Well, look at that.  It’s 2009.  The change from one year to another no longer fazes me, a fact that, when I have occasion to think about it, mildly depresses me.

Tomorrow I return to work, after having had one full week off followed by a partial work-week wherein I actually did very little working. That was nice, but now I find myself looking forward to a return to routine. I thrive on it. So much so, that I can usually offer a fairly good guess weeks in advance what i will be doing on a given day.

I have resolutions for the new year, but none that I feel like sharing. That way if I fall short on them there will be no written evidence of me having done so. It’s how I roll.

JAB

Just out and about quite a bit lately.  I’m off work this entire week, which is swell, and have just been busy playing Starcraft, NBA Jam, writing, hanging out, and gambling.

More later. And in case I don’t post again before Christmas (which seems probable), I hope everyone has a fantastic, secular Christmas, and leave you with this (via Tom tomorrow):

I just spent an hour making ring tones for my phone out of mp3s. I purchased some software a couple of months ago that lets me upload them to my phone. Using this other software I downloaded, I carefully edited a few songs into short clips, crafting the perfect set of ring tones. It was wonderful. I used to do this on my old phone with an older version of the software, and despite said software being a bit clunky, it worked beautifully.

When I went to upload my precious new ring tones a few moments ago, I discovered that the software has changed, and now I can only upload MIDI files. Fucking MIDI files.

It’s enough to make a grown man cry. Or drink. Or both.

Fuck.

Earlier this year Sarah and I got hammered and watched MAY, some lameass horror movie Sarah picked off of her infamous “horror movie spreadsheet.” It was terrible; the only cool aspect was Anna Faris, who played a hot lesbian. But even this wasn’t enough to elevate the movie to “watchable.”

Afterwords, we decided it would be a good idea to write a review for Amazon.com, so that others would be forewarned as to as to how crappy MAY was, and thus might not rent it. (Honestly, illegally downloading the movie wouldn’t even make the endeavor worthwhile.) Our review lasted about five minutes on Amazon, most likely due to the fact that there was a bunch of swearing and I likened watching the movie to watching a dragon fuck a car.

This morning I found a copy of that review on my lappy, buried for some reason in a sub-subfolder. So for your reading pleasure, I submit the following:

MAY was in two words, boring and terrible. Possibly not in that order. As I write this, I consider this movie to be one of the greatest debacles in Hollywood’s long, glorious history.

No, no. That’s giving the movie too much credit. I’d rather watch a video clip of a dragon having sex with a Honda (splooge and all) than this piece of shit, waste of a perfectly good 99 cent DVD.

Where was I?

Oh yes. MAY’s sole redeeming quality (and I do mean sole) is the half-hearted lesbian tryst. Anna Ferris is a total babe. In fact, if she were our president, she’d be Babraham Lincoln. And probably still a hell of a lot better than George W. Bush.

Seriously. Fuck this movie, and fuck you if you decide to watch it after this oh-so-eloquent review.

Really…fuck you.

Every time I look at this poor, miserable penguin, a smile comes to my face:

I think I am going to name him Nate.

JAB

If you’re feeling particularly brave, click through to watch a short video clip demonstrating “The Dangers of Anal Sex.” (Oh, and if you couldn’t figure it out from the title, the video is certainly NSFW.)

My heart goes out to that poor, poor cracked-out woman and her now misshapen rectum.

You can thank Sarah for showing me this one, folks. She may have clicked on the link at random, but it was only after having shown me a video of a man dressed in an inflatable whale suit attempting to awkwardly hump another inflatable whale. Say what you will about him, but the horny bastard is determined:

Quickly, a few admin notes:

1) Nate is blogging again, this time at Under the Thinly Veiled Guise of Sanity. It’s blogging for the depressed, by the depressed. And it’s pretty damn funny. Check it out.

2) I imported all of my old archives, so now the the engine’s tentacles reach back to October 2002. I’m in the progress of updating some of the categorization, but you can still check any and all of them out.

3) I joined Twitter. Been meaning to for a while now, but just have never gotten around to it until today. There’s not much there, but stay tuned because I suspect it’s all that will get me through the workday for the near future.

That title is not really being fair to the new Bond movie, QUANTUM OF SOLACE; I just wanted to be like every film critic out there and make some sort of derogatory pun off the film’s title.

QUANTUM is actually a perfectly serviceable action movie, plenty full of chases, hand-to-hand fights, and choppy editing. It’s barely recognizable as a Bond film, though. Aside from the character’s name, penchant for banging attractive women he’s known all of five minutes, and wrinkly old, party-pooper M, Daniel Craig’s James Bond could really be any other tortured action hero out there. Like Jason Bourne.

And that’s where this movie ultimately fails. It so desperately wants to Be like the BOURNE movies it forgot what’s supposed to make it a James Bond movie: a sense of fun. Even during CASINO ROYALE, as dark and violent as it was, you never forgot you were watching a 007 movie. This was a new Bond, a younger, more violent and raw chap, but you felt like you were watching a Bond in training. In QUANTUM — the first direct sequel in the Bond pantheon — all of this is thrown out the window. Bond spends most of the film miserable and vengeful, intent on hunting down the organization that killed the only woman he ever loved in the first film.

In the end, he does succeed in bringing in the man responsible, but he’s not any happier for it, and certainly no closer to being the James Bond we’re used to seeing. Hopefully the next film — which I’m sure is already being planned — will change this.

I’m finally back in Ohio after spending an exhausting two weeks up in Grand Rapids for work. I’m kind of feeling like a zombie today after getting in late last night and still coming in at my regular time today. It’s going to take me a little while to feel comfortable at my apartment again. Last night — because I didn’t unpack and basically just took a shower and went to bed — it still felt like I was at a hotel. But a much nicer hotel, with a queen-sized bed and comfortable pillows.

It wasn’t a bad time or anything, but whenever I go up there I don’t feel entirely comfortable. Like I’m just out of sorts. Last week I was up there by myself for sales training. I went out a couple of night with some guys from work, which was entertaining, and the rest I spent holed up in the hotel, drinking my two free allotted beers a night, or at the Panera down the road. This week, I went up with Mike and Steph. Mike drove, so my freedom of movement wasn’t greatly impacted. He went out with his bosses two nights, so he had to drive. Steph stayed in her room, drinking beer and talking on the phone. This left me without many options for entertainment. I ended up taking my laptop and walking the half-mile down the road to Panera. Tuesday night, I was hiking down the side of the dark road in the freezing cold, my shoulders hunched under my leather jacket, laptop slung over one shoulder. The occasional passing car would throw up a moment of gloomy lighting, and then I’d be alone again in the darkness. Idly, I started humming the theme from the Incredible Hulk like a yuppie Bruce Banner. It made me realize how glad I am that I don’t have to take the bus everywhere.

Let’s see, what else have I been up to?

I’d been reading THE WATCHMEN over the past week. I’ve tried to read it before, but couldn’t get into it and would abandon it fity pages in. This time I am actually enjoying it quite a bit. It’s a little dense, and I still can’t stand the way the books of the time were colored, but it tells a really cool story. Especially since it was really the first comic to deconstruct superheroes. TIME lists it as one of the top 100 English-language novels since 1923, which I think is a bit of a stretch. But it is good. Makes me actually look forward to the movie opening in January — that is, assuming it actually comes out.

FREAKS AND GEEKS has been in my laptop’s DVD player the past two weeks. I’ve only made it through the first three episodes, but it is damned entertaining. It stars pretty much every actor who has ever appeared in a Judd Apatow movie, which is fitting since he produced the show: Jason Siegel, Seth Rogan, James Franco, and a few others whom I recognize but can’t put a name to. The show occasionally wanders close to the “too awkward to watch” precipice, but never plunges over the side. On a whole, it’s funny as hell. I think a bunch of the same people were also in UNDECLARED which aired a year or two later, so maybe I’ll give that a shot too.

That’s pretty much it. Sarah is having a halloween party Saturday night, so tomorrow and Saturday morning I need to put the finishing touches on my costume. It’s a Heroes and Villains-themed gathering, so I am going as someone who suits me. I’ll put up some photos on Facebook/MySpace on Sunday.

JAB

Still here — alive and kicking, no less. Just been busy doing life-y type things. The Renaissance Festival, Detroit, Dave and Busters. That sort of stuff.

Am currently engaged (Make it so!) in the process of transferring everything from my desktop PC to my lappytop in an effort to make the latter my primary computer. The reasoning behind this is that I spend precious few hours at my apartment, and when I am using the computer, it’s generally the laptop My desktop is buried in my bedroom on a neat little workstation, but it always feels claustrophobic when I’m in there. Consequently, I spend little time using the desktop. But it contains all of my music and a whole host of useful programs that I miss when absorbed on the desktop.

The only downside to using the laptop exclusively is that it only has a 80 gig hard drive, so I think an external hard drive is to be had in the near future. One that can hold a terabyte or so of data. For all the porn, television shows and copied movies that make up my collection of illegally gotten material. An extralegal capitalist, I am.

Next year I might look into getting some kind of docking station for the lappy. That way I have something into which I can plug the 24″ LCD monitor I intend to buy. And a regular keyboard. Laptop keyboards are okay, but if you’re writing anything of extended length, a regular full-size keyboard is a godsend. Then should I want to emulate an actual desktop computer, I can do so.

I’m feeling poor right now, however, so none of these purchases will be made in the next six months. I am going to be tightening the checkbook I never ever use a little until next summer, save up some money. I’d also like to get a new car next year some time as well.

That’s pretty much it for me right now. How are you?

JAB