I believe that this man may have added an extra 8 to his intended price. Because, you see, he was high. INCREDIBLY high, and 8’s are tricksy when you are that high. I just don’t even have the heart to let this guy know how retarded he is.

I was disturbed to find that both iFish, a message board I signed up for because someone lied that one could get coupons for sporting goods on it, and another message board I’m involved with automatically emailed me to wish me a happy birthday. I spent the rest of the morning trying to ease back into work and take it easy so I don’t recharge the illness that is busy trying to kill me, and waited for the moment.

My phone rang, and I saw the name - Mickey, Grandma (my phone assumes you want to see everyone in last, first format, because it assumes you are a total dick), and I knew that the time of my real birthday present was at hand.

“Hello Grandma”

“Aaron?” (the thick accent has always made saying my name difficult, there’s an extra soft consonant in there somewhere, like an L between the two A’s. Also, she always presents the “who is this” name-challenge even if you clearly identify yourself early in the call, because she is crazy.)
“Yeah, it’s me, how are you doing?”

“You feel better?”

“Yeah, I’m feeling a lot better, how are you?”

“I just called to say Happy Birthday.” (She is fairly easily distracted in conversation, so she ignores any questions put to her until her objective is complete, and usually afterwards for good measure.)

“Thank you grandma. How are things going down there?”

Then my gift begins. A broken rhythm rendition of the Happy Birthday Song that puts me into fits of laughter each time, I have to stifle it or she’ll stop. Happy comes out “hoppy”, Birthday comes out “burse-a-day”, the rhythm is so masterfully distorted it would make Coltrane weep his inadequacy.

She then lays down the law about something, I believe it had to do with the fact that I am sick because I live in Oregon and that’s what Oregon does, then calls herself “strong like horse”, which only serves to put the icing on my birthday cake. From this point on, she responds as much as she ever does to questions, and we have a short but pleasant conversation about how cold it must be here and how I must wish I were warmer. I would like to talk to her more, but I am at work, and while I’m comfortable with that, she is not (she was baffled that my boss would just let me take two sick days off and not have to make up the time), so we cut it short and I head back to my desk humming a not-quite-right Birthday Song.
But that song is the best gift I get all year.

Interestingly enough, my last post about women got picked up by some spam aggregator and titled “Desperately Lonely”, which kind of depressed me. However, not 4 hours after posting that missive about being laid to the side, the woman in question emailed me back to apologize. Though meeting her was not meant to be for this weekend, it will hopefully be later this week. I was hoping that I could convince her to go out on Valentines and then be really creepy or over dramatic about it the entire night, but this cold is kind of making that unlikely.

It will likely be on Friday. TAKE THAT SPAM AGGREGATOR. I AM NOT DESPERATELY ANYTHING ASSFACE HOLES.

I have had something of a bad run with movies lately. First, I tried to watch the original Get Carter with Michael Caine, which was, as far as I was able to plunge into the movie, the story of a very quiet man who rides a train a very long time, in order to have low-volume conversations with almost no context in high-ambient noise bars. He then stares with great big blank eyes at a corpse the worlds narrowest coffin and handles a shotgun briefly, before being interrupted by Rachel Ray’s 30 minute meals: Cheez Whiz and Hot Cocoa Pot Roast for 15 in a flash.

I don’t have a problem with movies that start slow. That’s a lie, really, because I do have a problem with movies that start slow, but it’s not that I need two beefy german bondage boys named Sturm und Drang to kick me in the face in the beginning of a movie. I just need something, some vaguely compelling reason to be interested in this story. The Station Agent is a perfect example - You wanna talk about a slow start? Hell, that whole movie is slow. But it compelled me to watch, and I was rewarded for it. Get Carter could only have compelled me if I found compulsive mumblers interesting, and I do not.

In it’s wake, I chose to watch the movie Domino, the quasi-factual (in that there was a person named Domino Harvey) story about the inability of the toothsome but waif thin Keira Knightley’s inability to adequately proofread screenplays for “the turd factor”. The otherwise enjoyable romp set against the background of oversaturated and contrast-modified southern california had a lot of delightfully forced sexy bits, including but not limited to some kind of sex-for-information program early in the playbill, and some later naughty talk between Knightly and the ever lovely (and likewise decisionally delayed) Lucy Liu, and then the long (overlong) drawn out mescaline fueled, crashed bus desert romp with Choco, played by Edgar “My career was too young to die” Ramirez. Then the movie does the unthinkable… IT GOES FURTHER OFF THE RAILS. You see, in the middle of the directors vision of how a mescaline desert orgy is supposed to go (not very accurate, I gotta tell you), The Turd Factor rolls up in a drop top CaddalincolnTownboat. That’s right. Tom Waits. He pulls up in the middle of drugfucking and lays down some totally deep (and by deep I mean retarded) shit (bullshit). They all pile into his car and drive off of one car wreck (the bus) and into another (the rest of the movie… HO!! SICK BURN). Seriously, they randomly end up back in town and proceed to stand by while their long trusted Afghan driver packs explosives into where the money should be, steals the money, and nobody thinks it’s odd, even momentarily that the previously exposed explosives expert duct tapes something with batteries in it to his hand. I can only pray that the oral/anal sex that the producers got from the various hookers and hangers on that came with The Waits Experience was worth blowing their money-wad over (OH SNAP THAT WAS SO GOODS). I’m not saying that Waits isn’t destined to be an actor… Simply that he’s not ready just yet. Give him some time, and maybe he’ll get up to Bowie standards. It’s highly unlikely though, as he is a talentless hack. He should pray that he dies in a fairly obscene and not easily explainable way, so that his catalog will increase in value through the novelty of his death, because otherwise he’s going to end up right on the same shelf as Wilco now that they’re all dead. Wait, they’re not dead yet? Regardless, I still have one steaming shitpile to talk about.

Smokin’ Aces. I know, I know, this was supposed to be one of those review things where I dance around the issue and try to talk about all the good parts of a movie before I tear it down, but that is impossible with Smokin’ Aces. They turn over their hand and show you the twist, smearing it in your face, in the first 10 minutes of the movie. They then repeat this act every 15 minutes until the credits mercifully roll because apparently someone told them it was clever. It ends with a twist-within-a-twist that rivals only the knock knock jokes of a two year old for complexity and depth, and NOWHERE… NOWHERE does the action meet the promise of the premise. I mean, really, you have a half dozen hitmen converging on a single target, HOW DO YOU NOT HAVE TONS OF ACTION? The biggest issue with the whole thing is that, like a truly horrible pile of shit, it has recognizeably good bits scattered through it. Corn kernels and bits of apple, maybe the leg of a GI Joe or part of your remote control, just strewn. The scene where Chris Pine (as Darwin Tremor) is playing mush-face with Ben Affleck’s corpse (something I have fantasized about too) and assuaging himself of guilt? Perfect. Kevin Durand mooking about with Maury Sterling like a pair of drug addled chimps? Great. Alicia Keys playing black girl that everyone wants to have sex with? Naturalistic as hell. But the rest of it is pure, creamy dogshit. Common is sadly playing a serious role here, up against Jeremy Piven who is mailing it in even more than the screenwriter. That poor gentleman who had cheek stabbing treatment spends time doing character development and learning how to speak like someone, in this wonderfully belabored scene, then he is flushed down the toilet without another word. Bat-Manuel goes not-quite over the top in his scenes, even though the situation clearely called for “turn it to 11″. And I was just fomenting my hatred for both the writer and director and it turns out they’re both the same guy, Joe Carnahan, the guy who got picked to direct Killing Pablo, one of my favorite non-fiction books. Fucking great. Thanks a lot Hollywood machine, please continue to grind my dreams into a fine paste.

Every now and then, I run into something at work that reminds me that I am riding the short bus. We haven’t updated to 2000 on our NT machines for reasons I can only assume are veiled in mystery, ditto 2003 on our 2000 boxes, all of our support tool licenses are inevitably 5 revisions out of date, and very frequently, the license has - in fact - expired. The last such query I made about a tool led me to install the program and realize that the license had been purchased by an individual employee, on his own card. I almost wept.

Most of the time, to avoid this sort of problem, I just use free (as in speech) tools, and failing that, I use free (as in beer) tools. So I was excited to learn about PowerShell, which I had played with at home some and found to be intriguing, which is free like beer for folks with a valid Windows install, and could be used to automate some tasks without having to rely on the increasingly bizarre Win32::Foo Perl modules I’ve been hacking together. So I download it, and validate my system, and start the install. Bam, short bus time. We haven’t updated to SP2 on our XP workstations. Treetarded. Back to surfing CPAN and pretending I know how to script in Perl.