Friday, January 30, 2004

Well, I'm back to my old blog-procastinatifying ways. But I've been busy, so cut me some slack, homes.

Gearing up for the big trip to Montreal tomorrow. I managed to procure some tickets to the sold-out Bruins-Canadiens game; turns out a guy I play hockey with was going to go with a bunch of his buddies and they got tickets, but decided to bail on the trip because the Pats are in the Super Bowl this weekend. The guy was going to eat the tickets, but I talked him into giving them to me for $30 each; I believe they're $55 face value. Beats having to haggle with scalpers on the street.

Dang, the Godfather of Soul has seen better days, that's for sure.

So Howard Dean managed to rebound a bit in New Hampshire, finishing a distant second to Kerry but surpassing Edwards and Clark. Still, he's gotta win at least one of the Super Tuesday primaries to keep going. And the Good Ship Dean is springing leaks--he fired his campaign manager and he's running out of cash. No word on whether my last blog entry had anything to do with his recent misfortune; haven't heard from the 2.3 readers I have in the greater North American region.

This is stoooopid.

This is nasty.

I believe this is what the British call "taking the piss" out of the Pitchdork dorks. I call it frickin' funny.

Hokay, as my good friend Senor OJ likes to say early and often, that is all.

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Holy crap! Two days in a row! This degree of blogmentation hasn't occurred since the dog days of summer!

There were a few things in the news that cracked me up this week. At the Iowa caucuses Monday night, John Kerry pulled off a stunning upset after his campaign seemed dead in the water only a week earlier. John Edwards surged into second, pushing onetime-favorite Howard Dean into a distant third. Dean, who always seems to struggle mightily to smile, apparently felt the need to muster up some courage for his followers and launched into a bizarre rally speech after the results were in. With a crazed look in his eyes, Dean rattled off a bunch of states that they would win and ended it with a shrieking "YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!" One of the funniest things I've ever seen or heard. He has since become a laughingstock (check out the audio clips) and target for Letterman, Leno, Stern, and Conan O'Brien. I guess he's on Letterman tonight doing a Top 10 list making fun of himself, so I guess I have to give him credit for that. Still, he gave Kerry a huge push going into the New Hampshire primary next week, just by being a total spaz.

Staying with politics, the AP had a story this week about the favorite music of the Democratic candidates. Check this out:

John Kerry rocks out to The Beatles, while Wesley Clark jams to Journey.

Kerry says the album most likely to be on his C-D player is The Beatles' "Abbey Road,'' while Clark picked "Journey -- Greatest Hits.''

Howard Dean goes for the music of Wyclef Jean, and John Edwards likes "The Essential Bruce Springsteen.''

Joe Lieberman prefers Andrea Bocelli and Al Sharpton likes Yolanda Adams.

Dennis Kucinich goes for Willie Nelson's stuff. (AP)


Yeah, like Dean's ever even HEARD a Wyclef song before. But how about Wesley Clark copping to a Journey fixation? He probably thinks he's being cool with his choice. It's either that, or you get the disturbing image of him leading troops into battle with "Wheel in the Sky" cranking in his Humvee. "Damn, that Neal Schon sure can shred!"

What I want to know is, where the hell is equal time for Lyndon LaRouche? Voters need to know he likes to rock out, too. His favorite band? Slayer.

I was pleased to see that one of my favorite, but shortlived, TV shows, Freaks and Geeks, is coming out with a DVD for its first and only season. I guess it took a while to put it all together because they had to secure the rights for all the cool 70s and 80s tunes they played on the show (one of which was April Wine's "Roller," which I guarantee was never played on network TV before--or at least in the last 20 years). The DVD is due in April, but I got even more excited to see on their Internet home page that a special edition DVD set was available that included two discs of bonus stuff. I was all set to order it when I saw it cost $120. D'oh! I love the show, but not THAT much. I will, however, run to the store to get the regular DVD set when it comes out. The cancellation of that show is a prime example of the stupidity of network execs. Another is "The Simple Life."

Okay, I'm outta here.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Man, I'm such a slacker. Truly lazy. So anyway, I finally got to see my cameo appearance in my friend Bob Durling's fine movie "Ninja Zombie Explosion." Filming took place in October of 2002 and the movie was finished early last year, but I missed the screening at Bob's house. He was interviewing for a position at my company yesterday and dropped off a tape. He's been making goofy short films for about 10 years now, but this was his most ambitious and longest. I played the reanimated Gandhi, who is brought to life by an evil scientist. It was cool to finally see the finished product, which is about 35 minutes long, because I was only part of a small portion of it. Pretty damn funny.

Speaking of my acting career, today they had the screening of an HCPro video on medications management standards that I was in. I played a careless doctor who failed to get a patient's drug allergy history. And another video I was in two years ago was nominated for an award.

The Pats are going to the Super Bowl against the Panthers. Boy, I bet nobody picked that pairing before the season started.

My Rhapsody free trial just ended. It's a pretty cool service; I downloaded it at work, too, so I was able to listen to a lot of different music on demand. But I wasn't psyched about having to pay an additional 79 cents per song to burn tracks. They don't offer downloads, but technically you could just rip MP3s from the CDs you burn. For now I'm going to try out iTunes and things like that where you don't have to pay a monthly fee. I may revisit Rhapsody at some point down the line.

Netflix is rocking. We have "The Two Towers" and "The Shawshank Redemption" right now, so I'm going to have to set aside about 15 hours to watch them.

The brain-rattling cold snap is over, thankfully. It's nice to run outside again. Treadmills suck.

Monday, January 12, 2004

Hey thar. I really have no excuse for posting anything in the last week, because it's been so damn cold I've been indoors most of the time. I'm not just talking 20s and 30s...we were in single digits from about Thursday through yesterday. It actually got up into the 30s today, nice and balmy.

Tonight was Cam Neely Night at the FleetCenter. They retired his number and showed a lot of clips of him beating the crap out of people. He truly was a dominating presence for the Bruins.

Speaking of the Bruins, I'm going on a little road trip with a couple of buddies from work up to Montreal to see the B's play the Habs on Jan. 31. We'll stay over and drive back that Sunday, just in time for the Super Bowl. Which hopefully will feature the Patriots, who beat Tennessee over the weekend to advance to the AFC title game against Indy; Eagles vs. Panthers in the NFC game.

So the Netflix trial is going well. Watched "Dr. Strangelove" yesterday morning...Peter Sellers was the man. We've got "Hard Core Logo" (Canadian flick about a punk band that I've always wanted to see) and "The Shawshank Redemption" to watch. Deb went on to add a few more Deb movies to the queue.

In the spirit of giving it a shot, I just signed up for a free one-week trial of Rhapsody, the online music service from the good folks at Listen.com. I'd heard my old Webnoize homiez OJ and Lee sing its praises on numerous occasions, so I figured I'd give it a shot. They do have a ton of music.

Okay, it's getting cold in here. Promise to write more. Wish you were here. Right.

Sunday, January 04, 2004

Welcome to the '04. Haven't noticed any hovercrafts or bald guys with sunglasses on, but apparently this is the future. Y'know, the future where everyone has the broadband and the celestial jukebox and all that stuff we wrote about at the Webnoize five years ago. Riiiiight.

Getting ready to go back to work tomorrow after a nice five-day weekend. Didn't a heck of a lot except watch movies. We rented "White Oleander" and "Mulholland Drive" to watch on New Year's Eve, while we ate the lobsters we purchased. Unfortunately, Hannah decided she didn't want to go to sleep right away that night, so we ended up eating in shifts and only watched "White Oleander" that night. Not a bad flick. "Mulholland Drive" was classic David Lynch, in that it was very strange and very good. I recommend it to anyone who likes a good confusing movie. Not to mention the fact that Naomi Watts and Laura Harring have some seriously steamy love scenes together. I'm just sayin', is all.

Deb and I decided to join Netflix, the DVD rental club where you pay a monthly fee of $20 and they mail you three selections at a time. There's no late fees and unlimited rentals. Our first three, which we got a few days after joining, were "Waiting for Guffman" (which I've always wanted to see but never had--very funny, as I expected), "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" (a chick flick for Deb--fluffy entertainment), and "Dr. Strangelove," which I haven't seen in many moons. We have a growing number of friends who use Netflix and they all speak highly of it--props to my man Dr. Dube, who as with any number of cool ideas or products (TiVo, MP3 downloading, CD burning, digital video, the iPod) was talking this up years ago.

We went to the UNH-Yale hockey game as part of an alumni family night event Saturday, wondering how Hannah would deal--last year, she was too young to really know what was going on and we made until late in the third period. But now her bedtime is 7:30-8, so we weren't sure how long we'd be there. As it turned out, she didn't take a nap all day until we drove up to NH and as a result was verrrrrry cranky for the dinner part of the evening. It looked like we might have to head home before the game even started, but we decided to sit in the car for an hour and calm her down and that seemed to work. She had a blast at the game, until the end of the second period when she finally grabbed her coat and started saying "Hannah's car." So we left. They ended up losing to Yale, which is a pretty huge upset. Oh well.

Looks like we're in for an ice storm or something tomorrow morning. Hurray.

Day After Day #75: Word Up!

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