Dorf

11:17 pm: ho-hum
So iTunes has released Brooke White's original album from 2006. I was skeptical, but I decided to download it when I read all of the very positive reviews and no negative reviews. So I took a listen... and it sucks. I should've donated the $10 to charity. It's a pop album. She tried covering "Dream On", for crying out loud. She is not a pop singer, and hopefully she has realized that now. Too bad she didn't figure that out before releasing an album on which I would later waste $10.

12:04 am: Mudcrutch
For anyone who likes Tom Petty but has not bothered to obtain the new Mudcrutch album, I say to you now: go. I don't care if the stores are closed. Break in, you have my permission. Just get it. Seriously. I think the first track, "Shady Grove", might be my favorite Petty track since Mary Jane did her last dance. The individual songs, while great, don't all stand out very strongly though they hang together well, making the album itself somewhat reminiscent of Wildflowers, which is another huge favorite of mine. This one might actually rank second on my all-time Petty list, behind only Into the Great Wide Open. I just get irritated at one song, "Crystal River", because it's over 8 minutes long. Oy. Still good though. The album is totally worth the $14 it costs at Best Buy. You have been advised.

01:08 pm: Gas tax holiday
Proposed by McCain, stolen by Clinton: lifting the gas tax for 3 months

My typical weekly gas tax spending (current job or if I change jobs): $3 or $4.25

x 12 weeks = $36 or $51

Current typical cost of a tank of gas for me: $42

Conclusion: I'm not voting for a president based on whether they try to save me the cost of one tank of gas over the course of a whole summer.

04:30 pm: World news
British news is so much better than American news. Americans can only talk about the Democratic presidential bid, and about the 7 people killed in some southern storm. Boring. Without the BBC, how would I know about things like, for example, Nestle pissing off Azerbaijan? I care more about that sort of thing. Top news story on BBC's website is the Zimbabwe government. Did you know they have a government there? American news would never tell you that.

10:55 pm: Quote-tastic
OK, ready everyone? Best quote of the year. Or of the decade. Or the century. Or all-time. You be the judge.

Jose Canseco on his financial status after the foreclosure of his home:

"You know my life, this financial thing, is a very complicated issue. Obviously, when you make all that money, people think, 'OK, let's assume it is $35 million.' People have to understand that $35 million, you're paying the government 41 percent. That leaves you with about $17 or $18 million, not even. Then you're taking care of your whole family."

I love that last sentence. Yeah, I know how that is, trying to take care of your whole family on a paltry $17.5 million per year. Poor guy.

03:26 pm: Ashcliffe
Scorsese will be filming a few scenes from his new Leo DiCaprio movie in the park down the street from me. They're going to close off that section, so I won't be able to go watch, but still--cool.

09:25 am: tipping
Dang it, I had a guy here to service my A/C, and he did it, and then I couldn't find the checkbook, so he said to send it in the mail. That threw me so much that I couldn't adequately explain that I wanted to tip him but needed to break a $20, so he thought I was just looking for cash to pay the bill and again said I could just send it by mail, and he left. Now what do I do? I can't just not tip the guy, he's been a life saver since he's been my HVAC guy. Can I send it in an envelope with his name on it, or will his office just steal it? Man, I shouldn't be allowed to interact with people, I just screw it up.

10:32 pm: Idol
My Brooke was sent packing tonight. The only American Idol contestant I have ever voted for. Gone. Sniff, sniff. I officially don't care who wins now. I knew she wouldn't win, but I thought we'd get her back for another week or two. Sigh.

By the way, I have only heard clips from the new Mudcrutch album so far, but it sounds great. I finally know what to do with my $5 coupon at Best Buy.

08:51 pm: Almost every day for the last few years, I have web-surfed over to the TV Shows on DVD news website. Every time, I hold out a little hope in my heart that there will be an announcement about a DVD release of either Daria or Ed. And every time, I am disappointed. And a little piece of my heart breaks. It's sad, really.

02:27 pm: court shows
OK, I'm a bit of a freak for certain TV court shows. What gets me is the combination of judge and bailiff. Let's examine this more closely:

Judge Judy:
Judge: white woman
Bailiff: African-American man

People's Court:
Judge: Hispanic woman
Bailiff: African-American man

Judge Mathis:
Judge: African-American man
Bailiff: white man

Judge Joe Brown:
Judge: African-American man
Bailiff: Hispanic woman

Divorce Court:
Judge: African-American woman
Bailiff: white man

Judge Hatchett:
Judge: African-American woman
Bailiff: white man

Judge Alex:
Judge: white man
Bailiff: African-American man

Judge David Young:
Judge: (very) white man
Bailiff: African-American woman

I had to look up a couple of those since I don't watch many of them. Anyway, every show has 2 regulars, one of whom is an African-American individual, and the other who is either white or Hispanic. Fascinating statement on society and television I think.

03:04 pm: Dear Papa John's,

I don't care how many scenes of Rome and Venice you include in your commercials; your pizza will never ever ever remind me of Italy.

Thank you.

02:15 pm: Jobbie job
So I'm being offered a new job. It would be back at the place I worked before, up near where durdent & japoi used to live. So the commute would be icky again, and I'd have to work 40 hours/week instead of my current 15-20, but everything else about it is superior to what I'm doing now.

Yesterday I had to go into the city to see a few patients. I drove in, and couldn't find parking. Drove around for 20 minutes, called the facility, who suggested, "Double park?" So I went home. 2.5 hours of my life I'm never getting back, and I still haven't seen the patients. I never wanted to quit as badly as I did right then.

It would be a good job. Low risk, low worry, high pay, high benefits. And Megan says that she never heard me complain about a job until I started the one I'm at. So I must be unhappy. To everyone else, this seems like a no-brainer. But I can't imagine quitting a job. I've never done that except when I went back to school, and that was understandable. This time it would just be "because I want to." I'm terrified. I want to leave, but I don't want to leave. It's an easy job I have. But I miss having a regular schedule. It was nice for a while, but honestly, I feel totally useless.

So I might be offered the job in the next couple of days, to start in 4-6 weeks. Or it might take a few months, they'll let me know when they call. Either way, the job is mine to accept or reject.

I feel like He-Man: I have the power!!!! {echo, echo, echo}

Everyone figures I should take the new job. So I have no idea what I should do. How typical of me.

11:45 am: Just got a Facebook friend request from someone and I have no idea who they are. Normally I assume a stranger just did it accidentally, but this one is from Baldwin and has two Baldwin friends of mine on her friends list already. I am SO confused. I do have one theory, in which case it's someone I never actually met. Well, heck, I'll friend her and see what happens. I can always drop it later.

Edit (later): Wow, I was right. Teacher's daughter. How wild and weird.

12:31 pm: By the way....
If I ever seem to say something terribly horrible, and there is an alternative sarcastic interpretation of it that is funny instead of horrible, always assume I meant it to be sarcastic and not horrible.

Also, I changed my userpic to reduce the risk of other kinds of horrible misinterpretations.

10:05 am: Dunkin' Ripoff?
OK, Dunkin' Donuts regulars, I have a question for you.

The egg & cheese bagel costs something like $2.19. Ingredients include scrambled egg and cheese.

The Supreme Omelet on a bagel costs about $3.59. Ingredients include scrambled egg, cheese, and veggies.

So my question: is there something fundamentally different about the supreme omelet, or would I be paying $1.40 for a few chopped peppers?

09:58 pm: So I never really watched Buffy. But I was just reading up on some of the characters on Wikipedia, and I eventually discovered that Amber Benson's character Tara was killed off. So when I was done reading about her, I clicked the link to a character named Warren, who is the one who killed Tara, and....

Dude, Warren was played by Adam Busch. I used to go to camp with him when we were kids and then we worked at camp together. We weren't good friends, but I definitely knew him. I think he played the cowardly lion when we did Wizard of Oz for our camp play.

Weird. I'd use the excuse that I didn't watch Buffy, but apparently he was also in American Dreamz, which I saw, and the first couple of episodes of that Kelsey Grammer show, both of which I think I saw. Huh.

Apparently he's dating Amber Benson, or at least he still was dating her as of early 2007. Well, good for him. It's the least he could do, after he destroyed Tara and Willow's relationship....

03:03 pm: Sisterly Love
My sister has decided that our schizophrenic cousin is psychologically f***ed up enough that it's OK that he's getting married to a black girl. She's magnanimous, that one.

The latest thing is with my sister's car. When she decided to go to college (which lasted about 3 weeks, until they became so unscrupulous as to assign her homework), she was concerned that her truck wouldn't fit into the parking spaces there. So my parents took her car shopping for a smaller trade-in. She wanted a lightly-used car, but my father insisted that she get a new car. So they got about $10K in trade-in for her truck and my father chipped in and got a Nissan Murano for about $27K. Because that's the kind of car you should be driving if you have no job, nowhere to live, no money of your own, and thousands of dollars in credit card debt.

Anyway, as I said, 3 weeks later she was no longer in school. And my parents were acting as if they own the car (which, while they technically do own it and put a lot of their own money into it, they really did strongarm my sister into getting this particular car, and all of the money she had in the world was in this thing). So my sister declared that she wasn't going to drive it anymore. And she hasn't.

Now, it's 4 weeks later, my parents just replaced my father's 1997 Lexus with a fancy leased car of some sort. They were planning on trading in the Lexus and the Murano for a new car, but they couldn't get as much as they wanted for the Murano, since a new car devalues so much once you drive it off the lot. So they're shopping around for a better deal.

My sister is mad that they won't turn over her money now, since it's their fault that it's still tied up in a car nobody's driving. Her plan, if she could get her money, would be to put $6K down on a "junk" car (like a used BMW, of course) and use the rest for a $2K guitar. She's mad because the guitar is hard to come by and it's almost out of stock wherever she'd be buying it. She said that even if my parents give her the $2K, she'd be satisfied that something came out of the truck fiasco.

Sigh... I swear, I have no idea how some of us come out so normal. And I never feel as "normal" as I do when I talk to my sister.

12:56 am: Um.
I was looking at an old friend/acquaintance's Facebook page, and out of the corner of my eye noticed that she belonged to a Facebook group titled "Facebook Pole Dancers". Of course, I can't let something like that go unnoticed, so I had to check it out. Turns out that poledancing really IS a sport/activity that non-strippers do. Huh. In fact, many people have posted photographs of themselves pole-dancing to the group. I'm not sure why, but they have. Some of them, though, do look like they probably make more than just a hobby of the whole pole-dancing thing.

Just for the record, this web adventure was embarked upon out of sheer curiosity; pole dancing is not something that excites me in any context. Actually, neither are strippers. They just make me nervous.

03:54 pm: Tank Girl
OK, until about 30 seconds ago: NO IDEA that Naomi Watts played Jet Girl. Wow.

09:15 pm: Petty
So yesterday, a single was released by the very last band I would have ever expected to hear from again. Yes, kids, it's Mudcrutch, Tom Petty's pre-Heartbreakers band. Once I saw the release, I did some research, and it appears that two Heartbreakers (Campbell and Tench) were in Mudcrutch, so it really wasn't that tough to form the reunion. Interesting to note, but as Knoler recently commented, I'm not sure that Petty side projects ever sound terribly different than Heartbreakers music. Which is a good thing, but it makes the reunion less fascinating.