Take me to the Rivers

Rivers Cuomo's 'Personal Statement' for Harvard:


I gave away or sold most of my possessions, my house, and my car and lived in an empty apartment next to Rick Rubin’s house for the rest of the year.

Pop Quiz.

Which one of these headlines is from the New York Times, and which one is from the Onion?

1) Bush and Kerry Campaign in Same Iowa City at Same Time

2) Bush Talks to an Appreciative Catholic Crowd

Amazing, I checked the blog yesterday and there was nothing but that stupid picture Goobs posted. What the hell was that anyway? I come to post today and find a flurry of activity.

First off, Yohei: Well, it's hard to say for sure exactly what you need without being able to see your computer, but I'll try to explain. (or I can always stop by since I work in the city). You need to figure out if you have an ethernet jack on your laptop already or not. This can be slightly difficult, as they look exactly like phone jacks, only a little wider. (who are the ad wizards that came up with this one?) They usually have a little drawing next to them that looks like 3 boxes in a triangle, thus poorly representing a computer network. Of course, whether you have the jack or not you are going to need the cord to plug it in, so you can just get one and see if it fits into any of your holes (ha!). If it don't, you be needing a card.
Wireless Junk. Wireless is still a pretty new technology and based on my experiences in the past few months a rath dodgy one. To make wireless work, you need a wireless router (the transmitter) and a wireless card for your laptop (the reciever). Some new computers have the wireless card built in, again, hard to say without knowing what kind of laptop you have. If you do want to set up wireless, I have two suggestions. First, make sure the card and the router are made by the same company. Believe it or not, this makes a big difference. Second, make sure that company is Linksys. I've messed with just about every company out there, and Linksys is by far the best, albeit slightly more expensive.
That probably seems like a lot but in actuallity we've barely scratched the surface. Lemme know if you'd like to me to drop by (I do this sort of thing all the time...when I'm not installing home theaters).

Anyway, on to my bloggy stuff. For those who don't follow such things, there is a new Doom game out, Doom 3. You'll remember that Doom 2 was one of the best games ever to come out on the computer, and this sequel is about 10 years in the making. But it's finally out, and supposed to be really cool, so I thought about giving it a spin. Then I checked out the system requirements. Now, my computer is no slouch (AMD 2400+, 512 RAM, ATI RADEON 9100) but it doesn't even come close to being able to run this game. Just out of curiousity I looked up how much I would have spend just to run the game. $300! On a computer that's only a year old! I mean, I realize we're all a little older than most hardcore gamers, but I have the fastest system of anyone I know, and I can't run this game. Are there really people out there upgrading every 6 months just so they can run the latest and greatest? That must cost a fortune.

Ok, just a little bitching about how my computer sucks now, I'm over it.

As an aside, the same RAM that I bought for my computer a year ago now costs twice what it once did! I paid $75 for it last summer and now it costs $144. Isn't technology supposed to get cheaper with time?

I know this post is getting long, but one last thing. For those of you with a vested interest in this, it's worth noting that I checked my numbers with netflix today. In June I rented 21 discs and in July...15. I got almost 33% less for my money last month thanks to their shenanigans. And August isn't shaping up to be any better. So far I've had 2 out of 4 discs take an extra "phantom day" to get to me. George is getting upset!!!

Literature Day at the Updog Corral.

From Philip Roth's Patrimony:

         "She can't even buy a cantaloupe," he told me in disgust on the phone one morning, and because I had by then heard just about enough on the general subject of what Lil could not do, I answered, "Look, a cantaloupe is a hard thing to buy--maybe the hardest thing there is to buy, when you stop to think about it. A cantaloupe isn't an apple, you know, where you can tell from the outside what's going on inside. I'd rather buy a car than a cantaloupe--I'd rather buy a house than a cantaloupe. If one time in ten I come away from the store with a decent cantaloupe, I consider myself lucky. I smell it, sniff it, press both ends with my thumb, I smell another one, press down again with my thumb--eight, nine, ten cantaloupes I can go through like this before finally I settle on one and I take it home and we cut it open for dinner and the thing is tasteless and hard as a rock. I'll tell you about making a mistake with a cantaloupe: we all do it. We weren't made to buy cantaloupe. Do me a favor, Herm, get off the woman's ass, because it isn't just Lil's weakness buying a shitty cantaloupe: it's a human weakness. She is being persecuted by you for something that maybe one percent of the human population is able to do right--and even with half of them it's probably guesswork."
         "Well," he said uncertainly, taken aback a bit by my thoroughness, "the cantaloupe is the least of it . . ." but for the time being he had no more complaints to make to me about Lil.


A poem by Robin Robertson:

Asparagus

Pushing up, hard and fibrous
from the ground, it is said to be
grown for the mouth:
steamed till supple
so the stem is still firm
but with a slight give to gravity.

Each glistening wand has spurs
that swell in bedded layers
to the dark tip--slubbed and imbricate,
tight-set and overlapping round the bud.
In a slather and slide, butter
floods at the bulb-head.

Terror! Humidity! Allergies!

Oof...I'm sick and miserable. Thanks to WebMD I was happily able to rule out pneumonia, my incorrect self-diagnosis. Even better, this is the first time I went to that site and didn't leave feeling like every symptom of every illness applied to me -- the "Merck Manual" syndrome. Moving apartments and the dustiness of the process has left me feeling allergic and tired. Too tired for this old body.

Antihistamines racing through my blood and motivation at an all time low, I'm slowly picking away at my summer project of learning to read German -- a language where 'sie' can either mean the pronoun "she", "you" (singular or plural), or "they". Why?

Also, an unrelated question from me, semi-retarded: do I need to buy a card of some sort for my laptop to be able to plug into an ethernet connection? Or can I just buy a cable. A second question from the semi-retarded: how do I know what wi-fi card I need? Should I just order it from the manufacturer's catalog that came with my computer or can I just go to some store and get any generic one? Anybody? (Please try to be sparing with the disdainful comments about my "how to boil water" questions...)

Drop? Bucket.

Jesus, Gordon, thank you! Where the hell is everyone?

Has anyone ever told you you look like Sade?

Too funny not to link to, too offensive to photoblog.

If you ever wanted to know what my dream job would be, or, to be more specific, what my dream job would be if I were restricted to picking a dream job within my already chosen profession, click here. I'm a little jealous, but he sounds pretty qualified.

No, really. Where the hell is everyone?