The Frak is back!!

One of the best shows ever comes back for its final season this Friday. Battlestar Galactica has always been at the top of its game since it began. Nothing about this show disappoints and I'm sure this season will not be the exception to that rule. I can't wait to see what sort of rollercoaster ride the writers have planned for us.

Well, my brackets have virtually been busted. I have one team left. As luck would have it, all three of us who have brackets posted in back have chosen a different team to win it all so there will be no ties in this little pseudo competition. I was disappointed to see Davidson get knocked out. They had to be one of the more interesting and entertaining teams to watch play. And what the hell is up with Memphis? They seem to be playing the best ball of their lives and this is the time to do just that. Can't wait till this weekend!

Couple of quick side bits:

Watched The Capture of the Green River Killer on Lifetime Movie Network because I've had a crush on Tom Cavanagh since Ed was on the air. It wasn't bad. I was surprised to see James Marsters (woo Spike!) playing Ted Bundy.

Broke down and bought the Vampire Weekend cd because all the trades told me to. Glad I got it cheap. The first single is very catchy and I liked a couple of other songs, but I just didn't get into it. Maybe it's because the singer's voice doesn't do it for me. Oh well. New R.E.M. and live Muse out tomorrow!!!!

While flipping through the channels late at night, I stopped by to catch some of my fave trash tv, Cheaters. I don't know what it is about this show, but I feel compelled to watch. Perhaps its because I once saw a woman chase her cheating boyfriend into a public bathroom and beat him about the head with one of her shoes. Funniest. Thing. Ever. Anyway, in this episode, a guy was cheating on his "lady" with one of her own friends. The highlights included the moment when the guy decides to chase the camera crew out of the house by shooting them with paintballs, and the wrap up where the only comment from the "other woman" was she was glad she got some cash out of the deal by signing the release form after the incident was filmed. Ah...now that's class!

Things I Learned Watching March Madness

1. Adam Morrison looks like he is fronting a Motorhead tribute band.

2. Saul Williams' "List Of Demands" is my new favorite song.

3. I'd like a Sven.

4. I want to shave off all the half-ass facial hair jawline "beards" and random goatee type things.

5. I'm really tired of the chest thump. At this stage of the game, everyone is playing their hearts out, not just you. They are now banned. Xavier's Raymond gets a freebie though, because that 3 pointer at the end completely kicked ass.

On a side note, I felt a bit of naughty glee as I watched Joe Alexander from W.V. miss the free throw that would have won them the game. Perhaps this is karma paying him back for the comments he made following their win over Duke. I'm just sayin'...

Shiny, Happy, Blog

Seven more weeks!!!



I am loving the scruffy Thom by the way.

Couple of cd's to recommend and a flick bit to check out too.

Chapter 27, the new movie starring Jared Leto, has an exclusive 4 or so min. clip on http://www.comingsoon.net. He plays Mark David Chapman, the man who killed Lennon.

The new Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks cd, Real Emotional Trash, is really good. The group sounds much more like a band on this album rather than just a few of Stephen's friends that he invited over and asked to play some instruments while he turned on the recorders.

Also cool is the Gutter Twins-Saturnalia. Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan (sp) have teamed up and not surprisingly the album sounds like a cross between Afghan Whigs and Screaming Trees, only done by more mature folk. Again, pretty obvious. So far I really like the song Idle Hands. Dulli's voice plays nicely off of Lanegan's, who sounds like a melodic Tom Waits.

I picked up the new B-52's cd yesterday. I haven't quite decided how I feel about it yet. I'm about half way through and while the tunes, for the most part, are quite fun and catchy, the lyrics are letting me down. I still really enjoy the first single, "Funplex."

Okay, Ghosthunters is on so I'm signing off.

Three More Straws

I think that's what I have left. Three more straws till the back is broken. Seriously, over my vacation I was actually looking at my savings account trying to figure out how many months I could survive without employment.

I began feeling stressed last night. I got a headache around 5pm that held on until around 1 am. My neck hurt, my back hurt, my shoulders hurt...it sucked. I wandered into work around 9am. Thankfully, my attendance at the managers' meeting wasn't required. I was in the worst mood. Here's why.

Fri. evening, a friend calls and leaves a message on my machine talking about brackets, etc. As a throwaway comment, she mentions that my night person is now working on the floor part time. I thought she was just giving me grief. When I spoke to another friend on Sat., I find out that the comment is indeed true.

Apparently, someone out there has decided that receiving is getting too many hours so my night person is no longer working 4-10 M-F. She is, as of today, working 2-6 on the floor and then 6-10 in receiving. Though, she should be getting a 30 min. break which more than likely comes out of my receiving time and she has to take a few minutes out to change her clothes too. All in all I am getting f**ked over and I don't even get a decent dinner out of the deal. Nor are the f**kers cute!!

The best part of all this fiasco revolves around a couple of bits. First, since my other full timer is still only working 4 of her usual 8 hours a day and my other night person only replaces 2 sometimes 3 days worth of those other hours, I have no idea how we can be over to the point of taking 6 hours away from my department. Secondly, I have yet to have any of this told to me by a manager. If the first friend hadn't mentioned it in my message, I wouldn't have thought to ask second friend. When I got to work today, I found my night person left me a Post It stating she had had her schedule changed without her desiring it.

At no time during the weeks before my vacation did anyone say anything to me about there being an issue with hours. Amazingly, this shit always seems to happen while I'm gone. Not one of the 5 managers that I saw today even mentioned this change to me, even casually. When uber came in back around 4:30 or so, he said "How was your time off?" I replied, "Nice."

That was flippin' it. No, "hey, I need to go over a few things with you...you may have noticed we had to change the schedule around a bit, here's why..." Nope. Nothing. Nada. The usual, I suppose.

I HATE THIS PLACE. I HATE THIS PLACE. I HATE THIS PLACE.

Oh, and Duke lost. Suck.

HOLY SH*T!!!!

Thank the good Lord above for Gerald Henderson. Seriously. The above photo is of the game winning shot. Oh, and much thanks for DeMarcus. When he stole the inbounds pass, I felt much better. My entire body was tense for about 10 solid minutes. CBS was showing the K-State/USC game so I was watching Duke on the computer. I kept getting up during time outs to see how the Wildcats were doing. When the Duke game switched over to being the feature game on CBS, I was pacing the living room. I'm sure the people in the apartment below were thrilled to hear me scream when Gerald went coast to coast.

Now, we just need to play better defense in the 2nd round. There is no reason a team should get that many back door hits. Granted, most of them came in the first half, but still. Also, shooting has got to improve. Still, I am obviously very happy that Duke is going forward.

As for the rest of my picks, there are still a few games to play tonight, but so far I'm not doing too bad. That being said 2 of my 3 upsets went bust. Purdue played amazing ball during the first half of their game and Baylor pretty much had no chance to come back. My Kent St. pick was completely random so I'm not too crushed about missing that one. I was very glad to see Kansas State smack around USC. The second half of the Xavier/Georgia game was very fun to watch as was the Marquette/Kentucky match up.

Okay. Back to basketball. Looks like I can breathe easy for at least another 36 or so hours.

Bracket schmacket

This is about how I feel after filling out my brackets. Seriously, many of these games could go either way. For example, Indiana vs. Arkansas. Which Indiana team will show up? Some games I'm choosing having never seen one of the teams play. Some games I'm choosing for very personal reasons--whether that be out of love or out of hate. Worst of all, with the way the brackets were set up I have chosen my arch enemy to win it all.

That's right. I've picked Carolina.

Here's why. First, I refuse to go with UCLA. Just 'cuz. Second, I refuse to go with TX. Just 'cuz. Third, I have Memphis getting knocked out by Pitt and Georgetown taking care of KS. That just leaves Carolina. Damn.

Here are my Sweet Sixteen:

Carolina, Notre Dame, Louisville, TN, KS, Clemson, WI, Georgetown, Memphis, Pitt, Stanford, TX, UCLA, Drake, Xavier, and Duke.

Elite 8:

NC, Louisville, KS, Georgetown, Pitt, TX, UCLA and Duke

Final Four:

NC, Georgetown, TX and Duke. Granted, I realize that UCLA could beat Duke, but I will not pick them. I WILL NOT!!!! Besides, if Singler can get his rhythm back and hit some 3's Duke will be dangerous.

I'm probably going to mess up plenty this year, so I guess it's a good thing I have no cash down on my picks.

Quick yay-rah to Illinois and Georgia. It was sad to see IL fall pretty handily to WI (though they held it close in the first half), but kudos for getting to the final in the first place. It was, however, fun to watch Georgia win three games in about 36 hours. I have a feeling their coach referenced the Syracuse run and this year's Pitt run (yeah!). Plus, he probably got them mad at the tornado too. I hope Georgia will send Georgia Tech a nice thank you note for letting them borrow their gym. I'm sure their grandma's would be happy if they did.

Let the madness begin!

To Be Young Again

I am once again a 14 yr. old girl.

How did I end up in this state you may ask? The answer: I went and saw Penelope tonight. Now most of you are probably wondering why I would do such a thing. I, disliker of all things chick flick (with a few exceptions), willingly went to this movie. It was my suggestion. Here's why...



That's right. Once again, James McAvoy makes me do silly things. I'd prefer it if James would make me do naughty, naughty things, but his wife would probably have issues with that scenario. Penelope tells the story of a family curse that makes the next daughter born have a pig nose. Thanks to her already quirky beauty, Christina Ricci makes that nose look darn cute, but it's actually supposed to be a bit more disturbing. The only way to lift the curse is if one of her kind loves her for who she is till death do they part.

Armed with that sort of info, her mother hires a matchmaker to help the family find "one of her kind." Penelope is just a step above a teen age fairy tale. It actually would make a good mother/daughter film. There's no violence, virtually no bad language and just a bit of snogging at the very end. It has moments of funny and extra props go to the art department for the design of Penelope's world. Her room is great...part real, part fairy tale. As mentioned, Ricci's quirkiness helps her inhabit this weird sort of world with ease. McAvoy is solid as always, bringing a gentle sweetness to his part without becoming too much. Penelope is a nice, light film with enough laughs and good acting to pull through some of the weak and obvious spots in the script.

To continue on the subject of movies, I read today that HP/Deathly Hallows will be made into two movies. While it will be tough to wait between films, I know I couldn't figure out how they were going to condense the book. There just isn't anything that you can cut out. David Yates, who directed Order and is currently filming Half Blood Prince, will be doing the final two films. They will be shot at the same time, but their releases will be a few months apart. Right now, it's looking like Nov. 2010 and May 2011. In other David Yates news, his amazing BBC mini-series State Of Play has finally come out on DVD and I strongly recommend watching it.

And to wrap it up, I finally got around to watching 3:10 to Yuma. I'm not much of a Western movie fan so I wasn't rushing to see this one. It wasn't too bad. As I was viewing it, I instantly thought "this is a guy's chick flick." You know who all the characters are, you know how it's going to end, you know who is going to turn out to have a heart, you know the guy who usually is incompetent will do something heroic then promptly die...you get the picture. I did enjoy watching Bale and Crowe and the cinematography was really well done.

Well, next week is vacation and the NCAA tourney so I'll try and update here and there. I definitely won't be driving too many places during my break. Seriously, $3.45 for a gallon? Ouch.

Ghosts

Never one to shy away from an experiment, Trent Reznor seems to have entered his Brian Eno phase. Okay, maybe not quite Eno, but the latest release from Nine Inch Nails is all instrumental. Set into the world via the website (or Amazon when the site servers crashed from the strain of soooo many people trying to download--f*ck you Oprah and your online book club!!), Ghosts I-IV is much as Reznor himself described. It is a soundtrack to a daydream. A really flippin' long daydream, but a dream none the less.

I was unsure if I would enjoy it, not being into instrumentals myself. Not to mention my concern that I would miss Reznor's voice and all it conveys. I'm pleased to report, that this thing pretty much kicks ass. Or at least, the half that I have gotten through does. There is everything from recognizable piano and guitar to strange squidges, buzzes and other sounds that are both known and unknown. All together they create a hypnotic, but never dull mix. Trent has mentioned on his site that there may be more where this came from, and freed from his record label, I'm sure it will continue to be distributed in this fashion. Allegedly, NIN and Radiohead will be two of the headliners at this year's Lollapolooza in Chicago. I'm not sure how this record will transfer into a live performance, let alone one in such a setting. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

On a side note, I had planned to do a big thing about this weekend's upcoming Duke/Carolina game. But, after reading about the murder of the NC student body president (a really tragic event), discussing such a rivalry seems a bit trivial. It will be an emotional day for the guys from NC, and while I still want Duke to win, I'm hoping that fans from both teams will be able to bond through a shared appreciation of life and how fragile it is.

Seriously, enough already

I called off sick. Again. This time the culprit was a 24 hr. flu virus. Apparently the illness spread like the plague through my family following my nephew's birthday party on Sun. Nothing like waking up at 2:30am and throwing up about once an hour until around 1pm. I returned to work today with no energy and was mocked by our cleaning lady. That's the last time I help her toss garbage into the dumpster.

Quick question: why is it people who feel the need to share their desire for you to know God also feel the need to break the law while doing it? Today I got to read a paragraph telling me about how great God is while using the ladies (stall 3 if you are wondering). Bad enough that the little mantra ended with a smiley face (grrrrrr), but the person who wrote the diatribe is an idiot. Here is how she spelled reason: resone. Here's hoping there is no spelling quiz at the pearly gates.

Cool

I want one.

Congrats to Coach K for career win 800. With the way Duke was playing for most of the game, I didn't think it was going to happen yesterday. I will say this year's team doesn't seem to get spazzy in tough situations. They just couldn't hit a basket to save themselves, esp. during the first half. Coming soon--THE re-match. Can't wait till Sat.