Wow. I’m a blog whore.

The Bourne Supremacy doesn’t live up to the first film, especially so during the car chases. Also: why does the female love interest always get whacked in the first five minutes?

I also saw my first full episode of Lost. It’s probably the eighth episode in (or more), so kind of hard to judge, but lot’s of spooky stuff happening. And Charlie’s last minute resurrection? Cool. I really hope this show gets DVD treatment early next fall, and if you can figure out how to get your VCR to record (mine used to, then I moved, and it wouldn’t, and I haven’t set it back up since I moved into my current apartment), this is a show worth taking an interest in.

Rachel hits a chord that is I’m sure familiar to most of us, and certainly to me:

“Your life and time are not your own. They belong to your professors, to your creditors, beholden to your job. A job, I might add, which does nothing but further commercialistic, consumerist greed and is wholeheartedly not fulfilling or satisfying in any mannerism. You fail an English test and you know it is not the test, but you who is the failure. You fail a math test for the upteenth time and wonder if you’ll ever pass that class, let alone get a degree. And should you obtain that elusive scroll of parchment, do you have what it takes to compete with a million other people all vying for your coveted job? Sadly, you must admit you do not.”

She really is a great writer, and disturbingly close to the mark.

Via the Houston Chronicle:

A linguist from the University of Pittsburgh has published a scholarly paper deconstructing and deciphering the word “dude,” contending it is much more than a catchall for lazy, inarticulate surfers, skaters, slackers and teenagers.

An admitted dude-user during his college years, Scott Kiesling said the four-letter word has many uses: in greetings (”What’s up, dude?”); as an exclamation (”Whoa, Dude!”); commiseration (”Dude, I’m so sorry.”); to one-up someone (”That’s so lame, dude.”); as well as agreement, surprise and disgust (”Dude.”).

Dude! Like, whatever.

From Boston, Carpundit has solid words of advice for Bosto-Cop 2004: Imagine the department’s position if he’s ever accused of excessive force.

Can you imagine the victim’s position? “WOOHOO! I’m gonna be a MILLIONAIRE!”

I got home at about 8:10pm…and decided to open the box and install the monitor. I was very anxious see what had cost me so much money. When I opened the box up, to my surprise, I found that the box contained instead of containing the expensive 21.3″ flat monitor, it contained a brick taped to a piece of wood. (see picture: http://www.eguate.com/misc/Monitor2.jpg) I was of course shocked and immediately started to panic; thus, I put the item back into the box. I went back to Best Buy as fast as I could and got there at about 8:30 and told the person at the entrance of what had happened. At this point, Best Buy also looked confused. I asked some of Best Buy’s employees who were around if this had happened before; some of them confirmed that they had seen it happened before—with VCRs.

Read the full story here, and you can contact the victim in the case here.

All I know is if it could happen with a VCR, it could happen with a monitor. And my trust in the staff of Best Buy, or any retail giant, doesn’t extend very far.

Just to be on the same side — and especially with the Christmas shopping rush swamping a lot of these retail giants — take Silverslinksam’s advice from the thread, if you “buy an expensive item at Best Buy, I always open it at the security counter where they check your reciepts before I leave the store.”

You don’t want to pay fourteen hundred dollars for a brick.

I came across this article via Digger’s Realm.

Wired News reports,

What do a flight attendant in Texas, a temporary employee in Washington and a web designer in Utah have in common? They were all fired for posting content on their blogs that their companies disapproved of.

The rise of blogging over the past few years has, inevitably, given way to another phenomenon, as companies are forced to confront employees’ easy access to ranting and raving about work in public online forums like Blogger and LiveJournal.

This, in short, sucks ass.

Recently I finished watching the seventh season box set of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’ Feeling slightly down, I started watching some of what I consider to be the ‘greatest hit’ episodes. Yesterday afternoon, I watched season three’s “Doppelganger”, where a miscast spell by Anya and Willow brings forth a vampire Willow from an alternate reality. Anyway, this was Anya’s second appearance, I think. Her first was in “The Wish” where she was a vengeance demon brought forth by Cordelia to grant her wish that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, creating an alternate reality (the same one where Vampire Willow came from, actually). Anyway, Alternate Giles restored everything to normal by smashing a necklace of Anya’s, in the process leaving her trapped as the 12th grade girl whose identity and form she’d created to get close to Cordelia. At the beginning of Doppelganger, Anya is begging her old boss for her job back as a vengeance demon. At the end of her reasons why she should be given her powers back: “…and I’m failing math!”

I’m much the same way. Not the ex-vengeance demon thing, more the “failing math” thing. But this isn’t really about my failing math, it’s more about Tim Russert and his scary selective facts. But, really, let’s admit it - scary selective facts are fun. They are indeed.

At any rate, everyone’s heard it a thousand times—the Standard Recitation, in which too many people will be retired and too few workers will be there to support them. These facts make it sound like Soc Sec can’t survive—and Russert is expert at rattling them. But something odd happened on Sunday’s Meet the Press. Once Reid got his chance to speak, he offered some alternative facts—some of the facts we highlighted yesterday from that Paul Krugman column:

REID (12/5/04): Tim, all experts say that Social Security beneficiaries will receive every penny of their benefits that they’re entitled to—100 percent of them—until the year 2055. After that, if we still do nothing, they’ll draw 80 percent of their benefits. I want those beneficiaries after year 2055 to draw 100 percent of their benefits. But this does not require dismantling the program. For heaven’s sakes, they’re crying wolf a little too regularly here. There is not an emergency on Social Security.

Scary selective facts bad. Tree pretty.

Maybe we need a new army, then?

“You go to war with the Army you have,” he said in a rare public airing of rank-and-file concerns among the troops.

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?” Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense.

Read it all.

Read it all.

If a liberal blogger had asked this, the conservative blogger would most likely respond, “You don’t support the troops!” When a soldier says this, does that mean he doesn’t support himself and his comrades? I don’t think so. Then again, I don’t think one has to support the action to support those in harm’s way. That’s just me.

Of course, we know how much this Administration supports the troops. When they faced opposition to their inclusion of a no-bid contract to Haliburton in a Congressional spending package, they threatened that if the bill did not pass with the Haliburton inclusion, troops would recieve no additional armor.

Well - winners write the history books.

Chepooka asks, then I think…

… then I take aspirin for the headache … (ow)

I ponder often, (and I did tonight waiting for some lady to pay me for the food her kids were already scarfing down in the next room):

Why is it, when your dog is humping away at my leg, you take the time to tell me he’s a friendly sort, instead of pulling him off me before I crack my maglite against his head?

I’m kidding. I’d crack my maglight against your head.

But then, I’m a violent & malnurtured sort.

I had intended to take a bottle of wine with me to Connecticut for Thanksgiving. In particular, a brand called Fat Bastard sold at the liquor store next to (one of) the pizza shop(s) I slave away at.

As it wound up happening, I completely forgot to buy the wine because I forgot to include it on my “To Do” list I “to did” the day before I left for Connecticut. This is a primary reason why I asked my cousin to ferry me to a liquor store Wednesday afternoon to get some drinky-drinky for the following day, on our return from which she ran over a turkey.

Anyway, as it turns out, I’m kind of glad I didn’t buy the wine after all.

In lawsuits brought by the Healds and small winery operators, the Supreme Court will examine two questions of importance to connoisseurs, consumers and the nation’s $18 billion-a-year domestic wine industry:

Michigan, New York and 22 other states, supported by the beer and wine wholesale industry and some alcohol-abuse specialists, argue that shipping bans ensure that alcohol is sold only by state stores or licensed retailers. That, they argue, allows states to collect tax revenue and keep intoxicants from being sold to minors or chronic abusers.

Maryland is - of course - one of the 22 other states.

Yes, yes - I know, none of this would have prevented me from packing a bottle of wine into my bag and taking it into Connecticut. But, dammit, I wanted to spread the word about Fat Bastard! Well, that and get to rehash the turkey incident yet again. And, yes, it has been pointed out to me that the bird was most likely a pheasant, but when you’re going fifty miles an hour and it just sort of goes “sqwak” and then you’ve got a whole bunch of feathers, who can really tell, anyway?

Also - Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story = funny funny movie.

I want to hit someone with a big rubber ball.

Organizing my bookmarks, I came across this:

Awesome, eh? More here.