Erik Martin sends this link, which I should like to follow when I have time: an online graphic novel that looks quite nice.

Technology. I suppose I could spend the next ten minutes expounding upon how much of a nerd I am, because every time a new gadget comes out, I get tech-envy. Bill Cochran has called me “part-Asian” because I love to noodle with electronic things and have shiny new toys. Ladybug thinks I am a moron for drooling over the iPod Nano commercials when I already have a perfectly servicable 20 GB that I am in love with.

I think my love of technology comes from my dad, who has always had a bedside table full of wires, unused gadgets, lame stuff, but electronic nonetheless. I remember many Saturdays when I was growing up when we would wander into the Sharper Image and just look at all of the completely useless but still somewhat awe-inspiring gadgets. This was before the digital age really kicked up in the early 90’s, and gadgets got good.

Our first computer was intended, I think, to be my mom and dad’s productivity tool. This was around 1985, and we had a dope 640k PC with two floppy drives. I mean, it was the height of excellent. We ordered away for a shit-ton of free/shareware on floppy so I had all of the BASIC games I could possibly want and even a couple of .exe games. One of my favorites was a game called “International Bridge Contractors,” which would allow you to bid on bridges and then build them. The higher the bid, the higher the profit. Iplayed it so much that I was able to learn the algorithm behind the game– just how much you could mark up each type of bridge in each type of situation. Then, when friends would come over, we’d play in two-player mode. I would destroy them.

I also had “The Bard’s Tale” for PC, which my friend Chris had for his Apple II. If you don’t remember The Bard’s Tale, you are missing out on perhaps the greatest RPG ever– turn-based, series of text and static pictures (the PC version was a little bit animated, but pretty lame). But it was hella-well designed. We spent almost a year of weekends in Chris’s basement trying to beat that damn game. And then we did. When The Bard’s Tale II and III came out for Apple (to my knowledge, they were never released for PC), we won each of those with relative quickness. But the original… well, the original was difficult. We spent hours upon hours just teleporting up to fight the 4 groups of 99 berserkers. (I still remember the coordinates you used to get up there– 5, 12, 2.)

Thanks to Dr. Wade for today’s suggestion.

Whew, harquebus. What a word. It sounds like incubus and succubus had a hermaphrodite sibling they didn’t like very much, and her/his name was harquebus.

I don’t really know what the word means, but that’s not a surprise… there are amazing amounts of words that I don’t know. While I was watching Spellbound, I was simply amazed by those kids who would memorize the dictionary to pursue their passion for spelling. I really like words, but the idea of memorizing a dictionary doesn’t strike me as a fun leisuretime pursuit whatsoever.

But I do love words. I have been reading John Ashbery, and that mofo uses all kinds of words that I don’t know. He’ll just toss them in there, like I ought to know what they are, but there’s nary a clue in the context. You either know what he’s talking about or you don’t. I’ve consulted the dictionary a couple of times, but that mofo stumped the dictionary on one occasion. That’s impressive. He uses words the dictionary doesn’t know. And I don’t think it’s that they aren’t words, I just think they’re words so badass that the average dictionary doesn’t know them. You have to go OED-style to understand some John Ashbery.

I learned to love words from comic books, unsurprisingly. It’s amazing that such rich reading material is dismissed as unfit for educational settings. But hey, there are a lot of words that I learned to use in daily speech because I would see them in comics and look them up.

One of those words is “subtle,” another is “statuesque.” Subtle was in an issue of Daredevil, and I had to look it up when I came across it. Armed with the new word, I set about using it in casual conversation with my mother. However, one thing that learning new words from comics doesn’t teach you is pronunciation, so of course, when I tried to drop that science, I pronounced the b, which is entirely unsubtle.

Statuesque was a Stan Lee favorite. I think it was most applied to She-Hulk but Titania got it sometimes too. I assumed, since “statue” was the root word, that “statue – esque” was how you said it, but was convinced otherwise by my freshman college roommate Bumgardner, who referred to the tall blonde Tree as “statch-es-q.” I tried to argue my point– the root word– but he would not relent. He knew the correct pronunciation.

I have never heard it pronounced “statch-es-q” again, and I now just say “tall.”

Thanks to Tom McCudden for today’s suggestion. I wrote this from 6:12-6:22 PM, but couldn’t post it on time, since I was without Internet at the moment.

I’ve never really had much contact with Asia at all. But, back when we were just friends and both of us were still in college, Ladybug told me that she’d be shipping out for China. This news was not terribly surprising– she’d already studied abroad in Holland, so this was just another chapter in Ladybug’s international history.

Around that time, my mother happened to come into possession of a teddy bear. The bear was a second-grader’s project for his class– he sent the teddy bear and a letter explaining where the bear hoped to go off with someone, hoping that someone would send the bear on to another someone that might land the bear in one of the desired destinations. (I wish I could recall the bear’s name, something lame like Sunshine Bear. Ma, if you read this, remind me in the comments.)

The bear’s intended destinations were Washington DC, England, and China. Well, it so happens that my mother was living in Falls Church, VA, and is married to an Englishman, so someone who had the bear figured she’d be a good person to kill two birds with one stone. Of course, she had a delightful time taking the bear all over and taking pictures, and wrote up his history.

So she called me and asked if I knew any way to get the bear to China in a responsible person’s hands, and quite luckily, I did. Ladybug and I met for lunch one day and I forked over the bear. She took him off to China, took some pictures, had a little fun.

At the time, Ladybug was dating the most infamous member of her Hall of Ex-Boyfriends (see 11-05-2002 12:33 PM on that page), and he was studying abroad in Brazil. So, bear went to Brazil, where Infamous Ex-Boyfriend, who is quite a talented artist, drew up a wonderful picture book detailing the bear’s exploits across the world.

For years, my mother wondered if the bear had ever gotten back to the little boy; she’d never heard. When Ladybug and I began dating (five years had passed), my mother mentioned the bear, and Ladybug told her that the little boy had written a note to Infamous Ex-Boyfriend, and that she had a copy of the picturebook IExB had written and illustrated for the little boy.

It was an altogether satisfying ending to a long story.

While Ladybug was in China, she was my Asian pen pal, so there’s another satisfying ending to a long story– I married my Asian pen pal from five years ago.

Thanks to Zack Bly for today’s suggestion.

One of my favorite authors is going to be doing monologs on the opening night of the theater. It’s been in the works for a little while but it’s confirmed. I think if I get much more happy news, I might burst. I really like happy news, though, so I suppose I would welcome such bursting.

I love starting a new level 1 class at DSI. We started one at the beginning of September, and it’s great. We started one last night, and it’s great. That brings us to five excellent level 1 classes in a row in the last three months. If this keeps up, I’ll just have to start teaching six nights a week.

One of the problems with the Daily Diplomat is that I sometimes see the suggestion ahead of time, because comments are sent to my inbox. “Ravenous” was a suggestion that I’d seen in advance, and I probably pondered it a little too heavily to get a good, clean, 10-minute piece of writing out of it.

So, when I fired up the web browser just now and began, I told myself, “You may not talk about the best meal you have ever eaten.” (It was at Cafe Espanol in NYC, and that’s all I will say about that.)

Putting limits on myself immediately brought to mind playing pool in my friend Jason’s basement in high school. We were not awesome pool players by any means, though Jason could kick anyone else’s ass in our small group of friends. This seemed fair, by all accounts, since he was the one whose house had the pool table. He could practice whenever; we had to wait for him to invite us over.

I was a modest pool player. I depended a lot on luck, as I still do, and I missed really easy shots all the time, as I still do. But I was still leagues better than Becky, who hated playing me because, as anyone will tell you, I am an asshole when competitive situations arise. I didn’t even mean to be competitive. After just a few games, we began having to add restrictions, such as I could only shoot behind the back or I would have to balance myself on the table before the shot. (This was not good for the table; thankfully, Jason either didn’t notice or didn’t care.)

So, I played a fair number of games totally behind the back, and she would beat me about as often as I would beat her, but I did get to where I could make a shot or two behind the back. That skill has come in handy throughout the years in bars and pool halls, because people always jeer a little bit when I swing the stick around to make a backhanded shot that most people would make shooting normally. I’m really not showing off when I do this, it’s just that there are some shots I’ll feel more confident with when I’m shooting behind the back. And, as I said, I’m still not awesome, so I miss most of them anyways, which is right in line with my normal game.

Thanks to Porter Mason for today’s suggestion, which I used only by way of tangent. But hey, that’s how it works.

Just got off the phone with Dan Telfer, who will be sending an invite to his wedding. If possible, I would like to go…

So, yesterday blew chunks. I had felt a little better Friday night but then felt awful again yesterday morning. While coughing up a small golf ball, I felt a horrible pain in my ribs– I think I coughed so hard that I pulled a muscle or something. My ribs were on fire yesterday, and today they’re just really, really sore, but bearable. I’m not wishing for death today.

Reading Say Uncle by Kay Ryan, and really enjoying it.

I’ve been rocking out with bittorrenting some live shows, too. Very awesome.

Jeez, the anti-noir. This makes me think of film noir, but I don’t know that I have any really strong feelings on film or anti-noir, beyond maybe the fact that I enjoyed Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, which was, if I remember correctly, a huge bomb. I don’t know why, but I seem to often be OK with the huge bombs– I enjoyed Ishtar, I loved The Adventures of Hudson Hawk (wasn’t Sandra Bernhard hilarious singing “The Power” on the boardroom table?), I delighted to The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai in the 8th Dimension, I dug The Postman. I really dug The Postman, in fact. I saw it in Target today for like $7 and was really, really tempted, until I remembered that I’m grad school poor right now.

I think that the bombs are often less offensive than the movies that do mid-level business but kinda sink into obscurity. A good example of this would be Blue Crush. Movies are only considered true bombs if they at some point suffered under the weight of expectation. You can make a really expensive movie that’s not at all different from the 8-10 expensive movies that will be released the same weekend, or you can make a really expensive movie that will differentiate itself with its pure, unadulterated suck. I’d rather aspire to the latter– if people hate something so thoroughly, that at least means that you were probably on the right track sometime in the process, and you can get better next time. If it’s not a terrible failure, what’s the incentive to make dramatic changes next time? That kind of thinking left us with a sequel to Under Siege.

Though really, I am at the point where I prefer movies that simply cannot have a sequel. Ladybug and I just watched “Be Cool” (notable because The Rock absolutely steals the movie… and I mean, absolutely. Andre Bejamin was funny, but The Rock was just about genius!), which was pleasant enough, but certainly, “Get Shorty” needed no sequel. Why couldn’t Chili Palmer have died at the end?

Good movies where the main character dies at the end, and you’re OK with that: Fallen, Fight Club (sort of)… um, OK, I am out of examples. I’m only giving myself 10 minutes here.

The obvious exceptions to my no-sequel rule are comic book movies, which should never end with anything that prevents a well-crafted sequel. I’d like about 200 more well-made X-Men and Spider-Man movies. I’d even like another Hulk.

Wasn’t Howard the Duck a huge bomb? Liked that, too.

Thanks to Kit FitzSimons for today’s suggestion.

I didn’t grow up a hockey fan, per se, because I was born in North Carolina and was a major sissy. I played baseball, basketball, and soccer as a kid, because I loved baseball, I was decent at basketball, and everyone plays soccer when they are a kid.

Parents love soccer, because it’s the only thing in the world that will tire their kids out. Even the most hyperactive kid is a little tired after chasing a ball for two hours. If he’s not tired, he’s dehydrated. But either way, come 8 PM, your soccer-playing sweetheart is going to sleep, and mom and dad can finally have an evening to themselves to watch “Lost” or get busy.

So with no real access to hockey, I didn’t learn to love it until my early high school years, when, right as I was moving out of the DC area, I started to take an interest in the Washington Capitals. That interest bloomed big-time in college when I had cable and would watch the games on whatever Fox Regional Network was showing the Caps. Even though hockey on TV sucks balls, I really got to enjoy the grace of the game.

Naturally, when the Canes moved to town, I made them an allegiance, but it was several seasons before I gave up the ghost on my Caps. Once Joe Juneau was gone, my favorite line wasn’t so awesome, and little by little, they’ve let go the rest of the core of that team– Peter Bondra just left, Adam Oates got traded, Chris Simon cut his hair, Dale Hunter retired, Andrei Nikolishin’s name got harder to pronounce. (The rest of that kickass crew– Joe Reekie, Calle Johansson, Richard Zednik, Mike Eagles, Craig Berube, Ken Klee, and Godzilla. Man, that was a fun team.) So, it was only after a couple of seasons that I became a real Caniac, delighted by scores like “Carolina Hurricanes 6, Washington Capitals 0.”

Thanks to Brian Shaw for today’s suggestion.

It looks like, for the last six days, if you tried to comment on rosswhite.com or any of the blogs hosted here, you were jacked… someone had added “http://” to the list of blocked terms on the blacklist. And here I was marvelling at how quiet the spammers had been for the last six days. There were over 27,000 comments blocked during that time.

Ugh… I spent the last few days coughing my lungs up. The goo went from dark brown to dark green today, which I take to be a good sign. My head feels a little less cloudy, too, after sleeping 6 straight hours– I hadn’t slept more than about 2 for a couple of nights, even with some heavy NyQuil.

I finished my grad packet Tuesday afternoon and got the feedback… which was fairly positive. I haven’t posted the most recent poetry assignment, just because I hate hate hate the draft I came up with. The last couple weeks didn’t lend themselves to creative work. Hopefully, the next two will– I have 10 poems and no annotations due .

To try to facilitate the writing process, I’m making myself a promise that I will be back in this blog regularly, writing at least one entry per day about the usual “I’m so awesome” crap, and one entry per day that does essentially the same thing I would expect from a monolog for a Mister Diplomat show– you give me a suggestion, I let it inspire me. I plan to do one of these a day, using suggestions in the order that I get them. Leave them in the comments section here. I’ll be writing no more than ten minutes per topic.

I knew that I would get this answer, even if I didn’t want it…

You’re Tenzil Kem, Matter-Eater Lad!

Which Legionnaire are you?

DSI’s 4th Annual 24-Hour Benefit Marathon of Improv Comedy

September 9th – 10th, 2005
begins at 10 PM, Friday September 9

DSI’s 24LIVE pushes performers to the limit in a marathon benefit of improv comedy presented in conjunction with The Artscenter and Transactors Improv to support the North Carolina Children’s Hospital. A small core cast from Dirty South Improv will draw support from Transactors Improv and other North Carolina comedy ensembles, professional improv comedians from Chicago and New York, and local celebrities from all Arts disciplines as they press on thru 24 straight hours of comedy improvisation.

Location: 300-G East Main Street, 27510
Box Office: 919-929-2787
24hr Pass: $14, $12 Students & AC friends

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CALLING MARATHON AUDIENCE MEMBERS

Do you have what it takes to stay awake?

DSI has decided to have audience members sponsored as a way to increase awareness about the event, spreading the word while describing the benefit to possible “sponsors” as a way to invite them out and let them know what we’re doing, and to help raise additional money for the benefit. The sponsored audience would be 24LIVE’s “Marathon Audience” audience members, complete with marathon numbers, etc.

Download Marathon Audience PDF file from http://dirtysouthimprov.com/24live/.

It’s well known that I love me some Mike Doughty– in fact, I have his book Slanky on my desk right now for my reading enjoyment. Doom Wiggler sends along this link to Doughty’s best lessons learned in poetry class.

Hey, all you Southern poor! This is working very well for you!

This morning, Jill Bernard sent me an IM that said, “Would you join the Navy if this were your captain?”

The link took me to this picture:

Am I the only person in America who has given the MLB steroids issue, and has come to the conclusion that he just doesn’t care? Because I don’t. I did– I wrote in March that I didn’t believe that steroid users should be eligible for the Hall of Fame. But now, I don’t care. Yes, it’s cheating, but so is using a corked bat or scuffing the ball. And if you get caught, you suffer the penalties. That should be it.

Just because cheating doesn’t keep you out of the Hall automatically, doesn’t mean that you have to get voted in. If, five years after your retirement, the baseball world hasn’t figured out that you are an undeserving wretch, you probably were good enough to go in. McGwire will be voted in. Hell, McGwire should not have even had to testify before Congress, because he wasn’t even active when the Congressional hearings took place.

My faith in the game isn’t diminished because a couple of guys hit a lot of home runs while injecting steroids any more than it would be if I found out that Greg Maddux was scuffing his baseballs. Taking steroids alone won’t make you a great hitter, or everyone in the sport would have taken them. (This guy took them… see where it got him?) So, sports writers, quit the bluster. This isn’t as big an issue as you want it to be. It’s horrible that those guys, who a lot of us view as heroes, have cheated. It’s terrible that role models engage in dangerous behavior with a nation watching. But in the end, there are still a lot of guys who play the game the right way. And maybe we’re lucky that the whole steroids thing happened, because if it weren’t for 1998, a lot of fans still might not be seeing them.