WUMF: March 2013 Edition

I know. I know.  I missed another WUMF Deadline.

<insert Blues Brothers’ quote>

Truth is, I had the plague at my house since last week.  So, everything today revolves around that issue.

The Streak

The Pens finally lost, ending their streak at 15.   Now, if you are scratching your nugget, trying to figure out how that info equates to me being sick, realize that I was unable to eat anything for three days, and I did my own laundry last night to spare my wife the ick factor.   I’ll let your mind wander on that one for a bit.

Yeah, I went there.

OK, so the Pens lost.  The world has not come to a screeching halt, people.   We are still in it to win it.   The Pens losing signifies one thing.  They are human.  They have rough outings.  They have three people out with injuries.  Now, at least two radio stations summed up the reasons the Pens lost included the lack of Paul Martin.  That makes some of my friends twitch a little, but when you figure that LeTang is also one of the injured, you have to realize that without LeTang, all you have is Martin… and without Martin you have even less and that is saying a lot.

The Pens will be fine and this will give them some perspective towards that goal of hoisting and toasting Lord Stanley.  The pressure is now off of them for the rest of the season to be perfect.  They just need to be great as we know they can be.  They can play smart  hockey and not balls deep, blazing, hockey as if the fate of the world rests on a one timer from Sidney Crosby.  

The addition of Jarome Iginla was pretty sweet.  There is a level of gravitas this team now has with these editions.  I think the only Captains were missing are America and Morgan.   Shero probably has that on his list of things to do before the deadline.  Which is now at least 2 hours old.  But if anyone can make a trade beyond it, it’s Ray Shero.  I think he managed to trade a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball parts for some plutonium for his time machine.

The Buccos

Once again, it shouldn’t be hard to make the connection between them and what I was doing all weekend.   They lost their home opener.  Let’s start the 21^st season off right and not have any expectations.   Mr.  Shero, meet Mr. Nutting.  Mr. Nutting, meet Mr. Shero.  Now, the two of you stay locked in this room until Nutting understands how to put together a team, not a business model.

This Illness

So, yeah, I had it.  I don’t know what it was, but it was bad.  Sunday morning I woke up a little fuzzy.  By the middle of the day, I made the decision to not eat anything.  I wasn’t vomiting, but I was in the bathroom every 20 minutes.  At its worst, my fever was 101.3.  I managed to drink some water and eat Italian Ices.    That sucked huge time because Easter dinner is one of my favorite holiday meals next to New Year’s.   We have ham, kielbasa, sirecz (Hunky Easter Cheese), corn casserole, and sweet potato casserole. 

I called off Monday and finally had some toast in the afternoon.  That was the turning point, I thought.   I was fine, with no incidences all day.  Even went out to dinner with my family and had a steak sandwich and fries.

That was my biggest mistake.  I was up at 4AM, then at 4:30.  Then at 4:55 and 5:55AM.   I opted to work from home and after a magnificent feast of toast, water, and another year old Italian Ice, I was fine again.   For dinner, I took it easy, having some chicken noodle soup, pineapple, watermelon, and Jello.  

Today, I’m back to full strength.  And the only silver lining was that I lost 6 lbs. during the week.  That brings my total from December 20^th to today to 34 lbs. lost.  I haven’t done any exercise yet.  LOL.  I know it’s coming, though.

YouTube

I’ve been posting videos, weekly, to TheAngryCast and viewership is anemic.  I admit, I was hoping there would be a jump after I expanded to SimCity Playthroughs and The Design It series.   But, it’s still only a month in and I need to refine my processes.   I will say that I had to make another expenditure.   I managed to chew through 560gb of hard drive space in a month, so I bought a 1 Tb drive off Amazon for $80.   Now, I can move all my raw footage to date to the drive and keep the laptop hard drive for stuff I’m currently working on.    I better hurry because Dead Island Riptide is coming.   The connection… walking dead is what I was this weekend.

Like a Boss

So, here I was stuck in my house eating toast and year old Italian Ices, drinking water and avoiding dairy and people all be mixing it up and getting arrested while standing in line for free cakes in Market Square.  And, from what I heard, police were called to stop fights in line. What the hell?

Seriously, some drunk guy stole a case of cakes from the Cake Boss giveaway while people from North Carolina drove up here and stood in line since 7AM to get one.

Again, people, I ATE TOAST AND DRANK WATER FOR THREE DAYS.   And when I didn’t, I paid for it dearly.

How friggin’ good are these cakes?  Oh yeah, they’re free. 

I don’t watch the show and quite frankly, I wouldn’t stand in line for a free pizza let alone a cake.  I’d rather stand in line and pay for something from The Oakmont Bakery or Moio’s.  

And how bad does that make Pittsburgh look?  We get all these awards for livable city and tech jobs and sports and we can’t handle free cake lines?  Portland is telling us to suck it.

WUMF: September 2012 Edition

OK... so, I've been distracted lately with stuff.   It's kept me from regularly posting, and I'm still late on my Labor Day travels post,  but the culmination of a few things have led to another thrilling edition of WUMF!


The Replacements
We all know that the replacement refs suck.  Fine.  But really, does the NFL care?  No.  You know why?  Because even bad publicity is good publicity.  Was it a bit petty that the league did not cave until the blown Green Bay/Seattle game??  Yes.  But the league generates a billion dollars. Even though the regular refs get like six figure incomes for working half the year and first class airfare, that's a still a huge disparity. 

Yet, it kind of backfires when the biggest names in team ownership see their games impacted by the botched calls.  The Krafts, who own the Patriots, and the City of Green Bay, which pretty much own the Packers both had games with controversial end game calls, resulting in losses for them.  That might be why the talks finally resumed and came to a conclusion.  So, now, we can get back to bashing the regular refs for blowing calls.  At least we get to see the Hochuli pythons signaling touchdown or holding.  Flex them you douche.  Flex them all the way to the bank.

SPPPPOOOOOON!
If you know what that's from you'll know what the hell I'm talking about. On Sunday, my wife was about to give our five year old a bath when she noticed what looked like a blackhead on her back.  Turned out to be a tick.  I looked at it for a second and just said, "Eff it!"  I pulled it out.   I managed to get it all out, intact.  It sat on my finger nail looking at me, wiggling.  So, I flushed it.

In hindsight, I should have saved it.   We took her to the pediatrician on Monday and they actually wanted to hire me to do tick removals.  Seems to be OK.  They gave her an antibiotic to treat a sinus infection and after three days, the bite is hardly noticeable.   No, "Bullseyse", as it were.   We'll keep an eye on her, though.

Now, we have some woods around our house, but we don't go near them.  In fact, on Sunday, we were only outside to go to the store, and then she was outside with m for about twenty minutes while I grilled steaks.  She played on her swing.  She didn't go anywhere near brush.  So, I don't know if she got it then, or if those damn strays passed it along.  That situation is getting ridiculous.

Slenderman
The other reason I haven't been posting is that I got sucked into watching these videos.  For those of you who do not know.  Slenderman was part of a competition on the Something Awful forums.  The task was to doctor up some photos to make it look like some scary phenomena.   The result was this thing that looked like a cross between the Gentlemen from Buffy, and a sperm.  Go look him up.

Anyway, it turned into an ARG, which is an alternate reality game where a group of people started posting videos like they were found footage.   Under the guise of making a "Student Film" called MarbleHornets, a friend is given a bunch of tapes from the production and is told to "burn them".  Of course, you can't do that, so the person starts watching them and posting them as entries online.  What happens is that you see strange things like video and audio distortion, shapes, SLENDERMAN!

You get sucked in, even though you know the whole thing is fake, just because they capitalized on the thing that made Blair Witch so popular 12 years ago. There is no explanation for why it's happening and that's part of the fun.  You hardly see the monster.  Of course, when you do, it's so badly constructed, but still, it creeps you out a bit.   After three years and 60 some entries, it's gotten a bit ridiculous, but damnit if I won't watch every single one of them.  There's even free video games online surrounding the hilarity.

Hitchcock was really good in using fetishistic scopophilia in films like Rear Window and Psycho.  That's when you are entertained by watching others' as in the case of Norman Bates looking at Marion Crane through the peep holes or L.B. Jeffries looks at his neighbors across the courtyard.   But what really ratchets up the excitement or terror is when you are simply observers, unable to control what's happening.  You simply sit and watch something.  In the case of the MarbleHornets videos, you are given a POV (Point of View) experience and the person filming takes you along on for the ride, passive and unable to control what is happening in the frame.

YouTube Ad Fail… or Win

Let’s face it. YouTube ads suck.  I spent last year catching up on Yogscast episodes of Minecraft only to have to suffer through that stupid Xfinity… sorry Comcrap song, “Fun for you…Fun for me…” I was reaching for a gun by about episode 15.

ARRGGHH! YOUTUBE ADS SUCK. THEY SUCK. THEY REALLY SUCK! They suck almost as much as Zynga ads during games. Honestly, I have five seconds to harvest these crops before they die and the effers put up a pop up ad telling me to spend real money to get fake money. WTFBBQSTD!!!


Now, I am glad that the newer ads have a five second skip feature, but still, Who cares about the 5AM warrior, or whatever it is?

But are the ads targeted?  Is the video content I'm about to watch paired with an ad that speaks directly to the subject matter? 

If so, count this as a fail... or win, depending on how you feel.
I watched the trailer for The Hunger Games and the ad before the trailer was for McDonald’s.
I watched a stupid video depicting how bad Siri fails at understanding questions on the iPhone 4S and the commercial before it was for Android. 

The iPhone 4S thing wasn't even a good video.  I was expecting to find some humorous instances where Siri didn't work as expected.  What I got was a couple of haters, with bad accents, that Siri couldn't understand when they pronounced certain words.  Hell, I couldn't understand them.

Happy Birthday A. Wilford Brimley

Today is Wilford Brimley’s 77th Birthday.
The good folks at Liberty Medical hopefully sent him a box. Inside the box was enough dia-beet-us medication to help the 77 year old make it through his birthday cake.

And now, a message from the birthday boy himself.

Happy birthday Wilford. Go eat your cake, because it’s the right thing to do and a tasty way to do it. Maybe, if you're lucky, there's a pool somewhere with alien pods in it that can cure your dia-beet-us.  Until then, stick with the box.

Dork Star

I know I’m a dork. OK. Let there be no preconceived notions that I think I’m the coolest thing since locker answering machines. Remember those? I actually used that little gem of an invention as a pivotal piece of a plot twist in a story I wrote in Junior High. Further proof of my dorktitude. But still, I come here bringing nothing to the table in terms of coolness. So, it goes that there is still damning evidence of my days of dorkdom somewhere in my house. My wife will say it’s very easy to find by just looking at me and some of the shirts I wear, self made mind you. And as I write this, I can see the shaking of her head and can hear the voice coming from a place of both two parts pity and one part love proclaiming, “You are such a dork.” The evidence, at least one that we can call Exhibit A, is a video tape. A VHS-C tape smaller than an iPhone but thicker than a digital camera exists with me acting like the biggest nerd this side of Adams College.

It was 1993 and I was a freshman at Coastal Carolina University. It was my one and only semester at Myrtle Beach University and I was a bit homesick. Well, that’s what I told myself, anyway. I didn’t know a lot of people there and those I did know had way better things to do than to entertain the likes of me 24/7. Needless to say, I spent a lot of nights bored out of my skull. This was a full decade before Facebook and the best distraction I could hope for was a few hours of SimCity Classic. I didn’t even have email or the Internet to waste time on in those days. What I did have was a girlfriend 600 miles away and no cell phone or long distance. Sometimes, I had to decide on clean laundry or a phone call when it came to quarters.

I also had a video camera and wanted to do something both innovative and sentimental for her. A friend of my brother’s had asked me to film him and my brother rocking out to White Snake. Both his and my brother’s girlfriend were sisters so that’s where the connection lie. Oh, it was "Deeper the Love", in case you were wondering. A few of you might be thinking it was "Here I Go Again", but that would be silly, right?  Ok, it was all silly because it was lip synched in the end.  Anyways. I took the master video and mixed it with the song, matching up a specific movement in the video with the tape that was playing in the background so that I could match it in the editing. That’s where my idea came from, except I took it to a whole new level of dorkiness. I wasn’t going to just film myself singing a song. I was going to film myself singing three parts of a song and then mix them all together. My choice of song? "All For Love" by Bryan Adams, Sting, and Rod Stewart. Oh, don’t roll your eyes at me. It was cool… wasn’t it? The Three Musketeers had just come out and I snapped up the soundtrack and hatched a plan. I would film all three vocals in different locations, run them all through my editing box that I had with music synced up to the action and then just flip between each video, recording my final masterpiece. It could not fail!

Oh yes, it could.

I don’t know which was more sad, the fact that I actually did this or that I was able to get someone to film it for me. Probably both. The poor girl. She was such a trooper and didn’t once tell me I was nuts, though I’m sure she thought it. I mean there I was on a cool November Sunday wandering around campus with a boom box and a video camera. At the back of CCU’s campus was the Wall Building. It was fairly new and they were still doing construction on it. What was finished was this sweet bridge from the main part of campus over to the Wall Building. It had benches and pillars and lights and the back of Wall was a pretty nice backdrop.

We set up and hoped that people wouldn’t see us. Somewhere, in the back of my head, I knew how dorky this was. I think I blew like ten takes and a good two hours of this poor girl’s time. A jogger even ruined one of my takes and he was probably like, [heavy breathing] "dork" [heavy breathing].  After all was said and done, I had one third of the puzzle, my Citizen Kane. LOL. All I had to do was record Sting and Rod Stewart’s part.

When I transferred home for the Spring semester I found myself with a few options for filming but limited on crew. I highly doubted that I would have found anyone else willing to indulge my dorkiness. I headed down to the river via an old rail line that had been renovated into part of the bike trail. It had some great landscaping and was rather quiet in the Winter months. At one end of the trail was a bridge. I’ve heard it called West Jaw Bridge, West Draw Bridge, West Yaw Bridge and a ton of other names, but it’s a trestle bridge that kids in my neighborhood used to jump off of into the river for fun. I planned on using all of that area to do the second part in and then for Sting, I was going to use the castle turret at East Park for the final part.

Unfortunately, I got bored or ended up never having enough time or mental capacity to pull off the entire feat. Considering that the first third was filmed on the move and the second two thirds would be a stationary camera position made me feel like it wasn’t worth it since it would never look the way it should. And yes, once again, as I type that I realize how much of a dork I am for wanting scrap such a silly project because it just wouldn’t look right. In all seriousness, had this thing ever seen the light of day it would have been ridiculous. I would have probably made Uwe Boll look like Martin Scorsese.

Sometimes I’m glad that further proof of my ridiculous youth are kept hidden but it’s goofiness like this that makes me feel compelled to share. Yes, we can all grow and learn from this. Parents, don’t let your kids try and impress the ones they love with a boombox or a video camera. It will all end in tears, I just know it.

Now, where is my Kenny G CD?