The Z Axis

well, it's not, zorak, it's my granddad, okay?

I haven't been writing as much as I'd like, so consider this in the "better than nothing" file.

Allow me to preface this entry by saying that I do not consider myself a fan of professional, or "theatrical" wrestling, aside from using it as an exemplar analog to the political "debate" you see on 24-hour cable news networks. I don't follow the characters, or know all the history, but I have a cursory knowledge of some of the more popular characters, due in no small part to the fact that you couldn't throw a stone in my elementary school without hitting 3 kids wearing Hulkamania T-shirts. I know of the big people like Hogan and The Rock, and I will also admit to being a fan of the movie Suburban Commando.

Recently, the venerable Badservo foisted this upon me.

Yes, that's right, Randy "Macho Man" Savage made a rap album, and no, it's not just him commanding you to Snap into a Slim Jim over and over with a drum machine in the background.

No, that would be the easy way, the quick buck way, the way I am pretty sure Hulk went with his album, recommended on the same Amazon page as above.

I would like to say that this album was a quick money grab and not worth the melted sand it's burned onto.

Sadly, I cannot.

Yes, it reaches incredible heights of cheesiness and self-aggrandizement, but it also hits undeniable, crack-like levels of catchiness - which would be easily dismissable if the whole thing weren't so insanely well produced.

I've been listening to certain parts of it repeatedly for the past couple days, and I'm pretty sure that is more an indicator that something very bad is happening to the molecular cohesion of my brain than that this album is great.

But nonetheless, this album is great and you all should go out and buy and make the Macho Man rich and OOHHHHHH YEEEYUHHHHH.

Sorry, got away a bit there.

But man, that guy has a confusingly fantastic voice.

[you tell him, taddy]

really thought the giants would go all the way this year

For the record, 3 weeks does not even meet a highly charitable definition of "soon."

"But those same qualities they read as strengths in the beginning will inevitably be read as weaknesses or points of boredom, and he'll find his self broken-hearted again and again."

Sounds about right, Ray, sounds about right.

marker.

[they were wrong]

a random aside

This is among the most expressive-faced stuffed monkeys I have ever seen.

[damned cobwebs]

oh man

Viva le Onion

Nation planning Surprise Party to Cheer Up Conor Oberst

OMAHA, NE—American citizens are coordinating efforts to lift the spirits of wünderkind singer-songwriter Conor Oberst, sources reported Monday. "I saw Conor's picture in a Spin article about Bright Eyes, and he just looked so down," said Lindsey Keisner of Youngstown, OH, one of the party's 4,000 planners. "The country feels really bad that he's going through such a rough spell, so next Friday, everyone who can should meet in Omaha with balloons, funny cards, and silly little gag gifts." Britt Daniel from Spoon will lure Oberst to Omaha by asking him to overdub some vocals.

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAH

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAH

ha

ha

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

[pant pant wheeze]

re: marketing department

Wheee.

So, I've long been against the trendy notion of the "cameraphone," not because I'm inherently against trends, or people having cameras on them 24/7, or even the convergence of handheld electronic devices. In fact, I'm all for the convergence of handheld electronic devices, because I hate carrying a lot of shit on me. Any technology junkie will tell you, however, that the first "matings" of various such devices inevitably results in utter crap. In technology, at least for the first few waves, swiss-army-knifery almost always means your blade can't cut a damn thing, your bottle opener has trouble with cork above the density of strawberry pudding, and the little piece of metal that makes your scissors spring back open breaks the first time you use it. I promise if you think about it enough, that metaphor is insightful.

The problem I've had with cameraphones is exactly that - they are usually cameras first, and phones second, and bad at both of them. This is important to me, as - novel as the camera idea is - I want a phone first and foremost, and I want it to be a good one. I want a Phonecamera. This is because I am geeky and personal-publishing-enthusiasty enough to find having a camera on me all the time, especially a connected one that can fire images off to the various internets, a huge draw, but I also need to be able to make phone calls and run on a single charge for days at a time. I'm not against the idea of a camera/phone device, I just want it to not totally suck at one or the other, preferably both.

Enter the Nokia 6230, scourge of the haphazardly designed convergence device. My brother got one for his job for the bluetooth functionality, and since my contract with Cingular ran out in December, I'd been hemming and hawing about whether to take advantage of the roughly 3,000 "PLEASE SIGN BACK UP, LOOK FREE SHINY PHONE, RAR NEED CONTRACT" promotions they had been sending me per second. Apparently free agency scares the hell out of these people. I like their service a lot, and have been very pleased, but didn't want a repeat of my rushed new-phone experience with T-Mobile. This time, I actually used the phone, and did a lot of reading on the truly excellent Howard Forums before going for it. Amongst the many other incredible things I could say about this phone, let me just leave it at this: mp3 ringtones for the win.

The pic of my nephew I linked a couple posts back was taken with this phone, and while the camera's not QGA 8000x6000 resolution, it's more than adequate given that it's built into a phone I actually like carrying on me and using.

As is the case for seemingly everyone who's as nerdy as I and had a cameraphone for more than 7 seconds, this morning in my insomnia I set up a moblog, or photoblog, or whatever the hell you want to call it. I'm still too cheap to buy into a data plan from Cingular, and I don't know if that means I can't send pictures via the cell network at all, or merely that they will charge me an exhorbitant per-picture fee. Right now, however, I'm easily able to copy pictures off the phone via the memory card, or even easier, the bluetooth networking, so while I haven't posted an event occuring at 3:15 at 3:19, I'm still pretty much able to hit it same-day, and no one cares enough about the stuff I'm gonna post to miss the intervening hours.

I've signed up with Buzznet, which is a nifty little community that furthermore actually provides the email-to-web translation necessary for moblogging, and is free. Cooler than that, they allow you to have them post to a real blog for you, so I've set up this blog on the patrickcentral server, so I have a little more template control and can skip the buzznet ads and so on.

I'll be adding some sections to the main PatrickCentral.com layout and to the Z axis layout to reflect the addition to my online panoply of whatever, but I'm also considering using some kind of feed aggregation service like Feedburner to create one unified XML feed for you pesky Livejournal folks, who now make up the bulk of the meager few who read this crap.

Furthermore, I'm now going to make a post over at the buzznet blog that has a picture of writing this entry, just because I fricking can.

[boldly doing exactly what others have done once assured of safety]

insomniac political scorecard

I can't tell you how happy it makes me that the most brutal of these highly selective bouts comes from a politician. And a democrat, to boot.

Oliver, man, they're wearing the brand. Holy shit.

[my god, they're starting to throw punches]

misdirection

My nephew Mitch looks, well, a terrifying amount like me. This is none too surprising, as he very much takes after his father, and his father and I both take after our father to an insane degree. When out in public, there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind of familial relation amongst us.

This has an interesting side effect for me in particular, as I fancy myself more empathetic (empathic? is that a real or sci-fi word? empathetic sounds like a dig.."highly characterized by empathy," how's that) than my brother, and I believe my nephew is the same way.

This is unfortunate in that when he is unhappy, as children can get, in a whole-body sense - where their whole WORLD is invested in something, and I don't mean getting a toy or going to McDonald's, but still something we adults ordinarily take in stride - he makes this face of utter agony. It's cute and it makes me feel better about how I am still like a kid in that regard sometimes, if in the right mood, but more often than that, it absolutely kills me. It does so because I know that face. He may be inconsolable because his best friend just inadvertently popped his mom in the face by turning around too fast, and in the adult world, accidents are accidents, no harm done, it's already forgiven. However, in that face I can see how I feel in moments of utter betrayal and anguish, and it absolutely cuts me to, I dunno, something far more squishy and vulnerable than bone.

This is what I feel like on the inside when I am happy. I may be tired or miserable, but there are certain things the people I love can do that, at least on the inside, make me feel exactly like that in one of those "picture's worth a thousand words" kinda ways. Anybody who's seen me glowing from being in love or having been indulged in a supremely geeky event with complete acceptance and even affection knows my current, adult version of that face. My version is, of course, tempered by "adulthood," and though I still dip into this mode more than your average adult, little is felt as full-body as it was when you're a child. Having a digitally encoded version of that to look at whenever I want almost entirely balances out all the times the other thing happens.

That pic was taken yesterday after a family dinner at a restaurant where he talked almost exclusively to me and his mom. Oh, and stole his grandpapa's croutons. It's strangely fun despite the unfairness to see how my dad is with the kids, as I cannot imagine the wrath had I tried to steal a crouton. Every now and then, the mirrored lake of nothing that is my dad shows a lil somethin. Nice.

I was lying before.

I knew what would happen.

I'm not giving up on feeling things with my whole body yet - I think I'd be disappointing my nephew if I did. I'm still clinging to a hope that I can avoid becoming a full-on adult or my father, despite indicators that both are inevitable.

If you can't give up, and you can't win outright, change the battlefield.

[life, liberty, and the third thing]

patrick's log, supplemental

thanks to this guy

Also, I forgot to mention last time that just off to the right of this photo, during the opening act, there was a 40 Watt sound guy, running the board, and my hat is off to him.

In my life I have never seen anyone less interested in the performance going on not 6 feet from him.

It was a constant source of amusement.

[the supplemental meant they came back from commercial]

but he doesn't tour

So, haven't been many updates lately, but I've been fairly busy, and even this one was supposed to go up a couple days ago - it's been dated when I originally started it. It still has a sort of sleepily-tapped-out feel to it, but I wanted to knock it out before I moved on to other things in my head. I won't say it's been the most interesting thing to happen of late, but it's the most easily encapsulated in a blog entry.

Thursday night, I tagged along with the venerable BadServo to the 40 Watt in Athens for a show. I had renewed my car's tag online, but hadn't picked up the sticker in the mail, and Thursday was the last day I could drive around with a Mar 2005 sticker without attracting police attention. So, I was gonna be in town anyway, and it was brought to my attention that MC Chris was gonna rock the house, so I went.

For those of you in the unfamiliar, MC Chris is a production assistant turned voice actor on the popular Adult Swim programming block on the Cartoon Network, an outfit I am still desperately seeking employment with. He also has a solid fan base as a rapper, which is how he is able to book and pack venues like the 40 Watt. Many of you would no doubt recognize him from his contributions as the voice of Hesh on Sealab 2021 or MC PeePants on Aqua Teen Hunger Force - or maybe, just maybe, the crazy pincer guy in the Board room skit at the end of the Bebop Cola episode of Sealab. In fact, many of you have probably listened to one or these things and thought quietly to yourself, "My, that is an interesting effect they use on that voice. It must be like the modern, 21st-century version of the Alvin and the Chipmonks technology."

No.

No, it's not.

He sounds exactly like that.

But it's okay, because he does indeed rock the house.

I'd go through some tired, played-out play by play of the show, but I encourage all of you to check out a show on your own if possible - Especially you, Finn, given your taste for that weird kid rapper, and the fact that the leg of the tour in your area coincides with the new Star Wars movie premiere, and Chris is inviting everyone to catch it with him after the show.

Takes a special kind of guy to dedicate one song to Mitch Hedberg, sing one about the Aibo, suggest the torching of a frathouse as a segue into a geek pride moment, and then blow the lid off the joint with an ode to Boba Fett.

Suffice to say, as another song goes, MC Chris Ownz.

[so in the meantime I'm gonna memorize all of his rhymes]