non-cliche title about the oscars

You just can't use "and the winner is" or some lame ass title for your Oscar post.

Mostly, I was just excited to see Ryan Gosling get a nomination for Half Nelson, which I haven't seen. I think he got totally screwed 3 years ago when he wasn't nominated for The Believer, so I am willing to bet that his work as a teacher/crack addict is probably pretty good. Little Miss Sunshine got many nominations (as I am too lazy to count), including Best Picture, but I am really excited that Alan Arkin got nominated. I just watched Little Miss Sunshine for the first time last night and I loved Alan Arkin. I always love him, especially as Martin's shrink in Grosse Pointe Blank. Go Alan!

Other than Little Miss Sunshine, I have little else to contribute about the nominations, since the only other movie I have seen in the theater in the last 12 months was Pirates of the Caribbean which was such a tremendous disappointment that I could hardly stand to watch any new movies. All I could do was recycle a set of 5 movies I know that I love: Drop Dead Gorgeous, Ghostbusters 2, Point Break, Night of the Comet (which has only been on once), and Trading Places. And speaking of Billy Ray Valentine, congratulations to Eddie Murphy for his nomination. I haven't seen Dreamgirls, and I probably won't, but I am ecstatic to see everyone of Beyonce's co-stars getting accolades for their performances while her performance continues to be described with words like wooden and stilted. This is doubly sweet, since I read, when the movie came out, that they had tried to minimize Jennifer Hudson's role to pump Beyonce for the best Actress category. Were they fucking high? They did know that Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Kate Winslet (four of the premier actress of this age) were making movies this year, right? Did they really think that Beyonce "to the left" Knowles would deserve consideration? Maybe if she didn't surround herself with a bunch of butt-licking sycophants, someone could honestly tell her that acting just isn't her thing. Maybe they could throw in a hint that songwriting isn't really, either. Or dressing. Or dancing.

The only other category I am even a little interested in is the Documentary category. An Inconvenient Truth (which I have at home and need to watch) versus Jesus Camp, which is supposed to be crazy. I bet the academy, in a show of west coast liberalism, will give the award to Mr. Gore. That is quite an impressive resume - former vice-president and academy award winner, Al Gore.

That's all for now, since I am at work and have schoolwork that needs to be done.

She's sleeping now

Apparently my afternoon nap ran too long and now I can't get to sleep. The sad thing is that I wanted to sleep longer this afternoon, but I didn't, since I wanted to get to bed tonight. Now I'm fucked! I didn't sleep long enough this afternoon to cover being unable to sleep tonight. Damn it!

I had a pretty good weekend. I took the afternoon off Friday, to go get my car estimate done. It seems rather high and the appointment seems rather far out and the estimated time for the repair seems excessive - 3-4 days? Doesn't that seem like a lot of time to replace the fender and put a little nail polish on the hood? I sure think so, but I am not a mechanic, just a girl who slides into other cars in parking lots. After I got my estimate, I went to Microcenter to return a video card that I really thought I needed, but don't. Plus, it was the wrong card. PCI, PCI Express who can keep it all straight? That put a cool $150 back on my credit card; it also shocked me sane about how little I needed that video card. $150? I must have been out of my mind the day I bought it. Oh wait, that was student loan disbursement day, which is always as unbridled for me as the day after Thanksgiving. Granted, my frugality, inspired by the video card, was short lived, since I made my way to Borders next to redeem my $16.00 Holiday Rewards credit which was set to expire at the end of the month. I love buying books and although I know I should shop at independent resellers, Borders is at least a strongly democratic company, so I just let it go. It's not like buying pre-censored books at Wal-Mart or anything. They had a buy two get one free sale going on and since I wasn't get my purse (sorry yella nothing to report there) I got six books from this shelf. Oddly enough, 4 of these books are titles I must have checked out 1,000 copies of at the library. "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and "Wicked" were both very popular titles that I used to mock people for getting. Now, I own them. After Borders, I came home and played WoW for three hours. My paladin is now at lvl 17. I did about 4 minutes of homework, though, to make sure that I didn't have anything to do over the weekend.

Good thing too, because Saturday was pretty busy. First was the Kansas game, which I shall never mention again, and second was Villi's company party (or everyone but me's company party) at the Denver aquarium. The dress code was business to semi-formal, so we had to spend a little time getting gussied up, which for me meant not rinsing the conditioner out of my hair like a retard. I wore cute, but torturous, pointy toed shoes that had me reeling (in pain, not the dance obviously) about half way through the aquarium tour. I did like the small touch of having divers in the shark tank holding signs, welcoming us to the party. I used Villi's drink ticket for a second glass of exceptionally bad Chardonnay and just because I said I would, I will let everyone know this is a $6-7 bottle of wine, retail (Camelot Vineyards). As the night wore on, and the two glasses of wine made me headachy and cranky, rather than silver-tongued and clever, I made Villi and D leave because I was afraid gangrene was setting in on my feet. When I got to the car and took my shoes off, my toes actually orgasmed with relief. Upon closer inspection at home, I realized that my middle toe on my left foot had torn and had been bleeding, meaning that if I had chosen to quote Romy and Michelle's, it would have been true. Alas, I didn't meet any suit salesmen at the party.

I went to bed very early on Saturday, like 11, and woke up early. Instead of doing school work, I finished "You Suck," by Christopher Moore, played WoW for two hours and then fell back asleep at about 12:30. I woke up about 2 hours later and really haven't done a damn thing since. We watched the L Work tonight and it looks like they aren't even bringing Carmen back at all. This is unfortunate. But, I did learn tonight that Lily Tomlin was a lesbian.

Ok, I'm going to try sleep again.

So, procrastinate now; don't put it off.

Well, it's back-to-school time, again. That means it's time for me to weigh every single thing I do against school work and choose a winner. And I'll be damned if the winner isn't always "not school work." Right now, I should be reading for my economics class, which will probably be fascinating, since it is about race and gender inequalities in the economy: a topic, since reading The People's History of the United States, on which I consider myself quite the expert. But you know the rules, school work is always the last kid picked for kickball. I would rather clean my house than do homework and wouldn't you know that my laundry got put away for the first time in weeks yesterday.

I have an appointment on Friday to get the car looked at. I am much sad, because I have to take the money I allotted for a new Coach bag to pay my deductible. And really, what is the point of having a dent free car if you don't have a new Coach bag? Some may see my reasoning as faulty, and they would be right, but I really did have my heart set on a new bag and now I will have to wait for another unsubsidized student loan from the government. Reading back that last sentence made me really glad I am not taking some sort of consumer math class where I might be required to balance my check book or confront my spending. I imagine this confrontation as something from a horror movie, with Freddy Kruger as my reckless spending and Jason Voorhies as my buyer's remorse. If the movie were slick and stylized with a sense of humor, I would probably be running in some Jimmy Choos when I fall and twist my ankle and then Freddy would catch up, loom over me, and go to grab me, but instead of killing me, he would grab the shoe off my foot and ask "and just how much did you pay for a little leather stapled to some fabric?"

I guess I will find out on Friday just how out of the question a new coach bag is. For now, I will read some very boring papers on economy.

I hope everyone (2) is doing well. I'm excited about our little dinner out on Comcast this weekend. It should be very fun, especially if Alaska gets drunk and ends up in a fish tank or something!

Bugger

Considering that World of Warcraft nearly derailed my attempts at an associates degree, I find it to be an incredibly bad omen that The Burning Crusade releases on the first day of my junior year.

Fuck.

Things to do in Denver when you're dead

I have a bad habit. Whenever there is a storm or riot or blackout or airport closure in Denver, I like to go to CNN or Google News and see where we stack up in the news rankings. This follows my habit of cheering (silently) whenever Denver is mentioned in a movie. In Deep Impact, when they are talking about the fallout from the meteor or comet or whatever it was that was going to hit the Earth, they talked about Denver being the only city of note left in the west and I was completely excited. In rap songs, when they start listing all the cities they give shoutouts to, I listen for Denver, noting its rank and being horribly offended if Denver doesn't make the list. I was ecstatic when I saw this Faithless album cover, featuring the Bluebird Theater on Colfax.

I think this all started listening to Huey Lewis and the News' Heart of Rock 'n' Roll at like 11 and being devastated that Denver wasn't mention. At the time, I had no idea that Denver had absolutely no musical scene or tradition and that we hung our entire fame on Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Who? Yeah, exactly. I have great pride for Denver, Colorado and like to see it reported as a thriving metropolis, rather than a glorified cow town.

Today, however, the amount of news (bad news) about Colorado, is just scary. People are going to be scared to come here. On CNN, right now, Colorado is the breaking news, with an avalanche on Berthoud Pass (which throws our hockey team's name into sharp relief), a live stream of Darrent Williams funeral which reminds people that athletes die in drive-by shootings in Denver, a story about two planes nearly colliding at DIA, and two stories about the onslaught of winter storms here and how the national guard has been called in to help dig out cows and pigs that have been buried or orphaned in the feet of snow we have gotten in the last 2 1/2 weeks. Maybe all this exposure isn't such a great thing after all.

I will just have to hope that our evening at the Botanic Gardens isn't spoiled by poisoned monkeys, terrorist attacks, extreme flatulence or otherwise.

Nothing good on TV

Google is almost magical in its ability to find the strangest things on the internet. Sometimes, I am just amazed at what my search terms return. Today, I was searching for “please stop ringing,” because I was going crazy with the phones ringing (at time of post I’m still going crazy). Google returned a page about bad experiences with CompUSA. Even if you aren’t technical, this post is hilarious.

I purchased a "new" system an Emachine and purchased an extended warrenty. I was told by the sales people that the system would work great for my autocad program because it had 64 megs of ram and a 300mhtz celeron processer and a 16 meg video card. Well when I got the system home and loaded 8 years of work and finacial data on the system. I immediatly destroyed the floppy disks the data was originally on for sucurity puposes. The first time I tried to open the autocad program the computer physcially made a horrible sound and promply began to melt. At least I think it was melting there was a foul smell. Anyway the system shut down on its own. As I waited 15 days to open the box and try my new system which was very critical to me since my bussiness which makes me thousands of dallars a day was now down. I can't believe that compusa's failure of insight from my $600 computer purchase are now costing me thousands of dallors a day I mean this is my only computer to run my entire bussiness on! Nice job compusa! Anyway I took the computer into the store and the clerk who appeared to be like 50 years old asks if he can help me. I explain the situation and he tells me to carry the computer to the tech center window since I bought the compusa warrenty. I go to the counter and ring the bell. After 20 min of ringing the bell finnally someone yells around the corner "please stop ringing the bell we'll be there in a min!".Finnaly he comes and looks at my computer and stares at me. After a min or so in uncomforatable silence I start to explain AGAIN..and he then starts asking me a bunch of questions FULL of jargon with words like "enter key" and "start button" What nerve! what do I look like? bill gates! After much yelling and screaming on my part the system is taken from me for service. As im signing im told my warrenty does not cover backing up data! Compusa should be responible for everyones data! im the customer I don't have time to keep everything backed up im a very busy and important person! After speaking to the manager and getting the same run around I agree to pay for data backup. Now im up to $650 compusa nice job! I wait for 6 months for my computer to be returned calling and calling. I finnally get a nice sales register person to go back into the tech area and see whats happening to my computer.. Its sitting on the finish shelf with a completion date from 2 months ago! Its just been sitting there! I speak to the manger again and yell and yell! They refuse to refund my money but the store agrees to give me a backup software called "quick protect" I have not seen it before. I get home and finnally can put food on my table from working again. I then proceeded to install the quick protect software and a skull and crossbones appear on my screen and since compusa installed a new sound card in my system now the system begins spouting obsenities at my and my family! Then it begins to erase my entire harddrive! I was sharing wireless internet with my next door neibor and it proceeded to erase his harddrive and all the computers on his network! I immediatly called the Compusa and explained the situation to the tech center rep they thought it was somehow "funny". The manager said he would get back to me and its been 2 months with no word and no computer. I may have to file bankruptsy now because of compusas lack of forsight to sell a proper computer with a decent return policy. We must stop compusa they are vindictive and evil and care nothing for the customer!

Holy shit, there is so much wrong with this, I hardly know where to start, but I will try.

First – This post is dated 12/2004. In 12/2004, the OLDEST computer I had at the time, which was built in 2000, was a 500 Mhz Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM. The newest computer I had was 1.5 Ghz P4 with 512 RAM. This guy is buying a new computer with a 300 Mhz processor and 64 MB of RAM? For his work computer? This is just stupid. Added to the fact that this is an E-Machine and we are supposed to believe that this guy makes thousands of dollars a day? If some fucktard decides to buy an EMachine with 64 MB of RAM to run his auto-cad software on, he deserves to have a melt down.

Second – Well when I got the system home and loaded 8 years of work and finacial data on the system. I immediatly destroyed the floppy disks the data was originally on for sucurity puposes. This guy destroyed the data before he even tested the new computer and we are supposed to feel sorry for you? Are you really truly this stupid? If so, please quit lying about how much money you make? People like this make me so angry.

Third - and he then starts asking me a bunch of questions FULL of jargon with words like "enter key" and "start button" What nerve! what do I look like? bill gates! It’s 2004 and you are loading autocad software. You’re telling me you don’t know what the start button and the enter key mean? Again with the “are you fucking kidding me?” This is where I start to feel like this entry may be a joke.

Fourth - a skull and crossbones appear on my screen and since compusa installed a new sound card in my system now the system begins spouting obsenities at my and my family!
Um, ok. That isn’t your sound card; that is a virus.

Fifth - I was sharing wireless internet with my next door neibor and it proceeded to erase his harddrive and all the computers on his network. Um, that isn’t sharing; that is stealing and I bet that neighbor thought twice about letting that asshole on his wireless network.

The more I read this, the more I have to believe this is a clever hoax, but it only appears on one site and the text doesn’t show up anywhere else on google I have to wonder- dear god, is this real? His email address is for a satellite ISP for rural areas, so it is entirely possible that this rube is actually telling the truth.

Could you hurry up? Other people need to throw up, too.

Happy New Year, everyone. The last guest left about an hour ago and everyone in the household is in bed. I drank a bottle and a half of asti spumanti and many shots and I count my blessings that I am alive right now. I had a brief moment of discomfort when it felt like my stomach might burst ( I blame the carbonated wine). Now, however, I feel great. I have taken a bath and had a couple glasses of water and assume I should wake up feeling a-ok. The only x factor are the wheat thins I ate with reckless abandon. They may skew the results of my post-binge plan and make me ill and dehydrated tomorrow.

It was a small group tonight, but they are the very best people I know. I would much rather play drunken cranium with 7 friends than watch a stranger to a keg stand at some stupid party. It was truly my friends that made this, and my previous new years, so wonderful. French toast in the morning, but for now, a long sedated slumber.

Have a rockin' 2007, kids. Peace