so this movie looks absolutely terrible

so I've heard a fair amount about this guy Patrick Wolf. People mention him on their Myspaces and Facebooks and blogs and whatnot. I listened to a couple songs and they didn't do anything for me, kind of boring. But then I saw his picture and decided I'd never listen to him. Look at this clown.

This guy's the definition of "tries too hard." "Hey, I'll get ridiculous poofy hair and sit on a carousel. That will be witty and clever. Then I will get a tattoo of a unicorn (?!?!) above my skinny boob." Every picture is like "I am so sad and vulnerable, :(" It's just lame. And anyway, his name is Patrick Wolf. Dumb.

so I was typing www.myspace.com into my browser and did a typo: www.mu , then hit return, and lo and behold, it's an actual site. It's hotels in Mauritius, a little island nation in the Indian Ocean, which happens to have .mu as its website domain. Pretty weird.

I also discovered (reading Maxim) that .tt is Trinidad and Tobago. I wonder if I can buy Bu.tt , but unfortunately, it costs $1000. Man, I wish I had $1000 right now. That would be the best website ever.

- Hey, what's your email?
- andrew@bu.tt

Awesome.

so I think saying "with apologies to" is really dumb. I see it when people make puns or take-offs on quotations (and sometimes titles or photographs). To me, it seems really pointless, other than trying to seem smart because you know some famous person's quote or book or what have you. I really doubt the famous person will actually find your apology, and in the unlikely event they did, I doubt they'd care.

This is what inspired it, a random Facebook photo, but I've seen it all over the place. If you can't see it, it's a photo of three women, and the caption is "Three Women (apologies to Robert Altman)."

so here's an update on my quest to get Fucking, Austria and Condom, France to become sister cities.

I emailed a lot of safe sex and AIDS nonprofits and NGOs, including UNAIDS (the United Nations AIDS agency), Until There's a Cure, Product RED, the AIDS Alliance, Oxfam, the World Health Organization, AIDS Action Europe, and HIV Europe.

So far the only response I got was from Product RED, who said "Thanks for your idea!" But I'm going to keep at it.

Anybody have suggestions for places or people to email?

I lost the Nationals game

nice seats
Originally uploaded by squidpants

So my buddy Cam called me yesterday and said he had tickets to the Nationals-Astros game and was I interested? I said hell yes and went. Turns out they were awesome seats, the 5th row behind home plate. So nice they even have cushions and a server. Pretty cool. I looked at them and they said $120. Apparently the bank of the company where Cam works had them and he got them.

Anyway, it was pretty fun, the players in the on deck circle (and even the Astros dugout) were really close, so I decided to heckle them. My first target was Hunter Pence, a rookie. He was standing in the on deck circle and I yelled "Hey Pence, I've never heard of you!" Some folks laughed, but then the guy batting was out and the inning was over.

Next inning, Mr. Pence was up first and kept fouling it off. I yelled "Hey Pence, you're hitting it the wrong way!" and then, the next pitch, he hit a home run. Considering how close I was, I assume he heard me. So that was pretty funny. I was wondering if he'd look my way on the way back, but I don't think he did. It put the Astros up 3-2, and they went on to win 4-2. You can actually see the homer on his player page above, where it says "Pence's homer 400k".

So after that I only heckled the presidents, such as "Hey Teddy, your brother's better!" to the Teddy Roosevelt mascot. It was fun, but too bad the Nats lost. Luckily the Nats did win two of the three games in the series with the Astros.

The game also reaffirmed my love of heckling. Cam and I used to hekcle it all the time at GW women's basketball games because everybody could hear you, due to the small crowds. And GW was good, so that helped. Usually it was pretty harmless or dumb stuff, making fun of the opposing coach, making dumb puns, saying nonsense.

I wish I were a rich guy who could afford those Nats seats and I could just sit there and yell dumb stuff at the opposing team all day. It's fun. I think most of the people sitting around me laughed a couple times, and I only got a couple nasty looks. I consider that a success. Aside from the game losing home run.

so I got this MP3 in my email the other day, "Acceptable in the 80s" by Calvin Harris. He's a Scottish guy who fronts a disco goofball group, a bit like a more funky, jokier Hot Chip or a straight version of the Scissor Sisters. His first album "I Created Disco" is set to come out in the US September 4th. Apparently he made it on an old Amiga computer.

The music is pretty bass heavy and definitely fits with the album title. About the music, he says "Disco disappeared, didn't it? Everyone got sick of it. Now I'm reviving it, with space goggles, or something." His Scottish accent and occasional falsetto makes the vocals almost comical, but it fits.

Considering they're all disco dancey songs, they're diverse. "Rock N Roll Attitude" on his Myspace page has repetitive plucked bass like a lost !!! song, and "Merrymaking at My Place" is a jokey jam about partying with funnily repetitive lyrics like "Come into my house/You're invited into my house/Enter in the back of my house/" and so on about going into his house. "Wild Scenes" has choppy samples like a Daft Punk song, and so on.

It's fun stuff, here's the video for "Acceptable in the 80s." The rodent thing in the video has his own Myspace page too.



Official site
Myspace

so I had my least favorite recurring dream last night. It's not really a nightmare, but it's not a good dream either. It happens every now and then, I dream that I'm waking up and get out of bed. Then I brush my teeth, get showered, shave, put on my clothes, eat breakfast, and all that stuff, getting ready for work. I usually think "ah, this is nice, leaving for work early."

Then I wake up and I'm still in bed, not ready for work. So that sucks. All that work for nothing. I guess it's my body's way of telling me to get out of bed, but since it seems like I already am, I don't. Pretty weird huh?

so I've known about towns with names like Bumpass, Virginia, Fucking, Austria, Intercourse, Pennsylvania, and Dildo, Newfoundland (which is only about an hour trip from Conception Bay, figure that one out). But browsing a list on Wikipedia, I discovered Condom, France.

I think Condom and Fucking should become sister cities. Not only would it be hilarious, it'd be a good way to promote safe sex. I bet it'd get a lot of play (pun!) in newspapers and blogs, and everybody would forward it to everybody else. So I'm going to start the campaign!

I'm gonna email the Sister Cities nonprofit, UNAIDS, the International AIDS Society, and whatever other nonprofits I can think of. But before that, I'm going to visit this lovely little town.

A bus blew up by my old house

Fwd: bus!
Originally uploaded by squidpants

so this is across the street from where I used to live in Logan Circle. Pretty nuts. It was Friday on Rhode Island Ave NW between 11th and 12th. I saw and could smell the smoke from blocks away when I got off the Metro and went over to see what was going on. By the time I got there, it was just a charred, smoking bus because the firemen had put it out, but my old roommates (who took the picture) told me about it, as did my current roommate's girlfriend, who lives in the house right where the trolley is. Apparently it was on the way to get repairs and started smoking, then boom! The only person on it was the driver, who had gotten off before the explosion, and nobody was hurt. Yikes!

I wrote about it for DCist and the fire department has more photos and a video, which is wild.

(This photo is by Kiki Schneider.)

so I had an "Office Space" moment at work today. About a week ago, they sent around a mass email telling everybody to change their voicemail greetings. There's this long script which everybody has to follow, and which they (whoever "they" are) actually check it, and now we all had to change it again. They decided to change one of the phone numbers, so everybody in the agency has to change their outgoing voicemails. Which is certainly not stupid or a huge waste of time. (That is sarcasm.)

The script is long and took me about five times to get it right the first time. Here it is:

Hello, this is (------ Your Name ------), (------ Your Title ------) with the Office of the ( ----- name of the place where I work -----).

I’m not able to take your call right now, but if you’ll leave me a message, I will return your call within 24 hours or the next business day.

For immediate assistance, please call (202) _________ to reach our Project Coordinator.

Thanks for calling.

The "thanks for calling" part is on the second page of the Word document they sent out and I forgot to say it. No big deal, who cares, right? No, I got an email saying I have to fix it or we'll get in trouble.

That's got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard. We'll get in trouble for me leaving off "thank you" on a two paragraph voicemail greeting? It's up there with the guy in "Office Space" whose job is to pass documents from one guy to another. I can't believe it's someone's job to do this. What a humongous waste of time (not to mention money, since I'm getting paid to change my voicemail greeting so many times and someone else is writing these greetings and then making us change them.)

How about "Hi, this is Andrew Wiseman, leave me a message" beep? Is that so wrong?

so I guess I spoke this without even knowing it: Appalachian English. I barely have an accent, but I use a lot of the vocabulary.

For example, "pen" and "pin" are the same sound to me, I say "greasy" like "greazy," "Appalachia" as "App-a-latch-ah," "chaw" for chewing tobacco, "Coke" for any kind of soda, "I reckon," etc. Some of my relatives say even more, like "warsh" for "wash," "polecat," "skillet," "fixin to" and so on. Some of my older relatives say "yonder" and "touched," and when I worked at Kroger (a grocery store) they used to call going out to get the shopping carts "buggy duty." Hooray for regional dialects.