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This isn’t really an important entry—not a whole lot of substance to it—but our flight to Norway leaves tomorrow afternoon and I’m not bringing my own computer. Nope, instead of the little electronic hummingbird I call my laptop, we’re bringing a teeny-weeny junior-sized netbook that we bought a couple months ago. It was primarily so we could download maps from Google Earth to figure out where the hell we’re going on any particular day, but its uses have been expanded to include playing audio books while we’re on the road. And internet access, of course. (Whew!)

Consequently, at some of the hotels we’re staying at during our trip, I’ll have access to e-mail, the blog and Facebook (Whew!). I guess internet access isn’t that important, but family and friends might appreciate updates on what’s happening and you readers might enjoy the same. So why am I writing this? Do you really need to know about the potential for blog entries over the next four weeks?

Nope! But like I said, I’m leaving my electronic hummingbird at home and the keyboard on this netbook is waaaaaay smaller than what I’m used to typing on. So far, I’ve had to use the backspace key a lot more than usual, but at least I’m getting stuff on the screen. Legible stuff on the screen. So I’m just using this entry to practice using this keyboard. You know what they say: Practice makes pergevt… perfect.

According to someone who sent me a friend request via Myspace, Beauty and the Geek began playing in Russia very recently. (This assumption seems to have been confirmed by all the friend requests I’ve received via Facebook…)

To everyone in Russia who watched and enjoyed the show, thank you very much. I’m glad that I could have a positive influence in your lives or at least make you laugh at the phrase “Yeah, this is great!” and other choice one-liners. (I also hope the Russian producers used my laugh for the soundbites because such a deep baritone is hard to come by.)

So I guess I’m writing this entry for a few reasons:

1) I’m flattered that so many people in Russia were willing to search for me after Beauty and the Geek went on the air.

2) Unfortunately, unless you play certain time-wasting Facebook games, I probably won’t accept your friend request there (don’t feel bad—I used the privacy settings to make sure none of the game players can see anything important about me). Myspace, on the other hand…

3) I just got home from a week and a half of summer camp, I’m leaving on Friday for a trip to Norway and I didn’t want to leave everyone in the lurch for so long.

4) I don’t want to think about packing right now and this seemed like an excellent way to avoid it.

That’s about it. I hope everyone in Europe and Asia is having a wonderful summer and I’ll try to make little posts here and there about my trip over the next month. Unless I drop my laptop into a fjord. If that happens, denying friend requests on Facebook will be the least of my problems.

What does not kill me can still leave me in a persistent vegetative state, which, let’s face it, isn’t much stronger than being dead.

What happens if you’re driving, a black cat starts to cross the road in front of you and you run over it with your car? Do you end up with really bad luck because the bad luck stored inside the cat comes out of its body all at once? Good luck because you destroyed the source of bad luck? For safety’s sake, you may want to be extra protective of the parts of your body it managed to cross before getting hit.

Twilight: Eclipse is about to hit the movie screen and, quite frankly, I’m a little concerned at what this series of movies is teaching the youth of America. I know, I know, I just admitted that I watched both Twilight and New Moon, but listening to Rifftrax in the background made them immensely more tolerable.

Here’s an example: there’s the big “Team Edward vs. Team Jacob” controversy that’s dividing the nation—Should Bella want to suck face with a vampire or a werewolf for the rest of her (potentially eternal) life?—but according to the movie, there is no controversy. She says she’s madly in love with Edward and wants to live with him happily forever after. At the end of New Moon, he agrees to turn her into a vampire “under one condition.”

The condition? He wants her to marry him.

Her response? She stares at him and doesn’t answer.

Sure, it’s a suspenseful way to end a movie and get viewers to anticipate the sequel, but it also follows the theme of both movies so far. It’s been extremely rare for characters to finish three lines of dialogue without a dramatic (see: extremely long and awkward) pause. Still, if she claims she wants Edward to bite her so she can spend eternity with her true love, why would asking her to marry him be suspenseful? You think she might say “No”?

And during the course of Twilight and New Moon, Bella is running around with vampires and werewolves (at this rate, I’m expecting some other supernatural creatures soon, too—”Go Team Zombie!”). Meanwhile, her dad Charlie is stuck at home freaking out when she disappears for days at a time. First, she echoes the shit that his ex-wife said when she left him; the next, she doesn’t bother to contact him at all and he thinks she’s dead. How selfish is that?!

Charlie loves his daughter (a love which naturally includes extremely long, awkward pauses in dialogue), but she runs away, comes back, runs away, comes back… it’s always about the vampires, not her own flesh and blood [insert rim shot here]. You think that sets a good example for kids nowadays?!

So here’s some of what kids watching these movies have learned: Spending forever with someone is no big deal, but marriage? Be afraid… be very afraid. It’s also okay to run away, do what you want and not care about people who love you until you want to come home, at which point they’ll take you in with little more than a long, awkward pause.

Essentially, teenage girls can be self-centered, pretentious bitches who lust after hunky guys and ignore their parents with no negative consequences whatsoever. Don’t agree with that message? Then repeat after me: “Go Team Charlie!”

What’s the point of talking? Read the rest of this entry »

As the days passed and my impending doctor’s appointment got closer and closer, I kept thinking about what life would be like without my leg brace. So many things I took for granted before I had to wear it for six weeks after surgery:

* I could get out of bed and use the bathroom without having to clip anything onto my leg.

* I could move my shorts freely when sitting on the toilet instead of shifting them around at an angle across my lap because it was too much of a struggle to wiggle them down over the brace.

* I could take a shower without worrying about my underwear getting wet when putting it on or wearing a towel around my leg for half an hour afterward to make sure I wouldn’t soak anything else.

* Other things… well, maybe I shouldn’t have done them, but sometimes a man just needs to drive places. And shoot hoops in the driveway. And go bowling. Yeah, I didn’t exactly fill the doctor or physical therapist in on all of my recreational activities over the last six weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Five years ago. A side room at Benchwarmer Bob’s, a local restaurant/sports bar. TVs in the upper corners of the room that were tuned into Channel 23, the WB. 7:00pm CST. The first time I’d ever heard the song Opportunities by the Pet Shop Boys and then my face appeared on national TV.

Unfortunately, there’ll never be a reunion show unless the producers take compromising photos of the participants and make us all show up or they’ll release the pictures to some national tabloids. (For the record, any story about my being Larry King’s most recent wife is totally bogus.)

But people have gone their separate ways since then. I talk to Bill on the phone once in a while, went to Mindi’s wedding this summer and that’s about it. Still, I’d like to think that everyone has succeeded in whatever we’ve been doing over the last five years. Especially if Richard is still working at that carpeting store.

I was logging into the blog a couple minutes ago to write a quick entry about a Facebook group called “America is not U.S.A. America is a Continent.” It’s true, America doesn’t consist solely of The United States of America; it’s all of North and South America. North America + South America = TWO continents. But that’s beside the point at the moment.

The first thing I did was check out the spam filter because, well, there are usually some interesting (and sometimes amusing) messages posted by websites that think I need to work out more, need cheap mp3 files and need a bigger penis. They may be right, but that’s beside the point at the moment as well. This time, I found a comment written by an actual person with a valid opinion that should probably be addressed. (When you read it, you’ll understand why it got blocked by the spam filter.) Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll admit it, I went ahead and watched Twilight earlier this week. Thankfully, I was listening to an mp3 file from Rifftrax at the same time—commentary provided by the same people who produced MST3K in its later years—so I never felt the need to grab a pencil to puncture my eyeballs or eardrums to ease the pain. In fact, I almost feel bad that I missed some of the horrific, angst-filled dialogue because of the commentary, but better safe than punctured.

The thing that concerned me the most—even more than the sparkles and the 90-year-old’s desire for a teenager—was when Bella made Edward fess up about being a vampire. During the course of that conversation, he told her, “You’re like heroin.”

Now I have two concerns. Think about this for a second: he doesn’t eat food, he doesn’t sleep, he sparkles, he can leap over tall buildings in a single… well, he can climb big trees really fast. My point is that his biological makeup isn’t the same as a regular human’s anymore—how likely is it that heroin would have any effect on him at all, let alone the effect that Bella seems to have?

I did a little bit of research and found out that heroin did exist back in the early 1900’s, so it’s possible that he would have known what it was like while he was still human, but that would also mean Edward was using heroin as a teenager. Sure, it was sold as medicine, but if he remembers it being that much of a rush, he must have had a lot of coughing fits as a kid.

Even if we brush this concern off to the side and just assume that Edward knows what heroin is like, what does that say about his relationship with Bella? He’s extremely possessive and wants to keep her for his own. He thinks about her day and night. He’s willing to rip out the throat of someone trying to take her from him. He got a taste of her and needed an intervention to stop drinking her blood. He wants her to stay away from him, but can’t let her go. She is what he lives for.

Time to face the facts, Twilight fans: EDWARD IS A JUNKIE! (Feel free to reach for your pencils now.)