Another year, another April Fool's Day I have worry about who is going to trick me, thus turning my day into a distrustful day of conspiracy likely culminating with me shouting at green lights, "Yeah, RIGHT, you're green! I'm going to stay parked here, because I'M no FOOL!"

I have no wacky tricks for you, no upside-down websites, no bunny links that actually lead to porn sites. I'm pretty much terrified of having tricks played on me, but I do enjoy the interesting things that happen to other people, like the horrible trick Adam Carolla played on his producer on the air this morning.

The worst trick was played on me 7years ago today, when I was about to perform a play with Melissa that we had written, directed, and organized for over 6 months, with my parents flying in, and plenty of tickets sold. Then my treasurer, world-renowned Stuben Farrar, came up to me in a panic and informed me that he had forgotten to rent out our theater space. Yeah, no hearty laughs and back slapping were shared over that little trick. Unless by "back slapping," you mean "face punching."

I think it would be a delightful April Fool's joke for my bosses to send me an e-mail saying that I really didn't have to come into work, then not have it really be a joke, but be true, like an April Fool's Day present. But that's probably not gonna happen, so I'd best be off to dreamland...

But I leave you with this. The unveiling of a new era. An era of freedom. An era of prosperity. An era of sassy t-shirts.
I introduce you to the beta version of BuzzWear.
Step One -- Leave comments to let me know what you think.
Step Two -- ?
Step Three -- Profit.

At least that's the plan. Later, dudes.

So, I'm not burned to a crisp. Thanks for caring, everyone in the world minus the two people who commented.

I still don't know what actually happened, but it ended up screwing up a lot of stuff, so that sucks. I mentioned to some co-workers that we should sue the fire, but I don't think anyone was listening.

*sigh* Does anyone in the video game industry need to have coffee delivered to them? I can make a mean...trip to Starbucks.

Well, anyway, speaking of not being dead, my endless searches for intel on the internet have led me to one gem of a web find. Finally, it's like my life has a meaning!

I present to you a chance to make everyone feel really, really old.
I present to you...the stuttering kid from "Billy Madison"...IN COLLEGE!

Was it really so long ago? Yes.

When did this site turn into an insider Hollywood rag?
I'll have something real to say soon, I'm sure.

So I'm blogging right now because my building's on fire.

I'm pretty sure it is. There were alarms all ringing and shit when I got here, but no one else seemed concerned, so I went about my day. I started on my work and then we suddenly lost power.
But half of it's back now, and jackpot! My work computer is on the half that's off, and the WiFi connection is on the half that's on! Score!

So there are fire trucks outside, but it's a pretty tall building. I'm not too concerned.
Also I was sick on Fire Safety Training Day, so I missed what they taught everyone, but everyone else seems to have learned from it this valuable lesson -- "Ignore the alarms and fire trucks and read the newspaper."
Sounds fine by me!

I finally updated my reading page for the 21st century, and I intend to actually update it with books that I've enjoyed, rather than books I read because I have buyer's remorse until I finish a book I've purchased, no matter how insipid.

I also just made a user icon page because I had a whole 3 images that I thought weren't being laughed at sufficiently by me alone, so I now share them with the world.
I hope to update that, too, because when you master livejournal, you master the world.

Enjoy!

I think it's way cool that I keep seeing B-list actors.
I know it's bound to happen, since they all live right here, but it's just sort of something you think won't actually ever happen. Sort of like how it was always cool to see Amish people in Pennsylvania, even though, duh, that's where they're from.

But B-list people are way cooler than the Amish, and they don't even churn their own butter. And I hate to call them B-list, especially since they're more likely to Google themselves and find them here than, say, Tom Hanks.

I always worry, too, that I'll say something mean about them and they'll see it. Because I have pretty high Google ratings in some instances, (*rubs fingernails on shirt proudly*) I get to see a lot of people Google themselves and find their names here. Why else would my old Pittsburgh comedian friend Tom Kupiec turn up with 16 different searches leading to my site? Yeah, I saw that, Tom.
I also said something rude about a certain Pittsburgh radio DJ a billion years ago, and I actually got to know a little more about him and started to respect him when he became friends with Felicia...only to have one of his callers tell him some bitch was badmouthing him on the internet.

But that's the risk I take for you fine people, and so Dylan Baker, if you're reading this, I think it's totally cool that a hip star like you would be sitting in front of me on the Studio Tour of Universal Studios earlier today.
I didn't want to be a weirdo, so I took a picture of you from afar, but yeah, that's you. I'm also extremely proud of myself for recognizing you, and I applaud your work in the "Spider-Man" movies, and the lesser-known creepy movie, but the one I used to actually find your name on imdb, "Rick."

I really like the whole pictures with posts thing. It somehow makes me seem more legitimate.
Also, I have a lot of fun photoshopping my cat into various situations.

My mom and dad are coming in this weekend, so I should probably figure out things to do in California that involve leaving the house. I'm actually pretty nervous about this because I don't fancy getting scolded for living in such a shoddy part of town or for whatever other crazy reason I'm going to be accused of like why don't I have a better job or why don't I marry that delightful Tom Cruise and live forever in a magical spaceship.

I'm glad they're finally seeing me, but I also want Justin's parents to come out here, because he hasn't seen them in a lot longer than I've seen my parents. Also, he's all about wowing company and making food for them and taking them to fun places, whereas I would be happy playing Super Puzzle Fighter with my parents until my smack talking made them cry.

I also want my mom to try Justin's new hummus recipe because she says hummus is for dirty hippies, and I do enjoy proving people wrong. Then I'll give her some chocolate milk and tell her it was soy! Ha ha! What a weekend this will be!

Oh, on an administrative note, are many of you getting 500 server errors every so often when you check the site? I get it a lot and a couple other people have, as well. I complained to my new host, and they told me that I was on a server with a bunch of other morons who were getting high-traffic at peak times (midnight pacific, 3 AM eastern -- LOOK OUT, INTERNET!), meaning they wouldn't fix it until I complained more.
So if it happens to you, complain to me.

So I was clicking through CNN.com, morbidly feeding my obsession with all the things wrong with society and I happened across this Time magazine article.

As I've mentioned an annoying amount of times already, technophobia is just so unattractive and curmudgeonly in this day and age. Yeah, I make up my own words. But this technophobia turns well-meaning warners of overindulgence into looking like elderly men shuffling out on their lawns, waving their canes in the air wildly and shouting about kids and their makeout parties.

Let's take apart this picture and caption which I DID not edit. You can find the original CNN link here, but I didn't read the article. The pictures gave me enough fodder to mock. Plus I grew up with gadgets and my attention span is now so short, I just look at the pictures because I never learned to rea-- ooh, something shiny!

Okay, so I want you to read that caption carefully and HOLD THE PHONE! That kid IMs, watches TV, AND does a Google search?!?! What, is he in MED SCHOOL?! I mean, IMing and Googling, sure. TV and Googling, who doesn't? But all three? And he manages to concentrate with an iPod, 3 cellphones, and a laptop flying around his head? Actually, I don't see what the problem is. This kid's gonna have no problem getting into college! Forget the essay on how he tutored inner-city retarded homeless baby seals, all this kid needs to say is that he can IM, watch TV, and Google at the same time, which is ironically all he'll spend his four years of college doing.

And here we have young Bronte Cox chatting with FOUR of her friends, all of which are probably 80-year-old men named SexxyCheerAngel69. Note that she is also next to a fax machine, which in my humble opinion is completely obsolete now that we have scanners and email, but no one listens to me, because the MAN invested in machines for all the corporations and he'll be damned if that loud, beeping, jamming waste of space goes the way of the 8-track.
I note that she is also in an office, and unless it's her own as a result of her booming eBay business (selling her underwear), she's in major danger of stumbling into Daddy's special grown-up directory inconspicuously named "Tax Returns or Something That's Not Porn," filled with named pictures of someone named SexxyCheerAngel69.

And there he is right there! Never mind that his living room looks like it was painted by the Easter Bunny on Ecstasy, this man is BUSY. He's talking on his cellphone, so he is clearly from the future. You can also tell that he gets things DONE as indicated by the FedEx package in his arm. In the future, everyone uses FedEx, even is they don't want to. He is bringing the package to young Bronte to use for the quick shipment of her panties on eBay. One more positive feedback, and her feedback star will turn green with little lines shooting out of it!

Piers Cox surfs the net, likely trying to research why parents would give their children such stupid names. All Google searches on the topic direct him to the online Pottery Barn catalog, and he cries himself to sleep every night on 5000-thread-count pastel sheets. But right now he's posting on myspace about his favorite new band, Fall Out Boy! Man, they rock hard! They don't even hyphenate the first two words of their name, regardless of it being a compound modifier, that's how hard they rock! They rocked the hyphen right out of town!

Georgina, the matriarch of the family, totally does not have a lame name, and I am definitely not even saying that just because that's Melissa's mom's name. Piers pauses during a rare screen break to try and ask his mom why she doesn't love him enough, and why won't the Time magazine people leave their house, and isn't this article supposed to be about kids being obsessed with gadgets and ignoring their families, but she's too busy trading estocks on her Blackberry! As a matter of fact, she only bought the damn kid his own computer so that he would play video games in his room and stay the heck away from her and grow up with healthy values like this young German lad. Piers vows silently into the camera that he will treat his children with loving warmth and attentiveness, but can you imagine how sweet iPods are going to be by then?!?! Cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon...

Well, if you search really hard, under the sarcasm and ridicule, you can find my genuine feelings about how ridiculous it is to try and victimize people for trying to make their lives easier with the help of technology. Or maybe I just really wanted to make fun of this family for making the cover story despite looking less technologically advanced than the average street lunatic in Los Angeles. Either way, I think my job here is done.

A quick note about spammers -- I'm just leaving them up until Justin can add them to my MT-Blacklist, which will then erase them for anyone who uses MT. I hope the spammers have to someday watch their children die.

My old dentist was the best dentist ever.
His name was Dr. St. John, and he started working on my mom's teeth when she was 5. Unfortunately, people who work on your mom's teeth since she was 5 can't usually be your forever dentist, and when I was about 15, he passed on.
He seriously was a great guy. He always told me I was doing well and I had good brushing habits and he always gave me strawberry sugarless gum.

Well, after he passed away, we got a little relaxed with our dentist appointments, and sort of stopped having them. Once a year or so, I'd casually mention to my mom that we ought to find a new one for my brother and I, and she always waved us off mumbling something about how we were old enough now to schedule appointments for ourselves, forgetting, of course, that we were also young enough not to care.

And what the heck, right? I brush my teeth twice a day. I use mouthwash sometimes because I like the rush. I've used floss in the past, but we don't really get along. But I don't eat before bed, and I'm aware of tooth safety!

I think you know where this is going.
I had a nagging feeling in the back of my head that, well, it's been 10 years, and maybe I should just go. I mean, I pay dental every month, I might as well use it.
So I found a guy with my dental plan nearby where I live, which isn't always a good thing. Do you remember in the movie "Clueless" when Alicia Silverstone gets invited to a shady party in the Valley, but then her weird friend tries to rape her, and he kicks her out of the car at night next to a liquor store with a giant clown on the sign? That's where I live. I drive by that clown every day to get to work. I am not even joking.
So signing up for a dentist in my neighborhood was probably not the safest idea, because, as I told Melissa, I could park and find out it's a guy doing dental surgery out of a hot dog cart.
And also, I'm not even trying to be racist here, because it's a fact, but no dentists in a 10-mile radius speak English as a native language. I don't think it's too much to want to visit a dentist without needing to look up "Ow! Use more novocaine!" in Farsi. Also: not a lot of confidence gets instilled in the average patient when your dental degree proclaims in your office that you're a proud graduate of the Dental School of Cancun.

But anyway, I had Monday off, so I scheduled an appointment, and wasn't too nervous about it until I thought that maybe I should be, but then I reminded myself of my tooth-brushing habits and I wasn't too scared.
Fast forward to my dentist scolding me in broken English for not flossing, and reproachfully informing me that I had 2 cavities.

I didn't really know how to take the news. It was, of course, a devastating blow, but plenty of people have cavities. Just...never me.
I was instructed to schedule an appointment for the next week to get them filled.

Also -- an amusing side note of my checkup, which I seriously thought was just hack material for crappy comedians -- he took one of those sharp pointy sticks and started randomly spearing it into my gums. Then he stood back, looked at me skeptically, and said, "Do your gums usually bleed this much?"
Uh, well, I usually just use a toothbrush on them, rather than PIERCE THEM WITH A POINTY METAL STICK!
Did I miss that chapter in elementary health? Brush, floss, drive spikes into your tender, pink gums?

Anyway, so the night before my appointment, I made the mistake of watching an episode of "Monk" wherein, through some wacky turn of events and poor writing, our hero is being tortured by a dentist played by John Favreau. Then I got scared. My tooth didn't hurt. Why do I need a new hole drilled in my face? I didn't SEE the cavity. If it was on the inside and it didn't hurt, what's the big deal?
I'll drive spikes into my gums more, Doctor, I promise!

I was also terrified because everyone kept telling me, "it's not gonna hurt, it's not gonna hurt, you're going to be numb." And I kept telling them, "how are they going to numb me?" And then they all said, "Oh, yeah, by jabbing you with a gigantic needle." Luckily, in the University of Cancun, they teach you to swab a sort of painless numbing cream on the gums first, so it actually wasn't as scary an experience.
That is until I started playing out scenarios in my head, as I often do. You know how if you have your mouth open and you swallow, your tongue goes forward a little? I kept imagining that he was wantonly leaving the drill running in my mouth as he paid attention to other things, and at one point I swallowed, thrust my tongue out, hit (the back of) the drill, and jumped in such a fright that my tongue was going to be drilled that the dentist recoiled a tiny bit and thought he hadn't numbed me enough.
I had to sheepishly tell him that, no, nothing hurt, I was just scared because I was thinking of hurting, please carry on.

He drilled and drilled for a pretty long time, and before he put in the filling he handed me a mirror to show me the gaping hole in my mouth. "You see? It wasn't a very small cavity, either. It's a good thing that you came."
Let me say that again. He drilled for a really long time in my mouth, then showed me what a big hole I had in my jaw. YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE, DOC!
This dentistry is a racket, I tell you.

I left the dentist feeling all right, except for the fact that they showed me the bill, and I saw that my insurance only covers 50% of fillings (bastards), AND they didn't have enough time, so would I come back next week to get the other one filled? I guess it won't be so bad now that I know what to expect.

But here's the kicker. My tooth? It hurts now! Every 12 hours or so, I get a little sharp pain in my filling that is really irritating. For those of you playing at home, I went from having a cavity and no pain to having a filled cavity and pain. Hmmm.

So in conclusion, I don't think I ever had a cavity, and I think I am just going in next Monday to give them $200 to give me a matching pain on the other side of my mouth. I did fine without a dentist for 10 years, and I think I can go another 10 more after this visit.

I have been feeling like crap lately, and feeling like crap makes it hard to be amusing, so I've avoided whining about it here, but it seems I can no longer.
I actually have an amusing story to share with you all involving my first trip to the dentist in 10 years.
But that will have to wait for another day, because I am hoping for death.
If anyone from my work reads this, you'll know I've been nursing various one-day sicknesses for a couple months now, in which I spend the day chugging vitamins and orange juice, and it actually seemed to work, but now I think my immune system is finally discovering what I've been trying to pull over on it, and it is none too happy.
In a nut shell, let's just say that it all started off with an infection, for which I recieved antibiotics, which actually caused another infection, and now I have a third and unrelated infection, so I am just a disease vector over here waiting to go off.
If you see birds in your neighborhood suddenly eating Big Macs and playing video games, LOOK OUT!

(PS -- There really is something new in the knitting section that I just finished. :)

In case you haven't noticed, I haven't actually updated my knitting or my recipes.
My php script that makes the little asterisk pop up was activated by my switch to a new webhost and reuploading all my old stuff back into their directories.
Ironically, my comic was updated, but that asterisk is now gone.

To say the least, I am very impressed with my new host, if not for the sole reason that they return my emails.
It is now also pretty easy to see who's hotlinking me. I found someone posting an image of mine in a myspace, and I was about to be enraged with rage, but by the time I followed the link, I was actually flattered that I had been reproduced as a meme.
Not much of a meme, considering it has only been linked by one person to my knowledge, but I was able to suppress the urge to replace the image with a diseased penis or something to punish them for hotlinking me.

Anyway, here it is in someone's comments.

It was even used to insult someone! That just warms my heart.

Maybe I should become one of those people who makes quirky images like a unicorn and a bunny holding holding hands and singing "THX 4 TEH ADD!" or something. Yes...yes...

Update -- I'm also here (halfway down). Survey says someone googled "Ryan baby pictures." This hotlink was not nearly as amusing. I think I may replace it with an action photo of Scamp in his litter box.

I'm sorry, I know I'm late, but I have to comment on the Oscars.
This is surprising because a) I didn't watch them, and b) I think I had seen ONE of the nominees ("Harry Potter").

I also haven't read a lot of blogs about them, so excuse me if this sentiment is shared by a lot of people.
When I was a kid, I had always seen a majority of the nominated films. I was lucky to live in a movie-loving family, and unlucky to not be invited to parties or do drugs or have sex like the normal kids were doing, so I spent a lot of time at the movies, forming opinions, crossing my fingers for my favorites, and staying up late on a school night to watch the awards.
I don't know if it's because I don't watch commercials anymore, but I barely had even heard of most of the nominees.
Granted, the movies that I did see weren't exactly of the highest caliber ("Saw 2," "Rent," "The Exorcism of Emily Rose"), I really had no desire to see many of the others out there. And now that I see the nominees, I think I'm glad I didn't waste my money. I had enough buyers remorse after watching "Rent," or as I like to call it, "Why Some Theater Actors Should Not Be Seen On Film Ever."

Does it seem to everyone else that every single film nominated for Best Picture was an agenda film? Racism Bad, Homosexuals Are Good at Sex, Homosexuals Are Good At Writing, Terrorism Bad, and I Have No Idea What "Good Night, And Good Luck" is About, But It Is Grammatically Incorrect to Have a Comma There.
Why does Hollywood think it's its job to teach America values?
Whatever happened to "Rain Man," "Driving Miss Daisy," "Forrest Gump"?
Whatever happened to interesting storytelling for the sake of the story instead of social change? I guess I can hardly talk, since I haven't actually seen these movies, but I don't even really want to.
I am in the mecca, and no one's really even talking about a feel-good movie or a great story. I probably also shouldn't tell you that the next movie I plan on seeing is "Final Destination 3," so I'll just keep that to myself.

I watched Jon Stewart's monologue (on gorillamask the day after), and he alluded to box office numbers being down, then following it up with a mention of piracy on the rise. There's probably a suggested correlation in Hollywood's mind, but I honestly don't think it is. I wouldn't watch "Munich" if Spielberg gmailed it to me as an mpeg that started playing on its own.

If you ask me, either the Academy is getting to full of itself and no good movies are getting considered, or no good movies are being made anymore. I think it's the former, because in doing a little research for this blog, I realized that I had seen both "Batman Begins" and "Sin City," both of which I considered some of the best movies I had seen in a long time. I also hear "Serenity" was supposed to be wonderful, but I didn't even know it came until it went. And I blame Hollywood for that, too.

Well, I'm losing sight of my original direction, which is this. Leave the agendas to politics. Or talk to Michael Crichton. I read his political agenda books because there's a story arc and character development and all those things that film school keeps teaching these divas they don't need, so they masturbate on a strip of film and call it "Magnolia"...or "Lost in Translation"...or "Sideways."

Yeah, I know I probably had a bunch of people lose all respect for me with that last sentence, but I get upset when I have basic standards for a movie that aren't met.
Take this story as an excellent metaphor.
I used to go to LOEWS THEATER IN PITTSBURGH -- the same theater, PS, where someone was shot after seeing the cinematic masterpiece "Get Rich OR Die Tryin'" -- and there was ALWAYS a problem with the film.
If it wasn't a HUGE GREEN LINE down the picture that no one else in the theater seemed to want to get up to fix, it was a huge audio problem including but not limited to decreasing the volume by half frequently or shutting off completely.
This was the snazziest theaters in town, and the closest to me with stadium seating, so I kept going back, even though I hated them more than anything.
While watching "The Incredibles," the sound went out completely in the final fight scene. I went to the manager and complained and demanded for my money back. He sort of rolled his eyes, gave it to me, and sarcastically commented that he was sorry he hadn't met my high expectations for a movie. Sometimes I get so angry, that I blurt out exactly what I'm thinking, even though I'm the same person who wouldn't tell my boss that my hair was on fire. Anyway, I blurted out, "High expectations? You think me wanting sound to be in the movie a 'high expectation'? It's only one of the two things you need for a movie!" And then I stormed off.

My expectations for movie content aren't that high either. If my entertainment needs can be met daily by a sass-talking teenager who slays vampires, then I wouldn't say I'm asking for too much. Well, Joss Whedon is a genius, so maybe it is. Let's lower that to saying that my entertainment needs are also met by a Spanish-talking Dora who is an Explorer, and I don't think that's asking for too much, either.
Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swiping!
Good stuff.

Here is one of the strangest and most disconcerting telephone conversations I've had with my mom ever.

Mom: What should I make for the Oscar party tonight?
Me: I don't know. Dip?
Mom: Dad says I should make fudge.
Me: That's probably because Dad wants to eat fudge.
Mom: No, for Brokeback. You know, like fudge packer?
Me: ...
Mom: Get it?
Me: ...

This is coming from the woman who stopped seeing me do stand-up because I said the word "cock" onstage and I was an embarrassment to the family.
I'm gonna have to keep my mom from seeing these fancy-shmancy liberal-minded movies. Next thing you know, she'll watch North Country and think women should have rights! Dogs and Cats living together!

I'm not sayin' nothin' or nothin', but if this site should, I don't know, go down for some mysterious reason in the next week, hang tight, and I'll be right back online as soon as I can.

We'll talk later, okay? Call me!

Ahoy, mateys.
I have been up to too much lately. It's sort of sick. I've been thinking of all the projects I've been doing as different subjects in school. That way, when it gets too overwhelming, I just try to remember how much work I used to have to be responsible for, and how I still did it and got moderately good grades at it.

In an unrelated topic that I just now realized this second is probably really related, I've been having recurring nightmares lately. Namely, the old classic where there's a big test at the end of the semester, and wait, I forgot to go to class all term! Isn't this sort of thing supposed to go away when you've been out of school for almost 4 years?

Anyway, I've also been doing some various content that I think I forgot to ever post here.

Pictures from Christmas - Wintery Family Goodness
Guesthouse - Where I live now.
No Regrets - Some old fiction I dug up and reedited. Not too wonderful, but here it is.
The Point of it All - Another piece of fiction I like a little more.

Outside of a drug addiction, anyone know any way to make there be more hours in the day?

In an attempt to make this entry suck less, I now include my current favorite unphotoshopped picture.