I’m pretty tired this morning because of the Steelers game last night. It went well past midnight, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew the outcome of the game. I knew the Steelers would have their hands full with the Ravens, but was confident they could pull it off on a Monday night at home.

At halftime I was ready to turn the game off and go to bed. Roethlisberger was playing like a retard. Our entire offense sucked. Only our defense kept the score reasonable, but at 13-3, things weren’t looking promising. Players were being carted out left and right — the Steelers lost nearly all their running backs, and lots of starters were injured.

You know who really needs to lay off the roids? Ray Lewis.

But the Steelers came out the second half, during which I was actually trying to fall asleep. But I resumed paying attention to the game when things had completely turned around for the Steelers. They took over, took the lead, and even made the game really exciting by taking it to overtime. And in the end they pulled it off.

I’m happy to see us beat the Ravens, mostly because the Ravens suck.

Another repost . . .

What you see here is Mr. Fudgie Fudge. He’s the mascot for a local fudge maker, and they run commercials on the local stations. It features a weird theme song . . . “Mr. Fudgie Fudge is the one I want, Mr. Fudgie Fudge is the one I crave, Mr. Fudgie Fudge is what I want, Mr. Fudgie Fudge is all the rage, it’s the best fudge, ’cause Mr. Fudgie Fudge is made fresh every day.”

I’ve tried the fudge, and have to admit it’s pretty good. But the mascot frightens the hell out of me. Like he’s going to get me alone and do something terrible to me.

Here’s a re-post from the former version of the blog — the one I wiped out completely. I’m going to start putting up some of the funnier and more interesting stuff from the old blog. What the hell.

Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, Corey Graham . . . but they never mention me because I’m not enough of a tool.

Bald Bull
AKA “Dirty Son of a Bitch”

This week I’ve been obsessed with the Wii’s Virtual Console, where I have purchased a pile of games for the 8-bit Nintendo and the Super Nintendo. The wonderful thing about this is that my wife doesn’t mind me tossing money at the Nintendo — she loves these games as much as I do.

So I’ve rediscovered that fond feeling of being completely pissed off at a stupid game. Oh sure, I get pretty upset with the latest Wii games too, such as Super Mario Galaxy and MX vs ATV, but not like I got upset with 8- and 16-bit games. When I get pissed at these games, I’m brought to the point of doing something very irrational.

Like when I keep mistiming my punch against Bald Bull’s bull charge in Punch Out.

Or dying in World 1-1 in Super Mario 2.

Or being totally overcrowded with alien ships and bullets and fire and bubbles in Gradius III.

These are things that may just cause me to throw one of the end tables into my TV. Or burn the house down.

The horror movies site horror-movies.ca, which usually sponsors worthwhile contests to enter, is now giving away the DVD release of The Happening (a better title is The Crappening) when it comes out October 7.

I guess that’s the only way people will actually come to own this DVD — if they give it away.

No, I didn’t see the movie. But after the slew of reviews I’ve heard and read (most of which have contained spoilers), I can confidently say that if I were to view this film by that bastard M. Night Shyamalan, I would despise his directorial efforts even worse than I do now. It’s another case of the hype of the film completely misleading people. And the meaning behind the whole film — why everything happens — is completely retarded.

I’m not going to enter the contest for this DVD. Even if someone gave me the disc for free, I wouldn’t ever watch it.

This is clearly the best choice in most elections in America these days. Especially the Presidential election, which a lot of people seem to be all worked up about.

Like Jello Biafra said, there should be one more choice on every ballot: “None of the Above.” I am sure that would be the most popular choice on our ballots.

So, in order to support this, I’ve taken the picture you see here, cleaned it up, and formatted it as a printable PDF. Print them out — hang them up — mail them out — plaster the country with them.

Download the PDF.

Well, we all knew that already. Their music and images have “corporate sellout whore” written all over them. But when this article came across my feed reader, all I could do was laugh and think, “I told you so.”

Here’s what happened: there’s a company out there who goes around telling companies that they can get their brand name worked into the lyrics of pop songs (such as Mariah Carey, Ludacris, Pussycat Dolls, and all those other pop whores) “for the right price.” They accidentally solicited to an anti-advertising agency.

Here’s a quote that sums things up:

“It’s this desperation that advertising has come to because you can’t just tell people about your product anymore, because nobody cares. Advertisers have created this situation where they’ve made themselves obsolete. There’s too much advertising out there, so they try to find new ways to cut through the clutter that they’ve created. And this is one of those ways.” – Steve Lambert, as reported by BoingBoing.net

As I looked up news on Les Claypool’s web site, I found out that he has recorded original music for the upcoming Wii game Mushroom Men. As I’m a big Wii fan (and a huge Les Claypool fan, of course), I began to investigate this game by going over to its official web site.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll spring for this game when it comes out in November. But probably only because I can listen to new music from Les while I play.

And I’ll be damned — as I was writing this, an interview with Les and Ler (Primus) just came through my feed reader. It was done by Boing Boing, and the lady interviewing them — “Xeni” — is annoying as hell. At least Les and Ler are cool.

Beware of the retarded commercial they put in the middle of it. That’s downright annoying too — forcing that advertisement crap on me. I know it helps pay the bills and all, but come on. Boing Boing already has fifty million ads on their site as-is . . . do they really have to shove more in wherever they can?

I’ve been going by this notion lately: if there’s an ad somewhere that really bugs me — not necessarily the content of the ad itself, but even the timing/placement of the ad — I’ll make it a point to not patronize whoever the ad is for. And I’ll also badmouth the company.

For the longest time, I was against HP. I had heard that their products were shoddy, so I steered clear of them. Then, a couple years ago, I decided to try them out, buying a printer for both myself and my wife. It seemed that everybody was using HP stuff, so it couldn’t me that bad, could it?

I even planned on buying a nice new souped-up desktop computer of theirs at Best Buy within the next couple months. The Best Buy salesman had nothing but good things to say about HP (of course).

However, there have been 2 big incidents in the past couple weeks that have made me wish nothing but death and destruction upon HP.

Incident #1: The Cheap and Dirty Podcast

I love this podcast. When its host Dave came on and said he’d have to put the podcast on hiatus for upwards of a month, I was flung deep into the throes of suicidal depression. Well, maybe not exactly that, but I was bummed. The reason for the hiatus? His HP laptop was going in for repairs (apparently for the 3rd time or so), and it would take several weeks for it to come back. All becaue HP can’t make a decent piece of hardware.

Myself — I have a Sony VAIO laptop that I’ve run just about all day every day for the past 2 years, and the son of a bitch is still going strong. Dave, if I could give it up, I would send it to you man. Unfortunately, it’s the computer that enables me to put food on the table.

Listen to the Cheap and Dirty Podcast here.

Incident #2: HP Tech Support

This is good.

Last week, my HP printer started acting up. I’ve only had it a couple years, and it had worked reasonably fine, although I used it maybe twice a month on average. The error message was telling me “Carriage Jam,” so I checked that the cartidges were seated correctly, and did so until the error went away. But then I immediately got an “Out of Paper” error, despite the fact there was paper in it.

So I got on the phone to tech support, which, as we all know, has been outsourced to our Hindu friends. I spoke with some lady I could barely understand, who demanded my phone number.

“Why do you need my phone number?” I asked.

“It’s policy,” she answered. “We respect your privacy, and will use your number to let you know about important updates and offers.”

I told her I wasn’t comfortable giving this information out, because all I use is a cell phone. She kept demanding the phone number, and began RAISING HER VOICE. This pissed me off — she flew right off the handle.

After asking her to speak with her supervisor half a dozen times, she finally gave in and put me on hold for over 10 minutes. Then Apu got on the line, asking me what the problem was. I told him that I felt I was being mistreated by the lady I had just spoken to, and demanded and explanation.

“We’ll take care of that after I solve your printer problem,” he said, and then proceeded to troubleshoot my printer. This was a lie, because he never addressed the problem with the lady.

Anyhow, he came to the conclusion that my printer was shot and that I would need a new one. He gave me two options: pay for a technician, or buy a new one right there and then. I told him that based on how I was treated, I will never purchase another HP product again. This didn’t seem to bother him at all.

“Thank you, have a nice day,” he said, and hung up.

What the hell kind of service is that?! First of all, I was on the phone much, much longer than I should have been because I had to keep asking these people to repeat themselves. I could not understand them. Second, the first lady yells at me for not revealing my personal information. Third, the “supervisor” tries to get more money out of me and ignores the problem I had with the lady.

That’s HP for you. Like I said, never again. I was a few weeks away from dropping over $1000 on a new computer, but I’ll opt for a Dell or a Sony. Screw HP.