Year: 2006

Dear 1050 ESPN Radio,

Thank you for getting rid of such a high-quality, well-produced, nationally-syndicated show as Colin Cowherd’s The Herd in favor of another loudmouthed, obnoxious, know-it-all prick like Max Kellerman. That’s right, the same sexist jackass you got rid of 2 months ago when you realized his friend Brandon Tierney was twice the radio personality he could ever hope to be. But at least I now know that 10AM – 2PM on 1050 will be filled with people you would leave a bar to get away from, because ignoring them just isn’t enough. In other words, I can safely delete 1050 ESPN Radio from my saved stations in the car to avoid possibly stumbling upon Max telling everyone what a genius he is for coming up with another sophomoric idea, Stephen A. Smith screaming at the top of his lungs to pretend he has a point, or Jim Rome saying anything *shudder*.

Thank you for freeing up my radio for something far more worthwhile: music… or commercials… or silence.

– Me

Is anyone else sitting on the Firefox website, constantly hitting refresh, waiting for 2.0 to magically appear? Anyone?

Anyone?

Yeah, me neither… honest.

This is what happens when I shut down my feed reader for a couple months – I end up incredibly late to the OK Go on treadmills party:

Absolutely brilliant. I’m going to pretend that I bought the CD based on that clip rather than hearing their song on the Target commercial.

Sometimes I think the Internet might run out of ideas – and then what would we do? Then someone makes a site dedicated to cats that look like Hitler – and I realize that all is right with the world again. (thanks to Jess)

Maybe I’m just becoming a crotchety old man now that I’ve hit my thirties, but I’m sick of paying for things that should be free. Or at least not so expensive. If you beam a signal at my house, I should be able to do whatever the crap I want with it. Or something like that. It was thinking like that that got me to cancel our cable television. Well, not so much cancel as stop paying for it. And then pay for what I got because collections agencies suck.

A couple weeks before the wedding, I decided we really needed to buckle down on some expenditures, so I just tossed the cable bill. Wouldn’t it be great if doing that were enough? Well, it was good enough for me. And two days after the wedding, it was good enough for Comcast, too. I am amazed at how long they will let you wait to get service that you want to pay for compared to how quickly they will respond when you no longer pay for said services. I figured we wouldn’t use it for the two weeks we were in Hawai’i, and it wasted our time and money anyway. Especially considering we no longer used Netflix as a source of excellent movies and instead watched things like The Punisher and Seinfeld re-runs non-stop.

I picked up a crappy little antenna at radio shack so we could at least catch local stations from time to time, but my long term goal is one of these babies. That’s right, I want to snag HDTV channels from down in Philly. We’ll see how successful that is, but at the worst it would cost me the same as about a month with the cable company – I think I can deal with that. Actually, we already have an antenna up on the roof that should give us decent reception for now. The problem is getting access to it. I managed to shimmy all the way across the rather steep incline over to the chimney, but the sucker is just out of my reach, and I can’t find anywhere to connect the coax.

In the meantime, Lisa and I just have to wait a day after any shows we follow air a new episode so that I can procure a copy via nearly legal methods over the ‘net. It’s even better than DVR because the commercials are already taken out for us. So now we are keeping up with the following shows:

• Prison Break – That’s right, we finally got into this one just in time for the second season. What a shame, considering the second season isn’t that great. We’re still watching, but interest is waning.
• Lost – Ah, the classic. I wasn’t thrilled with the season opener, and the second episode looked iffy, too, until *SPOILER*Sun finally shot that woman – thank god for some bloodshed! Oh, sorry for that…
• House – We still love it. Yes, it’s formulaic, but the characters are fantastic.
• How I Met Your Mother – Got into this one late in the first season. It’s cute and funny and Neil Patrick Harris just plain rocks. I’m holding out hope that Alison Hannigan’s character is on her way out as I don’t really like her.
• My Name is Earl – We just caught the first episode of the new season and I had trouble holding back the laughter. Actually, I’m sure Lisa will testify to the fact that I didn’t even try.

I’m hesitant to even talk about the new series (Heroes and Jericho) that we’re really enjoying after all three of the sci fi/mystery/thriller shows from last year went belly-up. There’s also the mid-summer ones that we got into (Kyle XY and Eureka), although that somewhat fizzled (largely because Lisa couldn’t get into Eureka at all). I’m wondering why I ever thought it was necessary to pay for 200+ channels that I never watched and another 20 channels I shouldn’t have watched.

I’ve been redoing my whole blog reading process – seeing as how I haven’t kept up with any of them in a couple months (to go along with my crappy updating process over here). It’s given me a chance to figure out who is no longer updating and which sites just plain suck. While clicking through all of the links, I found out that Apropos of Something re-opened its doors. In fact, Jess has been writing somewhat steadily since June of this year.

If you don’t know why this is so exciting (and I’m sure this post is totally conveying my excitement), just take a gander at the Apropos Comics.

Penny Arcade demonstrates why I’m not allowed to get a portable game system.

A blog that once existed but no longer does used the phrase “The one about” to title every post. It was somewhat clever, if not just a tad limiting. I feel it’s time to start ripping off that blog that no longer exists because a) he’s not likely to care since he’s no longer doing it and b) the next few posts will probably be big summary affairs.

I hate when I find myself staring at a site that has offered up fewer updates for months and think about all of the things I wanted to post. It makes me feel like a lazy ass. And when I feel like one, I just sit on the couch and stare at the static on our TV and dream of what it must be like not to be a lazy ass. Oh, dare I dream such a lofty life?

This may very well be the dumbest post I’ve ever bothered to write, but it’s meant to kick me in the behind (I’m running out of synonyms for buttocks these days) and force me to go through all of the topics that have been cloggin’ my noggin these days (yes, I did just write that with a pathetic smirk on my face – and no, the spell check does not like the word cloggin’).

For now, I’m just going to head home to grab my camera and Lisa’s guitar so that I can meet up with her for a rare OpenMic appearance tonight. Hey, maybe I should write about that?

No matter how uncomfortable those hard ones are, the messy ones are the worst. Yes, I am talking about my guinea pig. Specifically I’m talking about the second load of you-know-what that I’ve had to remove from you-know-where in two weeks. Being soft certainly made removal easier, but the smell… for the love of all that is holy… the smell! How can such a little critter produce such a foul odor? He’s so tiny, but his tush packs a mighty punch… (the new built-in spellcheck for Firefox 2.0 just told me I should use tush over tushy – it also told me that spell check is two words)

Alrighty, enough of this crap (pun intended). I need to talk about movies or football or something like that…

A couple weeks ago I was hanging out with a friend from my old Hoboken bar crowd and mentioned that I had to mow my lawn the next day. She laughed and said that I was probably the only person she knew who had a lawn big enough to mow. And there was probably only one other person who had any grass to begin with.

Of course, bragging about my massive one-eigth acre stretch of land does not actually get the work done. That requires me hauling my push mower (yes, I am becoming a luddite) out to walk around in increasingly shrinking circles that never quite line up right in order to catch all stray blades. I actually do enjoy it on some primitive manly level, but my backwards technological outlook makes it a priority to mow every week. When you skip it for a month, that push mower basically shakes a metaphorical fist at me as it has to work one foot at a time.

Nevertheless, yesterday I managed to unevenly shave the front yard, rip out several pounds of ivy intent on tearing apart our brick steps, and trim the bottom half of an evergreen with some sort of grudge against our driveway. I just hope I’m not going overboard as some sort of payback for my Mom always stopping me from really going to town on the trees and bushes around the house. That’s right, I’m doing things my way, baby. This is my house and my rules, and the glasses get put in the cabinet I want them in, and the ugly trees get removed when I don’t want them, and the walls get painted whatever color I damn well please…

Assuming Lisa says it’s okay.