The basic line of my thoughts a minute ago:
"Oooh, sounds like Pandora is playing that Around The World song!"
"...but it won't be Max Raabe, will it. It'll be the original. Oh well, I've never heard the original, this could be fun."
"ATC, eh? Never heard of them."
"Hey! I wonder if Pandora has Max Raabe?"
"Dang."



I've also only ever heard the Raabe cover of Oops I Did It Again, never the original. I don't want to ever hear the original. It can't possibly be a tenth as good.

I have printed out ten copies of Morgan Freeman's head today! I have a very good reason to do so (well, to print out a bunch of them; I didn't actually need all ten), but I'm not going to state that reason, the better to sound like a complete weirdo.

There is apparently chocolate cake in the kitchen. And yet I have not immediately run off to nab a big ol' piece. Instead I'm patiently waiting to get hungry, so I can eat some real food, so THEN I can maybe have cake. Man, what the hell is wrong with me? It's not even a "trying to be healthy" thing, it's a "right now cake sounds nasty" thing. Plainly I am sicker than I thought. Resisting chocolate is not one of the things I'm known for.

SHALL WE RAMBLE SOME MORE POKEY I THINK YES

Actually, no. Nothing else is really on my mind except the new bloodlines coming out in EVE, but I already babbled about that in SocialMUX. Maybe I'll later paste it into a new entry or something. Suffice to say: SPACE MONGOLIANS

There is also the fact that if you are not reading Achewood you are missing out on a really awesome storyline. It more or less starts here, although a lot of what makes it so interesting is the characters, and the best way to get a sense of the characters is to start from ye olde beginning. So in conclusion: READ ACHEWOOD KTHX

The graffiti was uniformly black, a thin and spidery hand that ran across floor and walls and even briefly the ceiling, raving incoherently about the gasping groaning shores of bedlam, something concealed under plaster, out of which, large plaster bit, horizons chained, plaster, plaster, glistening walls of tainted meat!!!

<3.

The above link is to the first entry. Read, and see why I now hate Ursula Vernon more than ever -- not only is she teh win at pictures, but at words too. Unfair.

I wonder if she's going to update again any time soon...

Warren Ellis and Joss Whedon are both insane.

That is all.

So vfc's post got me thinkin'.

See, mechamom has this thing. Whenever anybody mentions what's happened to New Orleans, she tells them to quit making a big deal of it, that these things happen, look at what Hugo did to Charleston back in '89. It's just a natural disaster and reflects not at all on our government. Recovery is going to take time. Again, see Charleston.

It never seems to matter how many numbers and figures and facts mecha mentions, she always falls back on her "look it happens it is nothing new Hugo hit so much harder now let's stop talking about it" defense. But I figured I'd look up some numbers anyway, because hey, I was curious. What do I know from something that happened when I was 8? Back then I was too busy watching Thundercats and playing with My Little Ponies to care.

So according to ten minutes of Googling, Hugo hit the Carolinas as a category 4 while Katrina hit the Gulf Coast as a category 3. My foolish liberal brain would therefore expect that our example of poor, poor Charleston would've taken it up the ass compared to lucky New Orleans. More damage, slower recovery, awful all around.

And then there's the results of my Googling, which, granted, may be wrong. For all I know I was looking at pages written by foul info-terrorists, cruelly snickering fiends who dedicate their lives to making Livejournal posts inaccurate. Either way, the numbers I get are:

Charleston vs. Hugo, 1989 title bout		Nawlins vs. Katrina, 2005 grudge match
250,000 evacuations across affected areas		1.5 million evacuations across affected areas
900,000 people without electricity after the main event across North and South Carolina		800,000 without electricity after the main event in Louisiana alone; 800k more in Mississippi, 500k in Alabama, &c.
Under 100 deaths from Hugo (every source says something different but the highest I've seen was in the low 50s)		Over 1,000 dead from Katrina
Hugo cost an estimated $12.6 billion in 2005 dollars		New Orleans is costing an estimated $75 billion in 2005 dollars
"The vast majority of residents were back in their homes three months after the hurricane"		4 months later entire blocks are still deserted; 4.75 months later an estimated TWO-THIRDS of the city is empty

Wow. Funny how harder-hit Charleston, or more accurately the general Charleston area, appears to have done much better than New Orleans. Even the mayor of Charleston, who was THERE when Hugo hit, has commented on how bad it looks for New Orleans.

I'm sure it's not incompetence, though. Nah. Couldn't be that the levees weren't maintained properly, and thus broke, causing far more damage than Katrina itself could do directly. Couldn't be that FEMA is dragging its feet even more than usual on recovery. Perish the thought that our wonderful government would stiff its people on needed expenditures. Especially poor people, but then, it isn't such a big deal if poor people get shafted, right? Poor people live in economically depressed areas, and those areas aren't all that important to rebuild anyway. (which is actually what mechamom said once. She's such a Republican.)

I have nothing against the city of Charleston. I'm sure it's a lovely city, although I don't think I've ever been there. But I think it's kind of bullshit to say that what's happened to New Orleans is exactly what happened to Charleston.

I also have nothing against the other areas damaged by Hugo and Katrina. I know that a huge chunk of the Gulf Coast got raped last year, and that a chunk of the East Coast got it in 1989. But I was Googling things related to the argument that mecha and mechamom often have, and that means New Orleans and Charleston.

So yeah. There's my arbitrary time period of thought for the day. Now I think I shall go back to such mindless pursuits as playing EVE and working on comics.

http://www.whoisbenjaminstove.com/

ARGs are awesome.

Unrelated gif-based hilarity: http://threedays.livejournal.com/333824.html

http://chrisonstad.blogspot.com/2006/01/computer-crisis-solved.html

It's funny 'cause the same thing just happened to me the other month.

I was neglecting to dust out my processor's heatsink before it was cool.

...wow, all of the above sat waiting to be posted for like two hours. Post away, little entry! Post away. Meanwhile, I'm off to watch Brokeback Mountain.

David Willis is playing us. He's playing us all. Playing us like various instruments from hell. That damned octagonal orange speech bubble yesterday, and now this. Is it real alien-related drama? Is Robin just having a flashback? Is HA really there and, as suggested in a Websnark comment, hoping to walk around in a Faz suit and pretend to be a normal toy store employee for the rest of his life? We just don't know! Maybe the silliness and the "HILARITY!" and the "TITS!" are signs that it's a big fakeout. Or maybe they're just a smokescreen to lull us into thinking that this will be anticlimactic, so that the drama will be even more, uh, dramatic! You cannot tell! YOU CANNOT TELL!

Goddamn you, Willis. What the hell are you planning to do with all these souls? Because you own them, you know. You have to know. Or else you would not torture us so.

Of course, HA is funny one way or the other. "Instead, they'll just leave for some place they won't be required to know things. Probably Wal-Mart." Heh.

http://wigu.com/overcompensating/2006/01/he-did-it.html ->

My brother Jeffrey is an okay kind of brother. He tells way too many really AWFUL jokes, but I've got nothing against him, really. But why oh why couldn't my brother be this Jeffrey Rowland?

So, Jenny, what did you do for your New Year's obligatory special thingy?

I read Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness.

<.<

>.>

...what?

Oh, also! Four Panels has been pushed back to an early February launch due to illness here at casa de Jennyandmecha. Rest assured, though, that that same Punisher review that's been up since eternity is by no means the only one I've finished!

I invite everyone to have a nice day today, for whatever reason you care to select.

Me, my reason is 'cause we're seeing Wolf Creek today. If you are unfamiliar with this title, save perhaps that it is an unrated slasher flick, then these snippets courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes should shed some light on my anticipation.


It apparently descends into a pool of bloody entrails with its lurid and sadistic killings.

Its graphic depictions of mindless cruelty are revolting.

As it goes on, the action gets implausible enough to seem like parody.

Perhaps Roger Ebert says it best, in his no-stars review: There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's way north of "Wolf Creek."

Sounds like our kind of movie, y'know?