Category: Maria

July 20, 2005 /

Wheeler came to visit us. It was fun! We played a whole lot of video games and some board games and ate high-quality vegetarian foodstuffs. He stayed with Lisa and Scott three nights and me and Maria for two, and did not hold me responsible for making him trudge all over Bardstown Road in the heat. Wheeler is, to quote Sumana, a good houseguest and a friend.

Lisa, Wheeler and I constitute three fifths of our weekly instant-messenger-based Nobilis game. Normally we play from our disparate locations in Louisville, Louisville, New Mexico, Georgia and Connecticut; this time the aforementioned three of us were all in my apartment at different computers, which was a neat if odd kind of synthesis. It’s easier to Laugh Out Loud at a joke when there are other people doing the same within earshot.

July 8, 2005 /

I have a girlfriend! Her name is Maria Barnes.

June 28, 2005 /

I never talked about Sad and Happy Movie Day! Sad and Happy Movie Day was great! In attendance were myself, Maria, Lisa, Scott and Will; Maria’s brother Michael showed up for the second movie. We watched City of God and Shaolin Soccer, as was foretold by the ancients–first one subbed, second dubbed, but the dubbing actually worked really well for SS. It added to the goofiness of a film that takes its goofiness very seriously. City of God was appropriately poverty-stricken and filled with violence by and against children. The ending was not actually sad, but maybe that was for the best. We are still testing our toes in this format.

The next SAHMD will probably be in two or three weeks, whatever’s best for most of us. Hackers has been pretty thoroughly shot down, because all my friends are worthless Philistines, but I don’t think anybody objected to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Are there any strong objections to that? What about suggestions for happy movies? Information access protocol!

May 7, 2005 /

Bee and Graham are here! We ate some tremendous meals and toured our favorite parts of Bardstown, which entailed me buying a lot of crap. One of those meals was my second time eating the Tierra y Mar, now called the Beef and Shrimp Diablo; I also talked Michael, Lisa and Graham into trying it. We unanimously agreed that it did not put the lie to my earlier ravings. If you are in Louisville and looking to find maybe the best single meal in the city, you need to go to the Mayan Gypsy and order the Beef and Shrimp Diablo with corn cakes and fried plantains. Get the goat cheese and black bean empanadas, too, and try the exceptionally rich chocolate mousselike cake.

I felt expanded in more ways than one after that meal: as if my consciousness were enriched, my senses stretched out and switched on. I felt taller. I felt really, really full.

Sin City

April 1, 2005 /

Yeah, I saw it already, because I’m better than you.

And I gotta tell you… man, there’s a great movie in that footage, but that wasn’t it. It was a decent movie, an extraordinarily pretty one, and resolutely faithful to the original (as everyone’s pointed out). Cut all the voice-over monologues, I mean all of them, and you’d have a good movie. Cut the length of every shot in half, shrink Michael Madsen’s speaking parts (why, Michael, why? He sounded, as Maria pointed out, like community theatre), lose the stiff wire work and actually put the music from the trailers on the soundtrack–then you’d have a fucking magnificent balls-out bug-eyed noir-fu motion picture. I would watch that movie every night.

I hope there’s a director’s cut, or an editor’s cut, or a pirate renegade interweb cut, or something; I don’t think I’ve seen anything that needed it worse. Last night people were giggling when they should have been gasping, and all it would take to fix that would be a sharp knife and time.

Parasitology and Mycopathology

December 17, 2004 /

Reasons Not To Help A Med Student Study

The pictures

December 8, 2004 /

Leonard says that it was in fact Zappa, and offers further quotage:

“In every language, the first word after ‘Mama!’ that every kid learns to say is ‘Mine!’ A system that doesn’t allow ownership, that doesn’t allow you to say ‘Mine!’ when you grow up, has — to put it mildly — a fatal design flaw.”

Maria notes that in fact it’s usually more like “no,” then “mine,” then “mama.” I think that only makes the quote more interesting, as does the fact that it relates not at all to free culture, and very well to the MPAA/RIAA model of purchasing and licensing. To quote Leonard himself, “‘own’ ‘it’ ‘on’ ‘DVD!'”

Requisite Boring Domestic Post

November 11, 2004 /

There’s this black stuff on a good long strip of the caulk around my tub, where it meets the tile walls. It is considerably stronger and smarter than me, and it never goes away. The last time it got this bad, I had to call building maintenance to have them strip up the caulk and put down new stuff; it was clean for a couple weeks, and then the black stuff started growing back.

This time, not wanting to be the guy who calls maintenance for every little problem, I took Maria’s offer of assistance and tried other solutions. We bought big strong scrub brushes. We used new and stronger kinds of tub cleaner. We tried a bleach-water solution. As a penultimate resort, we bought an evil yellow jug of ammonia, the only stuff that is guaranteed by science to kill mold and mildew.

Earlier today, I filled the tub with four gallons of hot water and two cups of pure toxic irritant and attacked it for an hour. I got almost all the tub and tile bright and clean, but the black stuff, untouched, just laughed at me with its thousands of tiny mouths.

I called maintenance. Everything tastes like ammonia now.

November 8, 2004 /

Twenty-four hours ago at this time, I was still talking about the fact that I’d seen Bobby McFerrin and Savion Glover perform, live. Today, at this time, I own Halo 2.

I’d like to have Lisa, Flora, Allison and especially Ken (who turned me on to Halo in the first place) to play the latter with me; I don’t, as they are casualties of my own private diaspora. But I had Maria to go to the show with me, and DC to encounter there. I’ll have the Thursday Night Grandkids to kick my butt at Halo.

Sometimes I feel bad about marking time in my life by video games and concerts, but there are worse ways to do so.

October 14, 2004 /

Number of “canon” animated Disney movies: 44

Of those, movies where the protagonist’s mom is not dead:

The Lion King
101 Dalmations
The Aristocats
…?

Update 10.15.2004 0823 hrs: Ben points out that Pinocchio should count too, since his mom (the Blue Fairy) isn’t exactly dead.

Update 10.15.2004 1402 hrs: And Maria makes the case for Fantasia, citing that “in the Greek Myth segment, the Mommy Pegasus is totally still alive.” Okay, guys, but you’re reaching here. Let’s just face up to the fact that Disney hates all moms, including yours, and definitely mine.