IDIOTECHNOLOGY

Here's that story I referred to yesterday about my visit to the ancestral homelands:

Prior to my arrival, my parents had bought a Blu-Ray player, so when I got home, my brother and I went out and got them some Blu-Ray movies. Nice, right? We decided to watch Batman Begins. We put the disc in.

Fucker didn't work.

The machine kept getting about six seconds into the factory-new disc, past the copyright warning and MPAA rating, and just stopped. Gave us a little "spinny disc" icon and the message "Could not perform action" or something. It took us about ten minutes of putting the disc in and out (including a roughly eight-minute interlude where the machine simply refused to eject the disc at all, leading us to power-cycle the motherfucker by unplugging and replugging it) to conclude that it couldn't be a hardware problem. We solved it, though. How?

We had to run a firmware update on the fucking Blu-Ray player.

This happened. We actually did this. We checked the player's firmware version against the manufacturer's website, downloaded a zip file, unzipped it, put the package on a thumb drive, plugged the thumb drive into the Blu-Ray player, selected an update option from the setup menu, and sat there until the progress bar crawled to completion and we could unplug the thumb drive after the automatic restart. Unbefuckinglievable.

Answer me this: what in the good god damned fuck would my parents have done had my brother and I not been around? How did this technology make its way into the hands of civilians? In the garage I saw the box the Blu-Ray player came in, and it had the "Java-powered" symbol on it. Why the fuck does a Blu-Ray player need to run Java?!

After we did all this bullshit, btw, we got to watch Batman Begins, but that was the most ridiculous thing I have ever done with a piece of consumer technology. Someone needs to get punched, but I don't know who that would be.

I HEREBY COPYRIGHT THIS IDEA IN PERPETUITY

I've returned to the Bay Area from a too-brief trip back to the ancestral homelands of Syracuse, NY. It was nice, but that's not what I'm here to talk about, although I do have a story about it that I need to relate here in due time.

Waiting at JetBlue's excellent JFK terminal for my connecting flight back home, I went into Borders to check out their comics selection. The comics are next to the young adult books, and the stereotype is true, at least on the mass-market paperback level: YA is almost all vampire books. It's all either vampire books or angel books. But here's the weird thing: no books that have angels that have been transformed into vampires. Wouldn't you think that'd be a no-brainer? I mean, maybe someone already did it and my eyes skipped over it because the cover art just wasn't indicative of the book's contents, but sheeeeeeeeeeeeeit /claydavis

This is all to say that you should watch in 2010 for my upcoming series of novels titled VAMPANGEL: The Blood Seraphim Chronicles. Or maybe BLOODWINGS: Tales of the Vampire Host. Listen, the title's not important. It's all about content, okay? This shit is gonna be packed with vampires biting angels and angels biting humans and, like, halos made of blood and tears and crap like that. Nobody else can do it now, because I said it on my blog. That's how it works, right?

THERE IT GOES AGAIN

Twitter's "Trending Topics" list is always a good way to be reminded that most people just can't spell. Do you guys remember when #Micheal Jackson died? Or #Britney Murphy? #youknowyourfat when you can distinguish between monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Where is my rimshot

In other news, your Dogblog update for the month went up last night and I forgot to tell you!

RAP METATAGS?

So there was a brief moment where, listening to the Blakroc album's opening track, I found myself wondering whether ODB has been alive all this time and his death was an elaborate hoax, or whether the art of necromancy had been perfected and nobody told anyone. It turns out his appearance was just an unused vocal track, which leads me to wonder: if there's a pile of these unused vocal tracks just sitting around (my impression is that every (ex)member of the Wu Tang Clan has a vast stockpile of these somewhere), how does someone putting a new song together know which ones will be good for that particular song? Is there a system somewhere to keep all of this shit straight? Is there a vast library of unused ODB tracks that are tagged with metadata?

- 2:31
-- 4/4
-- 3 verses
-- 98bpm
-- weed, guns

- 3:12
-- 4/4
-- 3 verses, chorus
-- 102bpm
-- weed, partying

- 2:40
-- 4/4
-- 2 verses
-- 100bpm
-- weed, fucking

- etc

How else are they gonna know? I can't imagine any other way to get this shit done, but I'm not a producer. Who knows what they actually do.

IMSDB

Talking with a friend of mine who occasionally works as a medic on movie sets, it occurred to me that my default reaction whenever I find out a Hollywood movie star is a decent person is to be mildly surprised. It's like I expect them to be douchebags, and when they violate that expectation, it's vaguely astonishing.

We need a website for this. Internet Movie Star Database. You can only register to post on it if you're confirmed as a worker in the service industry -- waiter, stagehand, grip, whatever. If enough of these people post their own personal experiences with stars, what sort of picture would then emerge of each actor or actress, I wonder?

"Bruce Willis: freaks out if you bring him food that contains the color orange. Seemed apologetic about it later, though. Good tipper."
"Halle Berry: was very nice to my visiting 8-yr-old."
"Scarlett Johansson: slaps people all the time like it ain't no thang."
"Alton Brown: lets the crew take the leftovers home."
ETC

Wouldn't it be nice to have a more-or-less irrefutable* source for this kind of data, a place that makes bigtime celebrities accountable for their behavior to everyone around them? I think it would be amazing if it could be executed correctly.

* The truth content of the site is only as good as the people who post to it, of course, so there'd have to be some kind of system in place to verify each registrant. I don't know what that would be.

HOW YOU KNOW IT WAS A GOOD BIRTHDAY

I had a get-together at a bar on Saturday for the birthday, and it was awesome. And drunk. So drunk, in fact, that when I got home and fell asleep, I dreamed that I continued partying, albeit at a house somewhere in some suburbs I'd never seen before in my life. But some of the people who'd been at the real party were in the dream party, and I'm honestly not sure which of the things I remember talking about were with actual humans or their oneiric counterparts. That's a good birthday.

BEFORE IT'S OVER

If you heard a rumor that today was my birthday, you were not misled: it was! It happened. It still is, I suppose, for another 45 minutes or so on this coast. Originally I wasn't going to do anything, because I have a party planned on Saturday, but other friends of mine informed me that this was a stupid idea -- that to do nothing today would be essentially unamerican. And they were right! We went out to dinner and I got my hands on a dessert I haven't been able to eat in months, and it was fantastic.

Also, we made up a new word whose meaning you can probably infer. It's a verb: to vulve.

Usage:

"Did she vulve him?"
"She totally vulved him."
"Dang."

NEW SOLUTIONS TO OLD PROBLEMS

This morning on the bus I had this happen again, except I didn't have my Emergency Bus Notepad on me. Which is a shame, because I really had some good advice for the girl sitting next to me, who chose to initiate a phone conversation that lasted the entire duration of the bus ride about her mom and the issues her mom has.* I contemplated briefly simply telling her my ideas the next time I see her, but that might get really awkward. To say the least.** This is what happens when you want to convey two pieces of information simultaneously that are at cross-purposes:

- I have some useful advice for you on your mom situation
- Did you really have to have that conversation on the bus, next to me, where I had no choice but to hear it?

A new and innovative deterrence solution has been suggested:

The next time this happens, I pull my own phone out and have a conversation of my own, at slightly higher-than-normal volume, about something intensely personal, but also completely ridiculous. "Yeah. Yeah, the doctor says the worms are all in my left kidney. I don't know either, man, but shit, that's why evolution gave us two, right? Yeah. Naw, he said their reproduction cycle is basically diurnal, so I'm just going to gain that weight right back, and -- yeah. Yeah, weird, huh?" At significant points in the "conversation," I look her way and make deliberate eye contact.

It's funnier, but I don't know. Too subtle? Also, there's a nonzero risk of people actually thinking I have worms in my kidneys. I'm'a think about it some more. I really should've had my Emergency Bus Notepad on me.

* Her mom's an asshole, basically.
** "You're gonna get slapped" was what my friend Jess had to say about it.