Rants

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. My wife and I will celebrate it in our usual fashion, in bed by 10:00 PM and we’ll try and sleep through the fireworks. This is the first place we have lived, and we’ve lived a lot of places, that celebrates the New Year by firing off bottle rockets and noisy-whizzing-spinning things. Every year we exchange gifts with our friends with the 2 kids we baby-sit for. For like the past 4 or 5 years the boys have given me an X-Files calendar. This year I got a page-a-day calendar entitled “The 365 Stupidest Thing Ever Said.” Another year further removed from the death of the series and merchandise for the show is no longer a viable commodity. In another 5 years the re-runs will fade from cable. In ten years, the last stop before oblivion is Nick-At-Late-Night for one run through of all the episodes.

Yesterday we were in the mall as my wife and her mother were hunting Christmas bargains. I was killing time waiting for them to finish by digging around on the bargain tables in the bookstore, nothing better than buying a hardcover book for less than the price of a paperback. I had some lawyer book, not a Grisham, already picked out when I spotted a Robert B. Paker book. Flipped open the cover and noted it was a Sunny Randall novel, so I took it instead. Wasn’t until I got home and started reading the book that I realized I had already read it. I hate when I do that and I do it a lot. Fortunately my short-term memory is shot from all the dope I smoked as a teenager and while I know I’ve read it, I can’t for the life of me remember how it all shakes out.

5 Minute Infomercial – Stumbled on the 30 minute version of the very annoying infomercial for the Ionic Breeze this morning while laying in bed channel surfing until I absolutely had to get up to go to the bathroom.

What Color Is Your Pee? – Everyday is like St. Patrick’s Day now. It is a loverly shade of green, like I’ve had way too many green beers…

No Task Is Too Large… – I have at least straightened out all the IDv3 tags on the Christmas MP3s, still need to weed out the marginal ones. I did meld my 2 different version of My Favorites folders (home & work) and delete a few duplicates and dead links, but it has ballooned to 533 links in 42 folders!

My wife was watching some of a marathon of yet another sneaky redecorating show on the Discover Channel, Surprise by Design. At about at the 50 minute mark of the show they went to a commercial (nothing unusual there.) The commercial was for The Sharper Image’s Ionic Breeze Quadra Silent Air Purifier (nothing unusual there.) The difference was it looked like an infomercial with the snappy pitchman, the perky woman hype-cheerleader and the testimonials from users. Plus it just kept on going. At first I figured it was one minute commercial (which in themselves seem long in today’s 15 second spots) but no it went on some more. I’m guessing 5 minutes but it could have been three. We no longer have the time for whole 1/2 hour infomercials, 5 minutes is enough. I only wish that what I saw was 1/6 as annoying as 30 minute jobs.

…for me to ignore a little longer. I have had some pictures that I scanned on my desktop since the middle of October of family that I was going to add to a little webpage, but I can’t bring myself to do any HTMLing. I real quick like a bunny burned all 15 of my Christmas CDs to take to work to share with other people who wanted to listen to some holiday music. The directory ended up being a little over a Gig in size. I need to go through it and pare it down to 700 Meg so I can burn a CD full of MP#s for the car (and next year.) But I can’t get started because they were mostly various artist compilations and the tags all need to be fixed and that task is too daunting. I thought that perhaps I would weed out the garden that is my “Favorites” folder, after all there are 451 links in 35 folders, I can’t need all of them. It’ll be simple I’ll start clicking and delete the dead ones and ones that I don’t use. HA! I started at the bottom with the X-Files folder, it should be a goner as I don’t even watch the reruns anymore, but instead I got lost in that world I enjoyed so much.

Today I decided to clean up some of the Desktop clutter that has been accumulating for the past couple of months. Out went links to blogs I read, pictures I saved there temporarily until I uploaded them and such. I found a Winamp playlist from my too late to submit for October CD Mix of the Month, entitled Scary Music. I couldn’t just toss it out because it was such a good idea. The music was still stored in a directory on the C: drive in a temporary location. So that is what I spent the afternoon working on, a Halloween themed music CD. Yesterday I wasn’t sure what day it was, but today I was not sure what holiday I was celebrating….
01 – Danny Elfman – This Is Halloween
02 – John Carpenter – Halloween Main Theme
03 – John Carpenter – Halloween II Laurie’s Theme
04 – Sheb Wooley – Purple People Eater
05 – David Seville – Witch Doctor
06 – Misfits – Monster Mash
07 – Rob Zombie – The Munsters Theme
08 – Vic Mizzy – The Addams Family
09 – Ray Parker Jr – Ghostbusters
10 – Oingo Boingo – Dead Man’s Party
11 – Fred Schneider & The Shake Society – Monster In My Pants
12 – Mike Oldfield – Exorcist Theme
13 – Bernard Herrmann – Psycho
14 – Harry Manfredini – Friday The 13th
15 – Lalo Schifrin – Amityville Horror Theme
16 – John Carpenter – The Fog
17 – Don Davis – House On Haunted Hill
18 – Danny Elfman – Into The Woods
19 – Christopher Walken – The Raven