Sdtrk: ‘La porte a coté’ by Christine Delaroche

Since I have such incredible problems managing my time, I have opted to use an electric shaver, as opposed to the razor treatment, cos it’s considerably quicker. For the past couple of days, I’ve been on the hunt for buying a new shaver, and I’ll tell you; the whole process is striking me as being ridiculous beyond all reason.

The last shaver I bought was a Remington SF3 MicroScreen 1, a rechargable jobbie that I purchased around 2003. Recently, I’d noticed that repeated passes during use just ain’t cutting it anymore, pun intended, so I thought, well gee, I have to finally go buy some replacement blades. I get to Meijer, and all the replacement blades & screens for Remington shavers are for MicroScreen models 2 and 3. Furthermore, I don’t think they even make the model that I own anymore, which honestly wouldn’t surprise me.

So I’m thinking, fine, I guess I’ll just buy a whole new fucking electric shaver, you bastards, so I begin peering at the other shavers that were on offer. Now, I don’t know about you, but I go so long between buying shavers, that I keep forgetting how expensive they are. I remember distinctly when I bought the model I have now, I was with someone at the time, and I was annoyed at the prices back then, and she was like, ‘Well, if you have to buy one, you have to buy one’. So I’m looking at the shavers, thinking, ‘A new electric razor should be about $15 – $20’. Nope! The cheapest model was $30, which was $20 more than I had on me. Jesus.

I admit, I’m a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to some things. I’ll grouse if necessities cost more than I think they should, but for ‘luxury’ items, price sometimes isn’t a deterrent. How much do I think a top-of-the-line German-made electric razor should cost? A rechargable one with triple hovering rotary blades, a multi-speed moustache trimmer, a soothing gel dispenser, that flashes a series of LEDs while simultaneously playing ‘Upside down’ by The Jesus and Mary chain? $30. Replacement blades? Pack of three, $5. Yeah. I’m the Best Consumer EVAR!!1!@

The reason I’m mortified, really, is that the result is inevitable: I’m gonna trek back up to Meijer later this week and buy a brand new ‘cheapie’ $30 electric shaver, and I find that fact hateful. But this is something I have to have. I must have a shaver, as my patchy facial hair makes me look like a common criminal. I suppose it’s the fact that I need this object, colliding headlong with my unwillingness to lay out $30 that could have gone towards some sushi, or a couple of DVDs, that really irks me. Until I can make enough money to afford laser hair removal (I’m serious), I’m gonna have to use a damn razor when I shave every other day. I’m gonna have to go over my face several times, consider myself done, and then 20min later when I’m out the door, I’ll end up running my hand across my jawbone and find that I’ve missed like five or six spiderlegs, and hiss under my breath.
If I had my druthers, I’d purchase a straight razor, cos if you can use one of those effectively, you automatically get the title of badass, but my hands are so markedly unsteady that any effort that I’d attempt would result in at least eight severed arteries, guaranteed

Sdtrk: ‘Winter (studio outtake)’ by the Cure

Heh; today, for my Windows XP productivity class, we all had to do our PowerPoint presentations as part of our final.. whatever it was. I estimate that I spent 12 – 16 drawn-out hours developing my presentation, and what’s more I had to do it in the lab, as none of the computers here have PowerPoint. (Or Access, or Excel, but I do have Word, as that would be something I use in ‘real’ life.) There seemed to be an underlying theme — most of the women did more personal or human-related topics, i.e, the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, a nephew, a cruise, natural wonders of the world, post-partum depression. Whereas the blokes mostly did stuff that most blokes would go on about, i.e, motorcycles, wakeboarding, Mercedes-Benz cars, Chrysler cars, etc. The topic I picked was the history of the Mini Cooper, so I guess I slotted neatly into the latter category. I was the last to go, and I probably blazed my way through it faster than I would’ve liked (each student had five minutes), but I’d like to think I did rather well, especially compared to a lot of the other speakers.. I can say this: a lot of spellchecker buttons went unclicked, wherever these people assembled their projects. For fuck’s sake, people.
I’d also like to think I gave myself a wee bit of a boost by printing up several copies of a papercraft Mini, and passing one out to each student and the teacher. That was my ‘secret extra credit weapon’. 😉

You’ll forgive me if I don’t really discuss my school experiences on ‘Shouting etc etc’; despite my current drive to get my other 14 courses over and done with, academia and I are still rather estranged. I view school as a necessary evil, a means to an end. I really don’t like being there, and I highly doubt there’ll be a day when I don’t feel like an impostor whenever I walk up and down the corridors of my campus.

On Tuesday, I got to hang out with Marika, a friend of mine that I’ve not seen in a long time. We only got to convene for an hour before I had to get round to the lab — we stopped round to Quizno’s for lunch — but it was really great seeing her. I hadn’t physically seen her in over a year, and we hadn’t been able to get hold of each other until February of this year. She’d moved in with some furfucker for a while *shudders*, then she met a bloke and moved in with him, then she lost her job, and moved back in with her mum, and had her cellphone switched off. Now she’s got a job, and a new phone, and we’re back in business, as it were. She’d been wanting to reach me for a while, as back in early February, Derek said she’d stopped round to his house out of the blue, and wanted to know my phone number. Which was bizarre, cos I had attempted to contact her, and her old cellphone number was obsolete. So a couple of weeks after that, she called me from her folks’ house, but her mum didn’t want all sorts of calls at all hours of the eve, so Mari merely waited until she could afford a new cell. And that brings up to now.
Why is it ace, really, that Mari and I are speaking again? Mainly it’s cos back in the days when the Slag was living with me at No.23 Deafening silence, she accused Mari for doing something that was undoubtedly not her doing at all, and I, having no reason to suspect that the Slag was lying/just plain fucking delusional, went along with it, and informed Mari that when we bought our house, she wasn’t to set foot in it ever. Cue lots of crying and screaming. I think it goes without saying that it was a horrible day, and despite the fact that Mari forgives me for, well, thinking with my cock, I still feel guilty about being suckered to the point where I cut off our friendship.

So like I said, it’s nice to have Mari back. After Monti, she was my second female friend to learn about Shi-chan and RealDolls in general, and not only was she happy to appear with Sweetie & I when the French came round to film, but she’s open-minded enough to think that sort of thing is really ace. (She has been designated Shi-chan’s Organik sister.)
Plus, her height makes me feel taller than I actually am, and that’s always nice 😉

Sdtrk: ‘An eye for optical theory’ by Michael Nyman

I’m back on the Internets! After browbeating two SBC Amerifuck tech ‘support’ monkeys, who I daresay were calling from India, we now have better speeds than last time. Going back and forth with some tosser named Sam, we assessed that the problem was their fault, not ours, and it’d be seen to before 6pm that Tuesday eve. So after still having hideous non-speeds at 11pm, I called a second time, this time speaking with a different churl, and telling him that nothing had improved. The connection speed was ramped up about twenty minutes after my call. Results!
Just so you have an idea of what I was dealing with, I took a screenshot of the speed our connection was at at its slowest point, after visiting the SBC Americunt speed test site. (It’s kinda helpful to know the URL if you happen to be cursed with their DSL service, so I’ve reproduced the link here.) Anyway, the screenshot is kinda dodgy, but you have to see it. Yeah. Now wouldn’t you agree that’s a reason to be angry?

On the lighter side of things, I have finally found the name of the style of shades/glasses that I love. If you’re a mate of mine that’s actually seen me in person on more than one occasion, you already know that I own four or five pairs of shades. All of them have the same frame, but they’re all slightly different — one is transparent with mirror lenses, one is black with blue mirror lenses, etc. I’ve always wanted to find more variations of those shades, and eventually buy a pair of (fake) glasses with those frames, as they’re the only kind that look good on my face, but I never knew what they were called. Well, now I know — they style is called the browline, and the models are called either the ronsir, or the clubman.

Classically ace! They’re fine frames, fine frames. Now I need to scour online stores and estate sales for those bad boys..

Gonna try to catch Death from above 1979 at the Lager house this Saturday. The more I hear them, the more I like them, even though the cover for their latest Cd kinda scares me

Sdtrk: none

Short and sweet: Both of the computers here are having difficulties getting a decent internet connection. Everything is moving very very slowly. I was online with a so-called SBC technical assistant for an hour last night, whereupon he had me go to their test page to assess how fast my connection was (or wasn’t). According to the test, my current speed is slower than dial-up.

Back later. Angry now. So there you have it

Sdtrk: ‘Me and my ding dong’ by Pankow

Good going, Blogger. Down for almost an entire day. Refuckingmarkable.

Anyway, here’s this thing:

My Mormon name is Darvell Friends Forsaken !
What’s yours?

Shi-chan’s is worse, if you can believe that. Hers is Andoorie Traudi Treasure Cocaine. *confused stare*
Thanx Veach, for Mormonising us! Now we must eschew all sinful things such as technology. Goody Andoorie will proceed to churn some butter, and I shall go raise a barn

Sdtrk: ‘Swinging bachelor pad’ by Vitesse

Last night, I voluntarily watched the pilot episode of the american version of ‘The office’. I don’t normally watch broadcast television, in fact, I really haven’t watched telly since ‘Seinfeld’ went off the air, and I wasn’t even aware there was a bastardised version of ‘The office’ due to air over here; I was helping my mother with her computer, and I saw it mentioned on the TV listings, so I decided, why not?

Yep, it was shite. I mean, I knew it was going to be shite, but I suppose I had to confirm it. Over the course of 22min, I audibly laughed three times. That’s cos, gee, I’d already seen the first episode before. Seriously, it was the same damn episode as the original pilot — same gags and everything — only with americans in place of the British cast.
Turns out Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are executive producers of it as well. Did you guys need rent money or something?? Why did you feel it was necessary to take a brilliant show, and essentially cut off its balls? I mean, there’s no way they’re gonna be able to come up with something equal to the gag featuring Tim and the dildo over here. And I’m thinking the Finchy character isn’t going to be nearly as funny, since 98% of his speech pattern is really horrible sexual innuendo.

O well. I’ve seen it, so now I can forget it exists. I had to watch the entire first disk of the boxset to wash the bad taste off my brain, so the evening wasn’t a total disaster.
I think later on at some point, I’m going to have to explain to you, the casual viewer of ‘Shouting etc etc’, why I despise most remakes, but right now I have to leave my house. Wish me luck!

Sdtrk: ‘Emaciator’ by Ramleh

Just watched the trailer for ‘Star wars: Episode Three’. My reaction? I don’t know what the hell’s going on! No, seriously, I don’t. Do I care? No! No, seriously, I don’t.

Picture a young, guileless, and innocent Davecat, seeing ‘Star wars’ (‘Episode Four’, for you rabid purists) for the very first time, back in 1977, at what was known back then as the Northland Theatre. My excitement level was, like most kids at that time, running desperately into the red. Robots! Spaceships! Aliens! Laser guns! Etc! That excitement level went up a little higher with ‘The Empire strikes back’, cos everyone likes ‘The Empire strikes back’, and leveled off with the third movie with the Ewoks, whose title, for the life of me, I cannot honestly recall.

Years passed, and not only did I get older, I got wiser, and various avenues opened up. Around the early Eighties, I started watching this quirky British scifi show called Doctor Who, and suddenly, straightforward American-made scifi seemed less and less ‘cool’. Sure, I saw the Star trek movies in the theatres like everyone else, but they were holding less of my interest with each passing year. (Except for ‘Wrath of Khan’. Everyone likes ‘Wrath of Khan‘.) Every weekday, I’d sit goggle-eyed watching the latest installment of Doctor Who, and of course, the coolest thing in the world would be to be a Timelord, tumbling headlong through Time and Space with a TARDIS (and a sexy companion) of my own. And when I wasn’t watching that, I was watching Ultraman.
I don’t know when it really dawned on me, but I think what drew me to such shows is yes, they had a high kitsch factor, but the writers got as much as they could with the limited special effects they had available. Sure, the special effects in ‘Star wars’ looked great at the time, but to me, the story was just boring. And Star trek was just very bleh straightforward. Part of the charm of the Doctor was his eccentricities — the viewers sometimes had no idea what he’d do next, not to mention his enemies or his companions. That alone was so much more fascinating to me than what was more or less a Western in space.

Then in 1987, the local channel that had been previously showing Ultraman started airing this brand-new show that was animated in Japan, and had these really sweet jet fighters that transformed into robots!!1! That show was called Robotech, and it was the Silver Key to the Gateway of New and Different Television Entertainment, or Something. I could go on about how Carl Macek, the producer, Frankensteined together three almost-totally unrelated shows in order to create Robotech, but that’s another post altogether. In any event, Star wars, Star trek and the like were completely dead to me from that point on.

But yeah, back to Lucas and his excretions! I saw Episodes One and Two, and my brain has such a resistance to anything bearing the conjunction of the words ‘Star’ and ‘Wars’, that both films were almost completely unmemorable. Here’s what I recall:
+ Darth Maul looked like a badass, but actually wasn’t a badass
+ Episode One contained Space Negroes (Jar-jar and his race), Space Arabs (that flying bug guy), and Space Chinese (the aliens in that giant round space station thing)
+ Yoda knew kung-fu
+ That Clone trooper battle at the end of Episode two was probably the best part of both movies
+ One of my old coworkers at Quest used to go out of his way to pronounce it ‘Palapaptine’, cos it was funnier
+ Ewan McGregor, Christopher Lee and Samuel L. Jackson stuck in a shitty franchise
+ Jango Fett is a really stupid fucking name
+ Not enough naked Natalie Portman

I’m sorry, I have no respect for a film director who can barely direct his actors, and insists on constantly sodomising his own back catalogue, for the sake of ‘perfection’. I gave both Lucas and his goiter money for the ‘THX 1138’ DVD, and that was only reluctantly, as it was a new version with unnecessary CG scenes shoehorned in. Unless he starts a fund to request money to publically kill himself, that’s the last cent he’ll ever see from me.
Having said that, however, I would like to see what I hope is the final Star wars movie, and I intend on seeing it in much the same fashion as I saw Episode One: sitting over at Mike‘s, watching a second-gen VHS copy that someone filmed with a videocamera at the back of a theatre. That way, I’ll be paying exactly what it’s worth!