I spent the first part of my day hysterically laughing over these e-cards.  When you care enough to hit send…

My faith in journalism has been lifted a bit by this display by MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski.  She reached her breaking point with the stupid Paris mania that’s been going on, attempted to light the script of the news story on fire and when she was hampered, she took the paper and ran it through the shredder.  Amen, Mika.  Paris Hilton is not news (and yes, I see the irony in giving her attention to proclaim that she deserves none), and I see her as the epitome of what’s wrong with this country right now.  Paris has done nothing to contribute to society, yet she’s been elevated to deity-like status and given news coverage undeserving of her situation — hell, any news coverage she gets is undeserving, since I don’t see her doing anything positive for anyone except her. 

Has anyone else noticed the mainstream exposure TV On The Radio is getting recently?  In last week’s episode of The 4400, they were proclaimed to be “the best band ever” by one of the characters, and last week’s episode of Rescue Me ended with most of the cast screaming down the street in a fire engine as “Wolf Like Me” pounded through the audio.  I have to say that the Rescue Me appearance was way effing cool, and the track was blasting through the car stereo as I screamed my own way down the 10 freeway at 80 mph on my way to work this morning.  It felt awesome.

Meanwhile, my alarm is set for the ungodly hour of 5:30am so I can wing my way to Minneapolis for four days of alcohol, steak and my work-industry friends.  Maybe I should just pull an all-nighter?

So, the weekend breakdown:
Friday:  Dinner with a slew of friends, in which we were loud and obnoxious and drank plenty.  Then off with one of my dinner companions to go see Waitress, which I thought was pretty decent but was also pretty predictable and overrated given the amount of praise it’s been getting.  It’s a good movie so I wouldn’t say that I wasted money to go see it, but overall, I wasn’t as blown away by it as I thought (and was told) I’d be. 
Saturday:  Drove to San Diego and spent hours sitting in traffic on the 5 freeway because of the stupid county fair just to see my beloved Red Sox crumble and have their asses handed to them by the Padres.  I will say that these were the best seats I’ve ever had at a baseball game — premier club, about 50 feet behind home plate, gorgeous view of the whole field… and a server who came by to take our orders and deliver food to us so we didn’t have to leave.  All I can say about the game is, thank Jeebus the Sox scored in the top of the 9th, because I would’ve been super-pissed had it been a complete shutout.  And I was pretty proud that Red Sox Nation West made a very good showing at the game — I saw tons of people wearing Sox gear both in the hotel, around the Gaslamp District and in the ballpark.
Sunday:  After going for a swim in the hotel pool (and getting hit on by a gay guy who followed me from the pool into the hot tub), I decided not to buy field-level seats for the Sunday afternoon Padres-Sox game and instead left the country.  I’d never been to Tijuana and had always wanted to go, so I figured why not?  I roamed the touristy parts of the city for a few hours (and got a fair amount of sunburn action) before walking back across back to my car in the U.S. What I found super-interesting about the border itself is that when you walk from the U.S. into Mexico, there are no checkpoints — you basically just walk down a long pathway and then you’re in Tijuana.  Coming back to America, everyone has to wait in long lines to go through customs and get checked, and I actually saw a guy being hauled away in handcuffs while I was waiting in line.  And coincidentally enough, I called a co-worker while I was down in Tijuana to ask what the name of those candies she brings back that I like (because I was standing in a candy shop), and she had also come down to Tijuana and was eating at the same restaurant where I had had lunch!  As always, more pics here.

Tonight was a live show by Eddie Izzard, who is very quickly becoming one of my favorite comics.  I not only enjoyed the show because he’s effing funny, but also because it was a smaller theatre (maybe 150-200 seats), so it seemed a little more intimate and a little more interactive, with people actually shouting stuff from the audience.  If you haven’t seen any of his stuff, I highly recommend you go out and rent Dress to Kill or Unspeakable — hell, even check out some of his stuff on YouTube (this and this are two of my favorite clips of his).  To those who know Eddie and his act, I can tell you that I was surprised that he showed up dressed like a bloke.

Tomorrow is dinner with a whole slew of friends, many whom I haven’t seen in months, which will be great if I can get through tomorrow without my head exploding first.  Not only do I have two articles due tomorrow (and have to transcribe three interviews first before I can write the 2,000 words that are due), but there’s also big news going down in my industry that I know about but can’t report on… and it’s positively killing me because I want to beat the pants off my competition!

Then it’s off to San Diego to see my beloved Red Sox play, who I haven’t seen live in several years.  And Sunday, I plan to cross the border into Tijuana, which I’ve never done.  And then Wednesday, I pack up for five days in scenic Minneapolis, where it’ll be hot as hell and the humidity will be something like 120%, but I’m going for a great industry convention, so I’m expecting five days of fun and metric assloads of liquor and steak.  I hope I’ll recover in time to drink more on July 4th.  For now, though, I’m exhausted and need to crawl into bed....

Every since I was a kid, I’ve been intrigued by maps — mostly roadmaps.  I know, it’s kind of a stupid thing to be minorly obsessed with, whatever.  But I loved looking them over and seeing the intricate network of highways that cut their way through cities, counties and states to connect us all, especially since I love roadtrips and the thought of being able to get in the car and get virtually anywhere in North America.  (By the way, that thing about the interstates being designed so that one mile of every file-mile stretch is straight so they could be used as aircraft landing strips in time of war?  Not true.)

What really intrigues me is how these roads and routes and boundaries were established in the first place.  Before there was GPS, before there was Rand McNally, how did people find places?  During the westward expansion of the 1800s, how did people make their way west, managing to find all the outposts and forts along the way and eventually making it to their destinations without roads?  Hell, even before that, how did the people who made the initial trips find their way without those forts and landmarks?  When aircraft were invented and first began being used for commercial service, how did they manage to take off from the West Coast and find their way to Hawaii, a tiny little speck in the middle of the Pacific?  Someone had to make the initial trip to tell them what heading to go on, so who made that trip and how did they know what the course should be — especially since when you figure over that kind of a distance, even one degree would be enough to throw a plane off-course by a lot.

The dream vacation for me for the past several years has been to take a month or so off, start in San Diego and just drive up the West Coast, following the coastline and moving inland to hit some of the cities like Portland, Oregon before finishing in Vancouver.  I just hope that someday, I’m able to do it.

Dear Guy in Mercedes on the 405,
Yes, I know you think you own the road because you drive a fucking Mercedes.  Yes, I know it’s all the rage to talk on your phone while you’re in your car.  But the problem is, you’re in your car to drive and not to talk on the phone, so pay some damn attention to the 1-ton killing machine you’re in charge of, not your goddamn phone, because you literally ran me off the road into the shoulder because you decided you just HAD to be in my lane without signalling or paying any attention to my horn-blowing or anything.

Dear Neighbor,
Don’t get pissy with me over your laundry when you leave it in the laundry room for, oh, say, six fucking hours with the same clothes just sitting in the washer and dryer.  Your lame excuse of looking for quarters won’t fly.  We live less than 500 yards away from a 24-hour supermarket.  In six hours, a quadriplegic with MS could’ve made it to the Ralph’s, gotten a roll of quarters, come back and read an entire issue of Us Weekly.  So forgive me for not letting you hog the machines while your clothes just sat there, some of us needed to wash our laundry.

Dear Horoscopes,
Stop making it so damn convenient to put stuff off.  When you tell me “The worst thing you can do is to force yourself to do things you don’t want to do,” well, that’s just all the ammunition I need to slack off and ditch the gym for another day.

Dear Oil Companies,
What the fuck is still up with these gas prices?  I can’t believe that three years ago, we were upset because gas was approaching $1.75 per gallon.  Now we think it’s cheap if it’s anywhere in the neighborhood of $3 per gallon.  (I filled up at the el cheapo station near the office earlier this week for $3.11.) And yet some dude gets to retire from an oil company and score a $430 million pension, and the companies are all reporting record profits?  Yeah, keep telling me about how the price of oil in the Middle East is going up.  I guarantee you that gas prices will start to come down the closer we get to the election next year.

I neglected to mention… I was so tired yesterday that when I went to the cafe next door to my office yesterday morning, I got my coffee, went to the “condiment” stand (at least, the one for the coffee accoutrements), picked up my usual 3 packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low, tore them open, poured them into the trash, then dumped the wrappers in there too, picked up my coffee and walked out of the cafe before I’d realized what I’d done.

Who’s the dumbass?  That’s right, *I’m* the dumbass!

Quick hits:

- Best line I’ve heard all week:  “Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O’Donnell fat.”
- I highly recommend Who Killed the Electric Car? I saw the trailer for it when I saw An Inconvenient Truth but never went back to see it… managed to catch it on cable, and I think it’s worth the 90 minutes. 
- Does anyone have one of those indoor portable air conditioners?  I need to buy one, since predictions are that this is going to be the hottest summer on record, but every model I research has mixed reviews.
- I don’t know if it really is the power of music or just that I’m feeling a little tired and worn down, but I was watching last week’s episode of Standoff, and “The Funeral” by Band of Horses (available from the band’s site here) exploded through the speakers at the close of the episode… I almost burst into tears, it was such a beautiful and sad moment.
- One of my favorite shows, Jericho, has been rescued from the dead.  If you want to catch up with this great show so you can coherently see what the fuss is about next season, CBS is going to rerun the first season starting July 6.

The entertainment rundown of the weekend:
- Saw Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.  It was… okay, I guess?  Everyone says the third one is much better than the second one, and I’m not so sure — the third one was just as convoluted, with people changing sides and plots within plots and not knowing who’s allied with who… On top of that, it was freakin’ long:  almost 3 hours!  Definitely go to the bathroom before the movie starts and don’t buy a Big Gulp of soda before you go in.  But it was entertaining, and watching Keira Knightley for three hours isn’t bad.  Oh, and there is a short added scene at the end of the credits.
- Was fairly disappointed with The Sopranos finale.  Absolutely nothing was resolved!  It was just like another episode, and the cliffhanger was horrible — I even had to punch up news stories to see whether or not that sudden cut-to-black at the end was scripted or if it was my cable company screwing up. 
- Attempted to watch that new HBO show John From Cincinnati.  I say attempted because it bored the crap out of me, and I bailed out after 40 minutes.  I still don’t understand why the critics were raving about it.  I get the feeling that HBO is trying to put on shows that are weird for the sake of being weird because then people will think they’re “edgy.”
- Watched the return of The Loop on Fox and was amused by an outdoor scene that was supposed to be in Chicago but actually was filmed in Century City, right down the street from my old office and across the street from where I saw Pirates last night. 
- Am I the only one who’s been to a Starbucks recently, saw that they finally were offering orange mocha frappuccinos and thought, “Wow, someone finally convinced the higher-ups at Starbucks to watch Zoolander!"?

Excerpt of a text-message conversation tonight with The Best Friend™:

Me: Something tells me this situation could only be resolved through liquor or pudding.
The Best Friend™: Completely!  Pudding rocks.
Me: Pudding effing rules.  If scientists were worth anything, they’d find a way to make cars run on pudding.
TBF: Only problem with that?  Mass siphoning.
Me: Unless if was specifically a flavor no one liked, like a bizarre combination of butterscotch & tapioca. 
TBF: Except that I would eat it.
Me: I probably would too, but who else would?  Not many, I bet.

Here we go again:  Right-wing blowhard Glenn Beck (who I used to listen to back when he was a decent apolitical pop jock on a station in Connecticut), on his show on Monday, said that Dennis Kucinich looks like Gollum, the dude from Lord of the Rings, and then went on to say that Kucinich’s wife must be on some kind of “date rape drug.” From Media Matters, here’s the back and forth between Beck & his producer:
BECK: I’m wondering if it’s some sort of, some sort of, you know. What’s that date rape drug? What is—what’s the one? What’s --
STU: GHB?
BECK: Yeah, but it’s not powerful enough to actually knock you out, but it’s powerful enough to, like, make you think that you’re not standing next to Dennis Kucinich and making out with him.
STU: I, maybe it’s some other form of that.
BECK: What would be the—what would be the drug that would be just powerful enough to not—to make you not really realize that you’re making out with Dennis Kucinich?
STU: That’s called alcohol.
BECK: I was thinking cyanide. That would be the only thing that would really dull the senses enough. Even then, your dead body would be like, “Dennis Kucinich has his tongue in my mouth.” I—maybe it’s just me.

Okay, now what part of that isn’t as bad as the “nappy-headed hos” exchange between Don Imus and his producer?  If that’s all it takes to get tossed off a nationally syndicated radio show, then Beck definitely crossed the line.  What part of accusing a politician of drugging his wife isn’t insulting?  What part of insinuating that he’s illegally drugging anyone is funny?  And before you start complaining that “oh, it’s a joke, and liberals don’t have a sense of humor, blah blah blah,” then I’d like to know who was laughing when Imus dropped his Phrase That Pays because it didn’t seem that anyone was laughing on either side of the aisle — if anything, most liberals were being more lenient about it, saying he made a split-second error in judgment and should maybe be suspended but not banished from radio.  But I’m calling for parity:  If Imus gets booted on his ass for three words, then Beck definitely deserves to get thrown out for this one.  For our nameless friend who said, “You don’t go after amazing women” when referring to Imus’ slip-up, then what part of Beck’s attack was acceptable, considering she’s a woman who has volunteered in India at one of Mother Teresa’s poorest homes, spent over a year working in a village in Tanzania to help develop the region and has also volunteered for the British Red Cross?

I want anger.  I want outrage.  I want people to actually pick up the cause.  I’m sick of the Democrats and liberals just “taking the high road” and not making a stink about things the way right-wingers do.  Maybe if we did, our country wouldn’t be in this crappy situation we’re in.

If my liver could speak, it would be screaming for respite.  The Best Friend™ arrived, and the drinking-off of our faces commenced.  And it was an interesting and great weekend, though there are a couple of gaps in my head — which may possibly have been generated by the three Irish car bombs we did in under an hour one night (which topped off the three very strong mojitos we had earlier at Lori and Nicole‘s birthday party at Trader Vic’s, a place notorious for its strong drinks), and there was the night of the “special” cookie, where we both freaked out a little based on the ingredients.  Suffice it to say that I was more wrecked this past weekend than I have been in a while, and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.  The BF is a great partner-in-crime.  That’s not to say that we weren’t sober at any point this past weekend (illustrated here). 

So, those of you with laptops, question:  Do you shut the computer down when you leave your place or when you go to sleep for the night, or do you just put the laptop to sleep?  How often (and when) do you actually shut down and start up?