Olympic All-Name Team

           Dong Dong

               China,
            trampoline

           Kim Yoo-Suk

           South Korea,
             pole vault

                                                                  Hulk

                                                                 Brazil,
                                                  soccer excuse me football

If you stop watching beach volleyball for a second, you'll notice some outstandingly named athletes. Dong Dong won the gold!

Dumt & Farligt

Swedish for stupid & dangerous.

Pure Being

Saw this:


which brought this back:

Avengers Assemble

A promo poster for Marvel's The Avengers was spotted at the Licensing International Expo in Las Vegas. (Whatever the hell that is.) The Avengers comes out next May.

I Can Relate

Happy Monday, Bastards.

Shit

Wedon Directing The Avengers?

Not the British Avengers, you understand, with the prissy dude and the smokin' hot Emma Peel in the body suit, but the Marvel Avengers. Interesting pick, if it becomes official. Joss excels at building chemistry and tension between characters, the action is sometimes incidental to the human elements. Can he control a cast of heavyweights? Will this film be his or will he be handcuffed by the money and expectations involved? More

I Got It Before, But Now I Get It

I've been immersed in the world of Vista for a few weeks now, and this Mac commercial from a few years ago - my favorite of the campaign, by the way - is really hitting home. Anybody else besides Lurker and me rocking Vista, or REALLY looking forward to 7?

Good God, I've Been Busy

It's good to know I've been missed, Deighve.

After years and years and years of designing Web sites using table-based layouts (hey, that's how everybody did it back in the day), I have taken the plunge and taught myself to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a much more elegant and efficient way of doing things that separates a page's content from its layout. Why was I a hold-out, you may be asking?

1) Even just a couple of years ago, there were many people in my company still using Netscape 4.x, an ancient browser that was incapable of rendering CSS at all. However, a recent glance at our statistics verified that all my current customers are on board with IE6 (ugh), IE7 or Firefox.

2) I had heard some real horror stories about browser rendering differences with CSS and how the same things that rendered beautifully in one browser looked absolutely shitty in another. Weird indents here and there, odd overlaps where there shouldn't be any, who needs that? The only way around, and this is still true with IE6, is to use various CSS hacks to fool the errant browser into doing the right thing. ("* html" has become my new best friend.)

3) I, like most people, tend to stick with what I know.

I've done this completely on my own, with no prodding from anyone else - or hope of monetary compensation - because it's the right thing to do if I want to be regarded as a serious designer. (The look on my non-techie boss's face was priceless when I tried to explain CSS and its benefits to all concerned.) I've worked through a lot of lunches and even made a trip to work last weekend to figure something out that was making me crazy. (Thanks again, IE6!)

I'm still Johnny Newguy, and I'm relatively certain that my CSS will be a source of secret embarrassment in a few months, but to get a real sense of how powerful this stuff is, check out css Zen Garden and select some of the different designs in the right-hand column. Keep in mind as you do that the content for each page is exactly the same, only the CSS is changing.

Mind-blowing stuff.

Summer Movie Scorecard

I'm sure you bastards remember my summer movie short list post, yes? (I somehow forgot The Dark Knight, but it was on my mental list.) Here's my follow-up, in order of appreciation ...

1) The Dark Knight - A

2) Iron Man - A -

3) The Incredible Hulk - B

4) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - B -

5) Hellboy II - C +

6) WALL-E - MISSED IT

Rank 'em if you saw 'em, ladies.

The Most Gag-Inducing Moment In Cinema History

Fuck Doris Day, and fuck Pillow Talk.

My Sad Kitchen

So, we're just finishing up the first week of our kitchen renovation. Everything has been crammed into the dining room, and boy does it look like shit. The contractor says we're looking at three more weeks, and although I was skeptical at first, they are moving right along at a nice clip.

Next week, we run a gas line for the new cooktop, drywall the holes and get some tile on our naked concrete floor. Pray for Mojo.

Sean's Wife Steps In It

For those who can't watch the video, Sean's wife appeared on Fox the other day, discussing Mass Effect, a role-playing game on Xbox 360. She made some disparaging remarks about the game and its harmfulness to adolescents, also admitting that she had never played it herself.

Well.

In retaliation, fans of the game have bombarded Amazon with negative reviews of her book, The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever. To give you an idea of the shitstorm she ignited, yesterday morning there were 55 reviews as the smear campaign was ramping up. This morning? 491 and counting. They've even taken to uploading not-very-nice alternate photos of the book, and creating a discussion of the book titled "Cooper Lawrence Is A Stupid Bitch."

I predict Amazon will reset her reviews soon, so you should check it out today.

Lovely

We had an inspection on the little house we wanted to buy. Turns out that termites have not suffered the slump in the real estate market that everyone else has, especially where this house is concerned. The inspector deemed it "major structural damage" and showed us a couple of spots where you could step on the floor and potentially open up a new access point to the crawlspace. We're dropping what we're willing to pay to ridiculously low levels - so low the owners probably (and maybe hopefully) won't take it. So we're back to square one. Or maybe two, since we've got a couple of other potential places identified.

The best part is that when we went out to look at the place again after the inspection, I was walking around the house and noticed a bunch of wasps on a window. Hmm, there are a lot of wasps on that window, I thought, just as one stung me RIGHT ON THE FUCKING FOREHEAD. So that evening and the whole next day, I was uncomfortable and had a little bit of a headache, but no big deal. Until around 8pm when I looked in the mirror and noticed that my forehead was swelling around the sting spot. By around 8:45 it was starting to spread around my eyes. I iced it down and that seemed to help a little. I woke up yesterday morning and my whole face was puffy. I felt really crappy, so I did the walk-in to the Doctors office. Three hours and a steroid shot later, I walked out with a prescription for allergy medicine and slightly less discomfort.

All seems okay now. Not that you care.

The Fixer-Upper

They asked 175, we offered 145, they countered 163. Decisions decisions.

Ankiel Smash

The Rick Ankiel story is an amazing one. He shot to the big leagues as a 20-year-old phenom pitcher, but developed a bizarre psychological problem and lost the ability to throw the ball over the plate. After a long struggle, he gave up pitching, reinvented himself as an outfielder, starting his career over from scratch. Two and a half years later, he returned to the big leagues last night to a standing ovation and hit a home run in his first game back.

He spent most of the season here in Memphis with the Redbirds, the Cardinals' AAA affiliate, and led the league in HRs. Incidentally, the promotion for tonight's Redbirds game is a Marvel comic book featuring the Hulk, Iron Man, Spiderman and Rick Ankiel.

NERDLINGER, That's Who

Dig that theme song.

Well, Jacksonville's a city with a hopeless streetlight

Sorry I've been an absentee bastardo lately, but here's the latest...

I applied for a job with a company called LSI (lisjax.com) for an Instructional Design position in Jacksonville, Florida. They got back to me rather promptly, set up a conference call which happened today, and got back, rather promptly again, and orfered me a job. It's a cool ass job doing CBT for the Marine's V22 Osprey - not sure what it all entails, but it would be a lot more interesting than working for an insurance company (the only other nibble I've gotten). Granted, it's not higher ed, but the well seems to have run dry on those types of jobs (JU has evidently lost my number). Anyway, everything about the job is great, except they filled the Florida position and offered me this one in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Which you of course know as the home of Camp LeJune and the birthplace of Ryan Adams.

Everything about the job is good - salary, bennies, relocation, all that. Only problem is it's up the coast a bit farther than I wanted. They're expecting an up or down vote by Monday. I foresee a bit of 'meditating' (read drinking) over the weekend. Your thoughts would be appreciated.

PS - By the time you read this, I'll be sucking on 39.

I Can't Stand the Quiet!

One of my favorite songs and my favorite scene from Simple Men, a fine Hal Hartley film. C'mon you bastards, dance!

Forward Thinking People....

.... will check out the Frosty Turnpike Patrol to hear the song I recorded for the Daniel Bull tribute album back in June. Danny was a New Orleans guy, a singer and songwriter who passed away from leukemia at a too-young age. His former partner Lauren is putting together a tribute to Danny and his songs, so we (myself, Dave Baker, Elzy Lindsey) chose 'Show No Concern' and gave it a good whacking in the studio. It was fun to play loud again.