I don’t get to see snowfall too often in downtown Seattle. As I gaze out from my bedroom window, watching University students play in the powder, a clean settling comfortably on the the surfaces, I’m struck by how peaceful this postcard is.

I hope the guy on that bike doesn’t crash.

I am overcome…

A while back, while reading my favorite website in the entire world, I came across a delicious morsel of information that instantaneously sapped all strength from my normally sturdy lower appendages. I immediately succumbed to my nemesis, writhing in a state of unadulterated bliss upon the floor.

I lack the ability to explain the magnitude of this in less than one thousand and four words, so instead I’ll use the four and a picture.

Nerf now makes this:

Your eyes do not deceive. Nerf now makes a fucking Sniper Rifle.

Needless to say, I immediately proceeded to my nearest certified and authorized Nerf vendor, bribed the 16 year old at the counter to skip the mandatory 3 day waiting period & background check preceding the sale of all firearms, and went Christmas morning style on the packing as soon as I got home.

Today, this instrument of vigilant peacekeeping made it’s way to my office.

It was at this point that the greatest idea ever was proposed. After watching me repeated shoot one of our software developers, my esteemed colleague, Hart, made a suggestion so groundbreaking, so incredible in it’s beautiful, beautiful simplicity, that it literally made my head explode.

After my belfry-less torso had finished collecting the various bits of my Marvin off the floor, and humpty-dumptied it back together with super glue and 2-sided scotch tape, I immediately felt the overwhelming need to share this idea with the world.

Now before I tell you this, the greatest idea ever in the entire world, a public service announcement. I’m not saying that hearing this will cause your head to explode, as it did mine. I’m simply saying that, immediately after reading this idea, your head will promptly explode. Consider yourself warned.

Hart sees me with the instrument of vigilant peacekeeping, and says:

“It should be a rule that all wars will be fought with Nerf guns.”

The sheer gravity of this statement is entirely too much for me to get my head around, even in pure theory.

This is why he’s my favorite superhero.

I stand firmly in my opinions of a many great category, and minus a few lone instances where the evidence against my position is impregnable, I generally cannot be talked of my ideological ledge, no matter how precariously icy the intellectual footing may be.

I’ve come to accept this as a flaw of character, like an ostrich who covers its insecurity over being flightless by acting like a total dick to other birds.

The one grace note of this mess, however, is that I don’t generally preach. I have no illusions to my over-arching necessity to this plane of consciousness. With that in mind…

Under few circumstances should you ever listen to any suggestions I make. Allow me to annunciate a reason. If you were to take any piece of advice I were to dish out, It could potentially lead to losing your job amongst accusations of gross misconduct of the copy machine, the jilting of your lover to a degree sufficient enough to compel them to flog you with expensive artwork, get you evicted from your place of residence after propositioning your elderly landlord, and finally resulting in your unceremonious death at the hands of a dog-lover who has caught you in the act of repeatedly head-butting a remarkably cute puppy.

And all I suggested to that guy was to go with paper over plastic. They found his body in a McDonald’s playground ball pit in a Sheboygan.

Despite this track record of destruction, I’m willing to risk your safety to offer up this piece of advice. It’ll be worth the copy machine, the artwork repair, the new residency, and possibly even the pooch assault.

It’s not often I come across a TV show I’ll actually actively evangelize. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is a show I’m willing to do this for. A show the concurrently takes on the slow destruction of the main-stream media, the insanity of the Far right, the insanity of the far left, and the continual degradation of the arts in favor of increasable commercial success. A show that would have made Paddy Chayefsky proud (and possibly irrelevant), and Howard Beale a little less dead. An ambitious task, I assure, and still 1-upped by the aching humanity with which it is all handled.

If you need proof, watch the holiday show from Dec. 4th. The episode ends with New Orleans jazz musicians playing O Holy Night. It’s indescribable, but the one thing I’ll say is, by the end of it, I was literally in tears.

Please watch this show. Please. It’s one of the few examples of how television should be, and unfortunately, it probably won’t last, as people skip over it favor of entertainment that can only be defined as “easier”. Shows that require no thought, and leave no lasting emotional connection. Shows that can’t make me cry.

So, next Monday at 10:00, when given the choice of Studio 60, “Who Wants to Screw My Sister”, or anything with fucking Paris Hilton in it, do yourself a favor.

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Just got home from Death Cab at the Key. It’s been a while since I made it to a show at an arena, and it was certainly a culture shock. A few things I noticed:

1. At some point, and I’m not sure when, it became unacceptable to use a lighter during an emotionally high point in a song. There was actually a guy assigned to yell at people in my section whom were violating this unspoken rule. And he was a asshole about it. At one point, after yelling at a young girl about this bizarre rule, I sort of wanted her to light him on fire. Note to 6 dollar an hour event staff, don’t fuck up shows for people. You’re there to do “crowd management”, I get that, and I have no problem with someone taking their work seriously. But, if you yell at young girls, I’m going to have to condone their behavior when they set you on fire.

2. In lieu of lighters, people were waving opened cell phones in the air. This was a wholly new phenomenon to me. At one point, there were a sea of glowing screens. It was pretty impressive. I’ve been to more concerts in my life than I’m capable of counting, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The thing that struck me, is that everyone in the entire world has a cell phone, so anyone really can get in on the act. A lot of people did.

3. As this was a Death Cab show, it attracted a certain audience. The one thing that I noticed about the audience, was the sheer number of people wearing glasses. I’m not sure why this struck me, but as an individual who suffers from the godsmack of mole vision, I tend to pay attention to one thing in particular. I have a number of female friends who have bad vision, but do contacts, or simply go without. While this isn’t an option for me, I understand, there is a stigma about this sort of thing. That being said, I’ve always found women who wear glasses to be considerably more beautiful than those who do not. I can’t explain this, but the attraction is undeniable.

4. Finally, the most important part of the night. The show was fucking killer. I was afraid their music wouldn’t translate to “Arena Rock”, but it worked. This is music that puts me in a happier, calmer state, an attitude I can physically wrap myself in, the buttery velvet of content draped lazily over my shoulders, warming me, protecting me against the cynically chilling winds of the outside world. I needed this. The weekend previous to this had left me in a state of semi nervous breakdown, the demons and hauntings rising up to overthrow their malevolent oppressors. When I step to this precarious edge, I usually institute a mental martial law to regain order. Tonight, all it took was 4 beers, and a really good concert.

The catharsis sets in…

I’ve been around the tubes once or twice, seen this great landscape change and morph, the rolling hills of the Wikipedia shinning and glistening with the dew of pure, unrefined information. The supple splendor of the Fark Photoshop contests. The majestic mountains of mammaries in the various red-light districts (so I’ve heard, of course).

For as lovely as the entire experience has been, there are shining examples of just flat out bad decision making.

A few days ago, I stumbled on perhaps the worst thing I have ever seen on the dump truck, and it has been birthed by a company I generally respect considerably. Ms Dewey, a “humanized” front end to the Live.Com search engine, has forever polluted my digital soul, and the aggravation is taking hold. My body begins to heave and expand, my musculature growing at an compounding rate, expanding to the strain my white shirt to the limits of its tensile strength, finally shredding off my body, revealing the newly found green tint to my flesh. My eyes glow with the rage of a million vengeful Inigo Montoyas.

This is the worst website I have ever seen. No joke, no exaggeration, the most abominable experience on a whole I’ve ever had in front of a computer. This is worse than… honestly, I struggle to come up with something so dreadful I wouldn’t mind insulting by comparison.

I navigate the Flaming Canid in the direction of a promised “New sexy search engine”. So far so good, I’m a fan each of those descriptors. Then, I land on the page. “ Ms. Dewey is Loading.. ”

Beg Pardon, Sorry, Missed that. You want me to wait to search? I must load some flash system into my cache, waiting for my opportunity to crawl the Internets. This had better knock my socks off, Google takes about 1/jabillionth of a second to load, and promptly finds precisely what I need.

Then I get the intro.

Again, this is a search engine. There’s an intro. A moderately attractive woman appears on screen, and promptly makes a total ass out of herself. She tries to be funny. She fails. She tries to be cute. She fails. She tries to have a conversation with me through the monitor. It annoys. 30 seconds later, I’m presented with a search box. I vomit profusely all over the keyboard.

I solider on, knee deep in the poorly conceived quicksand of “well fuck, we’ve tried everything else”. I enter my search term. As I type, she fidgets above, distracting, talking, laughing. As I type, the animation changes. She makes a humiliating comment about my typing speed, asking me if my hand is broken, or some such nonsense. I begin to scream, shouting profanity at the monitor, at this indexed hussy, this digital shrew.

I will not be turned away, clearly this entire system has been designed to turn away the riff-raf, those unwilling to muscle through the gag reflex of this fecal experience so far. The results will unquestionably be an elysian field of relevant information, presented in a fashion so revolutionary, so lighting quick, as to revolutionize the world. It has done a background check on me as I hit Search, cross-indexed me with 9 million individually relatable parameters, and extrapolated my favorite color selection, so as to overwhelm me with sweet, sweet information, finally transcending into the material plane to provide me a fresh Cinnabon.

All of this to generate in exact timing with the release of my mouse, the speed with which this will work.

12 seconds later (no joke, 12 seconds), my results fade into view. They are small, hard to read, and the text falls off the edge of the results pane, which is too narrow to show more than 3 full results. The mouse takes flight, embedding itself in the drywall adjacent to my bathroom. I walk over and dislodge it, finally taking comfort in the fact that I can click a link, any link, and be taken away from this travesty, this sulfuric, odious disaster. I click, thankful to be euthanized from this whole process. My target site opens in a new window. In the background, the avatar raps on the “glass” separating us, asking me if I’m still there. I vomit again.

This is THE example of people who flat out don’t get it. They substitute style for substance, screw them both up, and turducken the entire clusterfuck into a totally unusable experience. It takes me an entire minute to execute a search (compared to 5 seconds for Google, or hell, even Live.com), and I get personally insulted by a bad actress in a badly designed system.

Seriously, this makes me so mad I could take the fool behind this concept, stuff him/her full of Branches, and beat them with a ham until they explode in a colorful (albeit bloody) rainfall of delicious.

And when this happens, it will be the best thing to ever happen to the Ms. Dewey experiment.

You must’ve been high, you must’ve been so high…

I fall to my knees, my better judgment cast asunder, put on hiatus, an under-performing network television show. The confession claws itself to the surface, determined to inhale the sweet air of freedom. The time neigh, the opportunity seized. The shackles shaken off. Emergence.

I’m on the fence about Christmas.

Allow me to narrow the scope of that statement. Upon re-reading it, one might assume I’m in some way against the manger set birth of a child, possibly even a savior, preaching love, utterly free of provision, condition, limitation, smelling faintly of frankincense, ensconced in magi. This is not the case. While true that I have long since unsubscribed to the mailing list of organized religion on the whole, the pure idea of this story is a favorite of mine. When told unadulterated, the aforementioned unconditional love leads to one of my ultimate praises: “I gotta get me some of that”.

My consternation with Christmas is actually of the secular variety, and the fact that such a statement could even be said actually just made me smile.Here’s the thing. I love the lights, I love the giving. I love National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. Most importantly, I love the general sense of community that re-coagulates in the month of December. We fight amongst each other over myriad petty offenses, but the “season” washes these macroeconomic issues from our eyes, the soap of anger finally cleansed in a blink. And, it becomes globally a little more difficult to be selfish.

However, I have no such affection for radio stations that switch to an all-holiday music format, playing songs covered by brain-dead pop-stars singing about purity and love the night after heavy drinking, smoking, doing lines off the back of a hooker, and complaining about how their life is so hard. I have no love for people physically fighting over the last Tickle Me Elmo doll (although, in the interest of full disclosure, that thing is so damned cute I developed cavities after gazing upon its hypnotic machinations.) I flat out loathe the notion that someone can walk out of a store with a thousand dollars worth of gifts, right past the Salvation Army volunteer, without a second thought as to their over-arching duty to this world. Basically, anything that makes it globally a little more easy to be selfish.

So here I stand, before the mantle of Christmas, a crossroads waiting to be decided upon.

The wise men came, three made their way
To shower him with love While he lay in the hay
Shower him with love love love
Love love love
Love love was all around