superhandz

not a part

i know, right. terrible.

i put part one down there, and rather than continuing like a decent person should,
i talk about something i want.

it's this thing

now it's not that i'm so crazy about tv or anything, but this is such an awesome thing.
truly.

you plug it into your cable box/dvr/whatever and your high-speed internet connection, by way of a router is fine, of course.

then, while anywhere in the world that you have a high-speed connection,
you can watch any channels you can watch at home and control the box in the
same way as if you were sitting in your living room.
whether you're in a hotel in Australia, or in your back yard; at your friends and you all want to watch something you have on your DVR.

wow.

now, i've never used one, so i don't have any personal experience with this thing, but i've yet to see a bad review. the only negative at this point is the lack of a Mac OS X compatible client.
however, at MacWorld a couple weeks ago, Sling announced that one would be available in the 2nd quarter of this year. sweet.

this thing has been around for a couple years now, and i've never been able to understand why it hasn't blown up in a massive way, considering the amount of tv watching that goes on.

it might have something to do with legal issues that could come up, but they've made it pretty far with nary a peep from "Those Who Like to Sue."

oh yeah - they call it place-shifting, like a dvr is time-shifting.
maybe that covers their asses?

trip to the UK part 1

ok, ok. I'll get started on telling you all about the trip to Ireland and London with the fam-in-law.

we left Philly on x-mas day, on an evening flight. We were flying to London on British Air and then to Dublin on a connection Aer Lingus flight.
The flight was almost totally full, though we lucked out with the person next to us changing seats, so we had a row to ourselves. sweet.

Got to London at like 6am, next flight at like 9am, got to Dublin around 11am.
Met up with Lisa in the airport, then found the guy with the Tauber sign who was waiting for us. sweet.

the drive through Dublin was cool, driving on the wrong side of the street was a first for me, and a little disconcerting.
luckily, they don't have a brake pedal on the passenger side.

got to the Fitzwilliam Hotel, overlooking St. Stephan's Green, right in the center of 'downtown'-ish Dublin. It's a very modern hotel, a chic sort of place, if you will.
A room for Mikey and I, and a room for J and Lisa.
Free wired internet in the room was a pleasant surprise.

So let me see...this was Monday. I think we just ended up walking around the area a while.
Right outside the hotel is where Grafton St starts. Pretty much a pedestrian area with stores and the like.
Ben Yehuda-style.
People are really nice in Dublin, but the accent almost makes everyone sound depressed. The sentences all kind of turn down at the end. Of course, the weather does suck most of the time, so it's not surprising.
Went for pints of Guinness (the national pastime) with M, L, R, and J. It does taste different (better) over there, by the way.
Something to do with the soft water or something.

Had dinner with everyone in the hotel dining room.
The food was very good.
What sucked was the wedding planning talk that was so insane, it became pretty much impossible for me to keep any sense of decorum (Europe voices everyone!) and I had to take a little break in my room.
Yes, I walked out of dinner, but it was for the best. When I came back, there was a much nicer tone of compromise in the air.
It was actually at this point that the food was very good.

rough.

After dinner later, we went for a longish walk over to Temple Bar, which is the popular pub and hanging out area. What with it being St. Stephan's day or Boxing Day or whatever they call it, there were almost no pubs open.
But the walk was nice, even with the brief foray into sketchy Chinatown area.

What I really like about the whole trip was the awesome history that is all around.
It also was really clear (to me at least) that the Irish really were fucked by the British for hundreds of years and that it was really terribly brutal at times. The English just seem to have had this sense that they were the absolute pinnacle of human development and anyone else was just terribly uncivilized.

prigs.

boy o'boy!! auld eire!

and awaaaaaay we go!!

hey! sign this

the letter from Rep. Conyers to Bush declaring intent to try to pass a motion to censure he and Cheney.

please sign.

Damn!! David Brooks gets apocalyptical!

!

and apoplectic!!

will it lead to apoptosis??

I don't even know what to say

except that I'm very happy that this shit is going down.

I'm talking about all the shit about Bush that's coming down now.
He said a year ago that he doesn't wiretap without a warrant, and now he said that he does.

I know, I know, it's no big shocker that this administration lies like all-get-out,
but hopefully, this'll be the straw that finally gets stuck in the camels eye and then it gets
infected and then they have to amputate at the neck.

bring it, bitch.

i love this essay by Kristof in the New York Times.


war-on-christmas-o'reilly-bullshit.

read it.

cold. so cold.

so very cold.

I guess if it gets much colder,
I may have to take shelter in my freshly killed Ton-ton.


no big deal, though.

I've got a lightsaber.

yes, I remembered I can post pictures

hey - you'd be in the spotlight too, if you had a name like that.

damn she's cute

we start 'em young,
and we start 'em on macs.


oh yeah - she's my niece

what'd you say? I'm what?

much too cool for you?

oh.
that's what I thought you said.

mmmm...summmmmmer

I miss it.

A Conversation in Context (Philadelphia, 2005)

< Con

and when those days come, the days of the apocolypse
- not the jesus one, just regular worldwide catastrophe, I truly feel like I will be among the useful.

but listen to me well,
those of you with skills only useful in this 'advanced' society of ours,
if you try to fuck around (cover YOUR back?? why should I cover YOUR back?? maybe I won't!)

then I won't hesitate.
I won't be able to.

sorry.

text >

the write stuff

So you know how when you’re in a bad relationship with some guy, he’s totally going out, being beligerant. He had come into the whole relationship seeming like a good guy, really compassionate. Like he wanted to help you clean yourself up, stop hanging out with those guys, put on some nice clothing and get your hair and nails done.
So you go for it, and he seems relatively harmless for a bit.
Then some bad shit happens that affects a lot of people and all of a sudden he seems to get some kind of hero complex; like he’s supposed to go and help all these people. But weird-like, not in a red cross kinda way, but more jesus-on-a-cross kinda way, you know? So he’s getting all strange and and negative and stuff, and after all kinds of different shit happens,

you meet a new guy.
He seems like a pretty good, upstanding guy. Really couldn’t say much bad about him. You know a lot of people who’ve been friends with him for a long time, and they all have nice things to say. So you start hanging out with him and it turns out you like what he has to say. Turns out he says a lot of the same things that you think would be good for you – and he wants to be with you real bad.

So he starts wooing you, flowers, dinners, concerts, the whole deal and you’re thinking about this new guy. But
then the old guy comes back into your life. He just wants to keep you safe, he says; that’s all he was trying to do before, he swears. And you know what?, he says, that other guy just won’t be able to keep you safe when it comes down to it. He just won’t. When you go to the other guy, he just doesn’t seem to be able to find the words to say that it’ll be ok with him, that he’ll be able to keep you just as safe – even though you have a feeling it’s true.

What’s a body to do? You gotta trust words, and so you go with mr safe. Hey, at least you can always say, you said you would; I trusted you.


Sigh.


I guess in the end, that’s what it came down to. The guy with the right stuff on the inside was pushed away for the guy with the writers staff on his side.


But you know what makes me smile? That even though I rejected him, he still sends me emails. Little notes to let me know that he’s still around, still cares, still hopes for our future together, and still needs money.

God bless John Kerry.

hey, here's a thought

who gets up in the morning on a frigid winter day, shivers as they get out from underneath their nice warm down comforter,
looks out the window at the snow on the ground, sees the breath billowing out of bypassers mouths and

PUTS ON SHORTS!!

maybe it's 'cause I spends my whole day on a college campus, and it's just another one of those crazy college kid fads, but honestly, what the fuck.

jeopardy

have I ever mentioned that I watch this show every day?
or if I don't watch it, I record it and watch it later.

I love jeopardy and there's a decent chance that I'll kick your ass at it.

thank you Alex.

weddings, classes, and more

so this is pretty final - August 24th at the Palm House in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.
should be a smashing time.

as it will be in a glass house, please don't throw stoned.

about classes, I'm trying to sign up for a creative writing class that will teach the sort of writing that is along the lines of Woody Allen and Mark Twain.
Coupled with my burgeoning improv career, I should have a 4 movie-a-year contract in no time.
and likely making movies as good as Woody's recent offerings.

and the more?

I'm hungry.

tap for it

what a time.

so we went to new york on tues eve, saw a bunch of wedding venues on wednesday - thanks to R for letting use the car. really did make the whole thing easier.

thursday morning, M, J and I took the train up to CT for thanksgiving day - hectic as always, lots of people, food and
noise. noise. noise.
was J's first time with the mass of humanity that makes up the extended.
of course it was M's first time, and both handled it beautifully.

a night's sleep and we were off to Providence for the weekend.
a rented car and a few hours later, it was sundown.

I do love seeing interaction between J and the parents - not sure why, but it makes me pretty happy.

very nice times were had over the weekend, lots of heated discussion on all things, from holy to unholy.
fear not - abortion, belief in god, homosinuality, and any other controversial topic were all guests.

plenty of warm discussion too.

J learned how to tap for just about anything - very cool.
near to cured her insomnia.

saturday night's alright for fighting, but we decided to go out for a drink instead - worked out better in the end. hung
with shy, and that was cool.

sunday was taking M to the airport, saying bye to B and Maia.

a tour of Slater Mill was quite cool. very wild that they could see what was needed to get from A to Z and could build a machine to do it.
turning cotton into thread into cloth into money.
it's like magic, using gears.

the train home - decided that was better than flying early Monday, and truly it was.

I'm pretty sure M and J had a nice time,

and the gluten ribs were great.

wedding balls are stinging

yep.
going on Wednesday to look at a few venues for the biggest wedding of my life (our lives).

should be interesting, looking at these places with the sharp and trained eye of a professional venue-looker.
I'm sure I'll see all kinds of small details, both positive and negative, that will both excite me, as well as cause great dismay.

I'll be looking for such things as: are there toilets? how many? is toilet paper included in the price? double roll, or single? do we get bathroom attendants, or will guests be expected to turn the sinks on themselves? how about drying their own hands? do we really want to go there?

if you've been married before, you know that these are some of the things that weigh on the mind of the wed-ers, right up until the caterer doesn't show up.

then your priorities change.