Whine Tasting: It snowed today. An unconscionably stupid act on the part of Mother Nature. Can you believe that? We've been cruisin' along in with 70s-ish weather, then we wake up to snow today. I take this as a personal insult.
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I recently picked up two CDs on the cheap from Half.com, both of which served to remind me why I should not buy CDs. So Much For The City by The Thrills - a sort of under-produced alt-rock sound, with pop hooks and a dash of alt-country slide guitar. Got critical raves as a first class debut. If you say so, but there are only like 3 or 4 memorable songs and the rest I could live without ever having heard. Baby Monkey by Voodoo Child (which is the name Moby uses for his dance oriented mixes) is even less inspiring. A couple of interesting tracks but basically, the guy mailed it in.
Why do I not subscribe to Napster and just buy the tracks I want? It's not like it's a lot of trouble to do. It's like picking up the digital camera on my desk and taking a few pictures. Simple little things I should do and I just inexplicably never do them. I'm sure there's some kind of syndrome for that. Everything's a syndrome.
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So I've been working on redesigning this site (more emphasis on the articles, less on the blog) and, like a good web designer I attempted to follow what are called "web standards" in structuring the underlying HTML. "Web standards" are guidelines for the use of the underlying language behind web pages which are suppose to assist in consistency and interoperability across browsers. Laudable. The problem I had was no matter how much I read or how many tutorials I followed I could never make it do what I wanted. Now, I am not an idiot (don't give me that look). My day job is as a manager in product development for a software company. That is to say, I know my way around technical concepts pretty well. Yet no matter what I did I could not find a way to structure the page like I wanted while adhering to "web standards" (strictly speaking in this case, avoiding the use of tables to format a page). I also discovered that a good deal of the "web standards" are not implemented properly in Internet Explorer (meaning for 95% of the universe) or work differently in different browsers, which really defeats the purpose. So I suspect even if I was able to follow "web standards" I would still be turning back flips trying to get everything right. What an enormous waste of my time. I went back to not following "web standards" and, sure enough, actually got a good skeleton working that looked and worked just fine in the matter of a couple of hours. I have resolved that all "web standards" advocates can bite me.
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I an involved in the mother of all battles against a cold virus. The dastardly critter has a solid foothold in my throat and is making forays into my sinuses but has been consistently beaten back so far. I really need my immune system to launch a decisive counter-attack but that remains an involuntary biological function. If the eggheads who spend so much of their time working on cures for limp willys would devote their time to the broader problem of re-engineering people so they have willful controls over some of these involuntary processes not only would Viagra be obsolete, but I could bring an anti-viral hammer down on this cold. I truly believe human beings evolved in this manner just to piss me off.
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I saw the movie Identity, starring John Cusack and Ray Liotta, on HBO. It was awful. It started out as a mildly interesting thriller, in the vein of Ten Little Indians, and then it goes swiftly and surely down the toilet. I like John Cusack and Ray Liotta and they were very good, but I can only assume they were being blackmailed. HBO promises a new first time on cable movie every Saturday, but they only serve to remind me why I don't go to the movies or rent DVDs. An extraordinarily high percentage of them suck beyond the event horizon (astronomy reference, never mind). The following week featured Solaris which I don't really have an opinion on because I couldn't gut it out beyond the halfway point. A sedated snail could blow the doors off this film. People whose opinion I respect have told me that it is a thoughtful movie, about the nature of memory and grief. Wrong vehicle guys. A movie is not for deliberate extended meditation. That's what those four-inch thick novels that they study in graduate school are for.
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Here's something to look forward to: One of the very worst aspects of the '70s is about to make a comeback. Disasters. First we have an earthquake miniseries called 10.5 which should be bloody awful. And then there's The Day After Tomorrow, wherein global warming causes massive floods and ice ages and droughts and dogs and cats living together, which should be bloody awful. Apparently this is what happens to the unfortunate folks who survive the nukular holocaust of The Day After, which was bloody awful. The day after the day after tomorrow, the beleaguered human race will suffer mass suicides rather than see another bloody awful disaster film.
Is there someone somewhere who decides when inane fads are supposed to make a comeback? If so, I will pay real folding money to have him killed rather than suffer the second coming of leg-warmers.
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My car rattles. My shoes squeak. And contrary to popular opinion it is not in my head.
