:: Journal : Atomic Microwave : Search Phrases : The Chimi : Books : Links :: September 5th, 2004 - Something to chew on while you wait Comments [51] FAILURE 02: THE RUBBER BOOMERANG The Eric was never one to save money. Many people in their early twenties have problems with money, but no matter how far they slide down towards the poverty extreme of the financial teeter-totter, they can rest assured The Eric will be there waiting at the very tip to keep them company. And to see if they have a spare package of ramen or two to make it through the night. The problem is that whenever the tide comes in, whenever The Eric is given any significant amount of change, he feels that it is his duty to jump ass-first into the consumerist ocean and ride the waves till the disgusted sun goes down. This is just the way he lives his life. His first job, working as a "courtesy clerk" at Safeway, lasted over a year. Before I move on with this point in the making, allow me to enlighten you as to what a courtesy clerk is. A courtesy clerk is a young person between the ages of roughly fourteen and sixteen who is forced to dress up in slacks and a button-up white collared shirt with a tie, and is then made to sort out the endless onslaught of shrewd groceries falling in from every tenth angle while at the same time denying tips and making forced social gestures at ex-KGB secret shoppers. This is the part you get to see. The other part entails cleaning questionable and complimentarily anti-gravitational feces in several shades of seducing azure and hemoglobin crimson out of the deep dips and sharp corners segregating the ceiling's stained tiles. I should know, Safeway is where I got my start as well. So before I get back on track here, let me just say this: respect the minimum-wage employees you encounter in your day to day life. They could slice open your gut with a receipt and make a water park out of your small intestines without batting an eye. My brother worked at Safeway for something in the ballpark of fourteen months. He had nothing to show for this. No one, himself included, could figure out where all the money he made went. I had only a vague clue. First of all, each day that he worked was concluded by indulging in a fiesta of chocolate milk and artificial crab meat. If you choose to remember anything about my brother, remember that. In fact, I will repeat it. His ideal meal, the meal that made each day of work worth the struggle, was about two pounds of nice fresh artificial crab meat washed down with chocolate milk. Other things I can recall him blowing large sums of money on include radio-controlled vehicles and accessories, nails to incorporate methodically into said radio-controlled devices, aquariums complete with deformed water-monsters to cage within the glass prison, various compact-disc albums of hit music to scrape across anything pointy, fishing paraphernalia, shiny things, and a wide array of objects that could either create or catch fire. Jump back about six years to when The Eric was the tender age of eightish. In these early years, he did not have the income necessary to assault his digestive system with conflicting genres of food. He had to look elsewhere. On one rare occasion, he chose to buy something that might (probably not) have been worth the money! This weird rubber boomerang thing shaped like a hollow triforce which supposedly returned to the (smiling) thrower. Of course, the package could have been a bold-faced lie, as we never had the chance to see it return. With a huge grin formed of his artificial-crab and chocolate-milk laden intake orifice, he threw the rubber, flexy-edged, three-point outlined Trojan aeronautical contraceptive representative into the menacing breeze of foreshadowed disappointment and the fucking thing hooped a tree branch thirty feet up like a genetically-altered Olympic gymnast from 2154 whose sole motivation through four years of excruciating training was to ruin The Eric's otherwise destructive Saturday. This was merely an accident in the eyes of The Eric, but Dionysus himself could not have planned this tragedy so perfectly. Not only that, but the tree branch that lured in the little rubber bastard forked into a display reminiscent of the tantalizing mathematical puzzles cluttering the pristine work desk of the one and only Stephen Hawking. Nothing short of a hydrogen bomb would undo this unfortunate blunder. Six years have passed. The Eric is in his teenage years. The family is building a new house next door to our current house (we liked the neighborhood but wanted a bigger house). To make room for this new house, the lot next door needs to be cleared. The lot is nothing but trees, trees where The Eric and I spent much of our childhood, the lot where one aged and faded red rubber boomerang has spent the last six years in atrophy, never knowing if it was on par, never knowing if it was up to the task. Now that our family were the rightful owners of this sacred plot of land, and the land had to be cleared soon anyway, my brother had free reign to chop down any tree he saw fit. What he saw, in his tunnelvisionesque mind plagued and rotted by six years of tree vendetta, was a thirty-foot wooden obelisk laughing at him with rustling leaves for six helpless summers past. With his trusty axe (an axe that was likely rigged to catch fire on command), The Eric chopped away his anger and pain. The tree came crashing down in defeat. The Eric had six years to make up to the sad, frustrated boy who spent his entire week's allowance on this toy in hopes of an afternoon of innocent fun. And thus to cloud over these six agonizing years, he gripped the faded boomerang, extended his arm back, and put 120% of his teenage angst into the throw that landed the dilapidated piece of rubber into a tree branch on the other side of the street. August 14th, 2004 - Things are falling apart right and left! Comments [42] Ahoy! It's been a while, yet again, but it's all good. Well, sort of. My 160gb hard drive died yesterday, but this was not as devastating as it sounds. Somehow, in some subconscious way, I managed to save everything that's important to my primary, 40gb hard drive, the one that has stood the test of time! Ol' 40 gigger is the storage device which holds my operating system, everything created/written/made by me, and anything else irreplaceable, with the possible exception of the two seasons of The Wonder Years I had on the dead hard drive. I may never find them again, and I'm sure Kevin Arnold, his abusive father, his rained-on painting of a mother, his bully future coke head brother and gothic prince Paul best friend had many more lessons to teach me. The lesson about judging '80s television characters at face value alone, in particular. These were only the first two seasons, I never managed to catch the seasons where Winnie started morphing into a goddess. So, the dead hard drive is just a nuisance. I'm gonna have to buy another one, but luckily hard drive prices seem to depreciate faster than any other computer part. I think I'd better play it smart and not get Western Digital this time. This will be a perfect opportunity for me to install Linux on my primary computer again, now that I actually understand the power of Linux (after spending approximately 480 hours around a walking, talking assembly of uber-geeks in all their furious glory, I think I learned to navigate the rough seas and unknown territories of the land of Linux by osmosis alone). Now that I've sufficiently bored about 2/3 of my reading audience with this paragraph, I'd better move this along. We went to the fair about a week ago, me and some of us other folk. The fair was standard fare, same old sprawl of disappointed faces, frustrated that the fair has remained identical for nearly a decade. Seriously, you could probably find a place to buy snap-bracelets within five minutes of entering the gates of this wood-chip sprinkled, steel-wheeled devastation-reactor driven, anomaly thrusting checkered-tent conception, burnt apple candy sloth injected, crying child blood gonna fizzle Zipper evaporated slanderous interpretation of an off-center, Hell-influenced corner of purgatory. Every time I walk through those fair gates, I do a double-take with my nose and ask those around me if a clown just got sodomized with a lava lamp, because that's what my nose is telling me. It's like they're melting down landfills, carving little airplanes and pendants with rusty razor blades out of whatever toxic material remains, and hiring a beard-scraggled oil-slick with a staring problem to pitch lofty dreams to the masses of otherwise healthy kids so he can make this month's rent on his porn-storage station in the deliverance sector of the woods. Parents: buy your kids a computer and urge them never to leave the house. This is the only way they'll survive. Drew and I spent hours at the "Rat Races" tent. These were not rat races; they were something far more sinister. They have this circular table with all the numbers of roulette wedging themselves outward from the center. 1 through 36 I believe, plus the mutant 0 and 00. Red and black, with the two sickly greens for shits and giggles. Each of these numbers has a little rat hole. So they put the sacred (note: sacred, not scared) rat in the center of the table, give the table contraption a whirl, and then it's like watching furry shit hit the fan with a dirty pocket full of your money. The rat runs this way and that, the crowd goes "WHOAOOHNOFUCK" each time the rat looks like he's about to be decisive for a change and then he hops back and forth some more, playing with everyone's emotions before he throws in the towel and scurries down wooden asshole number 14. This is ingenious. This was fun and all, but it could have been more fun, so Drew and I threw in our fresh brand of spice. The people working at the tables, paying people off or, more often, taking our money, were supposedly working for tips. I don't like the idea of paying the man who takes my money away, so I asked him if I could tip the rat. I did not deserve the glaring I got for that remark! Drew later asked if he could give the rat some heroin, the money-manager said this was also impossible. People kept yelling out to the rat, telling him which hole to go into. The guy who spun the table shouted "Tell him where to go!" to which I exclaimed "GO TO HELL!"... after that round was complete, the table-spinner looked in my general direction and asked "Who said 'Go to Hell'?". Silence. Later on, the table-spinner thought it would be cute for the crowd to start naming the rats. One of the rats came to be called "Cajun Thunder" somehow, I'm not sure if that was Drew's doing or not. After switching rats, table-spinner yelled "What's this rat's name?", to which I answered "Profit!"... more strange looks from all parties involved. And when the rat decided to try and crawl off the table rather than dive head-first down the abyss, I explained to the bustling throng of gambling adolescents that the rat had found morals. The rat exploiters saw things differently and scooped him back into the spinning wheel of sin. If I could do it all over again, I would have worn a hat, because whether they will allow me to tip the rat or not, no one can keep me from tipping my hat to him. I rented The Neverending Story on DVD from Blockbuster last week. I hadn't seen this since I was a kid, so it was quite the memory refreshment. After being thoroughly annoyed at the once-beloved Rock Biter (come on man, you're eating rocks and talking at two words a minute, people are gonna think you've been huffing gasoline again), realizing Atreyu could pass for a small girl rather than a young boy without even trying too hard, observing that the black man with a bump on top of his head is probably what Samuel L. Jackson would see every morning in the mirror if he had white hair and a bump on top of his head as well, and taking note to how uneasy simple but otherwise obnoxious synthesizer music can make me when applied correctly (that is, when played to the beat of a drowning white horse), the damn DVD froze on me! It got all choppy for about a minute and completely froze, bringing down my entire operating system with it (yes, I tend to watch DVDs on my computer for some reason). I tried it in my Xbox too, froze the damn green machine as well! I then remembered this was one of those double-sided DVDs with both wide-screen and full-screen versions available... score! I can outsmart any scratch! So I flipped the DVD over, clickity clicked in my chapter selection back to the splendid scenery of a horse drowning in mud, fast-forwarded a tad, and FREEZE! Goddamn thing froze again! I took out the DVD and examined it. Just my luck, it had a dent in it. Have you ever heard of a DVD with a dent in it before? I could entertain my mind for hours trying to think my way out of this one, but that wouldn't be as entertaining as watching schoolboys read about horses drowning, especially when the androgynous warrior of Tinsel Town is yanking on its head with a rope. Why don't they let us bet on drowning horses at the fair? You know we're already halfway there. We could bet on where we're all going once we die, but everyone would already know the answer. If this obstruction on the DVD had been anything other than a dent, I might have been able to salvage this quintessential motion picture of '80s culture by flip-flopping sides whenever the DVD player started smoking, but as it stood, the dent affected both sides of the disc in exactly the same place in the movie. Not only that, but apparently there were several dents, because after I skipped over the first dead parts of the disc, the whole thing started to crumble away like a stale cookie after passing the halfway point (otherwise known as the 'I just wasted $1.49 because I'm not gonna go raise Hell with The Neverending Story in my hands at Blockbuster' point). This whole Neverending Story DVD fiasco reminded me of my damaged Freaks & Geeks disc 6 DVD, which got caught in my parents' ADHD five-disc changing combustion chamber and made an exploding sound, leaving a lively groove of scratches one centimeter in girth across the entire bottom of the DVD. I had given it a brief rundown before to see if it was okay. It seemed okay at the time, but after having experienced the inane power of Blockbuster's destroyed childhood dream of a horse-drowning simulator, seeing that it was capable of freezing up my DVD equipment even while fast-forwarding at 32x, I decided to fly through three episodes of prime canceled television series from 2000 to complete my defective evening. Sure enough, Freaks & Geeks froze in two places as well. Luckily, knowing that these were authentic scratches affecting the Freaks as well as the Geeks rather than obscure dents from the questionable reaches of curiosity, I remembered the power rumored to be contained within an ordinary tube of toothpaste. I took the Freaks and the Geeks into the bathroom, rinsed away any dirt that might be on the surface, put a dab of toothpaste on there, smeared away in oval, resuscitating motions, and rinsed off the minty taste. Success! It now plays without a hitch. Not a skip or pop or anything where the DVD once froze completely. This is almost as amazing as the CD-boiling phenomenon. I pack my lunch for work. I make two turkey sandwiches with American cheese, Grey Poupon mustard, pickles and mayonnaise on honey cracked wheat bread. They are spectacular. I pack them away in a brown paper bag with a generic brand 'Cola' to keep them company. It's cheap and it gets the job done: it fills me up each day when I start to get hungry. I went to eat my sandwiches yesterday and there was a sandwich missing. Someone had opened up my bag, taken out a sandwich, and closed it back up. This is not supercomputing facility behavior! In the kitchen, where the refrigerator resides, I stood facing the wall for the longest four minutes in all my life, just to see if it was moving. If it was moving, I would conclude that one of the super computers had created a shape-shifting, camouflaged artificial intelligence who lurks in the kitchen, attaches to the wall, and eats Muffin's sandwiches when he's not looking. After I ate my single, lonely sandwich and drank the depressed generic brand Cola, as I went to throw my trash away, I happened to notice a pile of food on the kitchen tables. There was a sign on this food that read "Free Food! Also check the top shelf of the refrigerator." I opened the fridge and peered in at the top shelf and said "Fuck!"... that's where my lunch bag had been! But it all worked out in the end because there was a bag of corn tortilla chips sitting in the free food pile, which was used to stab the roof of my mouth with the leading point of a vicious triangle chip. Yesterday, I hammered on the coffee quite a bit. My sinuses were raging from the third summer influx of smoke, my head was stuffed up, and I was dead tired. What better sinus medication than coffee? I made several trips to the bathroom, and I apologize for turning this into another bathroom discussion, but here we go! On one of my trips to the bathroom across the hall, I passed by a man coming out of the bathroom who must have been about 6'7". I don't get the chance to look up at people very often, so when it does happen, I just get confused. I wondered what it would be like to be so tall, but when I reached the urinal, I think I figured it out. There, on TOP of the urinal (an automatic-flushing urinal, mind you) was a pube. I figured this must be the sum of all 6'7" experiences, to be so obscenely tall that you are able to lose a pube on TOP of a urinal. Good show. That pube must feel on top of the world. Oh yes, and before I forget (actually, I did forget, so I came back and added this later): Anna-Angel, Tiffany Teen, Jordan Capri, Kate's Playground, Peachez 18, Tawnee Stone, Katie Fey, Sherri-Angel, Missy Model. If my statistics page is any indication, I may have just increased my website traffic tenfold by listing those names alone. This is gonna be a cool experiment! In one of these entries I said "NextDoorNikki" and now about 1/2 of all the search phrases that bring people to my site contain "NextDoorNikki" in them. That word/phrase just mixes around with all the other words on my giant pages of text to bring all sorts of freaks here! If I were feeling particularly whorish, I might even add some alternately spaced/spelled versions... such as TiffanyTeen, MissyModel, Peachez18, JordanCapri, KatesPlayground, AnnaAngel, AnnAngel, or Ann-Angel, but I have more integrity than that ;) Btw, to you Google horn dogs that have no idea what brought you here, check out The Fluff Junction and for the love of God, vote and upload pictures. It won't survive without you! July 20th, 2004 - Good use of the AM hours! Comments [201] HeYo! I just got an email from someone who appreciated my website, so that got me all excited, enthused and made me wanna update! Lets see if there's anything to talk about here. Oh yes, I was in Denali Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning. I'm not sure what you non-Alaskans know, but Denali is the park where Mt. McKinley is located. You see, Mt. McKinley used to be named Denali (named by the Athabaskan natives), but then it was renamed after president William McKinley. I think he visited the mountain or something, but what the hell! The tallest mountain in North America is named after William McKinley and I still don't have the foggiest idea who he was! For this reason, it is important to call the mountain Denali any chance you get, even though it is not technically correct anymore. But the park where the mountain is located is still called Denali National Park. So those tourists never know what they're getting themselves into. Are they going to see a Denali or a McKinley? I hope for their sake they see a Denali! I only know one thing about William McKinley, and that's the fact that he was assassinated. That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel right there. Well hell, they shoulda named the mountain after Abe Lincoln! There's a fellow I can respect! If Abe Lincoln were alive today I might call him up on my beepity boopity cordless telephone and see if he wanted to tear it up on some Dance Dance Revolution at the movie theater arcade. What's that Mr. Lincoln? You wanna wear your top hat while you dance? Right on!! Denali has grown quite a bit since the last time I was there several years ago (I'm talking about the park, not the mountain of course. Mountains don't exactly grow like dandelions.) There were like 4x as many tourists walking around this time, and now there's two intersections with traffic lights in Denali! It never had traffic lights before! There's also a Subway restaurant in a log cabin and a pizza place run by a gang of friendly Russians. Unfortunately, the last day I was at Denali I slept the day away. There's nothing unfortunate about that in and of itself, all that fresh air and high altitude are slumber influxors. But then I was awake all night, and being awake all night in a cabin is like spending all night in a desolate corner of space. I couldn't turn on the light because that'd wake up my parents, so I played some Fire Emblem on my Gameboy Advance and read some Electric Jesus Corpse outside at 2:00 AM with the small sliver of sunlight lingering over the horizon while mosquitos shamelessly ate my flesh away. That's the Alaskan experience! We had some company here, which is why we were out doing Alaska type things. It was my dad's cousin and his wife, and a couple who are their friends. I had never met any of them before, and they were all surprisingly very cool! Actually, they were all a bit weird in a refreshing way too, which is both rare and welcome for persons of their age (late 50s, early 60s). We went to the "Salmon Bake", where a Quentin Tarantino look-a-like grilled up some salmon, calling out quirky phrases in an aggressive tone such as "Salmon! Nutritious and delicious!" I don't know many people that could grill fish over a fire all day and shout out things like that with a straight face, but the Alaskan Quentin Tarantino does it with flying colors. That mofo could have played the part of Toilet Duck like Shakespeare, I swear. But then I wouldn't want him touching my food I guess. They also had some dude slicing up prime rib. I stood in a line of maybe ten people, all telling the carver what kind of meat they wanted (well done, rare, medium rare), and since this color deficiency of mine keeps me from seeing pink in meat, since I never have a clue as to what's going on in any given situation (admittedly, this has nothing to do with color), I got up to the front of the line and told the man "I just want a big piece of meat, I don't care where it comes from." and people began cheering me on! This guy two people back in line shouted "Spoken like a true carnivore!" and the carver said "What you just said is a carver's dream." Actually, he didn't say 'carver', he said something like 'matridee' or some such word I have never encountered before. And then, like a gelatinous fish seeping in through the wall by osmosis to scrape a gravy stain off the kitchen counter, the carver's mysterious word triggered some part of my brain that obviously didn't develop correctly, and I started thinking about dominatrices. This all happened in two and a half seconds. Then, as I was leaving this unhealthy scene of applause for my meat request, the man standing between me and the guy two people behind me (thus, the person directly behind me) said "I'll have the same thing he had!" (pointing to me). How can I be expected to function in this underlying peculiarity of mainstream society? I'll tell you how! Like a KING! Then I ran off into the bushes and ate my slab of meat. Yes, so I've realized I've made references to the brain in a fair share of my entries. I thought about this fact while I was laying awake in a cabin for five everlasting hours with nothing but endless waves of alien thoughts to bombard my essence. It made me wonder what would happen if I were ever taken as like a prisoner of war or something (the war on nerds? Idunno). I swear, four days in a cell without a book and I'd be halfway to Pluto. If not physically, then at least in spirit. Anyway, I realized I'm actually quite interested in the human brain, so once I got back to civilization, I searched good old Amazon for brain books, and found one that looks pretty interesting! Needless to say, if I'm looking to buy something from Amazon.com, I have to make my order $25 or more for free shipping to get the best deal! And since I really just wanna buy an assload of books again even though I have this "To Read" pile that just keeps growing, I have four books in mind I will probably be buying real soon. Here they are in another one of these cool yellow-bulleted lists: Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. Ramachandran The Steel Breakfast Era / The Decadent Return of the Hi-Fi Queen and Her Embryonic Reptile Infection by Carlton Mellick III and Simon Logan Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov Masters of Doom by David Kushner I may be turning into a regular shopper, because in addition to buying these books here, I'm also planning on buying a couple shirts. Button shirts! I've been a slave to tshirts for all of my life. They treated me well and I won't be ditching them for good, but I feel like taking the next step to Hawaiian shirts. So I will be buying these two rays of sunshine: I will buying these with the intention of at least once wearing them unbuttoned overtop this shirt: I can't tell if I'm pushing the envelop or just being obnoxious, but if I saw a person dressed like this, I'd make them my new hero! This is going to be a terrible mistake, I just know it! Okay okay! I decided I wanted to try writing something very long, something book-length. I don't think I'm gonna get there with this new project I just started, but it should be entertaining! I will be writing a collection of stories about my brother. They will be true events with a large dosage of ultramuffing (you'll know it when you see it). Hopefully I will stick with this! Here's what I have so far (giving this entry a whole new definition of long)! These are the stories of my brother. Suspend your disbelief if you must, legend has it the world's collective belief came to a screeching halt on the dark and twisted night he was born. Legend also has it that my brother managed to find this belief suspended in midair somewhere in the dry heat of Texas and blast its ends off in a firecracker/tostada accident before he reached the age of two. On the fateful day of his birth, Mother Earth's eyes fell upon a new type of animal, a new breed of accident. Out of the womb, with a reflection of destruction glistening in the blood and no doubt, lighter fluid, coating all seven pounds and sixteen degrees of the 'for fuck's sake' consituting his fetal body, he let out a mighty roar that brought the hospital to its knees. For an ordinary person, a single drop on the head would be devastating, but my brother, The Eric, would not settle for a mere brush on the cranium. Minutes before he left the uterus, he assembled a makeshift radio transmission device out of umbilical cord and pieces of french fry to spell out a crucial message in blinking green letters on the EKG. A ladder was to be rested at a 60 degree angle on top of a pile of bricks and a rock tumbler. My mother was then to climb up the ladder and push with the might of the Holy Trinity. All fell into place. My brother came firing out at mach seven, twisting downward like a corkscrew to give each portion of his head equal opportunity for a blunt smashing against their respective rungs of the ladder, so that he might coat every inch of his brain with damage. He ate head trauma like popcorn. And much like the Crocodile Mile, take a run, take a dive, hit the rungs and land upside down in a pile of bricks. The rock tumbler was there just so he could play with it and prove that he was capable of breaking it within 45 seconds of the start of his existence. The Eric is a fascinating creature, complex in his simplicity, worthy of at least six hours of explanation on a National Geographic mini-series. Because of this, there is no real place to start. You will experience confusion, bewilderment, shock, and yes, possibly even awe during this adventure. You will experience them all at once, and I'll admit, it will be quite disorienting. Hold on tight and keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times. And for my sake, try to imagine crawling out of the dank pit of adolescence with such an anomaly plaguing every corner of your life, filtering each and every one of life's lessons through a screen of distortion, and standing by your distant side on all occasions to twirl around a mutation wand he found in the woods next door. A stick, I might add, that he used to guard our mailbox from neighbor kids at 4:00 AM in his bath robe. The Eric is the one true polar shark. By this, I mean that he is a polar bear and a shark, both at the same time. This is what he thinks, at the very least. By the end of the day, the least is all we have. We were raised in Alaska, and being the large person that my brother is, the guys at basic training came to call him Polar Bear. This should not come as any particular surprise. There is a certain sense of surprise, however, that a person would opt to cover himself in thousands of dollars worth of colorful shark tattoos over the universally understood need to feed. I suppose there's a vague sense of dignity in begging for hot dogs as long as you brandish various still scenes of aquatic animals in the process. Certainly, there's no need for running water when sharks can swim in your skin. But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, I present to you... THE ERIC FAILURE 01: MONOPOLY It's difficult to say exactly when my parents and I found out that our son and only sibling had somewhat of a 'special' side to him, but like the first trampled bush that lends way to a path of retardation, one particular game of Monopoly glows bright within my mind. This, perhaps, is where it all started to go wrong. This was the modest beginning of a 'what the fuck' snowball that would surely roll itself so large, it could not possibly even exist without a permit signed in tattered recycled soul by Jehovah, his dirty, gambling-addicted self. The Eric was the one tray of muffins that got away from the great lord, black smoke billowing out of the crying oven while God's eye's glazed over watching The Love Connection on his 9" Zenith kitchen television. Then let the fucker loose because no one in their right mind will take the smoldering tray of berries and crust in to call it their own. Everyone except Mom and Dad. I cannot be 100% sure what the correct rules of Monopoly are without digging through the snot green shed in my back yard for hours on end, weeding through corpses and rubber inflatable pool gorillas, or going out to the store and buying a new box of Monopoly (Does anyone actually buy board games? They really just materialize like some weird fruit with little metal disease-carrying thimbles included.), but no matter how the rules differ from human to stubborn human, there is one rule that stays the same. When you are sent to jail, when your tiny wheel barrow is being pummeled up the pooper by Bubba and old toothless Rupert, there are only a handful of ways to get out. One, you can roll doubles; Two, if you never roll doubles, after rolling the dice three times, you are able to move again; Three, you can pay $50; Four, you can use a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card. Or, if you prefer to hang around and let 4x4 trucks and oversized tractors drive up and down the Hershey highway between servings of down-home corn bread, well, you can try extra hard to land on that whistle blowing policeman again so that he'll send you back on your second honeymoon. One time my brother found himself in prison, triggering some monumental puzzle-solving endeavor that left him speechless for the runted illegitimate nephew of half an hour. As he sat there staring off into space, his gaze bouncing off the monocle of monopoly man himself, firing out into the tiny iron dog's consciousness, making it whimper with either betrayal or unease, quite possibly both, a rusted 200-watt light bulb appeared over his head seconds before burning out, falling to the ground and making the carpet reek of ignited chemical funk. He voiced his devilish plan of action to the monopoly audience waiting in eager anticipation. "I've got it! This is perfect. Craig, you have a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card right? Can I buy that from you for $100? I'm tired of being in jail." Now, you don't have to be a mathematician to figure out what's wrong with this equation. If you don't understand, you might have a bad memory, in which case it will be necessary to refer to the previous paragraph. If you still can't figure it out, congratulations, you're the next redneck assclown my brother will be bringing to the house for dinner. I'll be kicking your ass with Kirby in Super Smash Brothers for dessert, you hopeless son of a bitch. When I have trouble sleeping at night, I like to consider how this logic, or lack thereof, might apply to other popular board and family games. In Scrabble, he might play a wild piece as the 27th character of the alphabet, pronounced with a flip of the tongue, a heave of the throat, producing an abstract approximation of several dozen six-piece Chicken McNuggets being sucked through a jet engine like an accident-prone ring finger through a salad shooter, immediately before takeoff sends the airplane through a seething haze of smallpox that was mistaken for a cloud. He would use this exotic new letter to spell out words fifteen letters long, dodging the rules to successfully piece together tangible entities of speech in curves and right angles across the mundane grid, somehow managing to avoid point power-ups from miles away, but hitting the 'this player is devoid of reason' square like a well-placed arrow hits the eye of a red and white bull. If this were Boggle, he'd replace the letter cubes with cherry bombs and blow off his fucking hand. July 1st, 2004 - Fire, Milk and Kirsanth Comments [217] If you live in Fairbanks, you already know the world is ending. If not, try and find a satellite picture of Alaska. Someone at work sent a really good picture to all of us coworkers, but I didn't think to send it back to myself or upload it so I could get it from home. Ian found this picture here, which is pretty good, but not as good as the picture floating around the office! The woman who sent the one around work put a star where Fairbanks is. Where is it? Under a thick cozy blanket of smoke and death that stretches out for hundreds of miles. Apparently lightning started these fires. At least most of them. Personally, I think this is all a big publicity stunt for Bic lighters. "If our lighters can destroy Alaska, their power is infinite." You'd better get used to seeing that, it's gonna be printed on all their lighters from here on out. But my advice to you is to keep your fingers away from the word 'power'; that pretentious word's overbearing nooks and scarce crannies will be filled with lead and arsenic. So, there's all these fires burn burn burning their way towards Fairbanks, meanwhile it looks, smells, and tastes like absolute shit outside. Visibility is only 1/4 of a mile. Which I suppose would be just dandy if you preferred your air to be polluted a weird yellow/orange/hell color, the consistency of molasses with the weight of a feather. Float like a butterfly, fuck up some lungs. It pains me to think I used to like the smoke. This was in summers past, but them old-timer smokes were never quite this ambitious. If you ever played that game BattleTanx for N64, you might remember what the sky looked like when you used that rare nuclear bomb. Bingo. If you threw a liver and a lemon in a blender and tossed it through the screen of a television, well... nevermind. These fires are coming in for the kill. Last night on the news they said the fire was 30 miles from Fairbanks. All the small towns around us were being evacuated. If Fairbanks was/is going to be evacuated, I'd wait till the last minute, wait until the flames start scaling up the wall of this fortress and eat my house alive. Once they've burned down my fan, I figure the heat would be beyond the threshold of comfort, so I'd hastily group and gather my most priceless belongings, make a mad dash through the hallway-inhabiting flares of destiny, bust down the front door with my tongue, and emerge victorious in the melting asphalt of the street, wearing my pimp hat like a crown, carrying my tooth brush, my Freaks & Geeks box set, and the dice clock I made in 7th grade shop class. Last night we did that milk challenge thing I've been wanting to do for years now. You all know how it goes, drink a gallon of milk in like an hour or half an hour or 10 minutes or something. We were just trying to drink it as fast as possible. Your momentum slows down at the 1/4 point; the 3/4 point is the wall. Of course, I had to vomit before even reaching the wall, and when I got there I found nothing but the cold, harsh reality of it all. Ian and I chose chocolate milk, Drew went old-school plain milk, and Kirsanth/Brad, the Canadian fellow who flew here to witness the apocalypse, settled for orange juice because he's lactose intolerant. I applaud his courage. If there's one thing worse than puking chocolate milk and pieces of Bacon & Egg Hot Pocket out your nose, it's probably puking orange juice out of those very same twin holes of Nostrildoma. If I understood chemistry correctly, milk is a base, which should balance out the stomach acid, making the traversal through one's nasal passage nothing if not a pleasant experience. When the explosion came, I realized why I got a C in chemistry. My brown stream of lactation surged down with the electric herky jerky motions of its poor, sorrowful source. Like a girthy milk hose with Parkinson's disease mounted on a colorful piece of playground equipment, I reigned down my flood of chocolatey devastation onto the playground rocks ten feet below, sweeping up ash and soot alike out of the carbon-monoxide filled air like a bullet-train through the wind. This was Ian's cue to follow suit, and soon after, the glorious Drew unleashed his faucet of froth with a soundscape of disturbing gurgling noises, like an audible sneak peak of Aliens vs Predator with the Predator having the upper hand. Those kids don't know how lucky they are that school is still two months away. Brad/Kirsanth, Zach, Drew, Drew's little brother Michelin Man, and I went bowling the night Brad arrived. Nothing so much out of the ordinary there, but on our way out of the bowling alley, back into the smoke and ash, I noticed a pregnant girl smoking a cigarette outside. On the news, they were saying that right now the air is 1000 times as polluted as normal. They're not kidding either; just go outside and look at something black from a foot away, it almost looks like there's little grey pieces of snow fluttering up and down not really sure where they're going. My lungs know where they're going, but I'm not about to broadcast their destination to the few death particles who were sufficiently lost as to not kill a man with their very being. The news also said that if you wear a mask or some type of filter, it will only improve the quality of the air to about 300x the normal pollution level. Hot dog. I've started breathing water instead. I don't see little particles of tree and forest creatures floating around in my water, and once again, if chemistry taught me anything, there's plenty of oxygen just waiting to be breathed out of nature's most primitive fluid. Well, to be perfectly honest, I haven't tried this yet. I'll have a drill nearby when I try it for the first time, just in case. Have you ever thought about the word 'cough'? Before you go on, take a moment and study that word and ask yourself if it's spelled right or terribly wrong. Look at it! That sounds more like the sound a raven would make if you shot it with a nail gun. Speaking of birds, my parents and I were sitting in our living room, watching episode #13 of Freaks & Geeks, and a bird fell straight out of the air. Birds plummeting out of thin air like a rock put a little more emphasis on these ideas environmentalists have been pitching around for years. It wasn't until then that I said to myself, "So that's what this pollution stuff is all about." This smoke is getting pretty hardcore, indeed. Lately, I've been experimenting with the idea of learning to play the bagpipe so if I'm ever down on life, I could jump out of a plane and play Amazing Grace on the way down to my own demise. But no, a kazoo would probably suffice. June 26th, 2004 - You'll get tired of me yet! Comments [34] Have you ever seen that movie Basketball Diaries? I forget the gist of it all but it had something to do with Leonardo DiCaprio, playing some sort of emotional hard ass, carrying around one of those spiral-less notebooks with black and white splotches all over it, the same kind the serial killer in Se7en seemed very passionate about. I guess he keeps a diary or writes beautiful poetry in it or something. To tell you the truth, between the one-on-one basketball game against the warden of Oz (Ernie Hudson, he was also a Ghostbuster) and the fact that DiCaprio kept his journal folded in half, I couldn't stay tuned into the message of it all. Where this is all leading is this: if I grew up in the ghetto, I hope I would be doing the same thing. Playing basketball with ghostbusters and writing random shit in a spiral-less notebook. That would basically be the low-tech version of UltraMuffin.com, only this way I'd be carrying around my website folded up in my back pocket. The Fluff Junction would be a Maxim. I would be content. But I swear my broke-ass parents would still spend every evening watching Friends, Frasier, and The West Wing, otherwise it just wouldn't be them. When I bought my current TV (four years ago), I rented Basketball Diaries and Dune. Those two movies compliment each other like Cheech & Chong, trust me. You'd never know mixing orange juice with ice cream was such a great idea until you've tried it! And how vibrant the grass when I turned on the television for the first time and The Next Karate kid was on with Hilary Swank standing in a field. By the way, we're talking about a $150, 20", standard low-definition television here. When you live thrifty the smallest purchases can make you feel like a king! Since I mentioned Hilary Swank, I might as well ask if you've seen the movie Boys Don't Cry. That was a great movie. If you're looking for a movie that projects insecurities like a waxed and shimmering aurora rolling around on a galactic sheet of tin foil, you can't do much better. The problem is that I think Hilary Swank is reasonably attractive. She has her own unique look going on and all. I know Robin Williams agrees with me after he went berserk on Conan, stopping just short of revealing his Hilary Swank alter, flowing with poisoned Koolaid, polluted with Karate Kid trinkets, dripping with unsound bedazzlement from the farthest reaches of taste, from the musky depths of sin. There was a point here, but I had to do some backtracking to find it. Yes, there is a daunting anomaly in the schematics of Hilary Swank. She so convincingly played a boy in Boys Don't Cry that it frightens me to risk thinking of the implications. This is one of those thoughts better left for Friday, because as many of us know, anything goes on Friday. Lord in Heaven. iPowerWeb, the place that hosts my website, recently updated their website with new hosting plans. Actually, to see these new hosting options, you'd have to head on over to iPower.com, because iPowerWeb.com is outdated. This company is iPower and iPowerWeb, all at once. How does that work out? I emailed their customer service and that was the first question I asked, "Get your shit straight! I see you have the same phone number. Try as you might to mess this up, I'll figure you out!" It's typical that my questions end in an exclamation mark and do not necessarily constitute a query, leave me alone. When all is said and done, I think they have some very decent hosting plans. When my subscription runs out near the middle of August, I'm planning on renewing under the iPower Pro Plus plan. That's $156/year for 2gb of webspace, 60gb of bandwidth/month, unlimited email addresses (which is absolutely essential when I've already given out four of my allotted 400 for the past year), three free domains (which sounds real cool because I keep forgetting how cheap it is to register a domain), and some other random stuff. So basically I'm paying about $50 more a year for 1.2gb of additional webspace. I've wasted $50 on many things in my life, but I think this is a relatively good use of that money. The Fluff Junction needs room for growth, and hell, that's enough extra space to host CD ISOs, best not to get myself into trouble though. The 60gb of transfer sounds nifty too, but I average about 2gb/month as far as bandwidth goes, and that was before I deleted the 90mb Alizee video I was hosting... replacing it with this NextDoorNikki video, which I've been told is not up to par with Alizee. I'll need a much larger audience before bandwidth becomes a concern. I demand an audience so large that I can run up 60gb of bandwidth by text alone! You can then call me The Scribe and I'll get a tattoo of the Hamburglar soldering a modchip into a PSone on my back. People would be like "I don't know what the hell that man's doing, but I sure hope he does!" I don't. Trust me. I'm disappointed that our local movie theater does not seem to be showing Fahrenheit 9/11. I was planning on going to that movie by myself Friday after work. Idunno why, but going to movies alone seems very refreshing to me. I went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean alone the day it opened last summer and ended up sleeping through 80% of it because I'd been awake for 31 hours; I would do it again in a heartbeat. I think back on that with the fondest of memories, utterly devoid of explanation. Yeah, looks like our theater is one of the ones that decided not to show it. I'm not particularly political, but I dislike Bush (or whoever's calling the shots), but I also don't like Michael Moore (if the things I read about him are true). However, I still wanna be first in line to see this movie! I spent the last hour of work reading up on how Michael Moore stretched the truth (or lied, depending on how you look at it) in Bowling For Columbine. I want to know how severely my head will be bung with a shovel before I dive head-first into this propaganda machine. You heard it here first folks; bung is the pale, spider-veined nephew of bang's past tense. It's intellectual masochism! Feel the sting! Of course, no one has seriously considered manufacturing a life-size gummy bear suit because it wouldn't last eight minutes outside of the closet without getting eaten. They should have taught a class in Getting Along in high school to offset the hate that Government class spawned. I'd teach the class but I know I'd just screw it up by saying all the girls in the class had to wear hot pants or something to that effect. Damn those high school girls! Give them the world and you'll get distraction in return! June 24th, 2004 - Overdrive! Comments [165] This is my new killer idea, writing an update during my spare time at work (and believe me, there's an overwhelming amount of that). The only problem with this scheme of mine is that I have no privacy at all at work. I basically sit at a table (a very nice, new, professional, and cozy looking table; don't get me wrong) along the wall where anyone and everyone can see my screen if they want to. Unfortunately for them, I'm typing this in a tiny little terminal window while logged into the 224MHz super computer of my very own. As a consequence of this lack of privacy, I feel as though someone is always looking over my shoulder. This is neither healthy nor beneficial in any way, I'll admit, but all I can do is put up with it while I do my thing, under a miserable cloud of paranoia and suspicion. Holy shit, the head of this whole department just walked by and I twitched like a furious lightning bolt with skeletons in its closet. Too much coffee for me. I got three and a half hours of sleep, which wouldn't normally be so bad, but when it occurs between the times of 8:00 PM and 11:30 PM, come 9:30 AM, it feels like a frog wizard with a file warped into existence to promptly shape a mischievous, dastardly, and downright dirty conglomeration of Tylenol PM, thermal paste, and all things unwanted on a Thursday morning into a fine point to slide it covertly through my pupil and play croquet with half a dozen neurons and a KFC popcorn chicken. The one I was forced to snort for extra credit in the second grade. Easy come, easy go. The frog vanished; it must be this quantum entanglement gimmick I've been hearing bits and pieces about. I've had four of these Starbucks-style, insulated plastic coffee cups full of coffee so far, which, technically speaking, is about twelve cups of coffee. I feel magical. And that urinal across the hall's thirst has been quenched an ample numbers of times. I feel like using the word audacious for something but I forgot what it means and don't care to look it up at the moment. Every time I get three to four hours of sleep and wake up around midnight, I'm pretty much screwed for the night (in the strictly virgin sense of the word, I'm afraid). I lay in bed with my two damn-near industrial strength fans performing a reenactment of winter through the unmistakably-summer, perpetual rays of assault and anguish shooting through my flesh two times over and bouncing off the tired walls before settling to the ground, only to take the lift back up and target their reticles once again upon insomniacs and large-haired tourists. It was 4 AM, but this is exactly what I expected. One of these days I'll learn to just keep sleeping when I wake up at midnight, but it's difficult to make the right decision when you're disoriented so. I heard the voice of reason trying to speak up and do me a favor, but moments later I managed to replace that voice with the lofty and treacherous resonation of one Panzer Dragoon Orta. That dragon screams with the sorrow of a seventeen year old paraplegic pig being slaughtered by Yahtzee through a membrane of honey. You wouldn't think he could do much with the mobility of only two hooves, but the good God graced him with a mean game of SimTower. When all is said and done someone's gotta suck the block of honey out of the drainpipe, and you'd better pray there's no encumbered mosquito rolling dice with the fate prehistoria. I beat Panzer Dragoon Orta for the fourth time, this was the first time on Hard though. I was planning to beat the Hard difficulty over the course of a week or so, but it only took two days... and I only played it for thirty minutes the first day. This game seemed so hard when I played it through for the first time on Easy, but apparently I've mastered the art of the Dragoon because I only died once the entire time through Hard. It's all cool though, I still have plenty of stuff to unlock and the game gives you a grade on four aspects of each level, as well as an overall grade. There's certainly some improvement to be made there. I want to make the Panzer Dragoon Honor Roll. I'll spray paint a broom silver and run around till I fall into the river, and then I'll just swish-swash away wherever the current takes me, not unlike the worthless events of this horrendous sleep-deprived day. As I sat in my kitchen munching down on a microwaved Egg McMuffin ripoff between a hot dog and a Hershey bar, each lined up for their chance to ride down the voided tonsil coffee slide, I managed to catch sight and sound (television is a multimedia experience!) of a commercial for a most upsetting product. TUMS without the chalky taste. TUMS without the chalky taste? What's the point of that?! The chalky taste is precisely why I printed out my own custom label which suggests 27 tablets as the recommended dosage. It works on a subconscious level. It must. Forget the Sweet Tarts and Mike & Ike (recent studies suggest they are, in fact, more than just roommates), Safeway should have a whole gallery of TUMS machines lined up for the kiddies to toss their hard-earned quarters in, just to taste the essence of chalk which manages to elude even those extravagant classroom ornaments. If I had a filter that could build up a supply of TUMS from the constituents of piss, I'd be first in line to colonize the moon. You can quote me on that. Remember when Kevin Costner drank his own wang tang in Waterworld? I knew you would! If I, purely by chance, ever become a doctor or other sort of medical professional, I will see to my lasting goal of introducing, or prescribing at the very least, a high-end line of glowing placebos. They will be perceived as a mere novelty in the beginning, without a doubt, possibly enjoying a brief fad of luxury appeal. This is all before the full-on Zen Buddhist functionality of the tranquil greens, oceanic blues, reds and gratuitous yellows receive mainstream acclaim. Acceptance will grow and spread like stubborn roots stripping away stained black concrete, defiling the basement of tradition. Left is only a utopian society dropping impromptu disco balls in white porcelain fountains, faint murmurs of excitement riding in on flat waves of recursion. I will be in my room, a kingpin of vibrancy cutting and folding new experiences of malformed teabags and shaping distorted lifestyles from salt and the scent of decay. Death never was an illusion; the pain is only emotional. We will be alone for a long time to come. June 19th, 2004 - The Fear Has Been Felt Comments [35] I have been Feeling the Fear, and it has been good! The other day, as I was driving home from work, I saw a giant piece of pizza jumping up and down on the sidewalk waving to passers-by. I began to shield my face from the terror that would surely be inflicted by this disgruntled piece of dough, fresh out of the oven and out to reek havoc upon its creators and consumers alike. With a detestable grim emanating from impossible directions, the dark distant clouds carrying strife in over the horizon, I wondered, is this piece of pizza hurt beyond repair? Maybe if I could just reach out to it to show that we are a relatively loving race. I formed my right hand into a loving fist and punched the off-center portion of my steering wheel, as close to the heart as I could manage without striking the solid pimpmobile symbol residing in the middle of the winter-processed, cracked and caverned plastic. My vehicle let out a mighty roar and the enraged slice of pizza quickly performed the most turbulent 180 I ever did see. And he waved! He smiled and waved to me. I waved back, and how great the feeling. I have welcomed new allies in the diligent race against fear. So, at work I haven't been doing a whole lot. I've concluded that my employer must have some sorta quota to fulfill, because there would be no other excuse to hire as many student assistants as they have. I get these vague projects every week or so that can be slapped together in a couple days, and then I wait. The first week of my job, my boss told me not to be shy about asking him questions or finding out what to do next, but I get the impression that every time I talk to him he's a little less happy to talk to me because he honestly has nothing for me to do. But once I get a conversation going with him, it usually lasts an hour or more. One time I was talking to him about mostly random computer stuff for an hour and a half. His wife called three times during this interval and three times she was shot down. Flooding The Craig with an onslaught of obscure UNIX commands takes priority. Though I did find it a bit strange when someone called up and reminded him his mom was having surgery that day. Our conversation came to a standstill and he just kinda stared off into space for a stretch of time that was just barely outside the range of comfort, right before telling me he forgot about his mom's surgery in a shameful voice. So what do I do at work when I have nothing left to do? By golly, that's the best question I've heard all day! I read Alice in Wonderland of course. One of my projects involves (I say 'involves' in the present tense because technically this project isn't done, but there's nothing left for me to do before additional instruction) setting up an 'Open Archives Initiative'-compliant static repository of the 12,000 ebooks in the Project Gutenberg collection, complete with PHP-generated XML pages of whatever metadata there is to list for each book. My boss told me to pick a single book to try it out before trying to scale the project up for all the books. He told me to pick Alice in Wonderland. There was actually no reason for me to download Alice in Wonderland, the book itself was never required to cross my eyes. But what the hell, I downloaded it anyway. And after I ran outta stuff to do, I started reading Alice in Wonderland! It's a lot better than I would have thought, and very weird. Weirder than you'd think, simply because of the things the narrator says. Here, you can even see for yourself! And when I feel like a quick read, I'll go for the always-loved, random NES game GameFAQs reviews. There's nothing better. I must have read at least ten NES game reviews on Friday, and probably about ten more GBA reviews. The only problem with recreational reading of game reviews is that I want to play/buy every game I read about, especially the shitty ones. For some reason, once a shitty game is three years old, it is enlisted on my 'Must Play' list. This is not healthy, nor is it cute. But what's it matter! I still wanna play Resident Evil: Survivor. I've noticed that a lot of these fellows who post reviews on GameFAQs really go out of their way to make their reviews funny. It is for this reason, and perhaps for this reason alone, that I am now considering posting reviews on GameFAQs. I would like to do my part for the cause, and give all those other folks out there something to read and chuckle at while they're bored at work. I also listen to a lot of music at work, which is unfortunate because I'm finally growing sick of a lot of my favorite albums. I listen to my music on an old Sony Discman that's nine years old. It even stopped working for over a year, but, like Jesus, rose from the depths of purgatory to ease my pain once again. I never paid attention in Sunday school, so I'm not really sure where Jesus spent his time after he died and before he raised from the dead. If it were me I'd probably arrange to bowl and watch the Twilight Zone at the same time. As you might have guessed, nine year old Discmans don't support MP3 CDs, so I'm quite outdated. I have ten or so audio-format CD-Rs with me at work, safely cradled in my purple, high-school branded CD carrying case. I'm sure I'm the only male from the class of 2001 to actually use the CD case out in public, but I always have the color blindness excuse to fall back on because, in all actuality, the damn thing is blue. I spend my hours listening to the likes of KMFDM, MDFMK, Das Ich, cEvin Key, Marilyn Manson, Wumpscut, and some assorted 'mix CDs'. I brought my CD case home to change the oil. I need to switch it up with a little Amoeba, Unheilig, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Seabound, Twista, Numb and Front Line Assembly. On a somewhat related note, I found out about a week ago that I have permanent hearing loss in my right ear. I haven't been hearing correctly out of my right ear since January. I thought it was a sinus problem for the longest time because I found out last summer I have this 'Chronic Sinusitis' condition that's like a sinus infection that never goes away. Apparently I've had this Chronic Sinusitis thing since birth but it really seems to be in full swing now! I had a sinus headache a year ago that was so bad I honestly expected my left eyeball to shoot out of my head like a cannon, Fist of the North Star style! Alas, I have 60% hearing loss for the lower half of the audible frequency spectrum in my right ear. It didn't seem so weird when I thought it was temporary, but now it seems strange as hell. It explains a lotta things though. I was told that the frequencies I have trouble hearing are not typically used for speech, which sounds about right. I can hear people talking just fine, it's certain background noises like the hum of a computer that I can't seem to hear at all out of my right ear. This condition is called Otosclerosis, my mom has it too; it's genetic. My hearing will continue to get worse and worse over the years, more so than an average person. It is correctable, but only when it's at its worst for some reason. That could be five years or thirty years... and I'm not sure which to root for! My mom just had surgery on her ear five days ago, six days after finding out I have this condition too. It's a good thing I have Chronic Sinusitis though, that means my left ear might plug up regularly and I'll remember what it's like to hear equally out of each ear! And then I'll walk around looking at the color purple cuz I never know what the hell is going on when I see purple! I'm a genetic grab bag! I dare someone to have children with me! It's somewhat comforting to know that I didn't cause this hearing loss by my own accord, listening to loud music and whatnot. In fact, the doctor said this condition is sorta like an ear plug. If I listen to loud music, my hearing will not deteriorate as quickly in that ear because the sound doesn't make it far enough to cause damage... and then if I ever have surgery, voila! A time capsule of good hearing! I liked that man's style, looking on the up and up. But I still told him not to encourage me! It's also comforting to know that if I had good hearing, I'd probably just waste it on shit like this: Mortified Rage - Fuck Cops II (Die Pig Die) Schizoid vs FFF - Dead By Dawn Kerberos vs Noisekick - 666bpm I suggest you turn down your volume before you start the Schizoid vs FFF one. Also, don't be surprised if the Kerberos vs Noisekick one crashes your Winamp; that is to be expected. It is simply an indication of how hardcore it is. On the way back from the doctor's office, riding with my mom, we went to McDonald's. And what do you know, the crazy black girl who worked at Sam's Club last year and gave me a hug before moving to Anchorage is back in Fairbanks, and working there at McDonald's! Ima have to start going to McDonald's more often just to do what I do. You see, she's the kind of person who hates everyone. At least, that's the image that she portrays. She hurled nothing but criticism and pseudo-insults at me for the first month and a half I worked at Sam's Club, but what could I do? I'm a lover, not a fighter! She served up increasingly devastating esteem mufflers (as that really is what they were, not quite insults), I served up increasing amounts of goofiness. The last two months I worked there, she became even more pissed off at me because she found herself smiling whenever I was around, even laughing against her will at some of the stupidest things that have ever come out of my mouth. This went against the grain of her image, so every instance of her smiling or laughing was followed up by her telling me to go away or attempting to jump-kick me. If I start hanging out at McDonald's now I might be at risk of getting burgers thrown at me. This I can handle. My garage has made it onto my list of the worst five smells I've ever experienced in my life. The #1 spot, of course, is still rotting pizza dough. I'm not sure if I mentioned it in my last entry, but at the Gallagher show, Gallagher took off his shirt halfway through the food smashing portion of the show and threw it out into the audience. My mom caught his shirt! She asked me what I wanted to do with it, if she should wash it or what. I told her we should hang onto it unwashed until I can get some pictures of it for my website. Unfortunately, after 24 hours, the sour kraut, mayonnaise, dog food, Pepto Bismol, honey, blood, sweat, semen and SARS soaked into the shirt and only a black, glitter-covered piece of merchandise remained. I guess it was still up to me to decide what to do with it, and I couldn't make a decision, so that cotton demon owned my garage up and down for three weeks. Now when you walk into my garage it smells like all those wonderful ingredients described above, but five times as potent as it smelled at the show itself, and with that loving touch of heat that makes all bad smells worth remembering. Now enjoy the refreshments over at The Fluff Junction. Currently, The Junction has a user base of almost entirely supercomputing-center workers. You must save us from ourselves. Upload pictures and add comments. I dare you to out-nerd us. It can't be done. May 23rd, 2004 - Some more text Comments [212] Yo Yo Yo ! I finished my first week of work, and it is great! In contrast with the other jobs I've had in the past, this job only took me about one day to get used to, as opposed to a week or two. I am finally in my place! And look at this, I'm typing faster than ever! Yep, sitting there on a computer for eight hours a day is really making me one with the machines, but that's really how it should be. I'm learning UNIX commands at a phenomenal rate! Unfortunately, this might make it difficult to write about anything but computers on this journal of mine, but I'll try! Not yet though! On my first day of work, I got a quick tour of the super computer center, including the basement where they keep all of these super pieces of machinery (five in total I think, but they have at least one 'on loan' which seems kinda weird). It's just this big room with all kinds of computer equipment the size of refrigerators. The two newest super computers are larger than my bedroom though, and twice as menacing looking. Plus they have these five-petabyte 'storage silos'. That's ridiculous. Five petabytes. About 5,000,000 gigabytes. Anywho, my job for now does not involve any of these machines. My boss has this dual 3GHz-processor machine with five terabytes (5,000 gigabytes) of storage that sits in a caged cabinet lurking among the super computers. It is our job, the two of us, to put it to use. So for my first two or three weeks, we're setting it up to function as an automated mirror site to host huge amounts of Linux software. We're doing this while we wait for someone to give us data to host and implement search engines and stuff for via PHP and MySQL. Anything is good with me. It's funny, the week before I started my job I was basically doing the same stuff, albeit with a much more primitive computer (224 MHz), just trying to think of a way to use it as a server. Except at home I don't have five terabytes and an OC3 connection at my disposal. The best part of this job is that I just get to sit there all day unhassled, listening to music, drinking (free) coffee, and everyone is extremely nice too! I went to Gallagher Friday night. I thought I was gonna spend the whole time laughing AT him, not WITH him, because of how corny he is, but boy was I in for a surprise. Gallagher is the biggest asshole I've ever seen in my life. Apparently he has given up on his innocent '80s brand of humor that we all remember from those videos that never get rented, except by me, sitting on the shelf at the local video store. Upon getting the tickets for the show, we were trying to remember if Gallagher uses profanity or not, we decided no, he doesn't. He does. Holy shit. Not only does he cuss, he calls eight year old girls 'bitches'. He puts specially-cut boxer shorts over fifteen year old girls to show everyone how they can be used as a sports bra, and then tells said fifteen year old girl she could look like an ass if she squeezed her tits together. He harasses women in their late 20s about giving birth to bastard children. He pulls teenagers who appear to be slow up on stage to shout at them and hit them in the chest repeatedly. He also goes off for minutes about how ugly Arab women are. This guy is PISSED. I swear there must have been over 200 people out of the 1000 there that were ready to burn this man alive, and I was bordering on being person #201. Do NOT support Gallagher! He is a poison! He pulls you in under the pretense of family fun, to give you a chance to laugh at a washed up comedian's expense for a measly $35, and then he lashes out in a fit of rage. It's frightening! At the end of my last entry, you'll notice I said 'I feel like getting something in the mail.' As misplaced and oddly timed as that might have seemed, I meant it with all my heart! So, after my first day of work, figuring I made around $64 after taxes, I went on an Amazon adventure with my pocket full of virtual money! Normally when I decide I want to buy something, I fight the urge for a week or two. I figure if it doesn't survive that two-week buffer period, I didn't truly want it. This is good impulse control, it works great because it keeps me from buying 75% of the stuff I think I want. However, I've been marinating on the thought of buying the entire series of Freaks & Geeks on DVD for over two months, and I wanted it more than ever, so it was bought! The 'entire series' might seem a bit expensive, but you also must take into account that you have never heard of Freaks & Geeks. Only I have heard of Freaks & Geeks. This is because it was cancelled before its first season completed. So the entire series is only 18 episodes, but hour-long episodes, so it's still quite a bit of entertainment! It's basically like an hour-long Wonder Years set in the '80s, without a voice-over, with more main characters, and much more awkward situations. Whoever cast the geeks was a genius; these geeks are the real deal. I know this because the three of them are like the three different angles of the Muffin, a solid geek. Anyway yeah, so this DVD set cost $49 and along with the 18 hour-long episodes are 29 hours of commentary. That's awesome! I also bought this book called 'Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway' recommended to me by Maxine, my IRC mom. Hopefully this book will turn me into a super human with extraordinary powers of boldness. If not, I still like to read, so it's win-win really. Speaking of The Wonder Years, I've been watching two episodes of that show on my computer every morning before work. What a weird habit to get into. I only have the first two seasons of it, out of six or so, which makes me sad. I downloaded them off of suprnova.org, and then decided I should watch the ones I have before I hoard the others like a klepto. This was a dreadful mistake, because they disappeared! I had ample opportunity to download the other four seasons and I screwed it up! Someone find them for me! This is why having Freaks & Geeks on the way is absolutely essential, I'll lose my grip on life if I don't have little kids acting out my current state of life for me! Which brings me to another point, I just saw an episode of The Wonder Years that summed up the entire past year of my life in 22 minutes. The part of me was played by a 7th grader. Hold on while I find a fistful of sleeping pills. The Wonder Years just kicked me in the face and stomped on my head. I think Kevin Arnold is my mentor now. I need to get the 5th and 6th season of The Wonder Years just to find out what I'll be doing in my 60s. Oh and also, just a second ago I found the first (real) picture had been uploaded to The Fluff Junction by someone other than myself. This makes me exceedingly happy! The Fluff Junction needs to take on a life of its own! Upload pictures you bastards! I enabled anonymous uploading so you don't even have to register first! But NO! That is not a ticket to upload a picture of that Alf-shirt kid! He fucks on the first date I heard! He's giving Kevin Arnold a run for his money! How can I live in this world if not by feeling the fear! But I'll do it anyway! I finished Valis during my lunch break at work Friday. My sights are still set on Electric Jesus Corpse, I'll be going in for the kill shortly! I don't think I'll be reading Electric Jesus Corpse at work though, not anywhere where anyone can see the title at least. Especially knowing that my 'uber-boss' (my boss's boss's boss's ...) goes to church. 'My' church, in fact. Did you know the proper use of an apostrophe for single-syllable words ending in 's' is to put an apostrophe and an 's' after it (such as I did with boss's up there). Most people will tell you that's wrong. But they are wrong because they do not feel the fear. I feel the fear. I feel it every day. May 14th, 2004 - So this is what summer feels like Comments [129] Hmmmmm! Well I suppose a lot has happened since the last update, or maybe not, I don't know. The biggest thing is that I got hired by my university's supercomputer center to program! I start on the 17th, and I'm not nervous yet, but you can be sure that I will be soon! As nerve racking as starting my first 'office job' will be, it sure as hell beats working as a cashier at Sam's Club. Except for the girls, perhaps. You see, my experience at Sam's Club last summer can essentially be thought of as a loudspeaker blaring an inch away from either ear 'This is where the girls are. This is where progress is made.' I can't help but think I had many chances to make a move last summer, but it's much easier to punch yourself in the face after the fact than it is to grow some balls. Unless you're one of those scrotal starfishes that can regenerate testicles at the bottom of the sea and pitch them to De Beers as diamonds centered on adventure and pain. You'll understand at this point why I did not make any sort of reference to my website on my application, resume, or during my interview. I might as well write 'Back to Sam's Club I go!' However, I figure working as a programmer at a supercomputer center pretty much translates into never seeing a girl again, but that'll be okay since I'll just be spaced out in programmer world all day, thus making the day go by about two or three times quicker than normal. The alternative would be selling 800 pounds of bottled water to every third customer between oceans of soy sauce and Harry Potter books that look eerily like that color I cannot see, in a way that I will never quite understand. I've got a harry potter too, but I only let him out of my basement when he needs more clay, for fear of him shedding over my Fresca (I don't really drink that shit, not anymore). I was at Taco Bell the other day, probably something like three days ago. I don't think this story requires the usual absurd UltraMuffin treatment because it's fine as it is, we'll see. This is really less of a story but more of blue print for or a commentary of my perpetual state of social confusion, lest it have some type of climax. Sitting down at the Barbie-sized table-and-chair ensemble, eating the tasty layer of cheese and meat the nacho supreme chips had left behind, the fork failed me. Perhaps a spork would have sufficed to get me out of this restaurant alive? No, a voice would tell me; an internal voice with faith in destiny, a spark of madness in a hazy landscape of intensity and wonder. Staring at this glob of meat, cheese, and mostly sour cream sitting idly on my black jeans a mere inch and a half away from my reproductive organs, it was no secret that today was yet another defeat growing within the vast cornfields of failure planted by the seeds of my birth. A trip to the rest room would be essential in this time of dire need, my trust then lay in the piping of this wonderful establishment. The sink. The faucet. My friends, however, had deserted me, and lacking the attention to stay hungry, I found myself in excess of one burrito. I could not simply lay the burrito on the table and hope for its continued presence on my return, so I decided it would be best for me, as well as for the burrito, to carry the burrito with me into the rest room. After swinging the rectangular contraption inward to claim residence in this room of rest, my eyes fell upon an employee of Taco Bell. Staring into the mirror, he wistfully combed his hair this way and that to attain perfection; my preoccupations lay elsewhere. I decided I would need to wait before I could use that one lonely sink protruding from the wall and into the employee's midsection, so in a moment of uncertainty, feeling social pressure pushing its thumbs against my eyes, I carried my burrito on into a stall. Thirty seconds had passed, and this employee made no indication of a desire to leave the restroom, so I laid my burrito down on top of the toilet paper dispenser and tried to pee. Twenty seconds was all it took before I concluded that there was not an ounce of pee within me with which to dispel, and therefore no feasible excuse to flush the toilet. Panicky, my mind pumped out solution after potential solution to this dreadful play of which I was the starring role. Here I stood buried seven layers deep within the heart of the beast, encapsulated within my barrier of harmless intentions, burrito by my side, focusing on the recollection that this very employee had taken notice to the burrito in my hand as I walked into this mess, and would no doubt stand by as long as necessary to see where it all ends. Course of action: walk out of this horrible room, with my burrito, as if I do this every day. This was done. Let us never speak of it again. Yet another paragraph about restrooms. Damnit. So I'm about halfway through this book called Valis by Philip K. Dick, and it's just blowing my mind. You can always rely on Philip K. Dick to exercise your brain in ways you never imagined. I love this book, but I have to stop every ten pages to attempt to process what has just been injected into my head, and usually that has turned out to be a mistake. I'll try and describe the first fifty or so pages, and it'll be your job to envision a book that starts this way and gets exponentially weirder every ten pages... I guess you can consider the rest of this paragraph a SPOILER, so if you already had this book in your reading queue, which I suspect you didn't, don't read this! The main character is a schizophrenic, he spends most of his time narrating the story of his other personality, a man named Horselover Fat. A pinkish ray of light aimed at Horselover Fat's head informed Fat that his son had a life-threatening hernia and needed surgery. This light was not actually pink, was not actually a color in fact, as Fat described it as a beam of information outside the range of color, possibly in the range of radio or heat waves. After the light hit these specific parts of his brain, he began thinking in Koine, a dialect of Greek he does not understand, and then he began to see ancient Rome superimposed over 1974 California. He suspects the pinkish beam of light was aimed at him from very far away, perhaps from an alien of another solar system or possibly even God, or a god. He suspects that the creator God from Genesis is a blind god, believing himself to be the only god when in fact there are many. The world he created was an irrational one hiding the God's world, the rational world, from the beings of the irrational world. He believes Jesus Christ to be living information, an alien being, or both, who only intended to save his small group of living followers by teaching them that we do not exist in spacetime, but are all nodes of a singular Mind, sitting stationary as we are fed information that draws out our universe and its behavior. It's actually a hell of a lot weirder than I made it sound, trust me, and not just for the sake of being weird. This is actually somewhat of a biography of Philip K. Dick; Horselover Fat is supposed to be him. In any case, this book just makes me want to consume hardcore drugs; they sound spectacular. And to think, after I finish this book I'm looking to read something a bit more grounded in reality... I'm referring to Electric Jesus Corpse of course. I'm downloading Mandrake Linux at the moment, it's time to put my 224MHz Cyrix powerhouse to use once again. For some reason, getting Apache, PHP, and MySQL working together in harmony in Red Hat is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. I somehow managed to get Apache and PHP working together through some form of divine intervention the last I messed with it, but never seemed to find a solution to the MySQL problem. But screw it, Mandrake is supposed to work like that out of the box I hear! The real problem will be in finding a use for a home webserver, especially since I'm already paying for hosting here. The more I mess around with PHP, the more cool I think it is! I just wish I had a use for it really... and more bandwidth for home! It would be stretching the truth to refer to this as any sort of real use, but I did manage to install a perversion station on my webspace. Hail Fluff Junction! Upload! Also, some time ago, I went to this fancy dress-up church dinner, a dinner that charged admission (for the food or because God is a mooch, we may never know). My parents had already paid my way in, this was entrapment. Something was not right with me that day, or maybe small hints of my spite towards church had bubbled up from the past, but I decided I would wear the wild spider / pot leaf shirt to this gathering. There, amidst the swish-swashing undertow of sociable suits and dresses, I stood tall as a misplaced hallucinogen at a tea party. I would have been getting off too easy if I hadn't taken the opportunity to meet my new boss' boss' dare I say boss' boss at this uppity shitfrolic, as fate would have it. Finding myself in a state registered to the 'stuck and not moving' alliance on the Fisher Price elevator with my Grandma punctuated my evening like a # punctuates a sentence, which is to say poorly, and with a lot of extraneous pounding. I feel like getting something in the mail. April 17th, 2004 - Shut up already! Comments [201] Yeah, it's been a while, but I have no apologies to give! I had a bucket of them ready to place in the most heartwarming sectors of this page, but before I could get around to it, I spread some salsa all over them and burned them in a barrel in my back yard. The barrel was red and said STFU along the side in a font far more terrifying than Times New Roman, and with good cause! That barrel was speaking to all you Comment goblins out there! Shut the fuck up! No no, it's all good. I've been real busy with school though. Not just homework, but lots of presentations and debates and whatnot. The kind of thing I actually spend a plentiful amount of time preparing for, as not to look like an ass in front of a classroom of these entities known as my peers. You'll notice, this is the exact opposite of how my website works. If I'm going to look like an ass, it's got to be right here on my website! The debate entailed me, the muffin, not in his usual state of ultra but rather a state of uncertainty and trepidation (a word that I've been trying to use regularly since I saw it in the book Foundation and said to myself, "Jeepers, if I could learn to use words like that, I'd sound like the illegitimate offspring of a Yale graduate!" Illegitimate you see, because anyone who's talked to me for more than five minutes can tell I was raised in a household of blazing toasters, flaming snow, explosive VCRs, and a willingness to have ones digits shocked in a light socket multiple times in a single sitting, all of which can be attributed to my brother. These are not Yale genes). The presentation was a 30min, PowerPoint speech in Programming Languages. My topic was a language called Smalltalk but somewhere along the way I got side tracked and started talking about my fear of winged ants. Yesterday, on the way home from school, I braved my way down approximately four miles of asphalt in my rusted albino, solid titanium piece of shit elephant car (which no longer makes horrible metal-on-metal screeching noises when I brake, thanks to the wisdom of Jeremiah, some new brake pads, and some other stuff I don't quite understand but I try my darndest), and found myself stuck dead center in the middle of a busy intersection for reasons beyond me. How one of those traffic-light, car-detector dealies can miss the presence of my car in the left turn lane when my car was listed 2nd on the world's largest countries list, right between Russia and the Soviet Union, does not quite calculate. Russia's alter ego decided it'd be best to back down when my mobile slice of ghetto screeched in a berserker rage as if it had taken up the art of welding just to sculpt a makeshift shank out of scrap, in a loose-resemblance of the quasi-devious, trifectious TDK logo itself, gracing so many green-bottomed CD-Rs of the past which coincidentally wouldn't accomplish jack shit of all trades in the modded, gray-slabbed Playstation of yesteryear. Jesus. So multifaceted, it's prismatic! Sonic resonations to the beat of scraping that mercury-oozing shiv of a shank orthogonal to the previously unsurmountable flow of crevices, engaging in chaotic motions of stillborn expansions, orbiting along the lonely, altogether unfulfilling path of 2 Pi R, reaching forward in giant strides to the pivoting point of the painless past. Only to find ruins at its dated location of departure. Just to get to the video store. At the video store, I rented The Hudsucker Proxy, an odd movie from 1994 made by the Coen brothers and starring Tim Robbins. I was standing in line for quite some time, trying not to look impatient because, in fact, I seem to have all the patience in the world but fear that I wear the face of an impatient man when I start spacing out and thinking about MegaMan III. Some middle-aged dude who cannot be described in words, insofar as he looked like the most generic middle-aged white man I had ever seen in my life. Unique in his genericness, I might be inclined to state. A walking paradox with a sharpened stick up his ass. The girl behind the counter was hitting some keys on the terminal of hers (I call it a terminal because it appears more outdated than those computers you see spitting out green characters of beechball-magnitude in the first three minutes of the movie Alien, which, by the way, is one of the reasons I own the movie.) Standing there as a hopeless bystander, I observed as the clerk allowed these justified and reasonable words to pass from her lips to the obscure ears of a six-foot walking asshole: "Your account has been closed." To which, this flapping anus winded "What? (some phone/account number). Come on." The clerk, one of our very own, then replied "Oh, there's a $19 late free, your account is closed until it's paid." In the seconds that followed, the lights began to flicker and upside-down crosses, formed of intersecting fetii, began to dance across the walls and windows in perplexing motions grown from the loins of an incubus spawned of Hitler's speed addiction, multiplied under the nocturnal dread of prolonged sleeping pill consumption, and proceeded to activate into an undead fury of hitherto unheard of nuclear fission constituting malformed and consequently deformed baby bits swinging into one another in helicopter-blade fashion till the skin became a solid stretch of melatonin-fabric pigmented a shade of red so dark it made black peer out with grim, envious eyes. And it was then that I knew something extraordinarily rank was about to puff out of the colon that stood before me. "I own $28 million in assets!" Yes, that is what he said! Whether this asshole was telling the truth cannot be determined at this time, but within the folds I did happen to catch a processed deposit faintly resembling one of those limited edition chicken sandwiches McDonald's stopped selling back in '82. I can only assume that the stick he had lodged so far up there brought forth complications in the insertion procedure of his enema tube, or some such scenario. The large intestine paid his dues, and as he walked out the door, announced "I own businesses from here to Homer"! (Homer is a town here in Alaska). It was then that I had the opportunity to give this man hell... in the most cowardly way I could! I bitched to the clerk about him and told her she shouldn't have to put up with that crap! All was good. Good enough, anyway. I would like to know who these people are who keep shitting in Chapman building's male restroom. One day, after having a modest six cups of coffee before leaving for school, I had to take a little preemptive wizz, and as luck would have it, the door was locked. For those of you not in the know, this is one of those single-person, gas-station style bathrooms that has a lock on the door. As has been discussed in my last entry, there are some bathrooms at this university of mine that are such shitholes I find myself holding them near and dear to my heart. This Chapman one, on the other hand, almost seems sterile. No personality at all. It makes it all the worse when I walk in there and smell a kaleidoscope's offering of inhumane scents. You know, twirl it around and you might just happen upon a whole new composition of unruly and bizarre aromas. Fragrances so cruel, to attempt to draw them out on a piece of paper would be to lunge and make slashing motions at the sketchpad with a pair of rusty scissors before sending them straight through your left eye. So on this particular day, I walked in there and it smelled like a petting zoo. I didn't know whether to urinate or to buy some pellets of food to throw at the pony who galloped out of this lifeless deathtrap after leaving it in disarray. But fine, whatever, I can deal with smells. I had not, however, anticipated that when I left the grisly scene, another person would be standing there outside the locked door waiting to go in. There is no doubt in my mind, in this young lad's consciousness, in less than ten seconds after evacuating the premises, the blame would be pinned to me. And I wept. Not because of this misdirected blame, but because I had to go to Statistics. I hate Statistics. It got me thinking, maybe the fellow who was in the bathroom before me had not, in fact, created that ghastly smell. In the days to follow, I would come to realize that it was indeed his doing. The next time I had to make use of the facilities, the very same man meandered out of the vault, that same devilish twinkle in his eye, and the world as I knew it sunk to uninhabitable depths as I was victimized by a shockwave of stenches complex as a six-dimensional Rubick's Cube in a crackling vat of Pop Rocks and honeydew melon. I felt the need to interrogate any and all in close proximity to this unearthly cleave of agony across the flesh of my day, and to figure out what reason would demand a person to twist hay and hair together with a pipe cleaner, dip them in fudge and set the resulting coagulated spiny fluffnugget spinning in a rotisserie oven until question marks began to replace the billowing black smoke. Okay, my head hurts, so enough of this craziness. A couple days ago I jumped up to grab and hang on to a basketball rim on a playground, as I've done safely in the past, but I knew what happened this time would happen eventually. I grabbed the rim just long enough for my body to swing slightly under the basket, then my fingers slipped and I went plummetting back towards Earth at a 35° angle. My options were to (a) Become damaged in a serious way or (b) Try to recover. So I chose (b). In doing so, I bent my back backwards in weird ways that reminded me of the days when I tried to imitate that bullet-dodging scene in The Matrix back in the high school hallway. The difference here being that recovering from this basketball stunt required bending my back at a much sharper angle. When I woke up the next morning, I felt as though my spine had broken apart and been taped back together with a roll of pain. But it's almost back to normal, so no worries! And on an unrelated note, I am awaiting three counterfeit Gameboy Advance games that I ordered from Hong Kong on eBay. It seems 90% of the GBA games being sold on eBay are counterfeit, but they work the same and are cheaper, so what the hell. I bought Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, Fire Emblem, and... Pinball of the fucking Dead!!! I need these games. If I keep playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon during my Operating Systems, Programming Languages, and Artificial Intelligence classes, I will be beating it in no time! << Alizee's Ass Archived Entries >> ultramuffin@yahoo.com © Ultrenial Muffiliciousness Enterprises