Caught a bit of SCTV on the Comedy Network just a bit ago, and they were playing the soap spoof The Days of the Week. Seeing it again my attitude towards it hasn't changed. It never really worked for me because they played it too straight. Soap plots are wonky enough as it is, so you really have to exagerate them to spoof them. Yet for some reason the SCTV cast and writers kept the idea going for quite a long time. Apparently they didn't seen any problem with the concept.

And speaking of anti SUV material, what should I stumble across a few minutes after my last entery but this page(they use naughty words, so reader discretion advised). These folks have got a real mean on for the Hummer H2. I'm not sure how many of these are floating around Saskatoon if any. There are a couple of Hummer H1s in the area, the most frequently seen one being a yellow model owned by Jerry's Food Emporium, a locally owned fast food place. There definitely something you wouldn't see me driving, if only because I have enough trouble parking a normal car or minivan, let alone an overgrown hunk of metal like a Hummer.

It seems I'm not the only person who dislikes SUVs. The French are considering a tax on them due to their supposed negative impact on the enviroment. Its hard to imagine something like that happening in North America. The howls of indignation and "you're interfering with my RIGHTS!" would be heard far and wide, not to mention the big 3 auto makers and the Japanese bitching about how it would hurt their business. Interestingly enough French auto makers don't currently produce SUVs, they're all imports.

Outside the kitchen window of the house is a thermometer. For the past couple of weeks or so, but I bet its actually been longer, a spider has been sitting on it at night. I can't help but wonder why. Perhaps its warm there at night from the heat leaking out of the window. Or maybe the light attracts something it likes to eat at night. Autumn is gradually approaching, and I imagine the occasional spider will begin to show up in the house. Unfortunately for them I usually vacuum them up when I get the chance. We have enough bugs in the house as it is, since we have a problem every year with camelback crickets infesting the basement every summer, not to mention ants sometimes getting in. At least we don't have to worry about some of the more agressive spiders, such as the brown recluse, that cause problems for people in the more southerly parts of North America.

Looking at some random blogs it amazes me some of the stuff people write. No, I'm not talking about the actual content, but the bizarre spelling they use. Is this some sort of New Age teenspeak or what? If you're one of the people who writes like this you might as well not bother. No one is going to take the time to decipher your weird shit in the hopes something interesting might be there.

Teletoon has been having ads of late for its new fall schedule. Some of it looks interesting, Undergrads is back to infect a new group of wouldbe fans, but they're also gonna play The Flintstones.

Sorry Teletoon, but I do not need to see the bloody Flintstones again. Here in Saskatoon when I was a kid CFQC played the series weekdays at noon forever. There was a time, and its probably hasn't changed that much, when I could see an episode for 10 seconds or less and tell you which one it was. I could probably recite chunks of the dialogue from each episode as well. So its one show I don't need to see ever again, especially if they only buy a half or a quarter of the episodes and play them 16 times over the next 6 months.

The series was very much a ripoff of The Honeymooners, with Fred in the place of Ralph Kramden and Barney as Ed Norton. An early episode even features Fred doing a variation on Ralph's perennial "to the Moon, Alice!" threat. And Mel Blanc's original Barney voice sounds very much like Art Carney's portrayal of Norton, and perhaps changed because it was too close. Ironically given that the show is now considered classic kiddy fodder it was obviously intended for a more general audience, just as the classic Warner Brothers cartoons were obviously intended to entertain people older than six.

Gotta love those loons at PETA. I was reading in the local paper today that a Newfoundland billboard company has decided not to rent its billboards to the group to present posters than claim feeding children beef is child abuse. This is apparently not a new campaign, but is just now being tried in the Maritimes. In any case its a stupid idea. You are hardly going to convince people to stop eating meat by comparing them with child abusers. Sometimes PETA seems to behave like a parody of an activist group, saying and doing things that if they were presented as part of a comedy sketch you'd laugh at, but in the real world make them look very stupid.

I tried a bag of Old Dutch's Szechuan Beef flavoured potato chips today. They turned out to be not bad at all. No, they don't really taste like beef. Would anyone think they would? But they did taste quite nice. Probably not the best snack for someone on a sodium reduced diet, but then what chips are?

After much screwing around trying to get an Asrock P4s61 motherboard installed in this machine we finally gave up and got another board. So far it seems to be working fine. We suspect that the Celeron 1.7gig CPU we were trying to use might have screwed things up. The joy of computer upgrading....

I think someone is trying to tell me something.

Went out to get a drink. Stopped off at the local Walmart and dropped a loonie(thats a one dollar Canadian coin, non-Canadian folks)into the Coke machine out front. It didn't vend me anything, telling me to use exact change only. When I hit the coin return instead of giving me some change it vended me a can of Five Alive and gave me 25 cents back. Grrrrr!! So it was over to the $1.25 Coke machine. Yeah, I at least got some product out of the first machine, but it shorted me 15 cents and vended me something I don't drink.

Probably the soft drink gods are telling me I drink too much Coke.

Things will be a bit slow from me for a bit. I'm trying to have a new motherboard installed in my computer, and there are software problems. Since thats the computer that has all my writing on it I won't be working on any of my fiction projects until its back operational. So anyone waiting for new stuff will have to be just a bit more patient. Fortunately I have access to the online world via this computer, so I can do things like write this.

That should of course be Beyond Good and Evil, but stupid old blogger.com won't let me edit my post to correct it. BAH!!!!

Here's something for the Undergrads fans passing thru. I was browsing thru the software section of a local Staples office supply store Monday morning and came across a game called Between Good and Evil. Interestingly I think the main character in the game, Jade, looks a hell of a lot like Jesse. Take a look at the screenshots here, especially the portrait shot near the bottom. The official page for the game, which is available in both PC and game system forms, is here.

There's not much to say about this link other than that its all KISS's fault.

I just saw something that referenced When Harry Met Sally, and of course this made me think of those annoying Herbal Essences shampoo ads. Unless you're recently arrived from abroad or are one of those odd folks who don't own a tv you've seen ads in that stupid campaign a zillion times. Well, believe it or not When Harry Met Sally came out 15 years ago. So it should be obvious to the folks that make that stupid shampoo THAT ITS TIME TO DITCH THAT STUPID CAMPAIGN, BECAUSE ITS SO BLOODY OUT OF DATE!!! Seriously Mr. and Mrs. Advertising Exec, most of us are tired of the damn things. I don't care how supposedly successful they've been, its time for a new idea. Those ads are the equivalent of a tv show in 1984 treating hippies as if they were hip and current, instead of vaguely farcical..

If you're a major league baseball fan, especially a Canadian one, you might want to check out the Batter's Box Baseball Blog. Not surprisingly a lot of the content deals with the Toronto Blue Jays. Personally I find the discussion there better than the alt.sports.baseball.tor-bluejays newsgroup on Usenet, although thats really not much of a surprise I suppose. A personally run blog is going to weed out the nuisances than an unmoderated newsgroup attracts.

Its not much fun being a Jays fan this year. The wheels have come off, and no one seems to be able to put them back on for very long. Letting Baltimore have an 8 run 8th inning like in today's game is a good example. I can't help but think that the team needs someone to do something spectacular to inspire them, but I doubt that's likely to happen.

Bummer. Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts is being treated for cancer. Fortunately he's reported to be doing very well. Its ironic Watts would be having such problems, as by all accounts he's always been the cleanest living of the Stones. Compare him to Keith Richards, who has probably tried most of the narcotic and intoxicating substances known to man at some point.

I was just watching Muchmoremusic's(Canada's equivalent of VH1) Ten Worst Dressed in Pop thing. But amongst the badly dressed, at least for this program, is host Karina Huber herself. She's wearing this horrible purple slip style dress with a sort of sash under her breasts. Ugly. Who told her wearing that was a good idea? Of course given that its probably a dress from the line of some sponsor of the program she may not have had much choice in wearing it.

Just a little update for folks waiting for chapter 8 of Bootleg. I'm working on it.

Honest.

Hopefully I can get it out within the next week or two. As usual I'll make no firm promises. In any case when it does come out I'm sure some folks will be quite happy with what happens in Chapter 8. I'm also hoping to get some other stories done in the next while.

Given all the frooforah in the current US presidental race about who served and what they did here's an interesting link. Its a list of prominent politicians and others from both sides of the political fence, and their military service, or lack thereof. As always its interesting to look at this from a Canadian perspective, since military service is very rarely an issue in Canadian elections.

Just a small request. If anyone comes across any Undergrads fan art please let me know.

Just a little heads up for certain folks. I was looking at the Teletoon schedule for September last night.

Nitz and the Click are back.

Need I say more?

Sunday afternoon must be pornblog update time at blogger.com. I was just looking at the recently updated blogs list and there's a couple dozen or so that seem to have just been updated. As if the porn biz needs more places to post stuff. Hmmm, then again maybe it does given how much having your own domain costs versus using one like this one.

Sure am chatty tonight aren't I?

I just went to check on one of my fav fanfic related sites, Rakhal's The Penultimate Ranma Fanfic Index only to find "WebSite Disabled, Please Contact Our Billing Department" in big letters. Ouch. This also means that the Lost Library of Florestica, a repository for various Ranma and other fanfics, is also out of action. Double ouch.

Here's a new word for your vocabulary: tablehooter. And what is a tablehooter, you ask? The answer can be found here. I even own one, namely a Realistic Concertmate 500, a rebadged Casio SK1.

I just remembered a bit ago that this is the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Oddly enough I've seen nor heard nothing in the media about this, when in past years I'm sure I have. Perhaps its just a case of WW2 becoming more and more like earlier wars, namely a true historical event instead of something that sort of hangs over everything. This process is of course inevitable for any historical event as it becomes more distant from the present and more and more people it directly affected pass away. Thirty years from now 911 will be the same way.

The musician body count for this year has gone up yet again. This time it was Rick James. Given his long problems with substance abuse it's ironic he died of reported natural causes, although the cocaine and other drugs likely didn't help even if he hadn't done them in years.

An interesting book worth checking out if you're interested in geopolitics and so forth is Thomas P.M. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. Its both a discussion of how the US might deal with international relations as the world changes and a look at how some of what currently drives US policy came about. I don't agree with everything he says, but he's definitely got some interesting concepts going, like his division of the world into Functioning Core, that is the countries of the industrialised world and those elsewhere with similar economic setups like India and China, and the Non Integrated Gap, places that are disconnected in some way from the modern world economy. He's not a partisan of the current adminstration and has some criticisms of its behaviour which I think are valid from his perspsective. He also has a personal website dealing with his writings.

This BBC article on the toughness of digital storage devices for digital cameras reminded me of a photography magazine special edition I read last year. It was about photographers present during the World Trade Center attacks. Included was an article about a photographer whose digital camera survived the attack when he unfortunately didn't. They were able to download the last photos he took with the camera. Very eerie.

I was watching ESPN's Friday Night Fights this evening. No, I'm not writing this via time machine, rather that's when TSN here in Canada played it this week. It was recorded before Friday's Tyson-Williams fight, and the regular commentators and guest Buster Douglas, who fought and beat Tyson back in '90, expected Tyson to win, as did most of those who posted to ESPN's website. Only 6.8% thought Williams might win. I hope at least some of those folks bet some money on Williams, as the payoff was likely rather nice.

Too bad for Tyson. This loss probably diminishes his chance of getting some really big fights lined up, and he apparently needs the money, as he supposedly owes the IRS a big whack of cash.

Even boxing is becoming grist for the reality tv mill. There will be two boxing themed reality shows this fall, with contestants competing to get a chance at a professional boxing career. One involves Sylvester Stallone and former champ Sugar Ray Leonard, while the other has involvement from current boxing superstar Oscar De La Hoya. Is this the kind of thing boxing needs? Boxing's image is tarnished enough in the eyes of many without linking it to the less than classy reality tv genre.