Shyzer.com

You bend over to pick up a book and singe off an inch as it accidentally falls into the candle on your nightstand.

Maybe it’s time to pull out the bald look again.

Apparently I’m the only person who remembers the trailers for Babel that they played constantly when it first came out. They made it seem like it was some international terror suspense movie that would be entertaining to watch.

It’s not. And it’s not.

The problem was that the movie wasn’t anything like the trailers made it out to be. It’s a drama that goes on and on about how we can’t communicate with other people who have the same feelings, emotions, blah blah blah. It was basically three poorly connected stories going on at once. It’s as if I was watching three separate mini-movies that kept cutting away just when I started to tolerate them. To make matters worse, half of the characters acted as if they had a learning disability that put them on par with 4 year old with Down’s Syndrome. Just because you’re a fish out of water doesn’t mean you have to act like an idiot, despite what this movie tries to teach you.

In fact, you know it’s a shitty movie on the screen when you find that you don’t give a shit whether any of the major characters to live or die. What rubbish.

I’m still debating over this photo I recently found via English Russia. The obvious observation is that it’s portraying some Cold War Soviet propaganda about the Evil, Bastard Americans and their damn nukes that are going to destroy the world.

But then on the other hand, if you look closer, you can clearly make out two butt cheeks on the sides of Russia. And in the middle are a few suspicious looking phallic figures…

So which is it, Russia? Do you think we’re trying to kill you or just get in your pants? Just let me know either way, because I’m kinda confused as to why I’m evil after looking at this photo.

Someday soon, I’ll probably be forced to own this cell phone, which has a built in breathalyzer function. Most people would probably get this in hopes of preventing themselves from getting behind the wheel of a car. Luckily for me though, I’ve never been interested in operating a blender, much less some other larger machinery like a car, whenever I get drunk. No, I’d be purchasing this little gadget for one thing and one thing only:

The LP4100 also allows users to set up the phone so on certain nights and after a certain time they do not call certain people in their phone book. Think ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend.

If you have a blood alcohol level over .08, the phone will not let you dial that person. So it not only promotes sobriety, but chastity - and probably your dignity, as well.

Ahhh, dignity. I wonder what it’s like to have some of that!

On second thought, a cell phone isn’t even my worst enemy when I’m drunk. The only people I call is Fellner and random numbers. No, what I need is to rig up the same type of device on my personal computer that will shut it down instead of allowing me to operate AIM, MSN, Shyzer, and Facebook while drunk. Because no matter how trashed I get, I never seem to forget how to use a mouse and keyboard…

Fisty off, I’m pround of myself for clicking the “drunk” category button.

Secondf off, I’m soo glad they didn’t have Facebook back when I was a freshman in college. Othersieh, i I would hav efound too many people I thoughtwere well burried in my past.

Third off, I wish they had had Facebook when I was a freshman, so that I would have been able to find all those folks I though tI had lost in may pasy.

Like I said yesterday, schools up here in Virginia have been closed since Monday. When you factor in that they’ll also be closed this coming Monday for President’s Day, you realize that the Gooblings were recently handed a 7-day weekend. And so far, they’ve each spent 98% of their time off indoors either on the computer or in front of a TV.

I hate to sound like an old codger lamenting about the “good ‘ole days,” but it’s easy for me to see how childhood has changed in the last 10 to 15 years. I was part of the last group of kids who grew up without some form of technology pervading my every waking moment. And this is coming from a guy whose dad bought an NES before anybody else on the block - just as much for him as it was for me. The same went for just about every other technology breakthrough over the 90s. Personal computer, big screen TV, high speed (56k BABY!) internet, you name it, we most likely were the first in the neighborhood to get it.

And yet even still, the majority of my childhood memories are void of complex technology or machinery. In elementary school, I didn’t touch a computer until 4th grade, and that was to play Math Blasters in Horizons class. After school was spent watching an hour of cartoons on FOX (who else remembers when Nickelodeon didn’t have any Nick Toons and Cartoon Network didn’t exist!? Just me? Okay…) before walking down the street to Michael Mace’s house to hang out. I do remember playing my fair share of Battle Toads, Ninja Turtles, and Zelda at his place, but even more of my memories from that early on in life are of me on my bike, racing around the neighborhood with my dog, just looking for something to do. Well, that, and playing in the woods where I found a dog bone and was convinced it was an Indian burial ground. In fact, that was my greatest asset as a kid. My imagination. God, the hours spent playing outdoors or with my Ninja Turtles or Ghostbuster toy gun. I may have played alone a lot as a kid, but I never felt alone after I let my mind run wild for a little bit.

By the end of elementary school and throughout middle school, my main after school activity was calling Chong to see if he wanted to “Play.” For us, Playing consisted of walking around and trying to entertain ourselves. Sometimes we’d find a house being built to Play in. Other times we spent our Play time chopping down trees in the woods in order to make a bridge over a 10 inch creek. Or even more often, Playing meant wandering around in people’s yards, down the nearby streets, along the abandoned railroad tracks, simply looking for something interesting and using our imagination whenever we found it. Yeah, we were older, but using our mind as a source of entertainment was still our key toy.

Sure, we played SNES and Genesis whenever we felt like it, but I can’t seem to remember playing video games for more than a few hours at a time, if that. They just weren’t that entertaining! You can only play so much Madden ‘94 before you realize that it sucks. And I’m not trying to make it seem like I didn’t play video games as a kid. I played a lot. But only in relation to other kids back then! Before, I may have been a video game master, but compared to kids nowadays, I would be the kid who couldn’t figure out how reload his gun on Halo. In all honesty, I’d say only about 50% of my free time before hitting high school was spent either watching TV or playing video games.

I’d put the Goobling’s at about 90%, minimum.

So is that bad? Do I think their “generation” is failing at something? No, it’s simply a fact I’ve noticed. It simply make me wonder what their memories are going to be of when they get to be my age. I don’t see how they can be anything beyond video games, computers chats, and disappointing TV shows. I can’t help but feel like they’re missing out on something that I was fortunate enough to experience, something which is gone from kid’s lives forever.

I’m sure my grandparents said the same thing when TV entered my parent’s lives. And the same was probably said a generation earlier when radios began popping up into homes across the country. That doesn’t change the fact that they were right. Things did change and it’s the elder people who see it happening because they remember what it was like “before.” Are either generation better off or worse because of the change? I doubt it, but it’s still hard to watch it happen.

During a week long snow storm, God…I probably would have spent only enough time indoors to eat, sleep, and cure my extremities from frostbite. The Gooblings haven’t even desired to touch the snow. I can’t even think of a moment beyond dinner time when any of them haven’t been in front of a computer, TV, or video game. Literally. No forts have been built. No surprise snowball attacks have been made. No giant snowballs have been rolled into the size of a small car and placed in the middle of a road at the bottom of a hill for a pickup truck to slam into, which caused the driver to chase after us….

I wonder what my kids will say when my grandchildren’s generation welcomes the invention of internal brain computers or automated chore & homework completing robots or something along those lines. I bet they’ll lament over the days when their games were only played on TVs instead of in full life virtual reality rooms, which totally made them better and more hardcore. They’ll recall when Google searches were inaccurate at best and how information on the Internet only seemed to be organized or sorted until you actually wanted to find something and couldn’t no matter how hard you tried. Or even how they had to hide their porn stash in C:/My Documents/Important Files/Saved029/Computer Logs instead of downloading them directly into their brains, which…well I think my grandchildren will have the advantage there.

But my kid’s will be right. Just like I am. Just like everyone before me was.

We all have missed out on something previous generations had. But such is the nature of change.

Do you know what happens when it snows so much on Monday night that school is closed for the rest of the week and Goob isn’t able to work? He stays in doors, bathed in the glow of his laptop, warmed by the flame of his candle, and entertained by the writings of Ayn Rand for 72 straight hours.

But, oh, to be 10 or 14 again! You couldn’t have kept me out of that white wonder! My body, however, is thankful that my idea of enjoyment now is reading while under a thick cover of blankets.

We all know 24 has been one of my favorite shows ever since I was first exposed to it during an 18-hour marathon viewing session of season 1, which was capped off by my buddy Chong’s dad coming downstairs at 5AM and screaming, “Alex, go to bed. You, go home!” Heck, I’m not even so much a 24 fan as I am a Jack Bauer fan. He’s like the Favre of killing bad guys.

Last season was a bit of a drag though, I must admit. The highlight of the season’s “threat” were a few cans of nerve gas that induced diarrhea or suffocation or something and the bad guys had enough to bomb 12 malls or 3 Super Wal Marts or something. Kinda lame… Though even that was better than the season before, where every few weeks the terrorists had a new weapon that never worked and by the end of the season, they hadn’t done much of anything besides manage to piss off Bauer. Great job, guys.

But with this season, after nine episodes, it looks like we’re back to the 24 of old. The baddies inflict some major damage early on in the season and are trying to do even more. (this time, with some handy, light-weight, compact suitcase nukes. I think this is a market LL Bean and Sharper Image totally overlooked.) It’s fun, fast paced, and the writers are even doing a better job at wrapping up some of the smaller, logic plot holes.

Well, except for the standard CTU ineptitude. If you took away Chloe and Jack from CTU, you’d essentially be left with the real life equivalent of FEMA. In fact, I foresee the following exchange to take place soon this season:

Scene: CTU has cornered the bad guys inside an apartment complex and are ready to pounce and save the day.

Jack: “Have you set up a perimeter?”

CTU Agent: “Yes sir, standard CTU perimeter.”

Jack: “DAMN IT! Bill, this is Jack! Fayed’s about to escape! Have Chloe start tapping into the California Highway Patrol cameras!”

Honestly, their solution is always to set up a perimeter. A porous, weak, almost mythical perimeter. For once, I’d like to see a perimeter actually stop a villain. You know, like perimeters are meant to.

If the title above didn’t interest you, then just go ahead and skip this post.

Wordpress is a wonderful blogging tool. Hell, when used correctly, it can even be a fantastic CMS. But for the love of all things Holy, when it decides to have a little fluke and stop working, it just stops. No error reports, no logs to go over, just the simple fact that WP decided it’d been working for long enough and that it was time to take a break.

And when you disable all your plugins to find out which one is the culprit, which is the solution 90% of the time, and that doesn’t work…well, let’s just say I’m not good at figuring out that other 10%.

HIF! went on the fritz today, loading every post I’ve ever made on the main page (fixed) and deleting every custom field (all the country flags) I’ve ever added (not fixed). The custom field mystery is the biggest stumbling block I’ve hit so far. The only code I touched all day yesterday was the quicktags.js file for Christ’s sake!

The irony of it all is that I don’t even care. HIF!’s current theme and design has already reached a breaking point that I’m gearing up to fix and the pure fact that a few flags aren’t showing up isn’t really that big of a deal. After hiring a few new writers, my next job is to seriously try and get a redesign made for the site.

But that still doesn’t erase the fact that I’ve got no Earthly idea why those damn flags just vanished.

Waking up with a hangover has got to be the most appropriate way to welcome the anniversary of ones birth. This past Wednesday morning was such a morning, as it took me a few minutes longer than it should have to remember that I was now 24. After showering and dressing in one of the free t-shirts given to us the previous night by our favorite Mexican restaurant while we consumed multiple Margaritas, I sat down to eat a healthy breakfast of birthday cookies and think about what 23 brought me.

I never used to worry about my age. It was all relative to me, seeing as how one day I’d hang out with kids three or four years older and the next I might stay inside all day long, playing with Legos and Micro Machines while watching cartoons. The thought of “getting old” wasn’t something that I feared nor anticipated - it was just something I accepted to expect, like the changing of the seasons or the Mariners sucking. People would always ask if I felt old on my birthday and I always thought it silly to answer yes, especially when the questioner was 40 years my senior. I was baffled as to how somebody could actually feel old when they were still in their teens or twenties.

And then my perception began to change for the worse. Somewhere along the way, I started caring about what others my age were doing and comparing myself to them. Well, not quite others my current age, but instead what those older than me had done when they were my age. It’s easy to look at somebody like Condi Rice, with her old-lady scowl that almost rivals Laura Bush for the “Scariest Face” award, and think of how you might like to be Secretary of State someday when you’re “older.” It’s easy to see that day far off in the distance, though, a brief sparkle on the horizon that you don’t give much thought too since it’s “so far away.” And then you read in TIME that she earned tenure at Stanford at age 26 and suddenly that sparkle turns into a mirage.

I remember the first time I read about Lincoln freeing the slaves. History is taught in such a black & white, cut & dry type way that most figures come off as not only perfect, but magical. As a child, your perception is simply that once there was slavery. Then Lincoln snapped his fingers and it was gone. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about his dream and then equal rights flowed forth. Washington woke up and was told he was our first President. Churchill said he’d never surrender and so Britain didn’t. We’re simply shown their end accomplishment and told how wonderful they are while rarely given a glimpse of the path they took to get there. We’re told that these are great men who did great things and that if we ever want to be mentioned in the same breath as them, then we too must do something great - eventually. For these accomplishments were done later in their lives, long after they had ceased to be little kids like you, so don’t worry. Now run along and enjoy recess.

Teachers leave out how at age 23, Lincoln was already serving in the Illinois Congress. Or that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was being led by a 26 year old Martin Luther King Jr. Or how the entire state and militia of Virginia was under the protection of a war hero named George Washington, at the ripe old age of 23.

I don’t know about you guys, but the biggest battle I’ve won to date has been getting Colton to put his socks in the dirty laundry every day. It was this realization that startled me into actually feeling old. How was I ever to accomplish anything as great as Lincoln or Dr. King later in life if I couldn’t even keep up with them in my early twenties?

I never expected anything in life to be handed to me for free. In fact, I hate handouts of any kind. I’ve always felt that if I can’t earn something, I don’t deserve it.

But I always expected to be given the opportunity for everything, which is an even worse illusion to have on life.

Nothing will be given to you for free, not even opportunities. I may never free an entire race from brutal oppression or boldly lead my nation through the jaws of defeat, but I certainly will never do those things if I just sit around and wait for the opportunity to come calling. As long as I never forgot that, never accepted what I had as being the best it could be, then I could keep myself from sliding into that group of people who seem to accept and embrace mediocrity. And it was with that epiphany that I finally started to feel young again.

I’m twenty fucking four years old. Do you not know how many opportunities lie before me, just waiting for me to seek them out and grasp onto for dear life? Lincoln had a law degree and a life expectancy of 35 years. I’ve got the Internet, modern medicine, and the ability to travel from New York to central Kazakhstan in 24 hours if I so please. The only thing we have in common is pure, blind luck.

So how could I possibly feel old?