The Rants of Mister P

Don't See Saw

A few weeks ago I rented the horror film "Saw". I liked it a lot. It's about a psycho who puts people in impossible situations: he may chain your foot to the wall and give you saw which isn't strong enough to cut the chain, but IS strong enough to cut through your ankle. Do you escape?

I then rented Saw II, which was good but a little more derivitive (the horror film cliche of having a group of people being killed off one by one). There were a lot of rough, gory scenes to sit through. Painful to watch. I resorted to holding my hand in front of my face so I'd only see 1/4 of the screen at a time. That night I had one of my worst nightmares ever: my 5 week-old-son was kidnapped, and my friends were helping the kidnappers. Which is especially scary since I don't even have any kids. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling a sort of panicked rage. The last time I had a nightmare that bad was after watching Blue Velvet.

I'm looking forward to renting Saw III.

The Ballad of Billy F.



I went to my 20-Year High School reunion, or as I like to call it, "The 10th Anniversary of my 10-Year Reunion." I am a petty person, and one of the things I was hoping for was to see that some of the jocks were now bald and fat. One of the specific people I wanted to see was Billy F.

Billy F. was straight out of a cheap Hollywood movie. Small-town boy with blonde hair, blue eyes, star quarterback, president of the student council, the works. He was the most popular kid in school whom everyone hated. Or at least my posse hated him. See, you may not believe this but Mister P. wasn't very cool in high school and people like Billy F. really had no reason to speak to people like me. Now then, I want to be clear, I have absolutely no memories of Billy F. EVER being mean to me in any way. He's simply a symbolic archetype.

When I got to the reunion, I told the other Band Fags (yes, that's what they called people in the marching band) that I wanted to see a fat Billy F. They totally understood what I meant. And then, He showed up. Tall. Thin. All of his hair. The people at my table said "well he won't be coming over to see us anyway". But I wanted to knock through the Dork Wall and I said "I'm gonna talk to him." I waited until he was at the bar so I'd have an excuse to come up to him. (I know it sounds ridiculous, but you sort of slip into old roles at these reunions. I wanted to break free of that.) I bravely went up to the bar and ordered a drink, but because the music was loud and I had been screaming, I had lost my voice. I wasn't about to say hello to the star quarterback with a crackling pre-pubescent voice, so I choked and went back to my table.

About an hour later, my voice was a bit rested and Billy was back at the bar. I went up again and this time said hello. I was overly honest and told him point blank "I was hoping you'd be bald and fat, but you're not". I'm not sure he understood, but so what. He did remember me going way back to our elementary school days together: "you were really into dinosaurs!" Great. Not exactly a cool way to be remembered, but I wasn't exactly cool to begin with. The important thing is that a Band Fag let go of 20 years of resentment and chatted with the Quarterback.

I still wish he was fat. Stupid Billy F.

More Zune



Quicktime clip (325k)

Feel like a teen again

Got another strange one for ya. I have an uncontrollable nose bleedi it's been going for almost an hour now. The odd thing is that it's on the outside of my nose.

I had cut back on my candy consumption leading up to my marathon 2 weeks ago. But after that, all bets were off and I've been eating all the crap I can find. The bridge of my nose started breaking out. I found an old bottle of astringent under the sink and washed my nose with it. Now when I say old, I mean OLD. Like it might have bought it 10 years ago. And I don't know if the alcohol turned to acid, or maybe I picked up a bottle of drano by mistake, but it stung a lot and the next thing I knew my nose was covered in blood. (It's just a small leak, but when I wiped my face I smeared the blood everywhere.)

I tried waiting it out a bit, but it kept bleeding and I was now late for work. I drove to the office, thinking it would stop on the way over. Nope. Now I had to get from my car, through the building lobby and up an elevator to get to my desk, all the time holding fresh tissue to my nose which would turn completely red every 20 seconds. Very undignified.

If I seem particularly light-headed today, it's from all the blood loss.

Zzzzzzzzzzzune

Look, I know that as a Mac Zealot I'm not exactly neutral here. But have you SEEN the ads for the new zune music player from microsoft? I mean, is there ANYBODY who thinks these ads are cool, or even interesting? I just don't get it.

http://www.zune.net/en-US/social/#

I understand if microsoft wants to play catch-up with Apple in yet another area. So they made a new music player. zune does have a larger screen than the iPod, but it's the same resolution. Apple sells songs for 99 cents; microsoft sells songs for 79 "microsoft point" which is equal to 99 cents. Cause we're stupid and we think that's cheaper. Black and white are the new Silver for electronics (thanks to Apple's innovative designs), and microsoft offers the zune in those colors. Fine. But then microsoft wanted to shake thinks up a bit and offer a third color. Great! So what exciting color did the come up with?

Brown.

Come on.

How is it possible that this is one of the most powerful companies on the planet? It's embarrassing.

Spam, Or No Spam?

If you had a message like this in your inbox, would you think it was spam?

From: Youth Minister
Subject: Sycamore

My name is Craig, and I am the slave of the woman in the office next door. (Your Mother of all people!) She has given me the task of sending you the graphics of a 'sycamore tree', personally I think she is out of her tree but thats a seperate issue! She said that you'd know what to do with this so here you have it... see the attached '.jpeg'.



It sounds like some kind of creepy, kinky sex spam, no? (Not that I would know.) That's what I thought at first, but no, for some reason my mother has a project for me to do that involves a photo of sycamore tree. Since she's not very computer literate she had someone she works with in her church office send me a picture of a sycamore tree.

Splish Splash, I was throwing out trash

(This photo is a staged re-creation:)



For the past few weeks, this over-filled trash basket has been sitting on the sink in my guest bedroom. I live alone, I don't have many visitors, and there was just no compelling reason to empty it. I had some people come over yesterday, so I finally had to empty it. I turned over the basket to dump the trash into a plastic bag. As it turns out, the basket was not filled with trash but with water. The only garbage was the piece of plastic floating on top. I dumped the water all over the sink, the floor and my pants.



Now here's the odd thing: for the life of me, I can't remember why I had a basket of water sitting on the sink. I would use a basket to catch a leak somewhere, but I don't recall having one. I use wastebaskets when cleaning out the fish tank, but usually use much larger ones.

I have no idea why I filled the bucket with water and put trash on top in the first place, but I'm sure it made perfect sense at the time.

Shave and a haircut... Two twits

I got my hair cut on Wednesday, and through an unusual scheduling coincidence I wound up going to the same place at the same time as Brad. I can't put my finger on it, but it just didn't seem right. I felt awkward sitting in the chair next to him. It may have something to do with the concept that getting your hair cut is a form of person hygiene, and I don't think that experience should be shared with your co-workers. I certainly understand that if you're living in Mayberry you might want to hang out at Floyd's to get caught up on all the town gossip. But in twenty-first century Los Angeles, I'm sorry; I don't think men should go to "get their hair done" together.