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Meet the new blog -- same as the old blog

Dedication:

Anyone who hasn’t figured out yet that this site is dedicated to the memory of fine friend and much missed maestro of mind boggling mental mayhem JEFF WEBB just hasn’t been paying enough attention to the important shit up to this point. Get with it, slackers!

Here it is... the Major Attitude Adjustment

BULLETIN BOARD !!

I can't make it any easier for you than this, folks.

Don't forget to check out KILL THEM ALL AND LET NEO SORT THEM OUT: The Essential Immorality of The Matrix!! If you love the movie The Matrix, you'll really want to throttle me after you read it!

Monday April 7 2003

The times, they aren't a changin'

I'm in this annoying email lull. I have mail out to everyone I normally correspond with, plus a few other people whose blogs I responded to via email, or that I saw on various sites, and as always, none of them are responding. But all my regular correspondents seem to have bumped me down to the bottom of their 'to do' lists, too. This happens from time to time and I just have to remind myself when it does that other people have lives, even if I don't.

But it's still goddam aggravating.

Here at blues2/jdw, the all new, not particularly different URL for this webblog, I now have all of one reader. Yes, the lovely Jen, whom I got into email contact with again a few weeks back when I saw the notice of her engagement in the paper, asked for the URL on Saturday, I guess, and I passed it on to her, so if anyone but her (or me) is reading this right now, bad BAD reader! And send me an email, dammit. And welcome, Jen. Hope you're not terrified by my surly and often deranged ramblings.

Lu hasn't bugged me since last Thursday, but she seems to be on a weekly cycle, so I'm not expecting her until Wednesday or Thursday of this week again. Despite last week's discovery that she and I have a lot more in common than I'd thought, she's clearly not right for me, plus, she's had two opportunities now to fuck my brains out and hasn't done it, so to hell with her. I've hit on a brillian plan to make her leave me alone... next time she knocks on the door, I'll wait several minutes and see if she goes away.

Isn't that brilliant?

Now, what would be best would be for me to start seeing someone else... and that would be my preference, too... but I'm goddamned if I'm going to let myself drift into some horrible settle-for relationship with this... well, not to be unkind, leave it alone, just... Lu is not right for me, and if she keeps hanging around eventually we're going to end up in bed, and I would rather be by myself than suddenly end up enmeshed in this awful thing just to not be myself. Lu is clingy; there's just no way I could bang her a couple of times and blow her off, she's going to want a relationship... in fact, she's already put it front and center, pretty much, telling me that she doesn't just want to sleep with a guy unless there is going to be some kind of emotional commitment.

She must find it frustrating that I don't speak Portugese; she could probably have found a way to let me know that much more subtly in her native language. Since she doesn't speak English well, though, she pretty much had to just come out and say it.

Obviously Jess no longer wants to see me at all... past readers o'de blog know that in hearts and spades by now... but if I could just get her to drop by a few times when I thought Lu would be around and act affectionate, it would do wonders to help me pry Lu loose. Oh, well.

I had a visit with Dr. Rappaport to check on the toenail this morning. It looks bad but he says they tend to at this stage. He hasn't cashed my $330 check yet, the bastard, which explains why my checking account balance remains temptingly high.

Christ, my life is boring these days.

Hartmut chided me on my first notation on the Lu situation, saying that a good looking woman coming around to make out with me was not exactly a bad situation. Apparently, I simply did not articulate well enough exactly how wrong I feel Lu is for me. Yet looking back at that past blog entry, it seems to me I made it clear that she and I are simply not right for each other. I'm just not comfortable with her, and don't really enjoy spending time with her. The last couple of times I've invited her in, it was because I was desperately lonely and hadn't been touched affectionately, or touched anyone similarly, in... well, a pathetically long time. But, seriously, kids... desperate loneliness and a need to be touched, while overwhelming and compulsive, are never good reasons to get physical with someone you really don't like very much. I know this, and, well, I really just don't like Lu very much, and I shouldn't be getting physical with her. Yet every time she comes around, I let her in, because I know she'll probably snuggle me and make out with a little, even if she's obstinate about screwing me (and thank God she is, or I'd be even deeper in a mess than I need to be right now).

I know, it's awful, it's inexcusable, I'm a bastard, it has to stop.

What would make my life simpler would be if all the women I'm not really attracted to, and all the women I really AM attracted to, would switch emotional places in regard to me. See, if the chicks I LIKE, any of them, were to come around and knock at my door hoping to be invited in for a snuggle, that would be great. On the other hand, if the chicks I don't like much would order me haughtily out of their lives, like Jess did, or just snootily ignore me whenever possible, like Erin does, that would be great, too. I could certainly live with Lu snootily ignoring me. And if I opened my door to find Jess there smiling shyly and asking for my advice on something to do with her lease, and then I invited her in and we wound up making out, that would be great, too. But nooooooo. The ones I want would chew through their own ankles to get free of me; the ones I wish would get deported come around and want backrubs. My life just sucks.

It's my webblog and I'll whine if I want to.

Hmmm. And that reasonably factual account of my pathetic, sordid, twisted social life should keep Jen from seriously contemplating dropping by for a visit, as we've idly discussed in email, too. Last time she dropped by it was delightful, but I eventually got freaked out by the fact that she was dating a friend of mine and had to make it stop. Now she's actually engaged (in the paper and everything) so, her dropping by would definitely not be a good thing. Unlike Lu, I really like Jen a lot... how many girls do you meet in this life who read SF and fantasy, like roleplaying games, can write reasonably articulately, and are as kinky as, well, me? Plus, who seem to find me attractive? Very few. But Jen always seems to be engaged to someone or other, so if the Story of Lu sends her packing, it's probably for the best.

Noisy work environment

In work related nonsense, I seem to be pissing off everyone. The woman who works behind me, that I normally get along quite well with, has decided I'm the reason that one of her Project Ayuda geezers quit with no notice over the weekend. See, this guy was very pleasant, but he hummed while he was working, and it was driving me bugshit, so I asked him nicely to stop. And he did. And now he's quit. And this woman got really snippy with me about it today, saying that if I'd had a problem with her worker, I should have addressed it with her.

Now, there's all kinds of shit I could have said here. I, personally, am someone who will, without realizing it, sing in a low tone while working, or hum, or even whistle. I'm usually unaware of it while I'm doing it. And when allergy season rolls around, well, for a week or so while my body adjusts, I snorfle, also much more than I'm aware of. And when this has occurred in the past, the people sitting near me have not troubled themselves to go to my supervisor about it. They just say "Darren, stop making that goddam [whatever] noise". Literally.

The other thing is, this woman wasn't present in the room when the geezer was humming and driving me crazy, she was out at a meeting.

However, she didn't want to hear anything that she didn't want to hear (and she's like that; she has her opinions and that's pretty much that). She feels it was inappropriate for me to speak to her employee about his goddam humming that was driving me crazy, I should have come to her instead, and that's it. So I noted at the conclusion of our conversation that obviously I needed to just not talk to her any more (this is like the third time in a week I've tried to talk to her about something, just kidding around, and she's bitched at me about something else that is completely stupid) and she agreed wholeheartedly, and we'll leave it at that.

I swear to GOD, though, I don't know why I still have this job.

The write stuff

This joke column I started to write, about Robert Heinlein's non-existent influence on modern day superhero comics, is starting to look a lot heavier than I thought it would. I'm about halfway through it, I'd guess, and while I'd really thought it would just be an opportunity for me to write a paragraph or two about each of Heinlein's novels, and maybe somewhat less than that about each of his short stories and significant articles, to demonstrate that, uh huh, yes indeed, this particular piece of Heinlein writing also had no influence at all on modern superhero comics... well, goddamned if I'm not starting to turn up what may very well be places where Heinlein might well have had some influence on modern day superhero comic books.

The first one was negligible; there's a Heinlein short story called "Project: Nightmare" that is actually patterned a lot like a post Silver Age superhero team, in which the government calls a group of psychics together to deal with a secret threat by the Soviet Union. There were very few government sponsored superhero teams in the Golden or Silver Age of comics that I'm aware of, but quite a few proliferated by 1985, and for all I know, "Project: Nightmare" may have influenced them somewhat. So I noted that.

The biggie, though, was when I got to The Past Through Tomorrow. I'd intended to simply do a brief run down on each story, novella, and novel contained in the massive volume showing how none of them had had any influence on superhero comics, when it occurred to me that while the material in each individual story may not have influenced superhero comic books, the very notion of a self contained universe in which a lot of separate stories with separate characters nonetheless all co-existed, and very very rarely, interacted (D.D. Harriman, I believe, is mentioned, at least, in several of the different stories) could very well have been an influence on the first stirrings of internal cross title continuity in comics universes of the time. I did a little research on the Web and in my copy of TPTT, and came up with a rather hair-raising coincidence: the first documented mention of Heinlein's coherent Future History timeline is made in the February, 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The very first time a bunch of separate characters published by the same company were put together in one grouping (the Justice Society of America), indicating irrefutably that they all lived in the same universe and thus initiating the first crude semblance of what would come to be called 'continuity' in superhero comic books, was in All Star Comics #3... which is denoted on its cover as being the 'winter' issue of 1940.

Now, 'winter of 1940' is a pretty broad stretch of time... much of it actually in 1941. (I checked, it was definitely the winter at the END of 1940, not the start; All Star Comics preceding two issues were for Fall of 1940, and before that, for one of the summer months.) And Astounding's more specific cover date may be inaccurate; magazines of that time had a tendency to advance their cover dates so the newsstand owners would leave them out longer. A 'February' issue might well have actually hit the stands in January, or even December of the previous year. And leaving all that aside, Heinlein had written several stories in the 'Future History' series by this time, and an industry insider... say, a fellow SF writer... might have known about the coherent timeline before John W. Campbell announced it in print in that particular issue of Astounding.

Obviously, there's enough elasticity in those dates to generate a whole shitload of interesting questions, especially when you throw in that the writer of the that particular comics story, who is generally credited as the originator of the whole superteam idea, and cross character continuity itself in comics, is Gardner Fox... another SF writer.

If Heinlein's coherent Future History timeline in any way inspired Fox to take the protagonists of several different comic strips and combine them all, for the first time, in one undeniable space/time location, well... yeah... Heinlein has certainly had an influence on modern superhero comics. From that humble beginning, the modern day superteam was born, and not only that, internal continuity within supehero universes itself. To say that Heinlein was influential, assuming Fox was inspired by Heinlein's timeline, is a grotesque understatement.

So, the article has kind of bogged down, as I wrestle with that.

Lord knows if any other surprising revelations await me as I get into 'brief' write ups of the remainder of Heinlein's works...

Who cares about comic books?! Talk about Jess some more.

Fine, if that's what you want. Might as well, since cuz in law Mel doesn't have this URL and she's the only one who bitches at me about the Jess thing.

I had another Jess sighting last week. She was strolling along nonchalantly, looking pleased as pie with herself (but how pleased is pie, actually? The life of a pie seems to me to be a short one, and not overly pleasant, unless you like being cut into chunks and devoured), her hand tucked neatly through the arm of some broadshouldered, gangling lout... the same one, I think, that I've mentioned before. I don't know who he is, although I suppose it could be her very short, stocky, bald husband, wandering around in public wearing elevator shoes and a hairpiece. I don't know Jess' husband very well, but she's pretty weird, so he might be also.

Assuming it isn't her husband, my mind goes to all sorts of arcane and convoluted speculations. I know Jess has a girlfriend (or had one, obviously, things could have changed in the last six months since Jess and I have had cordial contact); her husband gave her permission last year to date, as long as it was a chickie poo, and as long as, in his exact words to me as relayed to me by Jess, "I don't have to be involved in any of it". (Yeah, this guy has a functional pair of testes, he said sarcastically. Gorgeous wife he pays no attention to, and now he's like, 'sure, babe, go munch a rug, as long as I don't have to watch or help or being involved in any way'. I mean, holy mother of Christ. Why do the hottest women always end up with useless morons like this?) So I'm thinking, maybe Jess finally wore him down to the point where he gave her permission to date, period, and this gangling lunk with the odd hair is her new boyfriend? And maybe this is why she abruptly kicked me to the curb... because she knew, if she told me she now had permission to date the entire range of humanity instead of just the half that excludes me (as often as they can) and she didn't go out with me, I'd pout and snivel and generally be really really pissy about it?

I've seen her with this guy several times and honestly, he's just weird looking. He's big, which I assume (if he's not her husband wearing lifts) would be his primary attraction for Jess, since she's tall herself, and her hubby is rather short. I've dated very tall girls in the past; they'll settle for a shorter guy who is nice to them if they have to, but they all dream of some strapping male walking along beside them who makes them look petite and girlish. His hair is weird, which is why I actually wonder if he's wearing a hairpiece. He has this really kind of goofy looking facial hair, and all in all, he looks sort of like, what if Frankenstein was put together by an Amish scientist.

One reason I actually give some credit to the the theory that he might be Jess' husband in lifts and a wig, parading around town in public with her to see if anyone notices, is that, well, Jess is simply obsessively in love with her husband. Other than me, I have never seen her speaking with another guy at all. I grant you, I'm not privy to her personal life much and never was, even when we were supposedly friends. But she seems very very comfortable with this guy, and that little hand tucked through his arm thing is the way she generally walks with her husband, on the occasions I've seen her out with him (and recognized him as such).

Jess is a very private person, and very standoffish. She doesn't like to be touched unnecessarily (yes, I know from experience). So yes, she could have simply met some big galoot she likes considerably better than she liked me. Or this could be some old friend of hers I simply have no knowledge of. But it seems strange to me, and while I don't know her husband well enough to be sure, this guy's facial features seem very similar. It's just a weird thing.

Obviously, I'm still obsessing on this, but the weird thing is, Jess no longer seems particularly attractive to me, either physically or emotionally. I see her and I find it annoying that she ignores me, and it still angers me that she treated me so shabbily, so no, I'm not over it. But I don't find her wildly sexually irresistible any more. I'm just kind of insanely curious about who this guy is, and what their relationship is... although, unless he topples off his lifts and his wig comes off right in front of me, I doubt I'll ever know.

Well, that'll teach me

No sooner do I type that I'm having an email lull than my goddam sister in law Erica sends me this 77K thing that turns out to have fifteen attachments on it, and is this idiotic email spam scam where she thinks she's going to get a coupon from Applebee's if she forwards this to nine of her friends.

I swear, I just get into the habit of unhesitatingly deleting ANYthing with a 'Fw:' in the subject line, and then, for some reason, I decide not to this time, and it's shit like this.

I know from experience, you cannot yell at a family member to please not send you forwards, not without kicking off the mother of all email wars and getting everyone you're related to drawn into the uproar. For that matter, I've occasionally forwarded something I thought would be of interest to a specific friend, and gotten a snotty 'please don't send me forwards note' back, and it always pisses me off. So, I'm just going to go back to deleting anything with 'Fw:' in the subject line unread.

Tonight, tonight

I've slipped back into the sloppy habit of watching Boston Public, because there's nothing else to do at 8 on Monday nights, and Jeri Ryan is just SO goddam hot. Most of the characters I used to be interested in, student and teacher, are long gone by now, and I don't much care about any of the new ones. But Guber is still, occasionally, someone I'm interested in, especially if they're going to eventually set him up with the babe black teacher, whose name I cannot, at this moment, remember. However, it's worth noting that Kelley knows damned well all us lonely dateless geeks empathize with Guber and want to see him get with one of the show's babe characters (especially after forcing us to suffer through that horrific, seemingly endless pairing of Guber with the crazy Kathy Baker Hook Lady in the first and second seasons) and he's manipulating us with that longing ruthlessly. My despairing assumption that poor Scott was never, actually, going to get laid by anything remotely decent looking was one reason I tossed this show resolutely aside at the start of last season... sure, all the cute new boytoy male teachers can take turns jumping Jeri Ryan and the various other female hotties on the staff, but Scott? Scott, apparently, would be lucky to go out with Marla. This is, of course, very realistic, but is that what we freakish outsiders, hated and feared by the world we are sworn to mock relentlessly, watch TV to see? I don't THINK so. Gimme fat bald Sipowicz and his hot blonde squeeze on NYPD Blue any day to that particular dose of dating cinema verite.

However, as I said, despite my better judgement, I've started watching it again. It's actually, if anything, gotten worse in the last year and a half (last week's episode featured the discovery of that obnoxious midget from the Austin Powers movies hiding in a locker, emailing exam answers to cheating kids on their cell phones. I mean, sure, we can have midgets in lockers with laptop computers helping kids cheat, but we can't have a middle aged geeky guy get laid by someone hot, that wouldn't be realistic, don't you know).

And yet, still I watch. Thus does boredom make morons of us all.

I have been enjoying The Practice lately, although I think I mentioned it was mostly because Teri Polo's been on the last two episodes. The Practice is yet another David Kelley show that is really showing its age badly; plotlines have grown increasingly more contrived and Byzantine over the years (and they didn't start out simple). However, you do have to give Kelley props for the fact that this is a show that's been on for something like eight years now, and the interoffice romance has actually been relatively minor... in fact, only two regular characters from the titular 'practice' have slept together (he said, quickly flailing his brain to see if that was actually true) and they're currently married. Normally, in a TV melodrama featuring three regular actors and four or five regular actresses, most of which are fairly hot, everybody would have boinked everybody by the fourth season, much less the eighth).

Of course, Kelley's careful mixture of personality and physicality types probably works against that here. Kelley, for whatever reason, is always careful to have a physically unattractive male on all his shows whose dating patterns more or less conform to reality. On The Practice that's Jimmy Berluti, and since Jimmy's female co-attorneys are all hot (with the exception of Eleanor) he is, by Kelley's apparent "homely man law", precluded from getting busy with any of them. In fact, Jimmy's only real relationship to date has been with a much older judge who, for her age, is certainly quite attractive, but still, Kelly's obviously not going to offend gorgeous women everywhere by letting Jimmy get his hands on one in the fictional realm.

Why the amazingly great looking Bobby Donnell, or the equally good looking Eugene (he's the black, bald one) haven't hooked up with more of the firm's babes seems to be a product of both characterization and the prickling 'none dare call it racism' social segregation of our sorry modern day era. Bobby doesn't date around because he's an old fashioned guy, and naturally isolated; in the cases of all his relationships we've seen on screen, they seem to have been initiated by the (totally hot) women involved (must be a hard, hard life that Bobby Donnel leads). As to Eugene, well, the American media has come full circle. Back in the 50s and 60s, if black characters showed up on TV at all, they could only ever date other black characters, because it would offend the white audience much too much to see an interracial love scene. Nowadays, once again, black character can only date other black characters, but whitey is officially okay with it (or we'd better be, lest we be pilloried as racist); it's the black audience, and apparently more often than you'd think, the black actors themselves, who get annoyed when black characters are written having a thang for an ofay. See, when white people scream about miscegnation and betraying the racial genome and destroying the white culture and crap like that, well, we are seriously racist motherfuckers and we should be taken out somewhere and shot. But when hepcat Afro-American people say exactly the same thing, why, that's just ethnic pride on their part, and if us poor honkeys don't understand, well, shee-it, it's a black thing.

Which is to say, Eugene don't be knockin' boots with any of the other hotties in his law firm because he's black, and they're white.

Now, there is a black woman on The Practice, just as there is a black woman on every David Kelley program, and like all the other black women on every other David Kelley program, the one on The Practice is morally uncompromising and whiney and strident and shrill and yells a lot, and generally acts as the conscience of the show. And because she's morally uncompromising, she doesn't sleep around, either.

Lucy, the amazingly hot receptionist, apparently doesn't sleep with anyone else on the show because she's considered 'too young' (she's legal, but in her late teens or early 20s). Eleanor doesn't sleep with anyone else on the show (not even Jimmy) because she's fat and homely and amazingly obnoxious. Helen Gamble, who is majorly hot, did sleep with Bobby before he married Lindsay, but she's not a member of 'The Practice', she's a prosecuting D.A. and frequent legal opponent of the firm. Apparently, this means she doesn't have to sleep with anyone else in the firm, either. This season's new chick, who is also pretty hot, hasn't slept with anyone else in the firm either, because she's too young, plus, she's the newbie and it would be bad for her career, plus, it's just about time for someone on the show to be revealed as gay, and in the early 21st Century, on mainstream television, when we reveal a character as gay, it's always a good looking woman, because the young male demographic that all the advertisers covet as customers think female homosexuality is titallating, but are generally disgusted by gay guys.

There's another young female hottie who's been recently introduced too, working across the hall in Lindsey's now separate law firm, so maybe the two new girls will hook up for some steamy onscreen lesbian tongue kissing. Manipulative though it is, hey, I'll watch it... as long as Eleanor doesn't get involved.

Bile disclaimer, yet again

Let me repeat something I said well above, in different terms: this blog is not about being politically correct, or nice, or sweet. Nor is it necessarily even about being whatever it is you may define as ‘fair’. This is my blog, where I’m going to say a lot of the things I’d like to say but can’t, for various reasons. It will be honest. You may not agree with it; you may think I’m being ridiculously self centered and childish. And that’s fine, elsewhere on this page there’s probably an email link, if you feel strongly enough about it.

Nonetheless, I repeat: this ain’t about being nice. This is about me saying what I want to say. If you don’t like it, feel free to write me and tell me why. Feel even freer not to read this stuff any more. And bear in mind, I always feel free to print anything anyone sends me about this blog on this blog, and respond any damn way I feel like. I also feel free to delete emails unread if they’re from people I know are idiots, or to read a few lines and then delete them, if they’re from people who quickly demonstrate that they’re idiots. (But in general, I won’t; I’ll print them here and then make relentless and cruel fun of them, instead.)

Is the stuff I’ve written above childish and self indulgent? No doubt. But it's my weblog and I'll whine if I wanna.

So, if you don’t like my Major Attitude Adjustments, don’t read them. Isn’t that simple?

Later.

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