My Addled Brain

I’m at a kickass party - and you’re not. Free booze rocks.

Durn young punks think they have it all, with their Playstation 2 and that newfangled X-Box. They never played real games, at least not when they were cutting edge. But how do these old games, like Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Star Wars, or Galaga, stack up to the ADD afflicted, Prozac taking youth of today? 1Up just had to find out, and the results may surprise you. Or not. It all depends on whether or not you think that Adventure:

should be a 3D dot with laser arms that can do Matrix moves. Pachoo! Pachoo! Pachoo!

Bobby John, Age 10

The article is hilarious, but now I need a cane and some arthritis medicine.

I’m a hard man to shop for (as opposed to a man to shop hard for). Just ask anyone forced to purchase gifts for me. I take after the Padre in this way, for years, whenever we asked him what he wanted as a gift for his birthday/Father’s Day/Christmas, he would invariably answer “a ten pound box of 20’s and 50’s”. And while I admire that kind of wishful thinking, it wasn’t really a practical choice for a seven-year old. So, he’d end up with gifts that, more often than not, collected dust in some old, forgotten shelf. I guess the lesson I should have learned was “know what you want out of life”, but somehow, that all got twisted around, and what I’ve actually taken from that is, well, “eh”.

However, Teh 1 seems to have gotten around all that. I offhandedly mentioned that I might like to go to the New Year’s Eve show at the Ice Palace featuring Barenaked Ladies, whom I understand perform some type of stage production with music and singing. However, I lamented that it was too expensive (after all, we did somehow manage to purchase a house on our combined incomes of recyclable collecting and menial labor), and I put the thought aside. But Teh 1 was, apparently, not to be dissuaded, because what did I discover come early Christmas morn? Two tickets to a certain performance this very Friday.

And these aren’t Joe Sucker seats in some cold, dank rafter. Oh no, my friend, these are club seats, complete with all the free food and booze that I can stuff my distended stomach with. She hasn’t told me how she managed to scrape up the cash for this, so all I can do is offer my sincerest apologies to any elderly who are missing their welfare checks this week, still bandaged up from the attacks. She was only trying to brighten my holiday, you know.

I celebrate Christmas. Merry Christmas to those that do, happy holidays to those that don’t - even you scary Festivus people.

I know each and every one of you want to know what my favorite things are from this year - after all, late December is the time for retrospectives and “Best of” lists. So why not mine? Ah, an excuse to procrastinate - as if I needed one.

Ground rules: Lists will be provided in no particuar order, but if there’s a single favorite I have above the others, I’ll mention it as such. I’ll try to mention why I like something, but this is not a hard and fast rule. You may feel free to disagree with me, but you do so knowing full well you’re wrong, and quite likely out of your mind. Finally, no kicking, screaming, or biting, or I’ll turn this car around and we’ll all go home. I’ll drop these as I please over the next couple weeks. (Where have we heard that before?) Ready kids?

Five best albums of 2005

• The Killers - Hot Fuss. This band defies description, but they’re loud, the songs are addictive and have tons of energy, and if I weren’t a 31 year old white man, they might move me to shake my posterior-erior-erior until I just can’t shake it no more.
• Auf der Mar - Auf der Mar. Former Hole guitarist leaves the crazy crack whore behind for a solo career, and proceed to write an album that utterly shreds. She’s hot, and she’s more metal than you.
• N.E.R.D.- Fly or Die. This album goes all over the place, but somehow manages to maintain a cohesiveness that most bands can’t even begin to concieve of. Add in Pharrell William’s slick lyrics, heaped atop more hooks than a pirate convention, and you’ve got a great album with a social conscience.
• Beastie Boys - To The Five Boroughs. They’ve trimmed the fat, and shelved the instruments for this one. It’s just 3 MC’s and one DJ all the way through, and once again, three Jewish kids from NYC take all those hip-hop pretenders to the woodshed.
• Green Day - American Idiot. The best punk rock opera I’ve ever heard. Just because it’s the only one doesn’t mean it isn’t awesome. And the little Meat Loaf homage near the end is worth the listen all by itself.

My favorite book series is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I think I’ve read the book series well over a dozen times, watched the BBC TV miniseries several times, listened to the BBC radio version a couple, and done whatever else to immerse myself in Arthur Dent’s retardedly hilarous universe. The book series is so unbelievably funny that no amount of words can possibly justify it - but my suggestion is if you can read (and if you’ve gotten this far, guess what?) and enjoy reading about things like:

• Alien species with 50 arms, the only race in the universe to create deodorant before the wheel
• Deadly poetry
• Proving the non-existence of God (by proving He exists)
• Lines like this: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
• The secret to flying
• Cold, heartless beauracracy
• The smartest, most depressed robot in the universe (and easily my favorite character, perhaps in any book ever)

If this sounds like you, and you’re not MCG, then by gum, go and get yourself a copy and carve a space in a well-lit corner somewhere, preferably a spot where people won’t stare at you when you start to laugh out loud. And you WILL laugh out loud.

I bring this up because, next summer, the big Hollywood Summer Blockbuster, will be about a man finding his way in the universe when his home planet is destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial bypass. Since I, along with many, many other people, have such reverence for this book, knowing that the author, Douglas Adams, would not be able to finish writing the script for the movie due to his passing a few years ago, we were all worried that the movie would end up being freakishly twisted into either a Spaceballs clone (not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly not what a fan would want), or they’d remove the type of humor that makes the book what it is, and try and make it edgy or some other Ang Lee type of crap. Thankfully, that seems to not be the case here. From what I’ve read, the people involved have a respsect for the original work, and while there are changes, most of the big ones were introduced by Adams, and hopefully the others will fit in well.

I thought one time was too many for this to happen. But twice? Jesus, what is wrong with people? I understand the desire to have a child, but have your own, or at least adopt. They let people in trailer parks with criminal histories adopt children, so why couldn’t THAT lady?

Then again, taking a look at her picture, I kinda see why not.

Fourteen post deletions later, and I’m feeling MUCH better now, thank you.

The new cell phone I bought acutally pulls up the site in it’s full, awe-inspiring style, so I figured I’d try and see if I could post something here on it. Sure enough, it works great, if you like using a cell phone to write sentences. But when I went to send the post, it kept asking me if I wanted to be redirected - what it should have said was something like, “Would you like to send this post yet again, dumbass?”

However, the hotel we’re staying at has a lovely broadband connection for my laptop, enabling me to do whatever I want while here, such as post a note to MCG letting him know that the delicious fried grouper I had for dinner last night was served with cheese grits smothered in bacon gravy.

And as far as I’m concerned, grits should be a side item choice at every restaurant. Which will be my third decree as soon as I am elected king of this great land.

This is a test of the emergency cell phone posting system. If this works, then know that I’ll never, ever do this again.

This is a test of the emergency cell phone posting system. If this works, then know that I’ll never, ever do this again.