In these final hours... No summing up of 2005 is in the offing here. I haven't felt sufficiently moved nor have I martialed the momentary discipline to force such a piece from me. Reviews of the year are to be found in every flavor with little effort anyway. Very little of 2005 remains, and it occurs to me that I'm not finding myself any more settled on a comfortable path - a path with a heart, as the Taoists say - leaving the year than I did entering it. That can't help but make me a little sad. (Passengers, please note that the mini-melodrama warning light is now on.) I continue to feel less than mature and more than spoiled, the brewmaster's recipe botched. A yeasty beast of stench and froth. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I shower daily. I'm already bored with the analogy. I'm too lazy to either clean up the mess and start again or torch the place and move on. I believe that a great many of us never pulled out of the funk we dropped into in late Nove...
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Scambusters: A Call To Action Perhaps you can help me, and in the process we can help some others. My wife and I are dealing with a situation involving an insurance company regarding payments for a short and long term disability policy. This is something we've made quarterly payments into for at least seven years, against a day when her health might take a drastic turn for the worst. Such a day came this past year, and she's been eligible for payments since mid-summer. After a rough start as we got used to the forms, we received a few payments... and then late November - when we'd expect the next check, and which we'd filed the periodic paperwork for earlier in the month - came and went with no check in our hands. A little over a week into December, we placed a follow-up call at which time they claimed that one of the forms wasn't filed with them back in November, and that they were just dropping another copy in the mail that week. This was part of a small packet of...
Goodbye, John O'Connor Character actor Vincent Schiavelli - one of those faces most of us knew from more than one place (such as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai ,where he played one of the villanous Black Lectroids, John O'Connor), but whose name we likely never knew - has died . Gone at the miserably early age of 57, due to lung cancer. Along with a history of character roles on tv and in motion pictures, Schiavelli was also an accomplished chef who wrote articles and books on cooking. His list of acting credits , including some voice work for cartoons, covers over three decades and reached across genres and interest levels.
If These Be Holidays..! My holiday (ie time off from work) only started Thursday night, which puts me one up on the kids since they had a full week of school, including Friday. Still, here it is Sunday night - Christmas - and I'm only now getting to some time that's completely at my disposal. I expect it to go quickly, too. What I need to do is make sure I do some things I feel good about between now and the end of the year. If I just piss the time away the post-new year emotional drop's going to be close to fatal. I have had some fun along the way, though. While work kept me late on Wednesday night, just past 10 I heard a door being unlocked and then two voices, one of them a woman's laughter. Abbygal , which made the other voice Crypt Leak . He had a box in his hands -- which I was actually relieved to find out wasn't Christmas presents, as I was by no means ready to reciprocate at that point in the month -- filled with soil samples from another office that had g...
And so this is Christmas... Another hectic, pre-holiday week's kept me running, but there were fun spots along the way... not that I have the energy to get into all of that just yet. By Christmas night sometime I should be finally easing into the long-awaited leisure leg of my holiday and have a shot at recounting some of it. While in most other respects it's shaping up to be a good Christmas, I am bothered that I didn't find the time, cash and/or energy to take care of some other people in time for Christmas, especially when I'd have had to get them in the mail in time. One or two people will simply be getting something from me a little later. Faced with circumstances that are to shatter our sane and happy tradition of the past few years of staying home on Christmas day, we decided to have our Christmas this side of the long winter's nap. So, here it is not even midnight and all of the presents in the Norton household have been opened, initially enjoyed, ...
Slow motion swimming in the blender of time Finally having a little money in hand this weekend (Christmas bonus finally getting in-hand after 3 on Friday) and some breathing room (having gotten an obligation out of the way and getting a reprieve on a project at work) I set about doing some shopping. Almost any other year I'd start setting Christmas presents aside back in September - possibly earlier - but not this year. Still, some online shopping this morning solved much of that, and a very loose, solo shopping day took me closer. My usual Christmas shopping mode sees me wandering the Earth, finding likely gifts and setting them aside. This late in the game that doesn't work well, and the more prosaic checklist approach is in order. That takes much of the fun out of it for me, but I've bent somewhat in that direction out of necessity. I did at least one good deed today, taking advantage of the Blue Bell post office having some unusual operating hours on a Sunday to send so...
Another sign I have too many things to do I nstead of getting them done - or writing about something more immediate and/or of substance - I'm finding myself stumbling across some shots of clix from February's Collateral Damage Heroclix expansion. (Clix is all there'll be to see here, so unless you're interested then don't bother with the rest of this post.) The next DC expansion for the Heroclix game isn't due until February. As of this writing there were 14 items in the official gallery for the set , 2 of them Battlefield Condition cards ( the only two in this set ), four Feat cards, six new objects (each with special properties) and two special character pieces one will only be able to get in special ways. I'll talk briefly about these before getting to sculpts of eleven of the clix they haven't officially previewed. The shots are a little blurry, but one takes what one can get at this stage. I'll get to all those once I've walking through...
Pryor Appointment? The rumor's going around for at least the past half hour that comedian Richard Pryor died today , but if so, the news services are being very slow in picking it up. Confirmed. And again. I'll update that later once there's some more information. That "confirmed" links just to ABC and CNN news' home pages, where they had a "breaking news" banner about it death and nothing else. We knew he'd been dealingt with MS for years, so presumably it was health complications from that. I see that all of the news services are covering it now, mostly (understandably) drawing from the same copy. ABC 's is one of the longer pieces, though I'm sure the detailed tributes will be coming along quickly, as Pryor was a 1970s icon for many other comics. Toward the end of Richard Pryor: Here and Now he does a bit about Hell. "Had so much fun they kicked me out that motherfucka," he says. "I know I ain't goin' to...
Class Politics: The Pre-Holiday Money Game I'd caught the audio version of Robert Reich 's piece this past Wednesday on the end-of-session tax bills moving through the House and Senate , becoming one of the many dozens of things that I mean to point out but don't find the time, energy or sheer will to get to during the weekdays. Doing some random catch-up this morning, I was reminded of the tax bill versions . As is more often the case in these years of GOP domination, the Senate is living closer to reality than the House. Trying to do something about the Alternative Minimum Tax which due to a lack of indexing for inflation has moved from something to keep the rich from avoiding paying taxes into something about to hit the middle class. The final four paragraphs of Reich's piece sum up the situation nicely: The underlying question is who ends up paying for Iraq, the Katrina cleanup, the Medicare drug benefit, homeland security, everything else? If the House has its way...
What can the super doggy do? Wizkids has shown us a(n overexposed -- hey, maybe a background other than white would have been wise?) shot of Krypto -- the mail-away LE for clix brick buyers of February's Collateral Damage expansion. A potentially useful, reasonably representative 100 pt dial, it could see some play. I suspect it might disappoint a hardcore, Silver Age fan who'd probably be looking for something a little faster, but by and large it seems adequate. Update: I see they've added the first of the Collateral Damage Feat cards, the 15 pt. Inspiring Command . This is another card that promotes theme team building, though it does depend upon the set designers to get the team affiliations right. That is to say, it specifies "team symbol ", so a wildard shouldn't be able to take advantage of it even if there's a legitimate (story-based) reason for a particular character to be part of the team. That it allows the mechanics to work by having the ...
My new, holiday wallpaper An instant classic (and the obvious winner) from Xyling , produced for the otherwise disappointing Fark thread "A very white trash Christmas." The humor'll likely wear off and the depressing aspects take over, but for now I'm tickled by what he came up with. To better appreciate all the touches, here's the Norman Rockwell original:
"Christmas!" I decided to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas for the first time in what's probably been several years, and I soon remembered part of the reason I stopped doing it. While I'm still irritated by the way commercial TV insists on putting their intrusive logos in the bottom right corner of the screen, I've grown to ignore it most of the time. No, what I forgot was how much worse it's gotten. While C.B. was introducing himself to the cast of the play as the director, a banner across the bottom of the screen declared "Video of Holiday Bandits - Action News at 11." Hey, kids! Forget this crap! Stay up late to watch the video of the holiday bandits! I keep forgetting that these shows are just here to space the commercials. I'm an ass like that sometimes. I suppose I should be happy I wasn't watching it on TNT or A&E, because there probably would have been some animated ad for Law & Order or Dog, The Bounty Hunter once du...
Set to rest The Christmas party is happily over - for me at least. The auctions are run -- not the success I might have hoped, but still fairly good considering that 8 of the 19 didn't sell. I might relist them, I'm not sure and I'm not going to decide this moment. These parties are of no use to me -- they're supposed to be fun, but through my own social deficiencies I don't enjoy them. They remain an ordeal to me. I should have weaseled my way out of going once it was established that the bonuses were coming at a later date. Staying home would have been a far more enjoyable time for me, and I will be keeping that in mind if I'm still working at the same place next year. The event is very well-intentioned, and nearly everyone else appeared to be having a good time, but it's not for me. I'd eat better at home - I can make chicken flavorful, not serve it in thick slabs of tasteless white meat coated in a suspect sauce I ended up mopping up with a napk...
Work + Party = ? Tonight's the annual Christmas party for the company I work for, and I have a spot set for me. I'm not much interested in parties period , and going to a semi-formal affair with people from work (and their dates) doesn't really sweeten the deal. To be brutally honest, a solid 95% of the reason I attend is because that's when the Christmas bonuses are handed out by the host as he sees people come in and does the meet-and-greet any good host does. That's been the traditional situation. However , by Friday afternoon we found out that reportedly due to too hectic a schedule this week (and it was hectic, there's no denying that, and moreso for the head honcho than for any of us from what I could see) the checks were not processed and would not be handed out then. It seems they're coming almost two weeks later , on or around the 16th. Were I following my life like the latest volume in a series of poor novels I would have seen this coming the f...
Things that come back to you It started with Alibi heralding salmon-flavored soda ... ... which led to a comment from someone who tried the whole specialty soda gift pack , including Turkey & Gravy and Broccoli Casserole... ....which couldn't help but remind me of the classic (and apparently continuing) Steve, Don't Eat It!
Why don't we just cut to the chase and let Coke & Pepsi bid for the ad space? Someone remind me what country this is. Every time we take another shift towards day-glo money I'm reminded of how the more garish the make-up the cheaper the whore. This is the new $10 bill set to debut in the spring. Yes, yes, I know it's intended to thwart counterfeiters, but they're highly adaptable. I don't know. Maybe it's the red and orange.
More JLA/JSA coolness coming in '06 Yes, there's news every day and I could put items up more regularly, but this happened to be something I find myself looking forward to and wanted to spread it around. Steve Englehart will be writing a 4-issue run of JLA Classified which will run into a 3-issue run of JSA Classified . Rather than revisit the team he worked with when last he worked on the JLA, he claims he'll be working with the Detroit Justice League team of the 1980s -- Vibe, Gypsy, Vixen and Steel -- which leaves me a little disappointed, a little worried as to how second-string the JSA team he'll be writing will be, but on the other hand Steve can only improve on what's there. He speaks about it all in more detail over here . If you're still interested in spending some more time with him, he was interviewed recently in a CBR forum over here . For a more exhaustive overview of the bulk of his career (though not including anything from the past four year...
Infamy here & abroad Above, an editorial cartoon with an edge, and below is a bit of recovered history from the GOP's powergaming history in Texas, hopefully set to split open into more public view... though I have no faith in the general public to recognize the truly outrageous unless sex is involved. Both items ably spotted and passed along by Tammy , herself an invaluable natural resource. The article's from the Washington Post, and reprinted here in full without any permission whatsoever: Justice Staff Saw Texas Districting As Illegal Voting Rights Finding On Map Pushed by DeLay Was Overruled By Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 2, 2005; Page A01 Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan. The memo, un...
McDonalds Gets New Buns? ... and their food declared the path to the Aryan superman? Okay, so it's just for Japan (at least so far) but McD's has gone with a sexier campaign and a female dressed in Ronald's colors . (Thanks, Tammy , for the tip.) At least as interesting as this is, I was more intrigued by the quote from Den Fujita (at the end of the piece) when criticism of McDonalds' potential impact on the Japanese diet: "The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for 2,000 years. If we eat McDonald’s hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years we will become taller, our skin become white and our hair blond." I can only guess what Mr. Fujita looks like, but I suspect he's not tall and blond. I wonder if this reflects a cultural thread of self-loathing among the Japanese? Update: Thanks to CryptLeak not being crippled by chronic indolence, I've added a shot of Mr. Fujita t...
A little this, a little that... Something's trying to take me down, though I only realized it during this time off. No nausea and no outright pain - aside from some headaches - but leaden limbs and getting out of breath over nothing. I finally realized my lungs are compromised, with a spongy feel deep in them, taking up a third to half - or at least that's how it feels. Now I'm on antibiotics. We'll see what shape I'm in by Monday. Friday (aside from the trip out to see a movie) and through much of today I was resting, apparently needing it. I'm feeling more myself now. This evening we managed some clearing out in the living room today - getting some surprisingly bulky clutter out of the way as we decide where to place the tree this year. The Christmas decorating -- we've resolved to kick the season off earlier this year than happens during most -- has begun, and is now slated to be the main task for Sunday. I finally posted another set of auctions ,...
The First Muggle-less Potter Nick and I finally made it out to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire this afternoon following a roughly five hour delay. Hey, it's a holiday weekend. Schedules are for slaves. Seeing a movie targeted primarily at a child audience on Black Friday was likely not among my swiftest moves, but by and large the audience was well-behaved in the nearly packed theater. Unfortunately, there were some kids with control problems and even more unfortunately four of them chose our row. Some poor woman plainly drew the short straw for her block -- either that, or she promised her own one or two kids she'd take them to see the movie and they spread the invitation out to several friends. I lost count of how many times we heard "this'll be the last time" whispered to us as we had to partially stand up and turn the three inches of clearance between my knees and the seat ahead of me into seven. The youngest kid, probably no more than seven, was som...