I noticed the other day that my 2008 Venture Bros wall calendar has mysteriously ceased to be accurate for some reason, so I’m scouring the web for a 2009 wall calendar of some sort. Something classy. (And yes, I realize that the year is nearly half over — I’ve just been putting off buying one for a while and then suddenly it’s June.)

I’d like some sort of steampunk or retro-futuristic calendar, but those are surprisingly hard to find. The only real contender thus far is this one, which promises “12 months of retro sci-fi rockets, robots and death rays.” It’s not bad, it’s just missing . . . a certain panache. It lacks moxy.

Or should I perhaps switch gears, and go for a Ziggy calendar instead? After all, Ziggy is just so darn funny! Like cancer.

Sigh. Back to searching.

Still ill. Not as bad yesterday, thank gods, but am still pretty un-good.

I didn’t go to work yesterday, as all I was really up for was sleeping and puking, and for some reason they frown on this at the job. Instead, while trying to kill brain and body with a number of drugs, I halfway watched 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA and THE LAST STARFIGHTER. I have seen both several times so I didn’t feel compelled to follow them very closely, which I think is always best when you’re sick. In fact I think I mostly listened to THE LAST STARFIGHTER as I was really out of it for that one.

After slogging my way through work today, my plans tonight consist of making instant mashed potatoes and trying to sit through INTO THE BLUE 2: THE REEF. It doesn’t appear that Paul “Dude, I’m not a buster, bro!” Walker is in this cleverly titled sequel, and I’m honestly not sure if that will make the movie better or worse.

Funny how when one hasn’t been sick — and I mean, ill — for nearly two years, one forgets just how really terrible one can feel when one is sick. This is of relevant interest, because right now I am remembering that it is pretty goddamn unpleasant.

And that’s pretty much the depth limit that my deep thoughts will get to today. More later. Assuming I’m not dead.

One of the tenants in my office complex backed up the toilet today. Water was pouring out of the toilet, saturating the restroom floor as well as the immediate surrounding offices. Thankfully it was just water, with no other wonderful goodies floating about. My boss bravely waded in and worked some voodoo with a plunger, and the toilet stopped running. We called the landlord, who said he would send the plumber.

I immediately became excited, much to the bewilderment of my boss. It’s just that when someone decrees they’re “sending the plumber,” I get visions of Mario Jumpman bursting through my door . . . and that would just be awesome.

Needless to say, you can imagine my disappointment when, thirty minutes later, it was not a portly, Italian man wearing red overalls who came schlepping through my door, but just some . . . dude. This guy did possess a vaguely olive complexion — or maybe jaundice — and a gut, and was wearing a blue shirt, so I guess he was at least sort of in the ballpark.

I showed Ballpark Mario the offending restroom, which at this point had about an inch of standing water.

“Mama-mia!” exclaimed the plumber, “I better-a be getting out mah waders!”

(Okay, that was a lie. What he really said was something to the effect of, “Dang, I better get out my waders.”)

Then, Ballpark Mario went out to his van and, true to his word, came back in wearing tall rubber boots that went up past his knees. They weren’t waders, per se, but they were pretty damn close. (“Close enough for government work” is a phrase I love to use around my dad, who works for the Air Force, and who always finds it so amusing.) He was also dragging along a beast of a wetvac. It was missing a wheel, so when I say he was dragging it, I mean so quite literally.

A moment later, I heard the wetvac fire up from the back. Then five minutes later, I heard a startled yell followed by a thump. Knowing that this couldn’t be a good sound, I went to investigate, half-wondering if I was going to find a corpse.

I peeked into the restroom and saw Ballpark Mario sitting in the water, leaned back against the stall wall and rubbing a small gash on his forehead. I asked if he was okay.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was bending over and hit my head on the corner of the sink. Then when I jerked back, I slipped and fell against the stall.” He sighed. “It’s been one of those days, you know?”

I told him I didn’t really care and recommended that he get his ass back to work before I left and came back with a shovel.

He insisted he was okay, I found a band-aid for him, and ten minutes later he had the restroom cleaned up. Shortly thereafter he was gone and out of my life forever.

Then about an hour later, one of the other tenants knocked on our door and informed me that the toilet was out of action and again leaking more water than a pregnant chick. I called the landlord, who gravely informed me that, once more, he would send out for . . . the plumber.

I could only hope that this time they would send Luigi.

Ah, it’s a wonderful thing to live in this modern age, where a remarkable scientific find, such as the discovery of a 47-million-year-old fossil that could possibly be a missing link between primates and the rest of the animal kingdom, is presented to the public with a media blitz rivaled only by the release of the new Green Day album:

On Tuesday morning, researchers will unveil a 47-million-year-old fossil they say could revolutionize the understanding of human evolution at a ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History.

But the event, which will coincide with the publishing of a peer-reviewed article about the find, is the first stop in a coordinated, branded media event, orchestrated by the scientists and the History Channel, including a film detailing the secretive two-year study of the fossil, a book release, an exclusive arrangement with ABC News and an elaborate Web site.

“Any pop band is doing the same thing,” said Jorn H. Hurum, a scientist at the University of Oslo who acquired the fossil and assembled the team of scientists that studied it. “Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science.”

What intrigues me most about the story is, not the marketing of the fossil, or even the significance of the find itself, but how the fossil was discovered. In what I’ve read so far, this point has been relatively glossed over, usually just briefly touched upon as a a small plot point in the larger story of how this Jorn Hurum character acquired the fossil.

According to the Guardian, an amateur fossil hunter found it in 1983 at a well-known fossil site in Germany, then proceeded not to tell anyone about it for over 20 years before selling it to a dealer, who in turn sold it to Hurum. The New York Times goes on to mention that the fossil had sat in the collector’s drawer for the intervening years.

What I want to know is, why would a collector keep a potentially huge — and profitable — find to himself for 20 years? Was he stymied on what to do with it? Maybe he didn’t realize the scope of what he’d found, though if he was an “amateur fossil hunter,” one would think he would at least be rudimentarily versed enough in the field to recognize the significance of what he’d find. If that is the case, then perhaps being a collector, he kept it for himself because he enjoyed admiring it to satisfy his own pleasure, like one of those rich old men one occasionally hears whispered rumors about, who buy stolen, priceless paintings merely for the gratification of knowing that they possess them and no one else does.

Of course the most likely and reasonable theory is that the guy stumbled over the fossil, thought, “Hey — shiny,” took it home, shoved it in a desk in his collectibles and curiosities room — in between his Phantom memorabilia and Tarzan first editions — and promptly forgot about it for 20+ years. Until one day, when he begins cleaning out the room, because his wife’s been bitching about how there’s too much goddamn crap in his “man cave,” and it was either organize the room already or kill his wife, and he got the feeling that if he did kill her, she would just haunt him till he died, because that’s just the kind of harpy she is. And so as he’s going through things, he opens this desk, and BAM — there’s this old fossil he found back in the day, and he realizes that maybe he can sell it for some serious coin. Enough to possibly build an extra room to house his many other treasures, thus negating his wife’s bitching — or maybe just to hire someone to kill his wife.

I’m sure my carefully thought-out theories will be proved wrong in the coming days as more about the find is announced, but in the meantime feel free to regard them as the truth, which as we all know, does not have to have any basis in fact.

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