The Rants of Mister P

I more or less finished my Christmas shopping today (December 30th). We're going back down to Orange Alert.

In the spirit of the reduced stress lifestyle:
I like this lady. I don't know why. She is Happy Lady.

Mister P.'s Clip of the Week. (900k QuickTime)

Have you seen these stupid spinning hubcaps on the road?

They are the equivalent of an 8-year-old putting a baseball card on his bicycle so he can play motorcycle rider. The difference is that 8-year-olds aren't paying 40,000 dollars for an SUV. Dumb.

I figured out how to stop the influenza epidemic: just quarantine all the Toys 'R Us stores across the country. I swear, every sick person within a 10 mile radius was in the store coughing and hacking on me tonight. If the CDC would just keep those people inside the store, the virus would stop dead in its tracks.

While shopping, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker: "Attention customers... For your shopping convenience, Toys 'R Us will be open until 10:00 tonight." Excuse me? If you want to make things convenient for me, how about staying open until midnight? Then maybe some of the 30 snot-dripping kids in front of me in line might be home in bed already.

Stupid last-minute shoppers.

Worst Christmas Ever

I feel light-headed and queasy as I type this. Something went screwy with my computer's hard drive, and now my computer doesn't work at all. (I'm on a laptop now.) If it's a hardware failure, I may have lost everything. All my photos. My email. Video projects. Website work. Everything. If it's a software problem, the data might be recoverable, but it's extremely unlikely I'll get it in time for Christmas. I was working on a DVD of all the photos of the trip to Rome I took with my mother in October to give her for Christmas: gone. The addresses of friends and relatives to mail the presents I do have: gone. At least 5 Christmas gifts I was working on involved projects on the computer. Three days before Christmas and I have nothing.

So help me, I'll rip the fracking lungs out of the first person who asks "did you back up your data?"

Living a Sitcom



Regular readers will recall the Great Movie Run of 2003. Refresh your memory here. To understand the personalities involved, you need look no further than the new show "Two And A Half Men". In tonight's episode, they go the movies. I AM Jon Cryer. My boss' boss IS Charlie Sheen. The sad thing is that the wacky world of the sitcom is not as ridiculous as my reality.

Watch Mister P.'s Clip Of The Week (1.5 MB QuickTime).
(smaller version, 590k)

Why can't I be Charlie Sheen for once?

Ho Ho Humbug

I've started Christmas shopping... I have about 4 people "mostly done" and have about 15 more to go. I don't understand how I got all tangled up in this gift-giving cycle. What's worse is that even when I'm done, I'm not done. I had to re-wrap 3 presents tonight. For one of them, I forgot to include a note on the inside of the package, and with the other two I used the wrong wrapping paper. You might think that the paper doesn't matter, but that's because you're not a caring person.

Stupid Christmas. (thanks Lisa!)

Saddest News

Keiko the Killer whale died.

What Kind of Drunk Am I?

People are affected differently by alcohol, but there are several general categories. There is the rowdy drunk, the giggly and the depressed drunks, the sentimental drunk ("I love ya, man") and the life-of-the-party drunk. At the company Christmas party, I figured out where I fit in: I am the Insecure Paranoid drunk. My first clue was after my first drink, and I saw Lisa looking at me funny; I thought she'd be mad or disapprove of my drinking.

My friend was in town on business, and a bunch of us were going to meet her after the party "for drinks". But she managed to crash the party, and around 8:00 (a couple drinks later) I ran into on the balcony. I'm not sure why, but for some reason I was convinced she'd be mad at me. I think my rationale was that would be mad because I didn't wait for her to start drinking, and that was somehow rude. So I repeatedly apologized and made sure she that she wasn't mad at me. And of course, the more I apologized the more stupid I looked, so then I had to apologize for that. says she wasn't mad, but can you really trust people from the east coast?

What kind of drunk are you?

Words of Advice

If you're going to be drinking at the company Christmas Party, make sure you eat something along with it. Otherwise, you may wind up trying to kiss your boss.

(I do not have any specific memory that said event actually took place, but I do know that I have a really bad case of the hiccups.)

Reality Indeed

Average Joe was the latest reality-dating-show where a beautiful woman had to narrow down a group of 16 potential suitors. Only this time, instead of GQ models, the men were "average Joes": self-proclaimed geeks, clowns, frat boys. The woman "Melana" turned out to be pretty sweet, and genuinely seemed to get along well with all the losers- I mean contestants.



In a "shocking twist", halfway through the show four Abercrombie & Fitch types were brought into the mix, so now Melana would have to choose either a beauty or an average Joe. The first finalist was Jason, a 26-year-old student/waiter who still lives with his mother and whose IQ was lower than the number of crunches he did every morning. The second was Adam, the average Joe who as it turns out is a very successful Wall Street trader who made Melana laugh and smile every time they were together.



So how does the story end? The heroine looks beyond the outer beauty and sees all the love and goodness on the inside of Adam, and they live happily ever after, right? Wrong. She picks the guy who buys Ultra-Brite from Costco. In the end, financial security, a sense of humor, and purity of heart can't compete with Vidal Sasson Volumizing Conditioner.

Have we learned nothing from Shrek?

Thanks to my upgraded friend Travis, I now have comments on my Blog. Speak up, world. Tell me ya love me.

If there is a geek obsessive-compulsive award, I want it.

In this Sunday's FoxTrot, Jason's flipbook got scrambled up. I put it back together.





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Houston, we have a problem

I had a sad realization last night: I'm not going to Mars.

Oh, I don't mean me personally. But my entire life I had just assumed that I would live to see a manned mission to the red planet, and now I realize that isn't very likely.

As a child of the 70s, a Mars mission seemed inevitable. The Apollo program had just finished, and at the latest we should have been to Mars by the year 2000. Had the space race continued, there's no doubt in my mind that would have happened. Unfortunately, peace broke out in the world, people were freed (mostly) from the tyranny of communism, and we were left with no place to plant a flag.

The International Space Station was supposed to be an important step towards going to Mars. (I never was a big supporter of the ISS: we had space stations 25 years ago- remember SkyLab? Been there. Done that.) Now there are rumors that Bush is going to announce a plan to return to the moon to establish a base, as an important step towards going to Mars.

The moon base would be a 15 year project. Which of course means more like 20 years at the earliest. It will be behind schedule and over budget, and they'll spend the next 5 years trying to justify why they went to the moon in the first place. Then they'll announce the plan for going to Mars, which will be another 15 years (that is to say, 20).

So that puts us around 40-45 years away from Mars. I don't think I'm going to make it to age 75 to see it.

Stupid NASA.