:: Journal : Book Reviews : ARSC Newsletters : Links :: March 2nd, 2004 - This took me four hours... Comments [57] So, I got a haircut like a week ago. I also got my ear cut. This is the second time that's happened, but I'm not complaining. It's quite invigorating! Anywho, the woman who cuts my hair is a friend of my mom. She's been cutting my hair for like twelve years or more, and she's real nice! So I couldn't let her find out! She was lingering out in the hallway outside of my room for one reason or another, while her little grandson who looks like Jimmy from The Wizard (The Wizard himself! Callllifornia. Callllifornia. Yeah... Lucas. He's probably in a musty-funk prison getting powerfisted with a powerglove under a double-glazed fertile steel cattlebunk as we speak, giddy-ass pretty boy. It's so bad). There I sat, in my room, blood seeping out of my ear, being soaked up into a pretty pink tissue like SpongeBob TamponSlaughter while I killed many a foe with an AK-47 in CounterStrike, unable to mosey on into the bathroom to attend to this dreadful situation with a first aid padded hair-removal strip colored the skin tone of a tanned suburbanite from San Diego. While listening to Amr Diab! Arab music makes my hand steadier and my determination more tangible when an AK-47 is at play. And be sure, I did take advantage of this fortunate turn of events to add a whole new dimension of realism to everyone's favorite pre-millennium murder simulator. Any time I happened to have my head grazed off, symbolized by a little 'headshot' icon in the upper right corner, communicating to me that I had just received a fatal blow to the cranium, I made sure to caress and molest my mangled crimson curl of audio cartilage and scream 'HOLY SHIT! I'VE BEEN FUCKING SHOT!!!' at the top of my soft-spoken lungs at the sight of what an invisible digital aimbot bullet can do when it's in cahoots with my beloved barber. You'd think I woulda slept good that night, as I lay peacefully bleeding to death on my stanky-ass fluff tablet (dirty pillow), and most importantly, lacking the afro that had been building up over the course of a month and a half. However, your assumptions, as well as mine, would have been incorrect, because I couldn't sleep worth shit! Possibly because of these sinus pills I'm still taking, which the doctor said feel like the equivalent of a few cups of coffee. That and I had woken up at 2pm that day, which, in effect, is like kicking a $40 soccer ball onto the roof of your former middle school. It's so valuable, and there's no doubt that you want it. But you won't get it for nothing short of banging a sixty year old janitor with nine toes in the freshly carpeted and factory fresh scented band room. So, as my last resort in such dire situations, I opened my bedroom window as wide as it would go... it was something like -10°F outside. As uncomfortable as that should be, it puts me to sleep like a pill. Only problem was, as I brought my arm down from twirling the little salvation nob (we're still talking about my window here), I cut my elbow on my computer. If you don't understand how that can happen, look no further than here. There I lay, in the subarctic cavern of muffindom, head resting on a cooling soiled cotton rectangle, sprawled out over my curiously plum purple bedsheet, tweaked out on sinus medication, wrapped up in my 'enchanted forest under the moonlight' green comforter designed to cover the face of one of Jupiter's larger moons, dying out of my ear and elbow, and still wondering how and why The Wizard was at my house. And why he was watching The Rescuers Down Under. I happened to notice that the wall behind my pillow looked like someone had taken a handful of steel wool to it back and forth for the better part of a decade. Haircuts are absolutely essential when you have hair like mine. I decided to wear my tie dye tshirt to school the following morning. I had been trepid about wearing this shirt to school in the past, but I decided today was the day to break new ground. Or to outshine the sun, as this is certainly no ordinary tie dye tshirt. It was purchased on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. A place overrun by the Irish, where this lonely tshirt pulled me in like a 500-watt XL controlled substance of apparel. I knew to wear this shirt was to be begging for attention, but I felt up to the task, already beginning to catch predawn sleep deprivation hallucinations out of the corners of puffy red eyes dreary with the heavy depressions of another Wednesday. As I was riding the shuttle bus up from the campus parking lot, I happened to catch a small car winking at me. Certainly, this was a bad omen. Sitting there on that bus, I got thinking about this commercial I'd been seeing every morning between ten-minute segments of brain cancer, the Today show. B.B. King is sitting there playing a guitar, playing the blues, on the verge of pitching some type of over-the-counter medication that for the life of me I can't remember (you've failed, advertising!), and well, after the deed has been done, after he has thoroughly sold out, in the aftermath, he says something to the effect of 'You want to feel the pain here *puts hand over heart* not here *points to his hand*'. So B.B. King wants me to have chest pains? What the? What happened to television? I don't need this shit. As I was sitting in Statistics class, being distracted by the phosphorescent exploding star I had negligently enveloped my torso with, I discovered little circular splotches of blood that had been dabbed over my desk like candy dots for intellectual vampires. I had my doubts about whose blood this could be until I lifted up my arm and my page of notes stuck to my elbow in a thin tainted sheet of statiscal scab. Yes, it was indeed my blood. Apparently the cold, dry weather had caused my insomnia-induced computer wound to awaken and ride again. The rest of this class was spent balancing my attention between the acid trip on my chest and the little circles of massacre being spotted along the lower ledge of my desk like a rubber stamp. Rather than cleaning up the mess I made, I went to the computer lab and printed out a picture of Magic Johnson to put on that desk. The remainder of my day was spent attending to my usual academic affairs, contemplating a mad dash into the outer regions of space as I was overtaken by a robust suspicion that Athena had left the cottage, rifle in hand, for a healthy taste of supernova assassination. Being the only starburst in sight leaving a trail of blood in the desolate landscape of education and snow, I took myself to be public enemy number one. Now, here are some things that make me happy. Price Depreciation This is near and dear to me. For I am a cheap man who happens to enjoy the things in life that are worth living for: computers and video games. These two bastards can be expensive hobbies if you're a dolt with no patience! You can accept the powers of price depreciation into your life like the neon savior my cousin became when he taunted the powerlines with bolt cutters. It takes no faith, just a healthy load of retardation. The year is currently 2004 I believe, but I'm currently living in ~2002. I worked out a formula for this over the course of a week, here's what we have here: Let X equal the current year, Y equal moderate frugalness, and Z equal Salvation Army. Y = X - 2. Z = X - 10. Just like that. I want a new Xbox game, but seeing as how UltraMuffin is living in 2002, he has his sights set on TimeSplitters 2. He will visit ebay.com and be amazed to find people are already selling used copies of this brand new game, with prices going at around $8.99 plus $5 for shipping which, while still overcharging, is quite a reasonable deal in contrast to that bastard version of 2002 that was playing out in parallel to his universe in the year 2000, Standard Muffin Time. Twista I discovered Twista several years ago when I first heard the album Adrenaline Rush, which was actually released in 1997. The way I see it, if you don't rap fast, you are not a rapper. This goofy lookin bastard can rap like a tornad-- like a twister. I've been listening to that same album for several years and within the last few days have discovered that he has a new album out... after seven years! I think I was the only one left listening to his old album! This is great! I caught his music video for 'Slow Jamz' on MTV (somehow), and not only is this guy fast as Kenyan laser beam, he's the friendliest looking rapper I do believe I have ever seen. I wonder if he looks like that intentionally. He looks like the cool kinda black guy that would talk to me in high school Spanish class even though I dressed in all black, wore Nine Inch Nails tshirts and stared at the floor like the movie Con Air was playing in the carpet. Cheers Twista, you screwy looking, grinning ball of talent! The Sun Okay, we've had our differences, I'll admit, but I can never hold a grudge for long. Even though we didn't talk to each other for several days after I attempted to outshine him with my tie dye tshirt, we are best buds again. I will also admit that in the summer time when I get to see him 24 goddamn hours a day, I feel like bombing him with something that might sting. Possibly those large blocks of ice that cost a dollar and come in a bag advertising where that particular block of ice was manufactured or those cool crayon looking popsickles called Scribblers that are made up of two flavors/colors of popsickle taking on the form of a crayon's wax and round paper cover and have stupid jokes on the stick like 'Why aren't elephants small, white, and round? Because then they'd be an aspirin!' What? Shut up... Shut up. For Christ's sake is someone getting paid for that? Morgan Webb This is that girl you've seen on X-Play, if you have TechTV. I heard she used to be on The Screen Savers and knows a lot about Linux, which makes me want to team up with her in my computer science classes above all else. She changes hair color quite often, even if I can't tell the difference between when she has red hair and when she has black hair, or when my teachers write comments on my tests in red pen and I think I wrote the comment with my black pen while adopting a new form of handwriting and an attitude problem. She has her own unique thing going on, which I can dig, even if it means she looks like Skeletor an unusual amount of the time. Between Morgan and Sarah, I think TechTV must have a tendency to hire females who have 'Interestingly shaped skull' listed on their resume. But hey, it works! Especially when you've got legs like that! She seems genuinely happy all the time. So either she's a very upbeat person or a really good faker. Either way is fine with me. She's 5'7", she loves the Gameboy Advance, and a buncha like-minded nerds voted for her to appear in Playboy, but no word as of yet whether she will do it or not. The Restrooms In UAF's Gruening Building This picture to the left is not an actual picture of the restrooms in question, but it might as well be. I'd take a picture of them myself if that didn't look extremely weird walking into a restroom with a camera. There's a bathroom like this on every floor of the six story building, and they all look like complete shit. It's like walking into a tasty looking cream-filled chocolate, but the cream is piss... and the chocolate is shit anyway, so you pretty much know what you're getting yourself into. The walls are discolored from the wear and tear of time. And the piss stains. And the shit stains. So why do these atrocities make me happy? It's simple. When I'm pissing I like to feel as though I'm supposed to be pissing where I'm pissing, and I've never been in a bathroom more welcoming than these. I feel like I'd be doing everyone a favor if I pissed all over the wall instead of in the urinal. Everything'd be splattered, and it would smell like fresh piss, but at least it would clean the pieces of shit off the wall. Top Ramen I shouldn't even have to explain this one. Top Ramen is great, everyone knows that. You can pretend it's nasty, and perhaps to some of you it is, but you know when you fuck up and hit rock bottom, Top Ramen will be there to break your fall. Top Ramen is life support. I mean, you can be completely and utterly broke, but if you just walk down a sidewalk for five minutes, you can find enough money to eat a king's serving of these wonderful noodles! Nissin foods, who makes Top Ramen, even gives hobos and future hobos alike the dignity of having like twenty flavors to choose from! Even if they're all just variations of one another, they all get their own cool package color. It's like collecting baseball cards seeing how many of these unique flavors we can get to poison our digestive systems. There's chicken, beef, shrimp, and pork, which are like the primary flavors. Then we get into the 'stretching this joke too far' territory with flavors like creamy chicken, spicy vegetable, and oriental. And also picante beef, in case you want to know what it's like to drink fire. Quantum Mechanics I didn't put this on here to sound like a genius or anything. I don't really know anything about quantum mechanics except for what I read about it in The Elegant Universe. But that's the beauty of it! It sounds like no one really understands what the hell is going on! Check out that picture! That's how the documentary based on The Elegant Universe portrays quantum mechanics. Well, that and there's a space-age elevator in the middle of it all for reasons beyond me. Quantum mechanics say(s) stuff like the path a particle of light travels to get to its destination is all possible paths, including shooting off to Alpha Centauri before hitting the wall a flashlight is pointed at. Also, by quantum mechanics, there is a tiny, tiny, miniscule chance that a person could walk through a wall. Excuse me? That would be like not getting onions in my bean burritos at Taco Bell when I ask. Impossible. The Tie Dye T-shirt I Just Ordered Look at this beast. This is self explanatory. I am going to look like a poisonous hippy Alaskan jungle spider. All eyes will be on me, waiting for me to strike. This is actually one of two tie dye tshirts I just ordered a few days ago from www.tiedyeusa.com for $8 each. The other one is a bit more standard, but looks chaotic as hell. These shirts are introvert inverters. Fuck me, that sounded weird. When I wore my other tie dye tshirt the other day, I got a lot of positive attention from it. At least I think it was positive, but I guess it doesn't matter what I think! If I'm going to look like a fool, I might as well look like a fool in a big, bright way! February 19th, 2004 - Unorthodox but therapeutic Comments [27] I sent this to the Ball Park hot dog company. Dear Ball Park, I tasted my very first Ball Park frank when I was just a young lad. You might think me ridiculous for saying so, but to me it was a life changing experience. Sitting here now in my middle age, in my cozy three bedroom home, with four lovely children and a 40" plasma television with which I bask in my middle-aged mediocrity, possessing only remnants of my resigned will to exist on an existential plane which cannot even remotely be classified as a playground of the human experience, but rather a plateau of mental decomposition. I weep as my beloved Friends count down to their final episode, along with the fine array of other emotional thirty-minute peacock visualizations. I can only hope that Ross will find it in his heart to grease up Ed's lanes in the twilight of syndication. Although retired, I am an aspiring biologist. A hobbyist with a cause. And as such, I would like to inquire as to the means by which your deliciously juicy franks are manufactured. The crisp autumn day at the Little League diamond, when I received my first ravishing hot dog injection through the oral cavity which was once a mouth, before the accident transformed it into an entity which I have often heard referred to as a lip starfish, whether it is within my right to eavesdrop on my uncle and his suspicious doctor behind unfurled dirty blankets pleated and stapled with the split ends of crystallized vampire bats, I asked my father how such a wonderful meat could find a place in our tame world of solitary animal flavors. He told me a long winded story starring characters birthed from several contrasting orders of the animal kingdom. Dr. Scholls was the pork of the pack, and coincidentally received his fair share of sexual intercourse. Also, a creature by the name of Fleisch, a grade C premium beef wad clumped up like a failed asterisk with depth, had a small part in this meat symphony, although his role lay between that of an insignificant character and a recurring cameo. The oddest part of it all, however, was that the main character, an almost mythical character rumored to be the conglomerated confetti of mechanically separated chicken rolled up in a tight, soothingly elegant intestinal wrapper had no name. No alias. Overwhelming consequences were to be discovered by any and all who chose to label this flexible chunk sack of the best minds of a generation. Two blades of grass, twins but not identical, saved up enough dew to purchase a customized laser pointer in an expensive shade of neon lime green. It was forged in a lab to paint the name 'Philip' in a sharp, tainted, and often distorted vector upon the closest extremity which could be interpreted as a forehead on the chicken potpourri's slick pink epidermis. The two blades of grass disappeared the next day, replaced by a plump volcanic rock sent from a previously unheard of island in the Pacific. On the rare occasion I am grasped by the grip of better judgement, I believe my father's story to be a work of fantasy. But like a shepherd herds his sheep I am now leading a herd of curiosity nuggets. They have been glowing particularly strong this evening. My question is this: I have cut open an innumerable number of hot dogs in the last decade and a half, attempting to reverse-engineer their barricaded secret of materialization. Speaking to you from a candid standpoint, I know that these precooked flavor tubes have not remained in their solid state perpetually. They lived in a liquid form at some point in their unfulfilled yet tranquil time quanta in the Milky Way. How do you put them back together? Try as I might to learn this by my own methods of brute force and intense scrutiny, the answer forever eludes me. I have given up. I admit defeat. You are indeed the masters of your domain, Ball Park. When I look down the latitudes and, on Saturday nights, longitudes of the fleshy texture, I see before my fragile eyes the gentle rapids of silk flowing through an animal by-product. I see the future; I see change. I see our one and only chance, as a race of intelligent beings, to gain the upper hand on God. To broadcast our power to the stars, showing this apathetic man in the sky that our integrity burns with a fire so intense, mankind would require a glazed hemoglobin solution spackled over its pupils, a fusion of honey and thick pulpy vital fluid sauteed in an air-tight titanium chamber absent of the direction I have, being a man of Earth, come to call 'vertical', to be able to taste the colors we were never designed to see. You are the cornerstone to this endeavor, Ball Park. It is now in your hands. I have a proposal for you. If you wish to direct yourselves down the path of responsibility, the course of duty for the future of our species, and divulge with me the treacherously evasive formula for gluing pieces of chicken back together into refreshing new takes on the protoplasm condition, I will take it upon myself to create the very first animal in the inevitable army to ensure our survival. We shall have no difficulty dwarfing the power of the lord, but soon the machines will strike. Their harsh metal will, no doubt, bring enormous amounts of pain to bones and ligaments, but you, of all people, know that hot dogs have no internal structure. They exist in heightened ambiguity. Little will the machines know that these invertebrates' intelligence spawns from the creamy pseudo-organic matter itself. A hot dog's makeup is the equivalent of the overachieving gray matter found within a high school calculus student. Racism held them back from scholarships like grimy steel shackles. Our race of soldiers will be intelligent beings formed of hot dog cells and an indeterminate amount of Nerf arrows, which I intend to purchase for roughly $3.00 a pound at the local thrift store. They will be called Nerfalos. We will have to iron out the details, but I estimate that by the third quarter of the year 2017, a single Nerfalo will be assigned to each socially crafted group of four children. This, I feel, will be more than sufficient when the moment of reckoning sweeps over the horizon. The unpleasantries associated with social conditioning may turn out to be our only sizable hurdle, as the Nerfalo blueprints I have drawn up in AutoCAD are conceptually sound and feasible at a fraction of my initial budget. Thank you Ball Park, and cheers. With you the future of mankind is ours to behold. Sincerely, Rupert Collins It said on their site that they should reply within two business days. Hopefully they won't be like the Axe deodorant company and ignore me! I must be heard! Oh yes, and yesterday I got am email from the fellow who owns this site over here with some praise! Thank you! I'll have to email you thanks in case you don't see this! But yes yes, I checked out his site and it's great! Very weird and very creative! So I plan on reading everything on that site over time, keep up the good work! It's amazing that people like us are able to find each other! His site will be going in my link section. This should really go in a new paragraph but I hate small paragraphs so... the cut on my hand I got from beating up a large chunk of snow with my new friend Jeremiah is slowly healing. Makes me feel proud how much shit we kicked out of that manifestation of weather. When we were stomping on it and kicking it out in the middle of the sidewalk some girl came running over thinking we were roughing up an actual person, but that snowball was at least twice as real as a couple people I know. I think I'm gonna change my Artificial Intelligence project to making a snowball learn how to feel pain, then it can hang out with the rest of us. I've been taking these horse tranquilizers to try and clear up my sinuses since I haven't been hearing up to par out of my right ear for like a month now, ever since I had a bad cold. Those pills weren't doing shit so I just got upgraded to pills of the 'behemoth' size, which inspired me to explore the field of medical diagrams. Refer to Figure 1.1. It's like swallowing a small galaxy every morning, and that's about what it takes to keep me going. February 9th, 2004 - I just don't know anymore... Comments [22] If I sat here thinking up the worst idea I could ever conceive, it would be starting an 'entry' (or as I like to call them, 'another mess') at 2:00am on a school night when I have to wake up at 7:00. But since I woke up at 2pm today and then got in an hour nap around 9pm the minute I decided to get going on my homework, and also since I survived on three separate occasions last week on exactly 3.5 hours of sleep (without a problem), maybe I'm finally thinking outside of the box and have figured out one of life's secrets. Oh wait, we've gone over this, it's no secret at all. It's coffee. Maybe it'd be a secret if you had to crawl through the Colombian rainforest, feed the magical herb of Insomnia to an albino snake with a tribal tattoo on its tail, craft a raft out of bat dung to hitch a ride to the reflection of the moon off your eyes in a manner which is twice as orthogonal as the classiest of right angles, all the while trying to keep from letting this cocaine addiction of yours doing you in before you meet up with Joe Pesci in Las Vegas over a martini on the rocks to reminisce about the lustrous omniscient coffee bean of the long lost yesterday-- Have you ever seen that movie Congo? Gorillas jumping into lava! They gotta make a ride out of that! Why am I talking about coffee and gorillas again. This has happened for the last two entries I believe. That can't be healthy at all. But no, to get this magical liquid of wakeness, you need only to take a trip to the local supermarket or grocery store and pay like six dollars. I was never quite sure why some grocery stores were called supermarkets, but then I noticed them selling deodorant and condoms and I thought "Well, it's not food, but it's super!" Now sell me my time back for sucking me into this depressingly sterile territory of teenage jobs and broken dreams by the gravitational force of gloom. You can command your workers to act as happy as humanly possible, I'll still feel like God is pushing his thumb down on this building of empty feelings and emotional voids to make us all feel the pressure of the world on our shoulders. I'm looking in your direction, Safeway. The hard part is actually drinking the coffee, but I have found if you just toss any self respect you have for yourself out the window, you can drink down a dark on dark cup of 4x grounds coffee (with some of the grounds floating around in the bottom of the damned cup like fools gold, but the real thing) like Gatorade, once it's cooled down enough or you have a couple ice cubes handy. Sometimes I'll eat the styrofoam cup just for the extra kick of my stomach screaming and my eyes bleeding that I have come to rely upon to feel any sensation at all in the wonderful world I like to call Operating Systems class. Now that I've mentioned it, we have these quizzes in Operating Systems which are almost daily. But the teacher said he grades on what he calls the 'binary grading system'. What this means is, if it looks like you tried to do the homework/quizzes, you get a 1. If you didn't do them, you get a 0. On these quizzes we can even write 'I don't know', and we'll get a 1. He was almost encouraging this sort of thing during the first week or two of the semester, but apparently something has changed. This fellow (who some would call 'the teacher') just rambles on and on using Iraq as an example for any mechanism an operating system employs. And somehow he keeps incorporating chicken entrails into his explanations, which is fine and good, I can support a teacher like that. But my ability to pay attention in class is already suffering, even without the in and out of madness that drives Operating Systems like a thrilling and often scary wooden (and old as shit) rollercoaster. He put a diagram up on the overhead projector that quite honestly looked like four eggs throwing arrows at each other, with a number associated with each arrow like they were ranked in some type of distorted egg olympics. Oh yes, speaking of eggs, I know how to make this 5x weirder than all hell in half a second... There you go. So anyway, he put this diagram up on the overhead projector, and we were to write down what is occurring at each of the four steps. Well, obviously I hadn't been paying attention, but I remembered him talking about 'forking' because it loosely sounds like 'fucking' when he's saying it, and you just can ignore that. So I took it to be a forking diagram. Lots of circular eggs forking with their numbered arrow appendages. Not that I understand the concept of forking particularly well, but I decided to take a stab at it. I wrote about how step one was one egg forking and then that egg's significant other started fooling around with his second cousin along the sensual and inviting arch curving along the shapely arrow number four like an oiled up garden hose playing the ukulele to a retired Irishman or something like that. I got my quiz back the next class with a gentle red NO in bold, imposing letters next to each of my four diagram observations, complete with turbulent red squirrely brackets encompassing all of my writing in four subdivisions, covering it all like a blanket of failure, shrouding the simplistic beauty of my courageous attempt. I think this walking corpse even marked my name wrong. God almighty, something's wrong in the land of fun, semaphores and wakeup waiting bits. I hadn't noticed this man carrying around salt before, but it was on that fateful day of class that I realized how much salt he could give. He bubbled out of the saltiest parts of the ocean, rode in on a wave and sprung from the loins of one of those salt rocks I think I heard about in 4th grade like the rotting white creature from a fabled and equally hateful digitized lagoon of 1920's computing to gouge a bowl out of my gut and pour in salt like it was the second coming of the sodium king. So anyway, I've been watching a lot of those 'Done Quick' videos lately. Everyone's seen that Super Mario Bros. 3 video, and I had seen Quake Done Quick demos a long time ago, but I had no idea there was like a whole community for this sort of thing. My friend found this site by way of an elaborate and intricate labyrinth decorated in creamy shades of pastel, I'm assuming, or perhaps a forum, that has a ton of videos of NES games 'done quick'. Better yet, the guy uses BitTorrent to host them. I'm proud when someone finds a legitimate use for BitTorrent, they are few and far between. We downloaded a video of the original Castlevania being beat in thirteen minutes and crowded around the laptop to watch in the middle of the university's pizza place. Boy did we look rad, especially when the manly Nintendo twinkling sounds of broken holy water echoed out through the surging crowd of atheletes and attractive women. We were on top of our game. Link! February 4th, 2004 - Flintstone Piñata Tornado Comments [27] Ahoy there! Today is a day of celebration. Another day of surviving on three and a half hours of sleep by coffee alone. Coffee and the punches I threw at my face to no end for making these horrible decisions the night before. But this was no ordinary "put your homework off til the last minute" undertaking, I was up all night programming. Programming was being done and all I could hear were the taunting cries of my statistics homework. "Muffin, I will teach you how to find the probability of dying alone." and "Muffin, with me you can determine whether that tennis-ball sized piñata growing out of your dickhole is detrimental to your health... and if it relates to dying alone, you poor son of a gun." and so on. Oh, and who can forget the coveted "Muffin, if you stroke page 67 you'll make me purr." Statistics is a swell class to have taught by an obscenely bubbley bearded hobbit type creation at 9:15 in the morning, especially when you're lined up in a row to bake in the unnecessarily hot and dare I say completely unwarranted oven the higher-ups would like to think of as an environment for learning. Treat me like a chicken strip and I'll learn like a chicken strip. Very poorly. And then at 10:17am, two minutes overcooked, two minutes passed pissed and I'm mere seconds away from shouting "What's the probability of a turtle meandering into this room with a grenade strapped to its shell? Well it'll be a lot higher if you don't wrap your shit up!" Well, that thought had never occurred to me until just now, but you can bet I'll be mentally turtle threatening this whacky number teaching forest creature from now on. But being the optimist that I am, I can find good in anything: I suppose it's impossible to sleep when planted on a 1/128th-acre plot of the Sahara desert enclosed within the runt of a three-story-building litter, meticulously crafted and engineered to recreate the smell of ass in its entirety, housing the university's nerd division in the middle of the most god-forsakenly cold sector of Alaska, and bombarded with numbers and mathematical symbols that spell out 'I bring pain and suffering!' in an assortment of cryptic angles, sharp curves and painfully penetrating points. I'd like to throw a sloth into an oven. For no reason. Maybe it'd finally decide to get its ass moving is all I'm saying. So, I happened to glance over at the front page of the Local section of the newspaper for the first time in my life while abusing my body with fruity pebbles and 2% udder fluid. When did they stop putting prizes in cereal? What the bloody hell. If the prize was a gold pebble I think it's safe to assume that it was absorbed into my sugar-tooth and is now a happy little prehistoric filling. I never saw Dino shitting on the floor in the Flintstones, why can't I have a dinosaur for a pet? Top article above the fold was about my Economics professor of two weeks who was arrested last semester for drug dealing. This was the third article I had seen in the paper having to do with this charged master of supply and demand, but I also happened to see the article below it and to the right. Something to the effect of "Man charged with bank robbery." After closer inspection, I realized it WAS the guy I knew from college who was arrested for bank robbery last summer! The guy who called me 'Satan' and on the rare occasion 'Lucifer' and also the guy who I talked to about diving into a wall as if it weren't made of solid matter and keeping a glow-stick and electrical-tape clad super raven in my freezer as a pet in an effort to shoot the shit while standing in the buy-back bookstore line. I bet he'll be wishing he could dive through walls when the infamous giant black flesh submarine is shooting down his course at full force. Two guys in jail who I met through college on the same front page; these are the college years I'll be telling my (weird) kids about someday, those little bastards. As you may recall from my last 'entry' (I'm talking like a full-fledged half-hipped blogger now! Time to cry myself to sleep.), I talked about how great this book Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III was. Well, I decided to email him to tell him how much I loved the book, and he emailed me back! Not only that, but this guy is truly cool as hell! I advise you (yes, you!) to head on over to his website to see what he's all about. Check this out: Meet your newest fan! Hey there! I want you to meet your newest fan... me! I bought a couple of your books (Satan Burger and Electric Jesus Corpse) about a month ago and just finished reading Satan Burger, and I'm not lying when I say that Satan Burger is my new favorite book! This became obvious to me when I realized ever since I started reading the book, I couldn't go a day without mentioning something I read in it to a friend or two. It was refreshing to read something so strange and different. I was starting to think that books couldn't surprise me anymore, but Satan Burger caught me off guard on damn-near every page... not only that, but had me laughing out loud on many occasions! Thank you for doing what you do! You're so good at it! Now then, I'm going to make it my personal mission to spread the word about you! You deserve to be world famous (I swear!). I'll start working on the Alaska area (Where I happen to live. It's like living in a Pandora's box of depression with pretty pictures of mountains and wildlife painted on the sides to attract visitors). I'll pass around Satan Burger til it deteriorates! I'll make a tiny hood ornament shaped like your head to put on my car and make it shout blessings about Mr. T when I honk my horn! I was probably lying about that last part, but you can rest assured, the thought crossed my mind when I finished your wonderful book! It must be tough pouring everything you have into your stories and just barely being heard, but I guess that's the life of an underground author. If all those people out there knew what they were missing, I'm sure it'd be a different story. Well, maybe saying "all those people out there" was a stretch. Frankly, if I saw a 75 year old man sitting on a bench reading Satan Burger... well, I just wouldn't know what to think. I'd give him a high-five though! So anyway, keep up the great work! I'm looking forward to reading everything else you've written and will write in the future! - UltraMuffin http://www.ultramuffin.com Re: Meet your newest fan! Hey, thanks for writing! It really makes my day every time I hear from a reader who really liked one of my books. It gets me excited enough to write for the next 30 hours straight. I usually need positive reinforcement quite a lot because my whole life I've been told my books are shite because they aren't like any other book out there. I always think, yeah, that's why I write them dumbass, these are the kinds of books I want to read but they don't exist anywhere else. But every once in a while I start to wonder if my books really are any good. I like them, but for the longest time I wondered if I was the only one. Luckily, this past year, I've been hearing from people several times a week from all over the world. And my books are actually selling. It's pretty insane to me. I was expecting to be completely unheard of my entire life. Anyway, if you could do whatever you're willing to do to spread the word that would really help out a lot. My books have zero promotion. The publishers put them in print and just hope somebody will buy them. I try promoting them but people usually ignore authors hawking their own books. So it's promoted probably 99% word-of-mouth. People like you telling your friends to get my books and asking them to tell their friends and so on. So any help you're willing to do would make me extremely happy and grateful and we'll hang out if we ever happen to be in the same city at the same time. If you haven't noticed, I'm extremely approachable. I plan to stay that way. Hope you get some of my other books too. The three shorter novels that are out: Razor Wire Pubic Hair, Teeth and Tongue Landscape, and The Steel Breakfast Era, are my more recent work. I have at least 4 books coming out every year for the next few years so keep your eye out. I'm at work right now on a semi-sequel to Satan Burger, called Punk Land, about the place where Mort and Nan ended up (though they are supporting characters just as they were in Satan Burger). It should be out later in the year. Keep your eye out for it. thanks again and take care, --Carlton Mellick III author of the surreal and bizarre www.avantpunk.com As I was driving home from school down the highway today, as I have been every school day for the last two and a half years, a car that had just come up from the onramp decided he or she (I didn't get a close enough look to see if the car had a penis) wanted to change lanes while apparently pretending I was not of the existence persuasion, meaning the left blinker started flickering and the next thing I know, this car is getting rather close to me, but I just kept on trucking (or carring, or perhaps pimpmobiling in my 11,000 pound, rust-spotted, mobile piece of white steal). Several seconds after I passed this car, I took a gander at my rearview mirror and what I see is not a car. I see a friggin' Subaru tornado grinding, sliding and barreling down the shoulder of the road not taken (that being the road of Holy Shit). I mean, it was like five seconds before I even looked in the mirror and this car was still flying all over the place. Well, I say 'still' assuming he/she jerked his/her wheel the opposite direction when he/screwit noticed he was about to caress my car's silky pale thighs. I guess there's a possibility an ice bee buzzed through his unopened window and promised him fame and fortune over a glass of herbal tea. You dastardly little one. Oh and here's an Alizee video clip that's basically just the best parts of the other video I posted, but with much better angles, courtesy of Thunder-Chunk. January 24th, 2004 - Tonsil Clot Hurricane Comments [34] It's been a while, and this is turning out to be one of those boring Saturdays I've come to know like a close brother, so I crawled deep into my mind for something to do and remembered I have a website. First and foremost, I want to tell you all about a gem called Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III. As you may recall, this book was listed with the batch of books I talked about in my last entry. I just finished it today, and it's the best thing since sliced bread and Cadbury Creme Eggs. Basically, if you enjoy my website, buy this book immediately, that's all you need to know. If you think I'm weird, reserve judgement until you've read Satan Burger. It oozes weirdness so thick and shiny you'll choke on it eight times over before it reaches the anus; but it smells so good, you can't stop licking it. If you're not a reader, if you hate books, then buy this book. It will set you straight and show you what books CAN be. The whole time I was reading the book it felt like I was watching a cartoon shortly after huffing mercury through a Gravitron bolt (you know the Gravitron, that UFO looking ride at the fair that makes any adult who rides it feel like their chest is caving in, while the laughing little pukes prod their eyes in 4° increments, elongating the circumference of the perimeter with their relativity rings). It amazes me how someone so creative, inventive, bizarre and entertaining can go unknown... then it amazed me that I was amazed, because I then realized that the book industry works a lot like any other entertainment industry in America. Mainstream sells, anything that could be considered interesting doesn't stand a fighting chance in the mass market. So anyway, yes, buy this book. I had my tonsils removed on December 23rd. That was interesting. The night before surgery, I had to stop eating at midnight, and could only drink one cup of water between midnight and 5am... and then no water at all. It shouldn't have come as any sort of surprise that when the clock struck 12:01am, I was consumed with the urge to run into a zoo with a large katana and start slicing pieces of meat off of animals to wash down with a waterfall of bacon grease and well... I was gonna say gasoline, but that wouldn't really make sens-- wash it down with fucking gasoline! Mmmmmmm! But no, I just laid in bed watching the movie Dune (the one from the '80s) wondering how this was all gonna go down. I got an hour of sleep. I figured there'd be no reason to get much sleep since, hopefully, I'd be sleeping all day after the surgery. The morning of surgery, I went over there at some ridiculously early time, they stuck me in a room, put an IV in my arm (which btw, is not very pleasant, even for someone who's not bothered by needles), and I got to sit there in that room with my mom for two and a half hours because surgery was running late. Oh yes, and the fellow who put the IV in my arm was wearing fake (or maybe I just assumed they were fake) reindeer antlers with tiny ornaments hanging off of them. This was not cute in the slightest when the little fuzzy antlers started catching the IV tube attached to my arm and yanking on it. Next time Christmas rolls around, if you see a reindeer with a steady red 98.6° digital display on his nose, you'll know that was the nurse who got a thermometer shoved so far up his ass it made him fly when he decided to give Muffin the gift of fucking around with his IV tube! The surgery went well and/or good, strictly depending on what type of grammar you find acceptable. The doctor gave me a picture of my tonsils (which I have yet to scan!), one of which looked sorta like a prune. This must have been the little hellraiser tonsil that was catching shit in my throat and getting infected. The nurses taking care of me fed me a steady diet of rootbeer popsickles. I expressed my joy for this particular flavor of popsickle and the nurses were thrilled, as no one else seemed to want them. Just minutes after surgery and I was already multi-tasking as a rootbeer popsickle disposal utility. I was bored, so my dad offered to run home and pick up the book I was reading (which happened to be Satan Burger, huzzah!). This sounded like a swell idea on paper, but I decided against it, because I wasn't sure the cover of this book would be appropriate for a hospital setting. Well, that's my excuse anyway... the real reason was because the nurses taking care of me were cute and nice to me and I wasn't sure how sitting there reading a book with a giant ass over a plate on the cover would affect the situation. I've heard that there's only one sure way to shoot Cloud 9 out of the sky, and that's with a picture of an ass over a dinner plate. Healing wasn't very fun. Every time the pain killers wore off, it felt rather uncomfortable, and all I could think about was eating the Heart Attack Pan at Denny's. I had to settle with chicken broth, yogurt, and then later, macaroni and cheese for about two weeks. 72 hours after surgery, I was already beginning to crave the flesh of gorillas drowned in glitter-twisted embalming fluid slapped between a taco and an Oreo cookie. For some reason, about a week after surgery, something was happening with my throat where any time I ate or drank something cold, it felt like my throat was burning and raw. It felt even worse than it sounds, in fact. This went on for several days and then out of the blue, while I was in the bathroom, blood started gushing out of my throat. I didn't notice at first, but my mouth filled up rather quickly and when I swallowed, something didn't taste right at all! My mouth filled up very quickly again and I spit into the sink... and what came splashing out looked like tomato sauce or red paint, a mouthful of liquid red, thick and textured, completely void of saliva, and I started freakin out. I was kind of in shock and my parents were at the video store, so I assessed the situation and looked at myself in the mirror, astonished that I looked like an action hero during the final showdown fight in a movie, blood dripping off my lower lip and all. And then I went to the kitchen and sat down, waiting for my parents to be back. They took me to the emergency room. I got to swallow a good two or three more mouthfuls of blood before I got there, and this became a game to see how much blood I could keep down without puking, as the thought of vomiting had a giant 'Worst Case Scenario' plastered over it in my mind in violent red letters. My throat stopped bleeding by the time we arrived, but the hospital people wanted to make sure I didn't start bleeding again, so they blasted this stuff called 'Hurricane' in my mouth that tasted like thermonuclear banana and made my eyes water the volume of the North Pacific. They said this was to numb my throat so they could cauterize it, but I think one of them fellers mixed a banana with plutonium into an aerosol can in the back room and I was their outlet for shits and giggles. This did not upset me. For I had the sacred thoughts of drowned gorrilla on my mind and the banana that drowned him got what was coming, a mouthful of blood clots. So yes, they sucked blood clots out of my mouth and throat with a tube and cauterized some spots back there. They had me sit there for 30min to make sure I didn't start bleeding again in that time, and then I was off! Back home! The pains I was having before my throat started bleeding were now gone. It was like the feeling of relief puking gives you after an entire night of feeling sick to your stomach. What's the lesson here? If you start having pains in your throat, do everything in your power to make your throat start gushing blood. Trust UltraMuffin, he loves you. And here's a picture of my block in ice fog at -44°F December 20th, 2003 - The proof is in the pudding... and excrement Comments [34] So here I am. This was inevitable. Today, or rather yesterday if you consider 2:30am the next day, was my second day of Christmas break, and it's already too much. After all that work in school you'd think I could just sit down and enjoy not having to do a thing for a month, but it doesn't quite work that way. My life is all about anticipation. When what I'm looking forward to actually comes, I can only think of what comes next. Well, my tonsils come next. I'm getting my tonsils removed in four or five days, but it's all good. Hopefully I'll get some mega pain killers out of the deal, I'll make sure to come here and post my thoughts if that's the case... that should be interesting. I was lying by the way, I'll probably be sleeping and listening to The Wonder Years like I did when I got my wisdom teeth removed. When I got my wisdom teeth removed, they gave them to me in a little plastic bag... hopefully this will also be the case with my tonsils. I'll even bring an empty, cleaned out jelly jar if that's what it takes. I heard when you capture a tonsil it will grant you two wishes if it's feeling sad enough, and I'll make that piece of throat shit watch Braveheart several times. Notice, it will only grant you two wishes, these aren't genies for Pete's sake, everyone's born with one... Well, most people at least. They can't be too exotic or people'd be slicing each other's throats and selling them on the black market. Or a flea market I suppose, assuming people that still play The Adventures of Lolo have a wad of money and a few dreams in their pocket. I'll give you something to wish for: wish not to be like me. I finished up my finals, which is really nothing to talk about. Here's a little mini muffin though: after I finished my Economics final, when I went to put my pencil (note: the old-fashioned kind that need to be sharpened, how else can we keep the machines at bay?) back into my back sack pack back knack the freshly sharpened point of the other pencil went straight up my flesh underneath my fingernail. Wooo. Why is something like this possible? If I were born without finger/thumbnails and just had skin over that area, such pain wouldn't be easily accessible. And hell, my teeth wouldn't be rotting as fast because I wouldn't be able to open a can of Coke. What the hell. I'd like to see a biker or a boxer or something get stabbed underneath the fingernail... this is the sorta thing where being a man doesn't matter anymore. When you get stabbed under your fingernail, you aren't a man anymore. Your eyes water. You swear to yourself that watching a video of yourself sneaking up behind yourself with a machete and slicing out your spine all in the name of schizophrenic envy would calm your nerves. Oh, and you'd better believe it's recorded in shit-on-shit SLP mode overtop two episodes of Rainbow Brite and Three Men and a Baby on a tape originally purchased in 1985. This pain is enough to cause a man to have a period... for they have experienced something on par with the pain of birth. Having a fingernail ripped out must be like giving birth to a rusty Buick that's been sitting out in the sun in Hawaii while the family frolics on the beach trying to pretend they like swimming around in the sub-arctic sea that tastes like what would happen if an abominable snowman could shit salt. And so, after this assault on my thumb was complete, I noticed a splotch of something there. Being the color-deficient son of a mutant that I am, I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out if this splotch was graphite or blood. I guess it didn't really matter. Who knows, maybe I bleed graphite. Hot damn, I could get hired in a golf club factory... they'd stamp a big ® on my head for 'retard' so I could go running around the factory floor pretending I was a human golf club while I fetched some middle-aged men the coffee they would need to stay up and watch The West Wing when they got home. And here now is a list of the search phrases that brought people to my website last month: 0klahoma.com steve buscemi food pawn download axe kilo spray review yoga postures eightball daily bullshit powerpoint presentations on neutering animals laufzeitfehler strokes axe deodorant company weird flash animations chemicals used in plugin air fresheners shots in the ass coat-hanger abortion hepatitis orangutan fucking photograph at forty i wanna be the bald guy with a pony-tail and    a harley trying to pick up high school girls. burning sensation in my tongue physical checkup doctor pee cup //0klahoma.com 8040/11/cgi/pushit. why birth control pills should be provided by all scholls andres serrano fatal meningitis pregnancy toothbrushes powerpoint what is a spot on my gums? snoopy zambonie perfume pushit chart of yoga positions disney toon town game cracks flash game old man catches girl choose adventure atomic microwave ultramuffin zambonie vending carts axe spray advertisements 0klahoma.com cyst on my tongue neutering razor burn flash game 1st grade kindergarten kid cnn zambonie snoopy dr scholls crushing first molars blister yoga postures chart 15 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 26.7 % 3.5 % 3.5 % 3.5 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % 1.7 % You realize what this means of course? I must be reaching my target audience! I recently bought twelve books from Amazon.com. You see, what I've been doing over the last several months is surfing around Amazon.com for no apparent reason just looking for stuff I might want, and adding it to my 'wish list'. Even though I still have three books to read from my last shipment (of nine), I felt like having some variety to choose from and went ahead and ordered (some of) the stuff in my wish list. Here's what I got: Take note that all these books are laying on a fruity purple bedsheet. I don't give a crap. It's soft and blue to me. ... Hey, fuck you! Here's what we have here: Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn The Holy Bible: Contemporary English Version by The God Gang Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny Foundation by Isaac Asimov The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling Saved by the Light by Dannion Brinkley Valis by Philip K. Dick Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy Electric Jesus Corpse by Carlton Mellick III Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III The Mezzanine by by Nicholson Baker There we go! In my opinion, you get the most entertainment for your buck with books... and I'm cheap, so I think learning to like reading was some form of adaptation. And don't you laugh at my choices! You might be wondering about the Holy Bible, but I'm running out of blasphemous stuff to say, I will be reading the bible as research for the next round. You will notice that there's three books with the word hacker/hacking in them. Reading about hackers makes my nipples hard. That book 'Hacking' is supposed to teach you how to hack. I saw the guy who wrote it on TechTV and it appeared that he knew what he was talking about, I was too interested to say no. I've read 25 pages of it (even though I promised myself I wouldn't start a new book til I finished God Emperor of Dune, which I'm almost done with), and so far it sounds like it's setting out on what it's intended to do! The guy on TechTV said you need to know C/C++ and Assembly programming to know what's going on, but that's what I spent the first year and a half in college learning. So far this book has been great review of the stuff I forgot from Assembly Programming class (and it's more exciting in this book!). You can read about the rest by following those links I labored over! Those books Electric Jesus Corpse and Satan Burger have me most interested out of the fiction books, they sound like the sorta stuff I'd be writing if I was capable of writing a whole book. Yesterday, or Thursday (whichever you prefer), I invested $3000 in mutual funds in a Roth IRA. $2000 in the Growth Fund of America and $1000 into the New World Fund. This is money that will just sit there until I retire, hopefully around when I'm 50. This is the sorta thing that happens when your dad is an accountant. Yes, I realize this is not the boring kinda stuff you came to my website for, but hey, you've gotta know what this means for you! This means I'll be able to retire around 50 and I'll just sit there bored leaving me no choice but to start some major writing projects... with plenty of life experience under my belt. You think I'm weird now, just you wait til I have a cup full of pills to swallow every morning and I'm wearing Depends. And now, your reward for getting through all of that: Alizee. I've seen animated GIFs of this girl floating around the internet for some time now, but I finally found the video where the sexiest GIFs came from... click here for an example. And here's some pics of the video: For the full video, click here. I suggest right-clicking the link and 'Save target as..." I can't imagine what this is gonna do to my bandwidth... Well then, I rented a few movies to watch. What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Dune (the one from the 80s, the miniseries isn't weird enough), and Apocalypse Now. I better get to watching them. You can think about this while your Alizee video is downloading: OBJECTIVE: 4 Kidz... and I think it's about time I start archiving my entries, the size of this page is getting ridiculous. November 14th, 2003 - Mmmm, the stench of Friday Comments [23] Welly welly welly! It is I, Muffin! It is finally starting to feel like Alaska again. Seems like Alaska had been on vacation in Seattle for the last few years or something, but it's back in full swing, with the temperature dropping like a lustrous ice banshee in autumn. It's around -20°F at the moment, with forecasts as low as -50°F within the next couple days. Joy. I will feel like a child again. A child being used and abused by mother nature. So, I'm wearing full winter attire and plugging my car in at night and at school now, and allowing twenty minutes for my car to heat up before I start driving to school so it doesn't entertain its deepest mechanical thoughts and find a noose to drive though on my daily adventure to the place of higher learning called ULN. University of Liquid Nitrogen. This kind of cold can shatter slices of pizza like glass. It can just as easily shatter a person's will to live, as it does to each and every resident of Fairbanks. That's why Alaskan citizens get money each year just for living here, there needs to be a balance. You CAN put a price on your soul! This year's price was ~$1200. My soul must be made of that cheap plastic. So, these new gloves my mom bought for me several weeks ago were forced onto me this morning. The winter gloves I've been wearing for the last two years have holes all over the fingers, mainly from catching them on the razor-sharp panels of metal protruding from the plug hanging out the front of my car while I unplug it. The gloves, as unstable as they may be, still serve their purpose quite well. Winter is not a time for cosmetics! Functionality comes before beauty! Like sending a flower bed through a lawn mower (and a bee's nest for good measure) to sew the confetti remnant honey potpourri under the third layer of upper-torso skin in an effort to show that tapeworm who's the supreme commander in the 21st century. The flowers are a worthy sacrifice in this escapade. The theorists of America have stated on numerous occasions that when the cockroaches fall to extinction, when their frail bodies curl around their ego and their pride, when all that humans would have them believe reveals falsity through the surface of inscrutable truth, the worms will reign over the fabric of being. Space worms, with their B-movie aura infecting popular opinion, time and time again opting for risk over monotony, never took on the form of pretentiousness, never littered the dry sidewalks of Mexico outside copyright-infringing counterfeit Disney apparel stores. Toiling away into the underworld while the cockroaches sat in spas sipping on cosmopolitans. The hammocks reverse-engineered to be shaped to a roach back. Living it up in luxury, they forfeited whatever chance they may have had to strike it big with the tears in the stars. Wormholes, not cockholes. They travel as one, but fueled by the melange, mutated guildsman of mine. We don't waste the spice to travel through cockholes faster than light speed. That's what coffee and Coke are for. Pissing on far-off moons through the safety of the Chapman building, first-floor handicap-access stinkhole of a waste disposal room. I think that's a male only restroom too; we are nothing but pigs. I continued to wear my beat up gloves, they weren't bad. I don't think I ever asked for new gloves, but one day they appeared. But I ignored them. Until today, when my mom found my hat/gloves pile and replaced the tried and true old gloves, the ones with character, with these new ones. First thing I discovered, these gloves flare out at the wrist. I think I heard them talking too, whispering to the environment, saying "Here winter, come in here, there's plenty of room! This bastard's not wearing funnels around his wrists to repel the snow! We call him blizzard-wrists... and fucktard." And then I was driving to school, and for a moment there, I didn't think I was wearing gloves anymore, but rather cardboard boxes, made of very stiff cardboard. These gloves figured out a way to suffocate my fingers; they seemed of no use anymore as they could no longer bend. These gloves turned my hands into what could have essentially been described as palms with toasty warm tubes of Rolos coming out in gaggles of four. These gloves had some nice "grip-pads" on them, that weird plasticy stuff they cover the palm with to grip things, but whoever decided on the placement of these pads must have come from the land of Negative, the city of Utterly Unreasonable Cruelty (their nationally-acclaimed university being that of UUUC, so cruel that they wrap the pineapple with barbed wire before stuffing it up the ol' upper-math ass of advancement). The palms of the glove were missing grip pads in the one place where they might have been useful, right at the crease of my knuckles where my hand closes around the floss-thin frame of my antarctic steel steering wheel. And so I'm driving. Driving to school after letting my car warm up in the driveway, spray-painting a lump of sickly snow the color of exhaust. On my way through the tundra, where every car looks like it's either breaking down or smoking a cigarette through its tail pipe. Onto the onramp. I see a cardboard box. I think to myself "Well damn, I'm wearing cardboard boxes, I sure as hell don't have to be seeing them in the middle of the road as I'm driving to the unholy institute of brainpain." I swerve out of its way. Then boom, I hit another box. A white box that I didn't see... not that I would have avoided it if I had seen it. So I have yet to merge into traffic; I decide it'd probably be for the best if I don't drive the remaining four miles to school pushing a cardboard box across the road. I pull over, get out, the box is gone. I look underneath my car, managing to get a taste of that sweet sweet winter car exhaust, find the box broken and spread apart in torment nearly attached to the bottom of my car, I pull it out and punch it... as a kind of farewell from its siblings, my shitty paralyzing funnel gloves. An average day of school ensues. Computer science class is getting more vague and ever less sure of itself. No one turned in the homework that was due today, no one turns in homework anyway. 65% of the class skips class, even on test days. People miss tests, don't care. The teacher is depressed, doesn't care and just wants to drink until he leaves Alaska. I'm sure I'm learning a lesson here, but more like a lesson in depression than anything else. This was not part of the course description! It's like going to class on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to watch a mouse caught and dying in a mouse trap for an hour. The trap of darkness, cold and isolation. So, Ian and I played five games of air hockey without using the paddles today. It takes lots of creativity, will, and trial and error to play the game this way. The amazing phenomenon behind paddle-less air hockey is that the human hand can apparently fling the puck 3x faster than a paddle ever could. The human hand can also feel about 50x as much pain each time the puck makes that dull thud sound against your palm. See, we've learned that the only way to play this game without paddles and still have a hand in tact by the end of a game is to lift our fingers off of the table and block the puck with only our palms. This is the ideal case, as painful as it can be, but things tend to go awry. Sometimes the puck bounces off of your side of the table and blazes through your wrist-bone with only the sonic boom of a hard plastic piece of shit defying physics to muffle the sharp "dink" effect which communicates far and wide in a universal language that someone's bone just got violated. And then once again, when I became so involved in the game, and so desperate to defend my goal as to lay my arm flat against this air terror field and hope that all will work out. Dink: elbow. It strikes pain like a drill would strike oil, but the puck drills twice as deep. Pain coming out in radiant waves, broadcasting my error in judgement. Snapping my arm in half like the yard stick that it is. Throughout these five games, the puck managed to hit my hand in such a way that my pinky would go numb for seconds at a time. Only through this kind of stupidity can one find a funny bone in the pinky... and I found it three times. And I have renamed my pinky, it's now known as my blackish-purpley. Where's my trophy? November 9th, 2003 - Electric Satan Vaulting Comments [22] Why do I like single player video games? I don't know. But, like several other days of the last week, I have been sitting here playing Amped 2 (offline) for a couple hours... doing what I always do when I'm playing single player games: getting pissed off. Amped 2 is a hard game, that's for sure, but this has nothing to do with game difficulty. I don't think so anyway; but it probably doesn't hurt (that is to say, it probably does hurt). It's just that when I'm sitting on my bed ghetto-style (that's what you call sitting cross-legged on a bed for two hours because you have no place to put your weirdass gangly pole-vaulting legs) playing a game alone, with nothing to stimulate the social aspect of my brain other than the part of my brain that has no business socializing, I start getting infuriated. It may look like I'm playing a game... that's just what my hands are doing. What I am doing is dwelling on everything of the past month that volunteers itself up as rage fuel, apparently because my grey-matter panics and starts freaking out when it doesn't have induction proofs, plasma sorts, ass-backwards algorithms, and laws of aeschylus economics market germany space hitler costs to grind away on like a meat processor. I never run out of stuff to think about either. My mind will reach back to second grade just to prove a point: that it will always be there with me, through tough times... to drop the final gazebo on the zambonie's back and push the weight of the moon of distant memories down onto my shoulders. Either way, I guess it's good inspiration for this website. I could have written a bible-sized hate manifesto with the thoughts that came spilling out of my head during my crusade against Project Gotham Racing. And hell, the sequel's coming out in a week. We're all doomed. If I die, do not give me a moment of silence, for the love of God. Silence is what we give the departed because we can't think of anything better to do. So we announce to a group of people that we are going to do something. But we're not really going to do something. We're going to do silence. You just know these poor souls are sitting in Heaven or Hell or some sort of translucent smoke-fazed Taco Bell (alternately called the Defecation Station when you can see through the plumbing system from the outside) looking down on this room of silent people and saying to themselves "Jesus Christ, these people are doing it again." to which Jesus might reply "Mother fucker, they put onions in my burrito again." Every time a throng of people gives a moment of silence, a group of angels checks the television listings for wing porn. And hey, it's not classified as sodomy when Cupid shot his arrow in there. When I die, get the funniest man in the room to stand up to give some impromptu standup-comedy... and distribute a plethora of nachos. Don't waste your time on silence for God's sake! I have this thought on my mind constantly when I'm not updating my website. It's what I keep telling myself I have to mention in the next entry. It's also the thought that ceases to exist when I AM actually updating my website. I can't remember what it is you see, so I guess you won't be hearing it today either. Either way, I know for a fact it's not that funny... nor is it important. So I'll just substitute another thought for it right now: I saw on the Today show a couple months ago, some woman talking about how electric windows in cars have killed 24 children over the last ten years. How this terrible design flaw needs to be fixed before the slaughter continues. And she got all involved with sticking it to the car manufacturers... in the most aggressive way possible... ... with passive letters of course. Anyway, I knew not to listen to a thing she said because, luckily, I remembered some other statistic I had read years ago. That statistic being that about 100 people die each year chocking on ball-point pens. 100 people a year versus 24 people in the last ten years; and if these children can't survive against an electric window, their genes will be of no use during the war against machines. I immediately picked up the nearest ball-point pen I could find and studied it. Try as I might, I did not find a fatal design flaw. I don't think I could choke to death on a pen if I shoved three fist-fulls of them down my throat and wrapped my belt around my neck, and yet they're apparently 50x deadlier than electric windows. To me, that almost sounds like electric windows could actually SAVE lives... if given the proper motivation, training and tools. If I'm drafted and sent to Iraq, I'm gonna have to rig up some sorta strap-on electric window and some screw-on Jelly to keep me safe. And some colorful pills so I won't question that logic when my mind awakens from Whatthefuckville. So, I forget if I mentioned it before, but I finished The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick a few days ago. It was an alernate history novel, so quite unlike the other two books I've read by him. I also didn't enjoy it all that much, probably for the same reason. I have found that endings which leave you hanging aren't half as fun when a book isn't supernatural. So anyway, I'm reading Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk now. Fifty pages into it and I'm liking it. Oh and also, after watching Dark City again, holy crap is it a lot like The Matrix (the whole trilogy in fact), and it came out a year before the original Matrix. That's too close for blatant ripping-off, but it makes you wonder. There were parts in the commentary where if I closed my eyes, I could have sworn they were talking about The Matrix. Really weird stuff. I love Dark City now. I didn't like it so much when it came out because I was too young to understand what the hell was going on and nowhere in the movie does it spell it all out for you. Good stuff! Oh, and I've just been informed recently that the guy at the university who called me Satan (having something to do with my facial hair, he said) or Lucifer (on the rare occasions, you know, like the times you can buy eggnog in stores, which should be soon!), the same guy who I had a chat with about diving into solid matter as if it weren't actually there for thirty minutes while standing in the bookstore line... well, he's not here this semester because he tried to rob a bank just before school started. Leave it to a college student to think he's qualified enough, at 20-some years of age and with some billiard skillz, to pull off a bank robbery. Could it be possible that I made him that dumb? I'd like to think so. November 3rd, 2003 - Sleep is too good for me Comments [18] Okay, so I've been informed that it was not November 11th on my last update. Far from it in fact. Well it should have been. Nothing happened today, but what the hell, I'm bored, so I find myself reverting back to my old ways, opening up my HTML editor and trying to wring words out of my brain. We'll see how this goes, anyway. Last night I got an hour and a half of sleep, but surprise surprise, my heart is still ticking... but why? If I were my body I would have killed myself long ago, this amount of sleep is ridiculous. I've always figured there's no point in going to sleep if you can't get at least three hours; I must have hit the sack out of spite. Why am I not sleeping as I speak? Because this whole situation is absurd. When I'm this tired I feel like a poet because I'm amazed I can still form words out of letters... sometimes. Only in slow motion though. Today in math class I turned dyslexic. I would want to write "function" and "unctorpedo" would come blasting out onto my paper, bewildering me, myself and my nearest neighbors. I would intend to write a 'B' and a '7' would come out. I would struggle to construct a comma or a period in my notebook and before I knew it a little koala bear would be staring back at me. As far as I'm concerned, days like this is what coffee was designed for. I don't drink black coffee because I like it, who in their right mind would? I drink it because the me that decides to go to sleep 6:45 AM is the mortal enemy of the me that (barely) wakes up the next morning, and since this nemesis of mine gives me absolutely zero respect, I'm trying to kill him away one neuron at a time... and stain his menacing teeth the color of morning muffin, that bastardcore son of man. Also, coffee keeps me awake and black coffee is damn-near cheaper than the water it's mixed with. When I was a kid I thought the caffeine in cola would keep me awake. That was the power of suggestion right there; what a stupid little influential waste of bed-wetting turpentine glaucoma-creasing existential negation (that last part was Discrete Mathematics for "I'm a dumbass") I was. It takes industrial amounts of caffeine to keep you awake like this. I had six cups of coffee for breakfast, (with four slices of pepperoni pizza and a pear) and a generic brand cola (44 grams of sugar as opposed to Coca Cola's 39 grams, what's going on there?) and then another couple cups of coffee at school (and once again, I acted as the coffee messiah, as I am one of the few brave enough to change the coffee filter and start the free coffee a-brewin in the student council room). The downside to all of this? You have to piss like a defective, Blue-Niagaran aqua-camel every thirty minutes when you have this much liquid and caffeine in your system. I suppose this helps you stay awake, albeit in the worst way possible. But I manage. Hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep tonight. In my experience with these gluttonous proportions of caffeine, I have found that as tired as I may feel at any given moment, if it hasn't been at least 24 hours since my suicidal coffee binge, if I lay down I will end up staring at the ceiling while my eyes scream profane threats and inquire as to why I am not asleep yet. This is the natural order of things. I wonder if The Land Before Time DVD has a Spanish track on it. I forgot to post an update about my Caramello Challenge from way back when. When I started the challenge, I weighed 193 pounds. I ate the 36 Caramello bars in no more than two weeks, and I weighed myself afterwards: 194 pounds. I was shocked and appalled, I thought my mutant-metabolism was freakier than that. But low and behold, a week later, I lost four pounds and became 190, for no apparent reason. I think maybe sugar fuels my metabolism, but is on a week delay or something. Either way, when I got that placenta in my sock drawer pierced last Saturday it didn't read too many Popular Science magazines in the waiting room. Had to smack ol' pinky away with a broom when he started towards the tattoo parlor, though. Bruised placentas are what dreams are made of. Tonight will be filled with more Amped 2, and I gotta finish the movie Dark City, which I rented on Friday. I want to get through the commentary track too (the one that's not Roger Ebert... for God's sake). It is 5:15 PM and pitch black out. It's finally starting to feel like winter! November 11, 2003 - So here I am again! Comments [11] Yeah yeah yeah, I know that was quite a break from my journal. I knew it would happen, I can never stay focused for more than two weeks at a time. But I'll have you know, every update you see on this page took a lot longer than you think! It takes time to make the funny (that is, when your days are as mundane as mine), and I quit making updates about the same time I started getting homework in school... not a coincidence. So, don't be expecting any regular updates anymore! Hopefully there won't be another break as long as last time, but you never know. Anywho, I'm not gonna spell or grammar check my entries anymore; forgive me if I give up my obsessive ways... and believe me, you'll be seeing lots of mistakes ;) Okay, so what's happened while I was away? My economics teacher got arrested for running a trans-Alaskan "drug enterprise" with his personal plane. This happened like the third week of school. He let us out of class thirty minutes early because he had "things to do"... according to the newspaper, he was arrested about an hour after we got out of class. I guess we all know what he had to do now. He sold marijuana to an undercover cop, they searched his home and found twenty-one marijuana plants and evidence that he'd been flying alcohol and drugs to villages in Barrow. So, they replaced him with the economics teacher I had in high school, who is one of the best teachers I've ever had. But now there's talk of a teacher strike, so I'm wondering if there's a chance our teacher will get replaced yet again. The teacher that was arrested is just sitting at home waiting for his trial (basically just waiting to be convicted), the head of the economics department said he was "readjusting to his situation"... that must be what they call "contemplating suicide" these days. The newspaper article also said, for no apparent reason, something like this "Two years earlier, he had been hospitalized after a man tried to shoot him, but the gun misfired, and then tried to run him over with a van." Okay, so what I got out of this article was that I was learning economics from a drug-dealing superhero. Forget money! I want to know how to dodge a van and break a pistol with my mind! I call him Sub Zero now. That's what I would call any super hero that flied to the northern tip of Alaska on a regular basis, regardless of his business being there. My German computer science teacher went insane. You know, the one I mentioned before that seemed like he bathed in plums on Saturday nights. One class, about three weeks ago, he said something to the effect of "NASA has contacted me... they want to launch me up in a rocket and make me the very first space Hitler!" ... "I will command the stars!" ... "(begins shouting things in German)"... ? Yes, this really happened, and it got even more interesting. "Pressure is on Israel to launch a Jew into space, but if they do, Space Hitler will be right there waiting for him and he will say *puts middle finger up* FUCK YOU!"... The classroom was flooded with weird/nervous laughter, we had no idea what was going on. Then he said "In the early 1900s, the brown chocolate that came out of Africa was so much better than the German white chocolate. So some Germans went into Africa, brought an African back, killed him and stuffed him with chocolate and they said "Here is your brown chocolate boy!" ... I could have spent forty-five minutes in complete silence trying to think up the weirdest thing my mind could create, and it wouldn't have been a fraction as weird as the moment that line spilled out of this strange plumfucker's mouth. The class sat in complete silence for roughly five seconds, at which point Ian (ha! I said your name this time!) broke the silence by saying "... That's horrible." The teaching plum replied "It is more than horrible!" Someone else asked "Did they do that to sell more chocolate?" and the teacher said "Why would you ask such a thing?!" and the class, once again, sat in silence. He said "Please, do not mind if I... Germanize you" with a twinkle in his eye and hinted that we'd all be walking in next class with small black mustaches under our noses. I had to talk to him after class about the low score I got on my test, and in his office, he reassured me that there were, in fact, no swastikas on the walls. They should make this guy a kindergarten teacher. I'd love to see those parent/teacher conferences. Here as an email I got today: From: egjadqhm@boxfrog.com To: "guestbookrcn" <ultramuffin@yahoo.com> gumshoe loams buckled? c'http://0kLaHomA.com:8040/11/cgi/pushit.pl?h=tttf.dat&p=1a&' sensationalist heraldry backs cripplingly fatalistic ensemble inducible tanzania? sequences holders, hemispheres. frights anglican violas? Whoever wrote this needs to work for Hallmark. This shit needs to be mass-produced on greeting cards with holographic condoms stapled inside. Look at the colors mommy, and if you turn it this way there's a skull. This is poetry, but I don't dare go to that URL. Amped 2 for Xbox came out on Wednesday, a game I've been anticipating ever since it was announced about a year and a half ago. It's better than I could have ever imagined! I absolutely loved the original Amped. It got mediocre reviews largely because it's so goddamn hard. The controls aren't flawed you bastards, they're just precise! Anywho, I heard Amped 2 would be easier, but so far I'm thinking it's actually harder, which is great. They added some new elements to the trick system which require you to grow an extra arm and tentacles to harness, and I'm about 25% of my way there (and wouldn't you know it, the little tentacle nub is purple, how am I gonna explain that to the guys). Anyway, the big thing, and my current reason for life, is that Amped 2 is also online! This is in addition to the single player campaign that's nearly twice as long as the first game (which took what I estimate to be about 90 hours to beat). I'll spare you the details and just tell you that it's incredible. I haven't been this addicted to an online game since Counter-Strike. And it has leaderboards! A scoreboard that ranks you on ~15 different things. This scoreboard is really taking me back to the highscore-list driven arcade games of the '80s, I have to get as high on the list as possible! Right now I'm ranked #47 out of the ~1,900 people on the scoreboard. Check out the draw distance on this game! << Alizee's Ass Archived Entries >> ultramuffin@yahoo.com © Ultrenial Muffiliciousness Enterprises