running the government. Look it up.

As for the recorders in Iowa, I hope anyone who denies gay people the right to be legally married gets fired. Why should gay people have to pay taxes to support the salaries of people who won't do their jobs and want to deny them rights?

Video of the Week -- The Best of Clarence Boddicker

Two posts in one day? Crazy, I know, but I had to get a VotW in here, and it HAD to be this one:



Nothing tops 'Bitches, leave!' NOTHING.

Ow! My spine!

I tweaked my neck last weekend while doing some landscaping in the yard. So I went to a chiropractor, who took some x-rays of my back. Here's one of them:


You don't have to go to chiropractor school to know that this isn't the ideal spine shape.

On another note, I finally got the gold cross in Call of Duty 4!


I'm sure the two events aren't related, right?

Spotted on the entrance at a CVS pharmacy in my neighborhood

Now that the Midge has been through my neck of the woods, he can vouch for the fact that I don't live in a complete ghetto. However, someone didn't tell my CVS Pharmacy that:



That's not a joke. I took the picture last night. I understand that if the person at the register sees someone walk in wearing a ballcap, hoodie, and sunglasses, they might flash back to some security camera footage they saw on TruTV. But I'm not taking off my fucking baseball cap to pick up some Claritin. How is that for MY safety? Is the cashier going to shoot me because I haven't washed my hair that day, and didn't want them to see how messy it is? And don't get me started on cops wearing sunglasses indoors. They do it all the fucking time, like each one thinks he's Jack Nicholson at a Lakers game.

HOLY SHIT, IT'S A ROBBERY! Jack, put the gun down!

That CVS sign is almost as bad as this one:


Now, that sign IS a joke, but I don't think it's that far removed.

Seriously though. Would you take off your baseball cap to buy some deodorant?

Don't.

I disagree with one part of this. I thought 'The Wicker Man' was HILARIOUS.



Wait, what? 'The Wicker Man' wasn't a comedy?

The Midge on the Gilley's mechanical bull

Had I known he was gonna ride the bull, I would've brought my digital camera for better quality video:



Once his shoulders got hunched, it was over. Epic dismount though. Ankles skyward, just like that time in county...

Video of the Week -- classic Ric Flair

Continuing on the 'non-political' theme, I'm making this Video of the Week about one of the best entertainers of the 1980s: Ric Flair. No television personality made me laugh harder when I was growing up. His arrogant showmanship was obviously an act, but he had a gift. There was no pro wrestler who could talk like he could. Here's one of his better YouTube clips, where he talks the talk, and then walks the walk: