After ice cream sundaes (hmmm, Friendly’s), I persuaded American Geisha to swing past Target with me. I wanted to see if I could find the new line of Titanium Battlestar Galactica toys. She followed me until we got to the clothing aisle, at which point she detoured (typical woman!). I checked the toy section — nada! Foiled, again.

Have you ever noticed … like when you’re in a department store (Target, in this case) that’s about to close, they start paging the entire store, alerting customers that they’re closing? Well of course, ‘cuz they want people out of the store. But they were saying tonight, “We’d like to remind our customers that our hours are blah-blah until blah-blah.” The underlying message is, “What loser shops at Target after nine o’clock? Oh my god you people suck.”

And, yes, I’d be one of those losers.

I bought a Thundercat logo t-shirt. The funny thing is, I don’t own any of the Thundercats DVD releases because I’m certain that were I to actually watch any of those episodes, I’m sure I’d be bitterly disappointed and yet another childhood memory would be torpedoed on the high seas, a burning wreck as it slipped under the cold, icy waves of nostalgia.

I = DORK!

(Snarf! Snarf!)

I don’t get why this headline reads “Crazy Long” in describing a jail sentence for a dude who tried to gain access to Lowe’s computer database and access credit card information.

I think the sentence is appropriate.

I think it is ludicrous that a company like Lowe’s would have an unsecured Wi-Fi network.

I also think it’s hilarious that the FBI arrested “Botbyl’s roommate, Paul Timmins, who later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for using the Wi-Fi network to check his e-mail.”

Who knew illegal access to a Wi-Fi network was illegal?

The Times-Dispatch:

Frederic Arthur (Fred) Clark, who had tired of reading obituaries noting other’s courageous battles with this or that disease, wanted it known that he lost his battle as a result of an automobile accident on June 18, 2006. True to Fred’s personal style, his final hours were spent joking with medical personnel while he whimpered, cussed, begged for narcotics and bargained with God to look over his wife and kids. He loved his family. His heart beat faster when his wife of 37 years Alice Rennie Clark entered the room and saddened a little when she left. During his life he excelled at mediocrity. He loved to hear and tell jokes, especially short ones due to his limited attention span. He had a life long love affair with bacon, butter, cigars and bourbon. You always knew what Fred was thinking much to the dismay of his friend and family. His sons said of Fred, “he was often wrong, but never in doubt”. When his family was asked what they remembered about Fred, they fondly recalled how Fred never peed in the shower - on purpose. He died at MCV Hospital and sadly was deprived of his final wish which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a double date to include his wife, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to crash an ACLU cocktail party. In lieu of flowers, Fred asks that you make a sizable purchase at your local ABC store or Virginia winery (please, nothing French - the *censored*) and get rip roaring drunk at home with someone you love or hope to make love to.

This is great. I want an obit like this one, in case you failed to make the connection. Something, y’know, funny and funky. Hopefully, though, no time soon.

HT: a round peg in a square hole

I won’t pretend that sticking a banner on the right-hand-side of this blog had anything to do with it, but Hao Wu was freed by the Chinese government today, which I think everyone can agree is a good thing.

WWII games are a staple of the gaming industry, even sixty years after. I loved Dan Hsu’s quote, “I thought gamers would be sick of World War II games by now. But as Call of Duty 2 has shown, Americans never get sick of shooting Nazis.”

The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

Lady calls up wanting an order. She wants a pizza with tomato slices and feta. Whoops. We’re out of feta. Whatever, she’ll just take the pizza with tomato slices. She also needs two greek salads.

I doesn’t occur to me that I need to remind her, when she is still on the phone with me, that, yes, in the thirty-second we’ve been on the phone, we’re still out of feta cheese, and that the greek salads will be coming sans feta (because we’re out).

Guess who called back wanting to know why there was no feta on her salad?

Actually, it was her coworker. I guess Helen isn’t placing that lunch order anymore.

Y’know Alannis Morisette’s song, Ironic? The song that is ironic because of its complete lack of irony, yet title proclaiming it so? Right, remember the so-called irony of “the telephone call a second too late.” I’m paraphrasing that from my memory. Y’know. The guy gets executed and half a minute later the governor calls to pardon him? Yeah.

Well, this just takes the cake.

Three hundred years later? I mean, yeah, she wasn’t killed or anything, which is too bad, because if she had been, I actually woulda been making sense with that intro, right?

Oh, yeah, I dohn’t nyyd now spel chikr.

The mainstay of any pizza shop is the big map on a back wall. Every road, every side-street, every school, park, golf-course, fire station, police precinct, labeled in ADC fashion. Often, scrawled notes in marker by drivers — block numbers, bridge closures, likely speed traps. At the Franchise, we had not one but two maps — nothing really spectacular, and both maps showed much of the same area, one just had a better perspective of the northern streets, and the other of the southern, is all.

Greg splurged for a $300 massive single sheet map. He bought it last week, and it arrived yesterday. ADC didn’t make the map, so right off the bat, it’s disappointing. The two redeeming features are these: one, that it shows not only streets, but that it also shows private driveways, and two, that it has our entire delivery area on one map. That’s about as good as it gets. Streets are hard to see, and the labeling is beyond “tiny.” Streets are mislabeled, non-existant, or exist at several different points. None of the schools in our delivery area are shown. Streets connect where they don’t in real life, and don’t exist where they do.

All in all, it was hard for Chewbacca and I not to voice our belief that Greg got gyped on the map as we looked at it last evening. After some discussion — read: arm twisting — Greg agreed to call the map company and ask for a corrected version. I don’t see what the big deal would be — I mean, we’re pretty sure the woman he spoke to just called up some information on her computer, printed the map out, had it laminated, and FedExed it on its way. Frankly, the poor proofreading demands at least a bit of a discount.

I told Greg he should get all tough on her. “If you don’t correct this shit, I gonna stop payment on the credit card!” Yeah, but he paid with a debit card of course, the mook.

Chewbacca and I spent about an hour going over the map finding as many mistakes as we could and circling them with permanent marker and recording the mistakes in a notebook. We’ll need a list of the corrections for when Greg actually gets through to the company, and should we be stuck with this mistake-happy map, we’ll need to make sure that some of our stupider coworkers don’t actually believe that Stanley Drive exists in three places off of two different roads.

Since Greg had to mount the new map on the wall, he took the opportunity to paint the south wall of the kitchen. I wish I’d had my camera — you don’t realize how yellowed something is until you see fresh brilliant white paint going over it.

Old Man Frank is going to walk into a surprise today. First, he’ll probably complain about being blinded by the new bright white wall. And then, should he have a delivery, he’ll have to get someone else to read the map for him. He’ll joke, “I can’t see!” and then he’ll be serious: “Shit! I really can’t see!”

Ever say something, and then you’re like, “No, uh, I didn’t mean it like thaaaaat…” but it’s already too late? Whoooops.

So I take this delivery. I pull down the driveway, and the couple is tending to their garden. She walks into the house as I greet the guy and hand him the pizzas. He tells me not to worry about his dog, who is running up and barking. Finally, she comes close enough to sniff me.

Meanwhile, he hands me a check that his wife wrote out, and I thank him and we part ways, me back to my car, him into the garage. The dog has retreated into the yard. “Aw, she doesn’t like me!” I say to him, laughing.

As I back out of his driveway, it suddenly occurs to me that he probably thinks I looked at the check, was unhappy with the tip, and meant his wife didn’t like me.

I am such a fucking idiot.

What a bunch of sick fucks.

PsychoPhil and I were e-mailing back and forth not long ago about the forthcoming DVD release of Brisco County, Jr. He was reluctant to purchase the DVD set, particularly after the announcement by A&E of a complete, master set of Homcide: Life on the Street, including material not on the individual box sets. I retorted that DVD releases of TV shows would always be limited beyond that of movies — sure, you’ll get four or five releases of Blackhawk Down, but aside for adding a new documentary, or releasing a complete set — like with HBO on Sex & The City and FOX with Buffy The Vampire Slayer — there really isn’t much danger of owning a suddenly outdated DVD box set.

One of the tv shows I own on DVD is the original Star Trek — all three seasons, in their yellow, blue, and red cases, sit underneath my television. The Star Trek franchise — excluding some of its latter inclusions — has always been enjoyed greatly by me.

Tonight, I found reference on the Flare Sci-Fi Forums, to a test-project allegedly comissioned by Paramount Studios. The test-project is for a “special edition” of the original Star Trek series, featuring updated exteriors of the Enterprise in space, as well as new f/x for the transporter beam and weapons. The episode chosen was the second season’s The Doomsday Machine, one of the show’s better episodes.

I like the new special effects. I think they’re neat. I also know that if Paramount goes ahead and releases this set, I shall be unwavering in my opposition to its purchase, my appreciation of the original, unedited, un-special editioned series. I like Star Trek — flaws and all.

Advanced Placement has just over a week left. He graduated high school last spring, and he doesn’t start college until August. The problem is that his parents are going on an extended vacation and aren’t stupid enough to leave him home alone — it’d be a six week party! So they’re dragging him along. He’ll be missed.

(Yeah. Right.)

The kid I constantly joke about, the “Refire”, has been out for the last week with injuries sustained when he ran himself over with his car. WTF?

More money for the rest of us, at any rate.

You may have heard about Timken High School, in Canton, Ohio. It seems that while pregnancy rates may be down most elsewhere in this fine and wonderful nation, no one at Timken got the memo:

Thirteen percent of the female students at Timken Senior High School in Ohio are pregnant.

The statistic at the school in the heart of this old steel city contrasts with a decade of declining teen pregnancy rates nationwide. But teen pregnancy experts say the problem is not exclusive to Timken High.

Experts, parents and students themselves struggle to explain why such pockets of high teen pregancy rates appear. Are teens getting appropriate sex education? Do they have access to birth control and are they using it consistently? Has the stigma of unwed motherhood lost its edge?

“This might be a school that is forthright with its problems while others are not,” said Jay Green, chairman of the Education Reform department at the University of Arkansas. “But this is a widespread issue.”

Green wrote a study last year for the conservative New York-based Manhattan Institute for Policy Research that found 20 percent of urban teenagers have been pregnant, compared with 14 percent of suburban teens.

Urban teens as a whole don’t use birth control as consistently or often, according to his research, and often have less to lose financially and socially than those in the suburbs.

But Green couldn’t say whether those factors applied to Timken. The school of about 1,000 students draws teens from across the neighborhood and economic lines in the state’s ninth largest city.

Well, that’s all fine and good, but then I read a quote from the school’s principal. If you were wondering, by the way, this article is from the Las Vegas Sun. Just click the link for the whole thing.

“This has gotten to horrible proportions. I wish I knew the answer to why it’s happening,” principal Kim Redmond told the city’s daily newspaper

Wait.

Huh?

She’s the school principal and no one bothered to ever lecture her on the birds and the bees?