a stroll around the intarwubs

it started with Facebook.

Trolling the updates section, i chanced upon Gerwin's post of the mental video-edit of David Caruso's opening one-liners for CSI:Miami, which are punctuated by "YEEEEEEEAH!"

Looking for the link on Youtube, I found the the even mental-er video edit, which is 2 minutes of David Caruso putting on his Shades of Justice (without even the Who song).

Which reminded me of this comic strip, from Scott Kurtz's PVP. It took me a few seconds and a double-take to figure out the joke, which actually got me to laugh out loud.

And this then reminded me that I've been meaning to recommend a couple of webstrips.

The first being Questionable Content (which I may have mentioned before). Featuring a bizarre group of friends in horrendously awkward social situations which are made worse by their personality quirks (Marten, the protagonist, is possibly the most normal guy on the cast, except that his Mom is an underground S&M fetish icon who divorced his dad - who turned out to be gay, and he has a miniature "anthroPC" that is responsible for most of the title's "Questionable Content"). It's sort of Friends, crossed with American Pie... but a little more surreal.

It updates daily, and in theory you could jump in at any point, but you have to give it a few days to get into the groove of the comic. However, if you have a LOT of time to kill, you can read the archives and get caught up to speed (warning, there are a LOT of archives).

Then there's Danielle Corsetto's Girls With Slingshots. Which is also a sort of sex-comedy featuring almost thirty-something, with a dash of political incorrectness, and heaping doses of surrealism.

And it features the greatest supporting character of all time:

His name is McPedro. And he is an Irish cactus plant that can communicate with the strip's heroine when she's inebriated.

(i put up a "McPedro's Greatest Hits" in the photo album. since the image posting function was giving me shit)

Warning: All the comic strips mentioned here (especiall GWS) have R-Rated content, and could be considered "Not Safe for Work", depending on where you work. Nothing graphic or too explicit, but enough to make more than one eybrow curl out there.

as good an excuse as any to go crosseyed...

...and waste a little time for a few laughs.

here's the big version, in case the picture uploaded into multiply isn't big enough.

got this off facebook (i believe it was Riya). Virgin ad campaign, where the image is loaded with sight gags, puns, or literal references to band names. There's no specified range, genre, period, or even an answer key, as far as I can tell. and I'm woefully short of answers. off the top of my head i've found:

guns n'roses

queen

eels

matchbox 20

white zombie

presidents of the USA

phish(?)

nickelback

rolling stones

B-52's

The Eagles (that was an easy one)

Sex Pistols (heheh)

gorillaz (i guess?)

Led Zeppelin

Hole

Smashing Pumpkins

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Lemonheads

Garbage

radiohead

white snake (veeeery literal)

blur

alice in chains

crowded house

U2

deep purple

black flag

green day

black crows

...and I'm sure I have even't scratched HALF of what's in the picture. is the foresty hill in the back supposed to be oasis? the spoon and acrobats confound me...

intermission

I. Not as strong as I thought I was

My original idea was to tough it out until the end of the year for my usual extended holiday back to the Mother Country. It seemed like a good idea at the time, really. But when the post-summer syndrome hit, and everything started to pile up, I found myself looking at the calendar and weeping inside, in direct proportion to the months I had left before going home.

So I said "fuck it". I'm taking a few days off, to take advantage of the upcoming long weekend, and convert it into a Super Weekend.

Is it sad to be excited about waking up tomorrow, and not worrying about what time I wake up, knowing full well that it's a Thursday?

II. Lusitania

Of course, as luck would have it, the day before I take this little break, 5 things crop up and land on my desk. The real issue of this little break is whether I can stop worrying about the office and resist the urge to connect from home. Curse of the Laptop, I tell you.

One of the things that came up is that I have to fly to Lisbon next Wednesday, which was when I should have gone back to the office. Flying with the Boss and a colleague, for what could be considered a "power meeting". And I'm actually spending the night (which is a bit of a relief. Flying "low-cost" means that the flight schedules suck donkey's balls, and coming and going in the day is normally a deathtrap).

III. When the moon hits your eyes...

Celebrating my short respite with an honest to god homemade pizza. As is usually the case when I try something new, I think I overdid it. I mean, a pizza is supposed to be flat, right? Not... a mound?

I do not care. I was salivating while I was preparing it, and I'm waiting impatiently for the oven to DING!

IV. Old Friends

I honestly don't know what possessed me to buy Dave Matthews Band "Big Whiskey and GrooGrux King" off of iTunes. But I'm kindly glad I did. It's a return to old stylings, familiar sounds. The album never quite recovers the "pop" of "Shake Me like a MOnkey", the opening track, but it certainly tries.

(DMB lost me for a while. I wasn't too big a fan of Before These Crowded Streets. Everyday was all right, but I lost track on the rest of the albums inbetween)

What this did was reignite my long-dormant interest in DMB. Tracking down the previous albumes, and even the live performances. I'm in the camp that doesn't particularly appreciate the freestyling eternal jam sessions that they do, or at least I didn't. Might be age, might be a shift in taste... I dunno.

But man do they put on a great live show. The Central Park Concerts are especially great.

V. Quote of the Day

"Skirts are like Golf. Less is better."

VI. Not quite the rivers of blood

...or the plague of locusts, but it definitely ranks up there with the Signs of the Apocalypse.

The supermarket in front of my (uncle's) house has just closed. As in, out of business bye-bye. That it's part of one of the megalithic corporate consumer chains in Spain may be cause for alarm.

It was there when I got here, nigh six years ago. And now it's fini.

This definitely requires some reorganization on my part, as convenience just got chucked out the window.

(Hope always remains that some other supermarket chain will take over. We shall see)

well... that was disappointing

so Brazil gets the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics?

Hardly seems fair (but then, some would argue that it's not fair to have back to back Olympics in the same continent, so there's an argument for either side)

but I really thought Madrid was going to win this time.

A crap.

(I really liked this video, part of the Madrid presentation packet. The ad agencies were earning their keep on this one)

stranger things have happened, I guess...

...The Spanish Basketball team seems to have shaken off the cobwebs and remembered that they're one of the better international basketball teams in the world, and has just convincingly pummelled the French 86-66 in the quarter finals of the Eurobasket League.

the "strange thing" of the title is not in reference to the fact the Spain, of all countries, has a pretty good basketball team (world champions, olympic silver medal).

the strange thing is that I was actually watching a basketball game, on TV. It's fairly easy to get swept up in the adopted National Pride (no Philippine Sports jokes, please. I'm trying to keep this snarkless). And I have to acknowledge the fact that Spain has a pretty decent international sports representation of late (the football team seems to be on a streak, the basketball team is consistent, Nadal slumped a bit because of his injury...).

so I guess I'm going to pay a little more attention to the Eurobasket schedule. We're in the semis, after all.

(and we beat the French! I personally have nothing against the French, it's just more of that adopted National Pride talking. It includes the historicultural biases and grudges, too).

(and Pau Gasol really is awesome.)

by THIIIIS much...

I swear, the Great White Wallet Death and it's fancy schmancy Snow Leopard upgrade was this close to flying out the bloody-ass window.

3 hours to configure the goddamn printer. THREE HOURS.

Three hours of installing, uninstalling, reinstalling, downloading, updating, headbanging, handwringing, teethgnashing, and more installing.

and my printer, which is NOT on the list of supported HP models on the Snow Leopard release (according to HP), is printing. The low thrumthrumclick! of the inkjet rocking back and forth tells me that I Have Won.

I have absolutely NO idea what I did to make it work, but by god it works.

Still. No one should have to take 3 hours just to install a f@#%ing PLUG AND PLAY USB PRINTER.

it's 12 past midnight and i'm not sure if i'm too pissed off or happy about this result.

one-two, one-two

mmm... coffee.

(sorry, it's been awhile since I've gotten off my ass to make a decent cup of coffee for breakfast. today i steamed milk and everything, like a properish cappucino. Special Sunday Breakfast is something of a tradition I've brought with me from the Old Country, and while normally "special" means "copious amounts of bacon", today it means "fancy homemade cofee")

coming off a strange week - the summer buzz seems to be taking a little longer to wear off. Normally September is like flicking on a switch, and watching the cockroaches' frenzied scurrying. Traffic goes up by 200% (compared to August's ghost-town emptiness), everybody comes back from their holidays feeling "fresh" and "rested" and "full of interest"... i.e, they're royal pains in the ass because everything has to be done "chop-chop".

[end whine-baggery]

don't have much today, just a brief shout-out to some relatively new music which is similar, yet on opposite ends of the spectrum.

One.

Zane pointed me in Elbow's direction, and whilst I remain on-the-fence about the rest of their Seldom Seen Kid album, I do give props to this song. Classic hooligan song, with the chanting, the relentless "one-two one-two" of the drum line, with varying degrees of distortion and all around noise going from cacophony to melody and back again.

can you imagine how awesome this song would be played live, to a stadium of 50,000 people with the amps cranked up to twenty-five?

eventually I will understand the rest of the lyrics, but "there's hole in my my neighborhood downwhich I cannot help but fall" has an oddly bleak poetry to it.

and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks that there really should be a cocktail called "Grounds for Divorce".

Two

I wanted to embed the two videos in the same post, but for some reason youtube is playing rather coy with the embeddingment today. thus I will have to remit you to the video section of this here multiply page to see Snow Patrol's Crack the Shutters.

Which would sound awesome in a stadium of 50,000 people, cranked up to 25. It follows a similar pattern to Grounds for Divorce - the quiet, almost tender opening, the music building, then boom, the song hits it's stride.

the driving beat is there (a little faster than GFD), but the music itself is much cleaner, somehow "sanitized" for pop sensibilities. Mind, I don't say that as a bad thing, it's just a comparison. If it were up to me all bands would have phenomenally loud bass drums and distorted guitars, but that's just me.

and of course, there's a question of them. a song that opens with "I've been working on a cocktail called Grounds for Divorce" and speaks about drinking and falling through holes, well, it's a good song but not necessarily a bright and cheery one.

Whereas Snow Patrol, emotional saps that they can sometimes be, have written a sweeping, epic lovepoem set in a bedroom at dawn. I mean, "coz the daylight seems to want you just as much as I want you"... camaaaaaan.... still, mushy as it is, it seems to work. And I'm sure it's got the double-X chromosome set's panties in a twist.

Winner: It's not really a competition, but all in all I'll go with Grounds for Divorce. The sappiness is good in small doses, but the distorted, controlled mayhem makes for great walking music. Plus, it's a challenge to figure out the lyrics just by listening to them chewed upon...