wikipedia

i love wikipedia for its level of detail regarding things that no one ought to care about. it is absolutely incredible that a person would take the time to sit down and type up pages-long entries about fictional characters from the marvel universe. possible sequitor into that whole fictional world the creation of which gabe and tycho set into motion being avoided here.

that being said, i'm going to weaken what i just said just two sentences ago and say that i spent about an hour and a half today (and not at school, either. this was right when i got back, which is prime time) just thumbing (not in a literal sense, of course, although that would be fun to try) through different entries on comic book characters that i had never heard of before today. i suppose if i lived in my basement and lived on a diet of mountain dew and cheetos, the idea of just one person someday reading my work would be irresisitibly attractive. anyways -

hyperlinks are just so incredible. the time it would have taken to actually find the appropriate volume of a physical encyclopedia and look up a character whose name was referenced by an article i was reading at the time, compared to how long it takes to right click and select open as new tab - i would have given up on "learning" (if you can call it that) after the first 2, maybe 3 entries.

i can now call myslf, with a reasonable degree of confidence, knowledgeable regarding the origins and extents of juggernaut's powers, which was my main reason for checking into wikipedia in the first place. from there i undertook a fantastic voyage that included such stops as onslaught - a psionic combination of xavier's repressed darker subconscious and magneto, amber hunt - a pyrokinetic one-time host of the phoenix force, nocturne - nightcrawler's daughter in an alternate reality with the ability to possess people, the house of m story arc that reduced the population of mutants from millions to nearly extinct (several hundred) because the scarlet witch used her reality warping powers, dark beast - beast from the age of apocalypse, nate grey and franklin richards - the two most powerful mutants ever, the living monolith - one of the twelve that apocalypse planned to absorb, and a ton more that i've already forgotten about. i also know a lot more about mr. sinister, apocalypse, gambit, emma frost, and magneto than i'll ever need to know. ever. emma frost just walks around all day in lingerie. i don't even know why female superheros bother designing costumes with that option right in front of them.

other tidbits that i came across - decimation technically means the elimination of every 10th person (does it only apply to people? doesn't say in this article; it's actually an entry for the comics crossover of that name). i see a screenshot of the football (soccer) star set to play juggernaut wearing a metal neck brace armor thing so maybe i was wrong about the shirtless leather jacket costume. here's hoping that i am. apparently there's a term for bosses that are so pointlessly hard as to make glitching almost essential to beating them - snk boss syndrome. also, marvel vs. capcom 2 has four "god-level" characters" - not sure what the criteria are exactly.

also, someone who writes about comics must have at some point brought up how the x-men are beautiful to a fault, while the bad guys are almost always entirely unphotogenic. if you can look at a villain without vomiting, then he'll probably turn good at least once in some story arc. and if a villainess is hot, then she's really, really evil. unless she turns good. how much must that suck for the few x-men who aren't aesthetically perfect? not only is beast a beast and does nightcrawler have a tail, but they have to stand next to jean grey and storm and, oh yes, kitty pryde. if that's not a porn star's name then i have not seen porn. two guesses whether or not i've seen porn.

fortune 2/26/2005

"Think of the danger while things are going smoothly."

what the fuck? did that cookie just _threaten_ me?

the west wing

i finally finished watching season 1. i had purchased it from costco a long, long time ago and returned it after being unable to watch lord john marbury due to some kind of defect with the disc. i ordered it from amazon.com after it dropped down to $20, and finally had the time and the inclination to pick it up again.

i like the show. i never liked sports night, although maybe i didn't give it enough of a chance. and it's not because of the setting or subject, because i would be hard pressed to tell you which i care less about, sports or politics. wait, no, i care less about politics. that really wasn't very hard. some thoughts:

i have friends from columbia (i specify from columbia because, keeping in mind that most of my friends are from there by now, i've never heard anything about the show from the friends i made before college with whom i still keep in touch) who are in love with the show. it's a little upsetting; i think some of them like it because they wish they were the mental giants shooting down the feebleminded dwarfs as a career (even though that can be a pretty accurate description when it comes to republicans). one scene comes to mind during which two lobbyists (i think) are meeting with toby regarding pbs and they name the wrong people as the authors of oklahoma and death of a salesman, which sends toby on an i'm-smarter-than-you-are-and-i'm-going-to-rub-your-face-in-it rampage. i know people who pride themselves on their knowledge of trivia and love nothing more than to correct people when they're wrong about the littlest thing. i'm more than a little guilty of hypocrisy here - about the correcting, but i don't know enough trivia to be hypocritical about that - but that doesn't make it untrue.

other thoughts - (note: i'm not sure of the spellings. i can either a) go with the actors' names, b) guess on the characters' names, or c) actually go to some website and look up the spellings. i'm going to go with option b. i don't know all the actors' names, and (c) is too sad even for me.)

mallory - or allison smith, i _did_ look her up, is smoking. plus she has a real good angry look. the attractive kind, unlike the angry expression that the terrifying victoria secret model is always wearing.

i resonated with sam's position on public education. fucking right, give me a palace to teach in. assholes. here i could go off on a whole thing about the expeditionary school, but i won't.

boo, and double boo to whoever wrote (i think aaron sorkin wrote all of the episodes, so he would be receiving the three boos total) the lame hack season finale. that cheesy shit belongs in 24, whatever tired season it is in by now. ending the episode, much less the season, on the "who got shot, who is going to die" cliffhanger is so beneath the ordinary level and genre of the show. not to mention the fact that they introduced the "who is _going_ to get shot" cliffhanger in the opening and made us sit through another 45 minutes to even watch the shooting take place. fucking skinheads.

it's strange to think that the show was originally conceived to center around the deputy communications director. i do think he is the funniest character, both directly and indirectly. i wonder what the show would have been like if it had stuck with that.

vacation

i think as of noon today vacation reached the halfway point.

accomplished: i bought some food. from costco. i now own two enormous bottles of grey poupon, an industrial size carton thing of kikkoman soy sauce, 6.32 lb of chicken breast, SIX peppers of varying coloration (2 yellow 2 orange and 2 red. beat that), too many slices of muenster to count, and so on. using said purchased food, i made two _delicious_ turkey sandwiches, one not only a single, but a _double_ decker, with grey poupon. the next day i boiled up one half of the two pack (costco scorns your puny single pack) of chicken and cheese ravioli and that lasted me the whole day, forcing me to push back my plans for making stir fry. with 6 peppers and over 6 pounds of chicken breast, nothing can stop me. if i knew the volume of soy sauce sitting on the wheely thing in the corner of my kitchen i would list it here as well for good measure. my goal, this week, is not to go out for food once (or more than once). all sustenance must come from the kitchen.

i'm sitting in my longmeadow home now, with a boatload of laundry. i am washing _three_ towels right now. i previously had purchased two towels from costco upon moving into the duplex in springfield. i immediately left one in josh's apartment in virginia and purchased a replacement. however, two towels is not enough reserve when one's washer and drier are twenty minutes away. what's the normal number for people? i really found that two were insufficient.

with the clearing out of dirty laundry from my room in springfield i am well toward my other goal of cleaning my room. i think i might move the lipstick plant out of my room and back down to the kitchen. i have a whole hook suspension setup for it, but i could not screw it in above the window, and as a consequence only about a third of the plant gets indirect sunlight (meaning it comes through the window and shines directly on the leaves).

other things i plan to do before this vacation ends:
grade many papers for statistics
figure out where the hell my ap stats class is and where we ought to be. we must be so behind.
use minitab at least once.
create some practice exams for stats and geometry that they can take before they fail the real thing.

i have enough laundry for easily 3 or 4 more loads but after these towels dry i am out of here for today. next time i really need to bring a book with me, or something to pass the time. as you can see, i'm reaching for topics.

entourage. that emannuelle chriqui (i can't havce spelled that correctly), as sloan, with her hair pulled back, looks a lot like sai. anyone else see that?

oh, one thing worth mentioning. house party march 4. if i haven't invited you, my bad. you should come. it will be totally sweet. if you have read craig's slightly homoerotic evite, don't let that dissuade you. we will be playing beer pong. on a DOOR. just let that sink in.

i could mention winter league and the party, but i did nothing of consequence at either.

king of the hill

i love this show. i just got seasons 4 and 5 from amazon.com. under $32 for them both!

i particularly enjoyed this exchange between hank and his son.

bobby: i think khannie’s gonna break up with me cuz she hates me

hank: she doesn’t hate you

bobby: yes she does. she’s no longer the girl who fell in love with me. now she’s just the woman who yells at me.

hank: bobby, every woman has a period… of time, every month -

bobby: even mom?

hank: bobby, if we’re going to get through this, you can NOT ask me questions like that

bobby: my bad

hank: now, every month, a woman has this time when she gets very angry. at everything. and usually men are the everything. it’s like a tire fire - trying to put it out only makes it worse. you just gotta let it burn. grab a beer and let it burn

i went through the first 3 seasons a long time ago, and i can't remember the episode when bobby and khan first started going out. i'd like to see that again. they are a cute couple.

such a great show.

just now:
dale, the odds of winning that contest are one in a million.
yeah, if you only drink one beer.

eva or rah xephon?

which one's better? i can't decide. they're so similar in so many ways but in some very important ways, they're really not all that alike.

i like rah xephon's theme song better. must be because it's by yoko kanno.
the visuals in rah xephon blow eva away. not exactly fair though; how much older is eva again?
i do like how rah xephon is essentially a love story. and it's based on a nice and good short story.
eva in comparison is just depressing.
you can tell which is the flatteree and which is the flatterer by looking at their wiki articles. so much information in each, although i think i'd go with rah xephon's.

i started rewatching eva after blowing through rah xephon in maybe 3 days. both series are the same length, but jeez, eva seems soooo long. i watched the first disc in 2x speed since the subtitles are still visible.

i think overall eva is the deeper show. with more meaning. and it ultimately makes more sense, which is kind of mind-boggling, but i guess its like comparing the kettle to a super black pot. a lot of stuff in rah xephon doesn't even try to make the pseudo sense that eva goes for.

in the end, even though rah xephon is superior visually and musically, i'd go with eva. the whole love story and "happy" ending behind rah xephon is almost enough to tip the scales, but still. you have to respect a guy that creates the three main characters to represent three different personality disorders. you could write papers on eva, and i don't think you'd find a comparable amount of material to dig into for rah xephon.

this has to mean something. and i don't think i could be the only one. and this doesn't only apply to anime series. tell that to video game developers. i don't care how nice the graphics are; what i want is gameplay/story. i still go back and play might and magic 4+5, which is tiled and turn based and all this other old school outdated shit. the shift to realtime and 3d environments was the death of the series for me.

if you have any interest in anime, these are two shows you should not miss.

heh, in my ap stats class, one student mentioned fullmetal alchemist, and i went into a 10 minute rant about how formulaic (actually that is somewhat appropriate for a show based on alchemy, punwise) that show is. brothers meet nice alchemist, brothers slowly learn that all is not as it seems, brothers discover that aforementioned alchemist is really the most evil fucking person they've ever met. EVERY TIME. EVERY FUCKING TIME.

nice priest who performs miracles to heal the sick and feed the poor? this young woman, who admires and looks up to him, works for him in his church. for no fucking reason, he resurrects her dead boyfriend as a bird monster. SHE HAS DONE NOTHING TO HIM. she doesn't even give any hint that she could do something even _slightly_ annoying in the future. she just loves and respects him right up until he pulls that shit. and then he laughs at her.

loving father who performs his research in a quiet town? he has an adorable young daughter who misses her mother very much ever since she left the father, but at least she has her big cute dog to play with. oh wait, he COMBINES HER WITH THE FUCKING DOG. he turns her into a DOG GIRL. and why? he needed a human subject to transform, and he FUCKING FELT LIKE IT. how can someone that evil be too lazy to abduct a fucking homeless person? he's so fucking casual about it too when he explains how evil he is to the brothers.

and somehow the brothers are shocked and horrified every time. somehow they haven't learned to expect every single fucking alchemist they meet to be incredibly evil. the worst part, for me though, is the complete and utter lack of even a cursory attempt to explain the bad guys' motivations for being bad. they all just feel like it. they even say that in the fucking series. [paraphrased, but i swear to god, not far off from actual conversation]: "how could you transform your daughter into a dog/human chimera?" "she was around."

wow i typed a lot more than i meant to about that show. casey, you know what i'm talking about.

the constant gardener

trying to get anyone to watch the movie just by title is not easy. i imagine that the book dealt a lot more with justin's gardening pasttime, in the movie, it was a sidenote of no relevance that somehow was also the title.

my impressions:
tessa was a raving bleeding heart loony. what a bitch. why did justin love her at all? and the movie rating promised brief sexual content/nudity. movie ratings need a separate category for nausea-inducing pregnant nudity. and of course she was rich. no one can care so little about money unless he or she has always had too much of it.

overall, i liked it. started out too slow for my taste but net the movie came out in the positive. very disturbing, its portrayal of pharmaceutical companies. disturbing enough that i took a minute out of my boredom filled morning to google "constant gardener accuracy." one website came up that seemed worth looking at, for anyone who has seen the movie and wondered how much of it is loosely based, or inspired by, and how much is true.

of course, how accurate or colored that article is i can't say. it makes sense to me, the part about how americans and other civilized nations expect new drugs while refusing to participate in the trials that are essential to the process. kind of reminds me of the slogan "no blood for oil." if we're always taught not to deal in absolutes, shouldn't it apply there as well? exactly how much blood are we talking about for how much oil?

unrelated: curb your enthusiasm. hilarious. larry david must have had the most unimaginable childhood, in terms of everything that could be bad about one. i can't see any other way for him to have become the way he is now.