Author: Mark Alexander

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So I’m Sitting Here…

…with Donna Summer’s MacArthur Park Suite blasting in the headphones and I realized that the recruiter I met with earlier today wasn’t even alive when I was dancing to this in the clubs.

And then I realized that Ben wasn’t either.

I feel so old sometimes…

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Free? Are They Insane?

It’s funny…Ben and I were discussing this a few weeks ago, wondering out loud if Apple would sell OS X Mavericks at the same—or even a lower—price than they did with OS X Mountain Lion. We even joked that they’d give it away for free.

Even with my severely constrained cash flow at the moment, I had mentally set aside $20 (the price of Mountain Lion) to get the upgrade because, well…priorities!

Imagine my “surprise and delight” this morning then—while watching Apple’s Keynote—when they announced the OS upgrade would be absolutely free.

Are they insane? Or have they just caused a few more worry lines to appear on the faces of Microsoft executives?

I can already hear the headlines. “APPLE IS DOOMED! THEY KNOW NO ONE WOULD BUY THE UPGRADE SO THEY’RE GIVING IT AWAY FOR FREE!”

Uh. Yeah. About that…

I’d write more, but the download is almost finished.

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“Gee, Bud…


…that’s a swell idea, but I’ve already got a fisting party with Fred, Arthur, Bill and Joe booked that night.”

Yes, I am going to hell.

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“They’re All Gonna Laugh at You!”

Ben and I saw the new Carrie yesterday. I went in with low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised. While my memories of the original film are kind of hazy at this point, I think this re-telling of the story seemed much more faithful to the original story—or at least it fleshed out a lot of what had been missing from the 1976 film.

While I thought Sissy Spacek provided a much more vulnerable and abused Carrie, Julianne Moore brought a whole new level of cray-cray to the role of Mrs. White. Dat bitch be insane!

When the film ended, I didn’t feel like I’d been cheated out of seven dollars, but on the other hand, I had no immediate desire to see it again until it shows up on cable…

Final verdict? Recommended. It’s a fun little escape.

The same cannot be said for the pay-per-view movie we saw last night: Pacific Rim. The only redeeming feature of that stinker seemed to be the eye candy provided in a nicely matured Charlie Hannam. Setting aside that the whole premise was ridiculous, it seemed to be yet another in a very long line of  films where the firm providing the CGI just perfected one of those Wow! special effects (in this case, creating millions of bits of shattered glass) and immediately thought it would be a good idea to use everywhere. Again and again.

This was one of those films that I had wanted to see when it originally came out but never got around to. I’m glad now I didn’t waste money to see it in the theater…

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“He Would Have an Enormous Schwanzstücker!”

“For the experiment to be a success, all of the body parts must be enlarged.”
“In other vords: his veins, his feet, his hands, his organs vould all have to be increased in size?”
“Exactly.”
“He vould have an enormous Schwanzstücker.”
“That goes without saying.”
“Voof.”
“He’s going to be very popular.”

If you don’t know the where that reference came from, go away and never darken these hallowed halls again.

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My Guilty Culinary Pleasure

Yup. Cottage cheese and potato chips.

When I was a wee thing, my parents could not get me to eat cottage cheese. Yeah, it’s healthy and all that, but it was just so…bland. Then they stumbled upon giving it to me on a potato chip. SOLD!

From that point on, it’s been my guilty culinary pleasure. Ben thinks it’s disgusting, but it’s healthier than chips and that in-a-jar dip we had been getting. The cottage cheese is very low carb, and the combination of the creamy smoothness of the cottage cheese with the crisp saltiness of the chips is what makes it work so well.

I used to think that liking this was my own personal quirk, but a quick Google search has confirmed that I’m not alone.

As much as I love the chips, I need to keep an eye on my carbs, so next time I get the urge I’ll try it with some whole grain crackers instead, to make it an really healthy snack…

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And the Cylons Have a Plan

Seditious, treasonous pigs, all of them.

From AMERICAblog:

A little known video, before this weekend, has started to go viral as it shows how the House Republicans altered the US House standing rules on October 1, 2013 in order to ensure that the federal government would be shut down, and stay shut down.

It’s pretty arcane stuff, but awfully important.

Basically, the House Republicans changed the House rules on October 1 to ensure that House members could not call up the Senate bill that would have kept the government open. Had the rules not been changed, any member, Democrat or Republican, could have called the Senate bill up, and there very likely may have been enough Democrats and Republicans to pass it and keep the government open.

So US House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, changed the rules of the entire House of Representatives in order to ensure that the entire federal government be shut down in order to force the defunding of Obamacare.

Here’s Democratic Cong. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, asking Republican Jason Chaffetz about the rule change:

Van Hollen: H. Res. 368 changed the standing rules of the House to take away from any member of the House the privilege of calling up the Senate bill to immediately reopen the government, is that right?

Chaffetz: It did change the operation of the standing rule.

It seems that Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and their racist Tea Party brethren were protesting at the wrong building this weekend when they went to the White House to complain about the shutdown – a shutdown that Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and the Tea Party supported and helped orchestrate.

And now we have the ultimate proof that the entire shutdown was the handiwork of the Tea Party controlled House Republicans. They wanted to ensure that even if the votes were there, no one would be able to reopen the government. Amazing.

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