The Bananaverse

This must be immortalized so here you go:

Last night I had to do some shopping (had to. for a wedding.) and while at the clothing store I came across this tank top with a monkey in a tutu embroidered on the front. At that moment I realized that this is what was missing in my life. I could be a complete person if I just had the tutu monkey for my very own. I purchased it and wore it all last night and virtually every sentence I uttered came back to Tutu Monkey. I’m wondering if I could get my brother (who is artistically inclined) to maybe draw me a comic like, The Unbearably Exciting Adventures Of Tutu Monkey! or something else ending in an exclamation point. So there it is. Tutu Monkey. The End.

So the Tune du Jour is Cake, Short Skirt/Long Jacket. And all I know for certain is that *I* want to be the girl with the smooth liquidation and good dividends, with a mind like a diamond, with fingernails that shine like justice, and so on.

What I have decided is that I will probably never be the girl who’s touring the facility and picking up slack…I haven’t decided if this is ok with me or not. So far it just sort of makes me depressed. Mostly because I don’t think I’ll ever actually be that girl. but then, maybe that’s not so bad either…

bah.
I tried to get in touch with Palm about Palm Desktop, the ‘other’ half of the Palm software that controls Hot Sync and allows you to enter things a bit more efficiently than scribbling on your Palm. I wanted to know when there would be a version available for my OS. I thought I’d try the “chat assistant” which actually is a long way of saying “chat with an ass!” None of them were helpful at all, and one even disconnected from me when she said there was no carbonated version at all and I said that isn’t what your website tells me…she ended the session! another guy said he was sorry but he couldn’t help me, and someone else said that the current version will run under OS X. Well yes it will, I replied, but I want to HotSync and I can’t right now. When will I have that functionality? He didn’t know either, and the last person said there was no new Mac OS so what was my question.

Finally did get someone on the phone but he couldn’t tell me anything either. They will pay. They will ALL pay.

CAUTION: This entry is shaping up to be almost nothing but random bitching on random topics. Just so you know.

I have to send my nomad in for repair now. BAH! The little thingy (yes that’s a technical term, shut up!) behind the volume up button has come loose and I can’t turn it up anymore. I turned it down to zero so I can’t really listen to it now. I have to send it away to some sort of Nomad hospital so it can get better. Which sucks, because the whole reason I got the stupid thing was so that I could replace my broken portable cd player. And now I don’t even have that! It wouldn’t be a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that without headphones, people on public transport tend to bother me about stuff. Usually about my palm. “Do you read books on that?” “Is that a palm pilot?” “u r have @ teh cybarwebwebweb on g4dget @ yr hand, yz?” and so on. So yeah, sometimes I come home and I want to kill people. God bless the public transport system. And when I say God bless, I mean I really hope that a rain of fire falls upon every freak who ever had the brilliant idea of passing the time on the bus/train by chatting up people who wanted left alone, every idiot who ever sat near me and forgot to shower for about a year, and every single dirty hippie who thinks patchouli is the answer to all the world’s problems, including the stench of stale pot smoke in your sarong and your dreadlocks, and every single person who ever tried to sell me something, or ask me for money or a cigarette, and I hope that when that rain of fire comes, that someone who was wronged by these people (me or anybody else) is a safe distance away enjoying the whole thing, preferably with a cocktail. In each hand. Or something.

Scooter’s cousin got married. As usual, it took about 10 minutes before someone asked when we were having kids. It never fails. I’m going to have to make up some exotic story to make them stop or I’m going to have to do something a bit more extreme, like take out contracts on their lives. I’m sick of being harrassed about it is the main thing. I listened for four years to “when ya gettin married?” and now it’s “when ya havin kids?” so when we have kids, then what? when ya havin more? probably. God damn. It’s times like that, when after answering the $64,000 question for the fifteenth time, I wonder about people. Isn’t it OUR business? Don’t *I* get to decide? Maybe I’ll just start telling them it’s classified and leave it at that.

As an added bonus, Scooter’s grandma was really nice to me. She kept saying how nice I looked and all sorts of other miscellaneous complimentary things. So I foolishly thought she was just being nice to me and all that sort of goings-on until Scooter said something about his grandma and believing what she says. I asked him what he meant and he said that she will come up to you and go “wow you look nice today!” and then go home or off to someone else or whatever and go “Can you believe she wore that? She wore it to the last too!” So all this time I took her at face value and figured that maybe she just thought I was great, but maybe that isn’t the case. So now I’m all worried about what it is she’s saying to everybody else about me. I thought she liked me but she might just be nice to me and tell the rest of her family how evil I am or something. I don’ t know. And it may not be true at all, maybe she really does like me, but now that Scooter put the doubt in my mind I just can’t be sure and that irritates me. bah.

On Sunday, we apparently had a deep inner need to pick blackberries. For those uninitiated to this activity, it generally proceeds as follows: Drive somewhere sort of remote, carry around some sort of berry receptacle, and make your way through tall, long, tangly, unbelievably thorny bushes to try to get at blackberries. Apparently you are only allowed to stop when an appropriate amount of your own blood has been left as some sort of sacrifice or a really sadistic trade for the berries you just picked. I don’t get it. Scooter thought it would be great, though, so off we went. I wish I could have convinced him that a blackberry shake at burgerville would have done the trick, but no. So now my legs and arms are fairly scratched and I don’t think we got enough blackberries for all of this to be a good idea. So yay for that. We also made the requisite trip to home depot for a bunch of stuff and of course THAT was a load of fun. I’m reading books on my Palm so I sat on the big lumber cart and read while I waited for Scooter and his dad to do what they had to do (get some sort of lumber and assorted bits to hold it up) and then I got to push the lumber cart around when they were done. Joy of joys.

So there’s my weekend. yay and stuff. (:

Soon I discovered that this rock thing was true
Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil
Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet
All of a sudden, I found myself in love with the world
So there was only one thing that I could do
was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.

(I can’t take credit for the above, as much as I’d like to. Check the music for what it actually comes from.)

Lunch today sucked. So now I’m hungry because the lasagna tasted like someone put salsa through the middle and the salad was really lame. So I didn’t get much lunch. urgh.

Everyone should go read little gamers right now. Truly. they are awesome and they haven’t been going so long that you won’t be able to read them all fairly quickly. They are little and cute and cranky. Nothing like seeing a Hello Kitty looking guy flipping you off. This is a current VersoFave.

Another one is WEEEEEE! which will sufficiently mess you up. It must be seen to be believed.

In case that hasn’t sucked enough of your time, you might try my friend George. Dig it.

This is pretty much my opinion, as evidenced by an earlier post where I mentioned talking to LipLash about it:

go here to check it out.

so, this morning on the news I was listening as I got dressed and they had on an astronaut who talked about math and science and blah blah blah. Yeah, that’s nice, but what about other stuff? Everybody seems to think that all you really need is math and science. But you know what? I use very little of that junk. In fact, I agree with Paul Simon…”when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all…” the only stuff I really took with me is the stuff I learned between classes. If you say the right thing to the right person/people, you can make a great many things go wrong. Just because you wear the right clothes and hair doesn’t mean people like you any better. If you don’t believe me, you should hear what they say when you leave the room. It is much better to be hated than ignored. Guys who don’t like you because you’re smart aren’t guys you should go anywhere near anyway. Guidance counselors aren’t the best people to help you decide your career. If they were any good at it, they wouldn’t be guidance counselors. Do what you want, because if you’re smart you’ll get the hell away from all these people you went to high school with and since they’ll never see you again, what does it matter?

My tortured teenage existence isn’t what this is all about, though. It’s about math and science. Why do we need only math and science? What about the people who aren’t math or science people? Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe the reason test scores keep falling is because even though math goes up nobody is learning about Mozart or Rembrandt or Shakespeare? They still ask those questions on tests, you know.

When this is really going to be important is in about ten or 15 years when nobody is smart enough to make the cut on a game show. All you will get is alarmingly smart people (like some of the Jeopardy champions…who knows that much about the Great Lakes or the Bellybutton Lint Revolution of Zimbabwe?) or alarmingly stupid game shows. What’s really depressing is that nobody will really lament the lack of a rounded education until then, when it cuts into their entertainment…

Again, fresh from the web:

J.C. Penney Co. says it will pull a television commercial that showed a mother helping her daughter dress more provocatively. The ad, timed for back-to-school sales, had been running nationwide for about a week, promoting a popular style of hip-hugging jeans often worn with a bare midriff. The commercial showed a teen-age girl trying on low-cut jeans only to be interrupted by her mother. “You’re not going to school dressed like that, are you?” the woman asked. Then the mother tugged the jeans down lower on the girl’s hips to show how they should be worn. The commercial drew complaints to the retailer and on syndicated radio talk shows. “After much consideration, J.C. Penney had decided to pull the commercial,” Penney spokesman Tim Lyons said. The move came just a week after the Plano-based department-store chain pulled a T-shirt from its shelves after getting complaints from shoppers. The shirt showed a rundown mobile home and the words “Home Skooled.” Parents of home-schooled children complained that the shirt ridiculed their families. ————-

People need to relax. It sounds to me like the collective sticks up America’s butts are starting to chafe in all this hot weather. I am reminded of what Dennis Miller had to say on the politically correct epidemic (for it is a disease..)”How many politically correct people does it take to change a light bulb? NONE, because they’re all in the fscking dark!” (I know that should be a u, it’s not a typo, my mom might read this.) I mean, god DAMN. People are offended by everything now. What, you never laughed at a joke that might hurt someone else’s feelings? Blonde jokes, or man jokes, or woman jokes, or priest jokes, or nun jokes, or little kid jokes, or any sort of ethnic joke, or a joke about a certain company’s employees or ANYTHING? You know what that leaves you? Why did the chicken cross the road? Nope. Not even that. You’ve now offended an entire race: They prefer the term “Chicken Americans” now. See how stupid that sounds? This also means that like, NOTHING is funny anymore. You can’t tell jokes about anyone or anything because you might offend them, and you know what I say to that?

NUKE THE UNBORN FLAG-BURNING BABY HOME-SCHOOLED IRISH JEWISH POLISH ENVIRONMENTAL ANARCHIST GAY WHALES!!!!!!

Or something.

It pisses me off that someone else is allowed to decide for me what is funny or allowed or whatever. That’s stupid. You know, I don’t like a lot of stuff on TV or on the web or whatever, but you know what I do? I change the channel or I go outside or I find a different activity. I’m capable of that. Nobody is holding a gun to my head and saying “YOU WILL WATCH THE XFL!” maybe they should have, ratings would have been better…but that’s not the point. The point is, even though my personal opinion is that it’s shite, I will do everything in my power to make sure it is available for those who want it, even if they are not me. Nobody can make that decision except YOU. Now, I have to admit, I think I would have decided against letting John Stamos back on tv, but it wasn’t my decision to make, and I’m sure someone will watch him. Someone will watch the new Bob Saget show too, I’m sure, but it doesn’t have to be me. However, the only shows I really liked lately have been abruptly cancelled and that just goes to show that if you put something on which asks a bit more from the viewer that it won’t go over well. God forbid someone start hawking intelligence instead of some stupid show where a bitchy british woman lives with a bunch of people in a house and each week one gets voted off the island, only to be flung into a pit of rats or have to eat live crickets or something.

Sorry mom, but I have to do this…
FUCK!!!!

I was speaking with Jon when he called me to let me know he did in fact have a livejournal now, and as we were talking we somehow got off on a tangent (like THAT never happens) and I said “What the hell is wrong with you people!?!?! Which I guess is essentially Verso in a nutshell.” And I realized how true that was. So now I shall post it for the amusement of whoever is reading this. Not like I know who that is, since nobody ever freakin comments….

Rar.

Jon finally got off his ass (no small undertaking, mind you) and got his own livejournal after yours truly intimated to him the details of just exactly how we could take over the world with this site. Then we talked about just how sort of sick and wrong it was that this site even exists, and then we moved on to something that sucked and people we don’t like, or something.

That’s how Jon and I became friends, sort of. He was on IRC and his friend was too, and so was I, and his friend wanted to meet me and hauled him along. So I hung out with this boy who was indiscriminately social (and had crabs to prove it), his current “friend” (and when I say friend, I mean someone who comes over and has sex a few times a week), and Jon. Jon and I both grew up in small towns, both are adopted, both are huge fans of La Carreta, both BIG FANS OF THE NAKED, both tend to turn into Linda Richmond for no apparent reason, both really enjoy Penny Arcade, both enjoy Pet Shop Boys songs far more than we should, both think George Lucas was high when he named Episode Two, both like Night At The Roxbury far more than we should, both think that there must be justice in the world after seeing a film where Jonathan Taylor Thomas is beaten and gang raped, both firmly believe that most people suck, and the list just goes on and on. So there you go. A little bit about my friend Jon. (if you recall, one of my first entries is one where I mentioned that a friend of mine said “All your good stories start with ‘So Jon and I had a couple of drinks…’, you know that?”)

I’m happy he’s here so I can see what his lj says. He’s in Hell right now-and when I say Hell, I don’t mean his own personal hell, or a figurative version, he literally *is* in Hell.

Hot off the Web…

Driver injured in high speed demonstration at air show

By Associated Press, 8/5/2001 17:39 BOURNE, Mass. (AP)

A man driving a high-speed demonstration vehicle was injured Sunday when his jet-powered SUV flipped over and rolled off the runway during a driving exhibit at the Cape Cod Air Show.

Officials say 41-year-old Ken High, the driver, was slowing down after completing a 300-mile per hour run in a customized 2001 Lincoln Navigator, which is built with a jet engine.

The vehicle flipped over and rolled about 100 yards off the runway before it stopped. High was conscious, coherent and able to walk when he was pulled from the car.

He was listed in stable condition at Massachusetts General Hospital Sunday evening.

Authorities say they are unsure what caused the incident, but an investigation is ongoing.

———-

Let’s review, shall we?

“a 300-mile per hour run in a customized 2001 Lincoln Navigator, which is built with a jet engine.”
All those episodes of Dateline and all those warnings in newpapers and magazines and all those crash tests have pretty much determined that SUVs are top-heavy and likely to roll pretty much at will. Has Stone Phillips taught you nothing? Moving on…

“Authorities say they are unsure what caused the incident, but an investigation is ongoing.”
What??? You can’t be serious. *I* know what caused the incident, and I wasn’t even there!!! I’m on the OPPOSITE COAST, for sobbing out loud. And still, somehow, I have used my powers to divine the cause for the “incident”. And when I say powers I mean I used even less brainpower than the combined Scooby-Doo gang in full mystery solving mode. The direct cause is rampant, unfettered, contagious stupidity. Somebody had the brilliant idea of “What we REALLY need at the air show is a car with a jet engine. Soemthing big, though, maybe one of them there SUV’s that everyone is talking about. We’ll drop a jet engine in it and it will go real fast!” Yeah, they’re talking about how they fall over if you go like 60, let alone 300, but that doesn’t much matter. THEN someone had to say “Let’s buy a Lincoln Navigator for this project! That’s nice and big!” A Lincoln Navigator costs around 50 grand. And that is before you add options. Like doors and keys and a windshield. I can’t find a price on the web for a jet engine. I can’t imagine why that is…Step 3: convince someone who has $50k to spend it on a Navigator for an AIR show and hopefully find the person who can procure the jet engine needed for this paragon of amazing planning. Now find a way to wedge a JET engine into a CAR. Woo! Now we’re ready to turn this bad boy loose on the runway!!! This plan took more than one person to execute. And probably not much convincing.

This, kiddies, is why I try my best to miss the news as much as I can. I get what I want to know from the web, that way I am in control of what I find out about. This eliminates a lot of news that just pisses me off. But stuff I care about gets read, and some of that causes me lots of anger and/or frustration as well. It makes me want to find the people responsible for some of these debacles and bonk their heads together. Sounds like a cartoon, you say? And just how real does that news story at the top sound?

(edited for formatting issues)

well, it’s finally happened. I actually can’t believe this is true. If it wasn’t from Starwars.com I wouldn’t think twice about pointing and laughing. Alas, this is not the case. And it’s all over the site, too. Consider, if you will, the names of the original Trilogy: A New Hope,The Empire Strikes Back, and Return Of The Jedi. These are titles which, even before they had the movies attached to them, seemed to give you an idea of what was to come. A New Hope. Starting from somewhere and looking to the future and what lay ahead. Quasi-inspirational, sort of gives you the feeling of a happy ending. The Empire Strikes Back sort of makes you think that perhaps this isn’t as warm and fuzzy as the first. Maybe the good guys don’t win this time. Ominous title. Return Of The Jedi sort of sounds like maybe the Jedi make the Empire their bitch by the end. Maybe the good guys DO win in the long run. Is that true? Is it possible? Well, duh, of course it is. That’s what happens. And The Phantom Menace is kind of an interesting name, but it lacks the attention getting of the first three. Now we have THIS to contend with. Jesus. Does it GET any worse?? Well. I guess it _could_. I mean, we don’t have a name for Episode 3 yet. What will it be, Invasion Of The Jedi Snatchers? Third Rock From The Twin Tatooine Suns? Attack Of The 50-Foot Jar Jar? I envision a day, and it doesn’t appear to be all that far off, (say, May 23 2002) when I will become the sort of person I never wanted to be. Well, there are a few of those, but this particular variety doesn’t officially exist yet. This person is the Trekker Purist. (don’t get all pissed off if I use the wrong word, I can’t keep track of who’s a Trekker and who’s a Trekkie and all that goings on.) This is the Trek fan who says that even the shittiest episode of The Original Series is better than the best episode of The Next Generation. I’m going to become cranky and bitter and swear that the second series will never compare to the original. There’s no way, blah blah blah.

I was having this conversation earlier on IRC, and here it is (edited slightly to remove the tangent conversation about Natalie Portman and her indisputable hotness, and it’s subsequent dispute.):

(kyuss) Verso!
(kyuss) Star Wars episode 2: attack of the clones
(kyuss) is the title
(kyuss) http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/news/2001/08/news20010806.html
(Kyrina) blah
(Verso) kyuss: how lame is that???
(kyuss) haha
(kyuss) i dunno
(kyuss) i havnt formed an opinion yet
(Kyrina) too lame to comprehend
(kyuss) haha
(Verso) it sounds like one of those goofy B movies..The Blob! Attack of the 50-foot woman! Attack of the clones!
* Kyrina nods
(Verso) god.
(Verso) I can actually envision a day when I will be embarrassed to admit my fandom.
(Verso) that, or it will be sharply divided, like TOS trekkers and TNG trekkers.
* Kyrina nods
(kyuss) never!
(Kyrina) If there is one series and then another there are always people who prefer the classic and those who prefer the newer ones.
(Kyrina) The fights over Final Fantasy are brutal
(Verso) it’s not like, preference because it’s new or old.
(Verso) it’s like, preference because it isn’t crap.
(Kyrina) there’s a bigger difference then just one being taped more recently.
(Verso) god damn.
(Verso) kyrina: yeah, but it usually comes down to how there can never be another one like it.
(Verso) or whatever.
(Verso) people trot out the old “cashing in on the original” argument all the time.
(Kyrina) Verso: I have to admit I like the originals better.
(Verso) as do I.
(Verso) story development was better, plot advancement was there, not a lot of it seemed pointless.
(Verso) I’m sure part of it is me, but I never look back on the originals and go “that shot is for a toybox” or “that sequence is for a video game”

So, that’s where this whole rant came from. It sort of pisses me off and I’m worried that the next one will suck. I’m sort of holding out hope because I like Empire the best of the first Trilogy, it has the most plot advancement and no setup, you know who they are and what they’re about so you just sort of jump in. I like that. I am not your average moviegoing tard, I hate having my hand held through the whole stupid movie. I have very little patience for it. Movies like Memento and Pulp Fiction are much more engaging to me for exactly this reason. Keep up, and if you don’t, your loss. Anyway.

I picked a new layout for my lj. Lemme know if you dig it. Post a comment or whatever.

Things are starting to slow down a bit, both personally and professionally, so I hope to have more time to blather on endlessly here. I’m sure you’re THRILLED to know that. It sorta sucks that when you have the most to write about, you have the least time to write about it. So you end up with detailed descriptions of mundane details.

Before I forget: This will be significantly other than painless. There was an article about people’s failing biz models or whatever on the LA Times site and it said:
“We haven’t fully explored the range of business models and opportunities here,” he [John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board] said. “That process will be significantly other than painless.”

That’s too amusing for words. I love that. Significantly other than painless. It’s like, the pinnacle of understatement. Mostly he’s probably just cranky that he invested in a bunch of dotgones that went gunnysack on him before he got filthy stinking rich and bought a Porsche or whatever so he could cruise around and date cheerleaders. Or something. It’s an interesting article if you get a chance.

K, I’m done for now. You may get more later.