Hulk prettymuch ruined 2003 for me in terms of movie watching. I had time, but you know, I just didn't care. I'm over that, now, so I'm ready to watch the Academy Awards, even though I've only seen 4 of the nominated films. (And one of those is Big Fish, so there you go.)

I was thinking about doing a write-up of who I wanted to see win based on whose acceptance speeches would be most interesting, but I think it's going to be a pretty boring night in that department. The only potential speech that excites me this year is Bill Murray's. Danny Elfman might be loopy enough to be interesting, I guess. Honestly, my biggest hope is that Tim Robbins doesn't win, because I think he needs to be shut out for another 5-10 years before he's bitter enough to come totally unhinged and deliver a scathing, incomprehensible acceptance speech.

Why didn't they just cut the scene?

A woman is said to be worth her weight in hens and a man's wealth is measured by the size of his chicken.

So. Having listened to "Poison" about 20 times since yesterday, I've discovered that I actually really like the lyrics. I didn't like them much when it first came out. It's possible that's because when it first came out, I didn't wanna hurt someone just to hear them screaming my name. I dunno. But even now, listening to the Alice Cooper version isn't the same for me - I'm not as involved, and I don't fancy the lyrics as much. This strikes me as odd, because the singer in the song is espousing the viewpoint that I identify with - why would I identify more when the singer is female? It's not like "The Leader of the Pack," which touches me because I pity the singer.

Upon further reflection, it seems to me that I simply don't believe males when they sing love songs. I've fervently expressed my undying love for a person when I wasn't just trying to get into their pants, and I'm sure other males have done so as well, but my fundamental assumption when I hear a guy go weak in the knees for a girl is that they're just horny. I believe Bruce Springsteen when he sings "I'm on Fire," but I have no faith whatsoever that Paul McCartney just wants to hold my hand. I'm having a hard time coming up with more examples of love songs sung by males, because I really don't like them. But as soon as a female sings them, suddenly my reaction is "Oh, yeah, I know just what she's talking about."

It's probably worth pointing out that when I say "love song" I mean songs sung to a target who we assume has some interest in the singer, or particularly mopey songs about how awesome the singer's loved one is. I have no problem with "it's too bad I'm too screwed up to have a chance with the girl I love" songs.

I'm not sure I've ever been more ashamed to admit how much I like a song. Groove Coverage's cover of "Poison" is fricking AWESOME. It's a synthed up cover of one of Alice Cooper's poppiest songs, and I LOVE it. You can hear it on the site if you want to listen to it before mocking me.

Radio has always made me feel old, but lately it's getting worse. From early on, I had a thing for "classic rock." I finally outgrew that about 10 years ago, but for most of my life I felt old because I was listening to old-people music. Just as I got over that, the wave of '80s nostalgia hit (WTF? Don't we normally wait a full decade before that happens?) and now I felt old because the new music I was into as a windbreaker-wearing junior high kid had suddenly become "retro."

It gets worse, though. A few weeks ago, the local party music station proudly announced that it played "cuts from back in the day," then launched into a song that came out when I was in college. (Admittedly, I kind of gamed the system on that one by being an undergrad for 7 years. But still.) And this morning, my once-beloved classic rock station was playing "Rebel Yell." 1984. I was 9 when it came out, and I thought it RAWKED. And now it's "classic rock."

One of these days, I'll have the radio on "seek;" I'll be cruising along and hear about a crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube; I'll stick around for station identification, and it will be the oldies station. It's probably a good thing I don't keep a gun in my car.

Hm. I destroy 10 vehicles in 60 seconds. I click on the sheep until they blow up. I send my orcs to massacre seals. I blow up lemmings to watch the fireworks. I keep trying to hit the pedestrians, even though they always dodge. I try to shoot the dog when he laughs at me after I miss all the ducks. I blend frogs.

But for some reason, Poacher bothers me. I think I agree with ceej (midway down, can search for "penis") that part of the reason is that the motivation for poaching is just so amazingly lame. In fact, I think that's the main part of it. Maybe I don't have any qualms about doing any of the antisocial things I've done in video games because you can always get more vehicles, sheep, seals, lemmings, pedestrians and frogs. (The dog is an orb finder and immortal.) Poaching is inextricably entwined with the scarcity and possible extinction of the poached animals. There's no way I can shut my eyes to that when I think about poaching. If it were just some "rhinocerous skeet" swf, I probably wouldn't think twice about it, because it's not about trying to make as much money as possible while extinguishing a species.

Why are people who make Quizilla quizzes so freaking lazy? First it was that stupid "Are you a music GAWD?" quiz, where there were only two outcomes, and all you had to do was get half of them right to get the best outcome... And now it's this - the questions aren't equally weighted, so I can't figure out how how many you need to know to get the best possible (of two) result, but it can't be much - I had to guess at half of them, at least. I know that griping about a Quizilla quiz is like complaining about the quality of graffiti in a junior high school girl's restroom, but... These people obviously thought they knew something. Some of the questions don't suck. Why couldn't they muster at least, say, 4 images - one for really good, one for really bad, and two to round out the middle? Is it that hard?

Bleah.

Wow. I really am just too lucky for my own good. I was getting ready to leave for work, packed my schoolbag, and squeezed it onto the kitchen counter to go say goodbye to the dog. As soon as I turned away from the bag, it fell off the counter, did a little flip, and landed square on its back. I pulled the laptop out, expecting the screen to have shattered; the screen did have lots of little specks on it, but that's because the fall knocked all the crud out of the keyboard onto the screen. It booted just fine; it doesn't seemed to have been harmed at all by falling 3 feet with two casebooks on top of it.

I did clean the screen, tho'.

Ordinarily, I prefer having bad dreams to not being able to sleep. Last night, though, after an hour of lying awake (and I know that's not a lot for most people, but I'm the type that crashes within 5 minutes of laying down, normally) I ended up having one of those dreams that's just like real life, except things keep going wrong. Normally, I have those, and then I wake up and think through everything that's upsetting me at the moment and strike out all the ones that happened in the dream. This morning, though, I couldn't actually remember what happened in the dream. So all day, I'll have these things gnawing at me that aren't real, but that I can't displace because I can't actually remember what they are. Very frustrating.

In other news, there's a section heading in my contracts book with a title including the words "satisfaction," "mature," "perform," and "discharge." I try to keep the dirty mind in check while reading the casebooks, but that's a bit much to endure.

I just drove past a car with decal letters in the back window reading:

You just been passed by a GIRL

I'm not sure why they needed to spell that out, though - I figured the "Miata" badge on the back would be enough. *drumfill*

Ugh. So, with 2 minutes remaining in class, I got called on to discuss a case I had not read. Normally, when I haven't read a case, I skim it while we're working on the previous case, so I can try to bluff my way through it. But I had no idea we were going to start a case with 2 minutes left. In the words of the professor, "That's not good." 4 minutes later, the professor announces that he cannot, in fact, see the clock, and he's just now realized that we're out of time. Psy.

In other news, Fracster is just incredible. Ever since version 1.0 of Fractint, I have loved digging around in fractals and sharing what I found. It rocks.

Double bleah. I was expecting it to be lame, but not this lame:

Yeah. Master of Typer Shark is, apparently, the highest rank. No idea why it tells me there's a higher rank available. I suppose it's a good thing, though, since if there was another rank available, I'd probably waste more time trying to achieve it.
Bleah again.

Bleah. So the rank after "Lord Poseidon" is "Master of Typer Shark." Lame. There's another rank after Master of Typer Shark, but it's at 10,170,000 - the best I've managed is 8,995,003. What sucks is, I know that if I got really lucky, I could just barely manage the next rank. But I'll bet it's even lamer than "Master of Typer Shark." Psy.

The other thing that sucks about Typer Shark is that it's really not that great as a typing tutor. What REALLY bothers me are the mutant green sharks that change their letters to arbitrary characters as you type them. That specifically teaches you to type SLOWLY, because if you type out the whole shark at once, but the first letter changes just as you start typing, you get a tonne of typos. From a gameplay standpoint, I guess they're interesting. It would be nice to see someone make an interesting typing game that lets you read ahead as you type - one skill that Typer Shark doesn't really develop at all.

Oh, fine. Everyone else is doing it:

I'm only including states that I've actually had a destination in, plus Tennessee, because we stopped at a diner in Bucksnort, TN, and that's just way too cool to not mark on a dorky map. I've ridden through (car or train) a lot of eastern states, but didn't stop for anything except snacks.