• Recently watched television series and movies
• some books I read
• my cell phone
• the following video games: Dwarf Fortress, Gal Civ2.
• the tomato sauce I made the other day
• pictures.

That's all I can recall right now.

I don't think I've ever read anything written by Charles Dickens. It seems like I probably should have somewhere along the line, but for some reason I feel like it's too late to now.

I just finished watching the penultimate episode of a serious contender for Best TV Show Ever. But apparently now I have to wait two weeks to see the series finale, because HBO is giving the finger to On Demand subscribers (and, uh, their friends). I've also heard that reviewers are upset over not receiving copies of the entire season early, as with the fourth season. I guess this way the last episode becomes more of an "event." Hopefully not an event like the Sopranos finale, though. I keep trying to convince myself that the final anticlimax there was borne of true artistic integrity, but the soreness it left behind is a constant reminder a brutal gimmicky violation.

At any rate, the last few episodes of The Wire have been a treat as the many-threaded story lines finally come together in that final glorious knot. It's rare that a series forces me to pay attention as closely in order to keep up—Deadwood and The West Wing (Sorkin years at least) are two others that come to mind—and The Wire is the only one to have maintained such a high level throughout its run.

Unfortunately now I'm without quality television to savor each week. I've lately been tempted to dig out my DVDs of the first couple of seasons of The West Wing, and maybe I could even delude myself into believing that such a rosy political future is possible as my four year hangover is now more than three years complete.

On the moderately good TV front, has anyone been watching Breaking Bad? I just discovered this show a few days ago, and it's better than your average cable drama. The highest point of the show is the amazing acting of Bryan Cranston (Hal from Malcolm in the Middle). I know it's a hard sell when one actor is possibly carrying the entire show, but damn it he's just that good. Though, if you're not already watching it, you may want to hold out for the unrated DVD release which will almost certainly follow. A guy can only take so much silent bleeping and blurry boobies without becoming irrecoverably distracted.

Since I'm already wildly digressing from the original intent of this post... I watched my first movie in some months: Star Trek Nemesis. And it suuuuuucked! Not the least of which, the horrible action sequences... After exchanging shots for some time, The Beard asks for covering fire and Worf dives forward to shoot down all the enemy in an instant. Well why didn't you just do that in the first place? Also, the Remans are supposed to be some kind of super soldiers, but half a dozen or more of them are no match for a single 60-year-old archaeologist in a fire fight? Give me a fucking break.

Since the 3 possible Republican candidates are all running on platforms made up of slightly varied amounts of limiting civil liberties, war, torture, and pigfuckery they're all out of consideration for this endorsement. The one Republican I agree with on several issues is likely a racist nutbag and so he's out also.

On the Democrat side of things, the candidate I most agree with (according to several online tests) has already dropped out and was not going to get many votes anyway. So that leaves Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and between the two I definitely choose Obama.
[more inside]

...so I could make people believe I've already answered their questions. I really love my job. Until the last week before grades go out. Because no one seems to care about it until then, and then come the parents out of the woodwork. And students asking for EXTRA work in the form of extra credit because learning the material the first time was too much for them to do.

Then teachers start looking ahead at next semester's overcrowded rosters. They complain about the big class sizes like they don't realize it's public school....that thing people say they care about, but never put any real funds or energy into................and people keep reproducing like rabbits, while the number of schools stay the same..........hummmm.

So, I'm locking myself in my room with the lights off so everyone thinks I'm not here until the bell rings again.

NBC said that they debated internally "for hours" over whether to air the VT gunman's multimedia manifesto. That's right, whole hours. Rather than even waiting until the dead had all been buried before posthumously stroking the gunman's narcissistic ego, they decided to forge ahead and lay it all out for us in a tantalizing trickle of photos and video clips. (Speaking of narcissism, how 'bout those NBC NEWS watermarks on all the images. Classy. Neener, neener! The killer chose us and not you!) Their justification for airing the material included something about helping people who wanted to make some sort of sense out of the massacre. Right. Oh, so he was apparently a crazy monotone talking motherfucker. Now it all makes sense. Thanks, NBC, you've taken your cues from FOX NEWS well and have done the public quite a service.

I'm sure the desire to air their big scoop before the other guys had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on their decision. Nor was it that they thought viewers' interest might be waning after seeing the same old greasy head shot for 48 continuous hours.

(More below...)

I am getting sick and motherfucking tired of spammers spoofing their From: fields to contain my school/work email address. Consequently, I get bombarded with mailer daemons' and spam filters' UNDELIVERABLE messages, many of which make it pass SpamAssassin even with my fairly stringent filtering threshold. Today one moron actually sent me, along with dozens of others whom he thought were spammers, the following message:

I don't buy ANYTHING off of the Internet. Please remove me from your mailing list.

This guy's sig contains his name, company name, phone number, and website address, wherein he tries to sell his graphic design services over the internet! I was this --> <-- close to sending him a kindly informative email that subtley implied he was an idiot, but I thought better of it. He would know who I was... I guess a better solution would be to create an anonymous hotmail account for the kindly condescending email, somehow incorporating goatse. (BTW, I'm also this --> <-- close to replacing with tubgirl a now defunct image hosted on this domain that some myspace kiddie linked to some time ago. I'm tired of seeing that "page not found" message in the admin logs.)

Thing is, I used to never get a single bit of spam at that email address until a professor of mine several years ago decided in his infinite wisdom to put a class roster, complete with students' email addresses, on his website. Goddamn it. I should go deface his wikipedia page in retribution.

Spammers, take note. As a pacifist and a coward, I don't think I could actually kill you if we ever met face to face, but I believe I could give you a lifelong limp without too much of a burden on my conscience. In this day and age, I also think a jury of my peers would have to acquit.