And here's hoping he's bound for TNA.
The oddest part of this is that he just returned last Monday, and even got in the face of the champion & was in the "NBA Finals" main event.
The best part of this is that maybe he can go to TNA (and he shouldn't have a no compete clause ... he was fired) and find success on Christian-level proportions.
The worst part is that for the next week, the news of this release, and comments thereof, will wrap up with the repetition of the last word of the sentence, as if the writer is the only person to think of that.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Ken Kennedy released from WWF!
Friday, May 29, 2009
PC Gamer: Big Book of Free
Watch the newsstands!
I picked up a special issue of PC Gamer at Wal-Mart last night, wherein it lists 365 games you can find for free on the internet. And the good news is, I did some looking and there's only a very slight amount of repetition between this issue and the "101 Free Games" link on the side of this forum
I found a few free games on my own, and I've accumulated a list that I'll be adding to the forum sometime this weekend. I don't think the majority of these games have a lot of carryover between the list of 101 or the book of 365. Huzzah!
Now, if I can just find a list of what games that you can find at Best Buy or Wal-Mart or Target in the $10 game section are good to get, I'll be set to never leave the house again.
Candy bar memories
Man, I miss Bar None. That was one damn good chocolate bar.
If I remember correctly, it had two chocolate wafers, chocolate & peanuts in the middle, all surrounded by a chocolate coating. That thing made a bicycle trip to the Lincoln Ave. Grocery all the mo' better, a nice complement to a Saturday lunch of two hot dogs & a Mountain Dew. It was a lunch, I'd like to add, that you could get for under $5.
(I'm surprised I didn't risk a heart attack back then with that combo, like I did years later with a Snickers Cruncher and a Code Red Mountain Dew.)
Also, on the subject of candy that's fondly remembered and sorely missed, there was a Mike & Ike derivative called Cherry & Bub, which were, as you might guess, cherry and bubble gum flavored. There was a convenience store between Newport and Greenville that sold these as late as 2002, and man, I'd buy every box for the trip back to ETSU. I think I was singlehandedly skewing the numbers for the Mike & Ike company; "Gentlemen, we're seeing low numbers for our Cherry & Bub line, all across the board except in one store in Newport, Tennessee. Until those numbers dwindle, let's keep Cherry & Bub in production."
People say it's the olfactory system that results in the strongest memory recall; no doubt that's because the olfactory receptors in the brain are the closest to the forebrain, where research states our memory & recall skills are. However, it seems that taste would produce some kind of powerful recall, given the close physiological association between the nose and mouth structures. There's bound to be some crossover; one general example is, if you've ever smelled something so powerful that you almost experience the sensation of tasting it. Those can be some experiences you never forget.
What was I saying?
Oh, yeah. Hey, Hershey's or Nestle or whoever ... bring back Bar None; surely there's some anniversary or something that you can exploit by bringing it out in a "limited edition" or under a new name or something. I'll watch the cash register displays; don't let me down.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Bittersweet Tragedy
You see things quite differently as an adult than you do as a child.
(I apologize that this post is going to be a bit emotional, but this is really serious).
I had a really simple childhood. I was an only child and my parents both worked essentially opposite shifts for most of my "middle years." Mom went back to work when I was in 4th grade and stayed through I was in high school. Dad worked at the local mega-industry from before my birth to his retirement, which closely coincided with my high school graduation.
I never knew that we had things tough. I don't know how tough we had them to be honest. I just remember going and staying with one grandmother when my parents' work overlapped a bit. My other grandmother came to babysit me at my house on occasion as well. I don't really remember ever wanting anything and I certainly had no concept that we were poor. I knew that we weren't as rich as some of my classmates and I learned quickly the difference between a blue collar and a white collar neighborhood (we were in the former).
As an adult, I have come to cherish memories of my childhood. Yeah, we weren't high class folks, but we were good people. For that reason I say the following:
Damn you Stephen Sommers. Damn you Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett.
You four have taken one of the greatest aspects of my childhood, GI Joe, and absolutely made a mockery out of it and everything it stood for. No matter what house I was at growing up, no matter what the situation was, I always had a GI Joe with me to occupy my time and keep me focused. Now, you have collectively destroyed this for me by ruining this franchise.
The trailer to the new GI Joe movie makes it look absolutely twobob. Utter tripe. There is nothing good about it whatsoever. It looks so bad that I am considering not even watching it.
This creative team has managed to do the impossible. They have taken one of the most intricately developed comic books of all time (and we have to admit up front that Larry Hama is a genius) and completely fucked it up beyond all recognition. There is nothing at all, aside from the character names, that makes this GI Joe. Nothing.
Case in point: the scene with the suits. Apparently it doesn't matter that these guys are the most highly trained and skilled operatives in the world. No. We now have to dress them up in "acceleration suits" so they can run 90 miles an hour and dodge missiles. If you have an "acceleration suit," you would think that you could just put the average run-of-the-mill soldier in it and do the trick....so why invent this concept and make it a central part of the GI Joe movie??? It makes no sense? It is almost as bad, and will actually probably be worse, than the big spider that helped ruin the already bad Wild Wild West movie.
I mean really, the Transformers did great I know...but that doesn't mean that you have to put high-tech machines in every toy movie that you produce. I am waiting for the super high-tech My Little Pony movie to come out where they implant the ponies with infrared vision and stealth fur and they go kill bin Laden. That would actually be a better plot than the GI Joe movie.
Here is a spoiler, so don't read this if you are actually planning to see the movie. Cobra Commander in this one? He looks utterly atrocious with this clear helmet on and a breathing tube coming out of it....almost like a transparent Mysterio from Spider Man. That will be bad...but what makes it worse is that he and Duke are now old war buddies! Some vicious malady befalls CC and skips Duke and it drives CC bonkers. What the hell? Gone is the terrorist genius who just became evil because corporate America had stepped on him so many times. No...we have to go with a simple, non-subversive storyline where a guy takes an acid bath and comes out on the other side as Hannibal Lecter.
The creative team made some good casting decisions and then squandered them with some abjectly stupid ones. Chris Eccleston as Destro is awesome. He was a good Doctor Who and should own the role. Mr. Eko from Lost as Roadblock, er....Heavy Duty is another good one. That is where it stops. The guy playing Duke is a nobody and I actually hope they kill him off in this one and bring in Don Johnson as Lt. Falcon, as they did in the animated movie. Marlon Wayans as Ripcord is nonsensical. He apparently wanted the role because he was a fan of the old line....it is too bad that he couldn't keep the producers from making a mockery of it.
Yeah....thanks Hollywood for taking one of the few unadulterated memories of my childhood and making it worthless.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Fight like a girl?
Am I the only one?
Is it only in this part of SC that this is a widespread occurence? Are these taking over Florida or New York?
It seems as if I can't go one day around this joint without seeing women wearing these "Fight like a girl" T-shirts. Saw one yesterday at Wal-Mart, saw a few the day before in a variety of stops, saw one on a girl today at Applebee's waiting for my order.
I get it. The pink ribbon, "fight like a girl," breast cancer awareness, we are woman hear us roar. Ok, I got that.
What I want to know is, where's the prostate cancer awareness shirts?
And what will those say, pray tell? "Take it up the ass like a man?"
Roadside church signs
I love reading roadside church signs. Granted, I have a strange fascination with reading bathroom graffiti, too.
I just wanted to share this one piece of wisdom I gathered while burning up the roads here recently.
"The Weather Never Changes In Hell"
Subsequently, I found myself in the local Cracker Barrel, where they sell a book full of pictures of church signs. And nothing like this one was anywhere to be found. A pity. Knowing that the weather never changes in hell is worth a lot more than my knowing "What's Missing in Ch__ch? U R!" Guh!
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Shower thoughts 5/20/09
Q: If necessity is the mother of invention, who's the father of invention?
A: Thomas Edison
I've been having some heavy duty work & life responsibilities, which has been greatly limiting my access to interweb machinery as of late. As such, I've been working on some background and banners in my downtime at work, so when I get regular access to my computer back - which should be at least this month - I'll be on more often, providing more of that scientific goodness in a size Nate, that ya'll been lacking.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Why I Can Never Be A Devout Atheist
I wasn't raised in the Church. I attended once on my Grandma's request and was whipped with a willow limb for running away from said Baptist structure and into the street. I was four. My next visit was 20 years later. I went back to attend Grandma's funeral. So right away we can establish that I'm no theologian. Dealing with the dregs of New York City day in and day out for the last three years hasn't exactly helped to cultivate my faith in any substantive way either except to thank God for surviving another one before I go to bed. But every now and then something happens that reaffirms my hope that a loving God is up there and watching out for us. Which brings me to Steve Grindstaff. Mr. Grindstaff is a Johnson City TN car salesman who has reached the pinnacle of his profession. He's a millionaire many times over. According to various friends and law enforcement officials in the area, I've also heard firsthand that he is a cutthroat ruthless cheat and heavyweight cocaine trafficker who will ruin lives or maybe end them to make a buck. So to consolidate his place as an East Tennessee kingpin he built a 30 million dollar castle in the tri cities area in which he and his family reside. Enter God...
Lightning cause of Grindstaff fire
By John Thompson
Elizabethton Bureau Chief
ELIZABETHTON – Steve and Ashley Grindstaff were both philosophical and practical on the day after a fire caused heavy damage to their $28.5 million home on Boone Lake on Saturday evening – a home on which they had no insurance.
“Self insured,” Steve said. “I won’t get one dime of insurance ... I guess this is a case of thinking it will never happen to me.
“This house is under construction right now.” He said they will move back in as quickly as they can.
In building a fabulous home, Steve said he built it with only the best materials and wiring and all the latest safety equipment.
Steve said a rare January bolt of lightning was the culprit. Fire officials have confirmed that it was lightning. The only things he didn’t take into consideration when building the home were the copper beams in the turret of the signature tower of the house. Copper is one of nature’s best conductors of electricity. When lightning hit that copper beam, it efficiently conducted the super hot bolt throughout the top floor of the house, spreading fire and destruction. The power of the lightning bolt can still be seen in the jagged hole left in the tower.
The bolt also followed the plumbing, even striking the water main and sending water gushing several feet high in the yard.
Twice he had almost sold his lakefront home. The latest sale was supposed to be closed this Thursday, Ashley said. Steve quickly kept her from saying more. He said the deal had been confidential and he could not reveal the prospective buyer.
The example they are demonstrating in their latest trial is to not give up when adversity strikes, to recover, keep going and rebuild what was lost.
Just hours after the fire, the couple was clearly in charge of the scene as contractors and workers scurried about the estate, preparing to begin work to restore the house. Ashley met with cleaners while Steve discussed details with construction, electrical and air-conditioning contractors.
Between their conferences with contractors, Steve sat for an interview on the wall of the huge ornate fountain that graces their circular front entrance. Ashley came over and sat next to Steve and placed her arms around him and hugged him.
“Life has its ups and downs,” Ashley said. “God has a plan for us and we just have to be patient and we will see what it will be,” she said as she sat in Steve’s lap and put her arms around him.
Steve said he and Ashley are used to being local celebrities and know very well their actions may have an impact on others.
“We try to be a good example to children and young adults. We try to live right and to be ethical and honest in our businesses,” Steve said.
Steve, Ashley and son Steven were not home at the time. They had gone to a restaurant to celebrate Ashley’s birthday.
The first people to discover the fire were their neighbors, Sherry and Mark Carrier. They rushed to the home but could not open the large iron gate at the front wall to the property. They began calling Steve on his cell phone to get the pass code.
“We started getting calls from numbers we weren’t familiar with at the restaurant,” Ashley said. “We got so many we decided we better answer.”
That was how they found out their house was on fire.
They gave the pass code and Ashley asked them to break out a window in the wing where her two dogs were and make sure they got out. Then they rushed from the restaurant.
They spent the rest of Saturday night watching the Johnson City firefighters battle the blaze. It was the first time Ashley had seen firefighters up close.
“I want to thank the firefighters, I just really appreciate them,” Ashley said. “I was in awe. They worked so hard and they put their lives on the line to save our house.”
The Grindstaffs are now determined that the efforts of the firefighters will not be in vain.
Steve had said last year he planned to return to his roots in Carter County, where he owns one of the few places in the country that has Chevrolet, Chrysler and Ford dealerships side by side.
After the fire, Steve seemed to have second thoughts about selling the home and what inspired him to build such a landmark on Boone Lake.
“One day I will be gone, the dealerships will be gone, but this house will still be here,” he said. He was very familiar with another such landmark, Biltmore in Asheville.
“My driver for many years grew up at Biltmore. We visited it many times,” Steve said. The inspiration for the design of the house came when he was on a tour in Europe. He saw a house in Spain that so touched his imagination that he copied it on Boone Lake.
That inspiration seems to have returned. Steve said he is determined to build the house as quickly as the economy and the current car market will allow.
“I will rebuild it if it is God’s will,” he said.
I was looking at the Johnson City Press and ran across this article. I just think it's funny how somebody can be so self absorbed that lightning can strike your FUCKING CASTLE and you just figure God's plan is for you to rebuild it and stay there instead of going back to your roots in Carter County.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Brooklyn - Week Eight
Ron B. hit me up via IM to ask if I've found a job yet and it reminded me that I should probably write something up for SGM. I never set out to do any sort of "weekly update from Brooklyn" or "hillbilly in the big city" thing, but I did want to use the experiences as grist for regular SGM posts. It turns out that I'm pretty fucking lazy, though, so here we are at week 8 and I've written a total of three posts in that span.
Since Buck and Jake moved up here permanently a few years back, a couple of visitors making their first trips to New York City found themselves enchanted by the Big Apple and proclaimed their desire move here. What they didn't understand is something that Buck made a good point about relating to life in NYC: once you get into the grind of living here, it's pretty much like living anywhere on a day-to-day basis. You get up in the morning, you take care of your business, you fight traffic and lunacy to do it, you come home, you eat, you watch the TV, you fall asleep at night. Granted, aspects of daily living like fighting traffic and lunacy wind up amplified by cramming over 9 million people into an area just smaller than Washington County, TN. So after a couple of weeks, especially being unemployed and aimless, it just becomes life. I still see things that amuse me, yet wouldn't even hit the radar of a long-term New Yorker: for example, there's a filthy, enormous, disgusting bag lady in Manhattan so notable that the second time I saw her, I remembered where I saw her the first time. Now that I think about it, it's essentially the baglady from "Preacher" that Jesse Custer tracks down to learn about Cassidy's past. And the F Train is a fucking pain in the goddamn ass at least once or twice a week and sometimes multiple times during the day. NYC Veterans already know these things.
I didn't really go full steam into jobhunting for the first couple of weeks. The weather was shitty and I think I was sick for a few of the first days and really, who wants a fucking job? I was able to keep my head above water in terms of cash reserves and it looked like the worst thing that would happen is that by the end of this month I would be flat broke and heading back to Morristown to find a nice, quiet place to kill myself.
After sending out tons of resumes and applications via Craigslist, Monster, and Yahoo's HotJobs and getting almost zero response, plus twice wasting my time on interviews with bullshit street-pounding sales-scam jobs, I was finally able to find a nice position when I caught a last-minute Open House announcement on the day it was posted. For reasons that I'm not going to get into now, I'll keep the specifics about work to a minimum, but I guarantee at least one hilarious story when the time comes that I get fired or quit. I can, however, say that I the work itself is easy, it pays relatively well, and I work in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), one of the trendiest neighborhoods in New York and by extension, the Universe.
Something I'm not entirely looking forward to is my upcoming battle with nicotine. You see, New York, both city and state, really want people to quit smoking. Not only does a pack of cigarettes in New York City, due to excessive sin taxes, run anywhere between eight and ten American dollars per pack, but the state has a program where they will give you a free box of nicotine patches to get you started on the road to beating your wife and children in a severe Nic Fit. I mean the road to kicking the tobacco habit. Given that I'm not interested in seeing my tobacco habit become more expensive than coke addiction, I signed up for the free box of patches. When my current carton of cigarettes runs out, which should be at the end of this week, I'm going to begin the long, painful road to punching the glass out of every car window between my apartment and the Avenue U subway station. I think I mean the long, painful road to kicking the tobacco habit, but I doubt it.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
My "mystery potential theory"
Where I posit that we are all savants at something, whether we know it or not.
I was having a discussion with a colleague a few days ago, and we were talking about Asperger's Syndrome, among other things. Chief under discussion was the tendency of individuals with Aspergers (and with autism, to a greater degree) to be particularly skilled in some area. You see these people all the time in special interest news stories, movies "based on a true story," etc.
Then we started discussing child prodigies vs. children born within the autism spectrum. Long story short, I started just talking off the top of my head, and suddenly this concept started coming out of nowhere. To wit:
I posit that we are all born with an innate skill in some area, that far surpasses that of people around us. However, depending on our proximity to something that can help us cultivate that skill, we either achieve greatness in that area or we forever languish.
Take a piano virtuoso: Lil' Johnny's born to a family with a piano in the house. He sits at the piano at 12-18 months and starts banging on the keys. That "banging" becomes melodic form, and soon, at the age of 3, Johnny's fully capable of playing sonatas by ear. Okay, we've heard of the "Johnnies" of the world.
Now, take Johnny and put him in a barrio, where the family can barely scrape by. Or, put him with the same family, except the mother is a neurotic who still has her late mother's piano which "is never to be played or touched." Johnny, in the former, has no access to a piano, despite still having the skill inherent to play the piano extremely well; in the latter scenario, he's reprimanded harshly for attempting to play, therefore pushing him farther away from the chance to let his talent shine.
The "talent" under discussion can be anything, be it music, mathematics, sports, science, or just simple skills of human development - language usage, comprehension of definition, visual accuity, or sheer empathy.
Take my situation for a more practical example. I'm a therapist, and I happen to think that I'm pretty good at what I do. How would my life have developed up to this point, had I not been exposed to psych theory at a young age, had the interest to pursue further information, see enough in the field that I liked, applied some skills in practical settings, dated a lot in high school and college in order to gather info on the intricacies of human interactions and relationships, and then ultimately pursued this goal in an academic setting?
What if I'd listened to all the people around me growing up, who said that psychology was "crazy," or "no help to anyone," or "just talking real good?" Would I have pursued something else entirely, something I'm not as particularly skilled at? Would I have been miserable, or, as the "ignorance is bliss" mindset suggests, would "not knowing" have allowed me to live an incomplete existence, without the burden of knowing what I'd be missing?
But then, the question could be, is "therapy" my inherent skill, or did that just develop through hard work, and I'm inherently skilled in another area that has been untapped all this time due to lack of exposure to an outlet, e.g. spinning vinyl on the 1s & 2s?
Just some thoughts. There's probably something there for a paper or a book or some such, but I can't follow that right now. Too much on the plate, yo.
Friday, May 01, 2009
In today’s "I hate contemporary journalism" rant ...
I bring the "Uh, what?"
Here’s the blurb off the back of “The Wrestler” on DVD:
“Mickey Rourke gives the performance of a lifetime as pro wrestler Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a former superstar now paying the price for twenty years of grueling punishment in and out of the ring. But he's about to risk everything to prove he has one more match left in him: a re-staging of his famous Madison Square Garden bout against ‘The Ayatollah.’ Darren Aronofsky directs a powerful cast in this action-packed saga of guts, glory and gritty determination that is ‘as irresistible as a headlock’ (New York Post).”
There. That part right there. What about a headlock is irresistible? The alluring way that it cuts off your oxygen? The enticing way that it cuts off circulation of blood to the brain?
Wait, I think I see what they mean. The person who’s a victim of a headlock must go where their opponent makes them go; it’s not like they have much choice, and therefore little ... “resistance?” But that’s not quite the meaning of “irresistible” that would make me want to watch a movie. I mean, “The New York Post calls ‘The Wrestler’ ‘a film that will grab you around the neck and force you to watch it?’”
Maybe the review means that the headlock is irresistible to the person applying it? That would certainly change the connotation of the review. As wrestling fans well know, the headlock is generally used as a resthold, allowing the athletes some time to get their wind back, while still appearing to do something in the context of the story going on in the ring. Given the grueling physical demands of wrestling, the headlock, i.e. resthold, must be pretty irresistible.
Well, there you go. “The Wrestler” – “as irresistible as a resthold” (New York Post).
NOTE: I tried to look up this whole review on the NY Post’s webpage ... nada. Although using “headlock” as a search term did call up a lot of news stories about someone named Rihanna. Whoever that is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
