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I am alive, and Dave Grohl, who grew up near my hometown, is alive. And the new Foo Fighters album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, signals a welcome blowback of Foo Power, if not a true return to original 1995-1997 form.

To its credit, the guitar sound on the chorus of “Let It Die” makes me want to play music in a dark, carpeted, semi-finished basement. So it will be… right after I get Leopard / iLife 08 installed next Friday, aka “The Day Leading Into the Least Productive (from a non-computer perspective) Weekend In Recent History”.

Also positively, it’s not the Quato-esque abortion that was 2005’s In Your Honor. Which is maybe why it’s good, in the “it’s better than bad”, “Log” sense.

My post for the month. From my friend mark’s trip to St. Martin. Really can’t add anything to increase the awesomeness.

We all know how “down with the times” I am… but in this rare case I’m being relatively good, as Grindhouse only came out two months ago.

I’ve only seen the first feature, and I can already declare it the greatest film of all time.

It is truly the Citizen Kane of homage-to-seventies-sexploitation-and-violence flicks. And the music rocks.

And Rose MacGowan, back in the Doom Generation days, was a stone, villianous fox. Then she was on Charmed and all that and married the prince of darkness for a while (rebellious teens), and I think had some plastic surgery, and it was like, wha happened? But now she’s here as a go-go dancer, then she get stumped, then they attach a table leg to the stump, which is hot, and for the coup de grace… well… we all know by now.

I’m on the fence as to whether I’m going to even watch Tarantino’s portion (Death-Proof). Kinda don’t want to ruin the perfection.

This is fairly freakish… although it does sort of resemble my office at the moment.

I like how the web page describes it as only a ’semi-extreme’ performance. I guess a fully extreme performance would have to involve Kris Angel.

Flatland!

I know that for some of you, lack of fresh blog content here is tantamount to lack of sufficient oxygen, and I would apologize… but You need to get a life. and i’m speaking to a population of no one. so it’s all ok.

But check this: such sentiment is meaningless in the face of the POWER of the triumphant return of trapped in the closet starting in 7/07.

oh yes. in the past, i’ve alternatively warned against getting trapped in the closet, and embracing ‘trapped in the closet’. if none of this is resonating, go back to the place where it all began, and prepare yourself for what is to come.

… but I have no choice in the matter.

I’m hoping the heart-stopping screech my computer just emitted at the end of this install process was a result of some unrelated situation (ex. the 150 deg F internal temperature) as opposed to a feature of Google Desktop for OS X.

Made you look.

No, this is not the severed head of a techno-bauhaus muppet, and this object and I do not belong to a secret, bare-knuckle boxing ‘fight club’. You are looking at me holding a battery that was once in my Mac Book Pro 17″.

One afternoon, after a particularly scorching Parallels session, I was moving my MBP to another room when I noticed that the aluminum battery cover was sort of, uh, visibily warped. More accurately, I noticed that the MBP’s underside was hot enough to fry a proverbial egg, but there’s really nothing new about that. Then I noticed the bulge.

Deciding it was time to ‘cool it down’ (or was it cool it now, per New Edition?), I ejected the battery, checked it out, thought ‘huh, that’s funny’ and put it on my desk for later inpection/action.

Some time later, I came back to my office to find the battery as you see it in this picture. I guess as it cooled from ~150 deg f to room temp, it expanded or contracted (or whatever things do when they cool off), and the battery pack sort of popped like a kernel of popcorn. Or something.

Well, better this than a spray of molten battery material to the face. Not that I’m saying that has ever happened with this sort of Apple battery, because that would be slander.

This is probably similar (or identical) to the 15″ MacBook Pro battery bulge/warp issue that Apple has an automated recall page for. AppleCare replaced it with zero argument (thanks Jason).

The moral of the story is: Don’t… um, well. I’m not sure what to tell you not to do. Perhaps: as with breast and testicular cancer, pro-active scanning of odd lumps or bulges in your Apple battery is perhaps the best method to head off any long-term difficulties or mutilating explosions. An ounce of prevention…

Melissa Joan Hart’s younger, evil twin is so terrified. What’s wrong, girlie?

Now she’s so happy! She’s plotting the use of her weather-domination device!

He’s a good guy, that Sanjaya. Girl, you really got him now.

And he needs to leave the show. He shouldn’t be there. For the good of the hunger-strikers.

David Sedaris May Sometimes Exaggerate For Effect - Gawker

I can grasp the hubub over A Million Little Pieces and this chick, to a degree. Although I haven’t read either one’s work (and probably never will, LIARS!), I doubt either volume features a 20-page forward attempting to convince the reader that every word is the non-embellished truth. But I really don’t know, to be honest. And it’s not the point.

But when Gawker goes after David Sedaris, who is basically a comedian, and I don’t think makes any real pretense that what he’s saying is completely (or even remotely) true, what hope is there for anyone who wants to write anything another human would want to read, given that if we are to “write what we know”, we would only write a series of facts so mundane as to literally and instantly vaporize the reader[1]?

Is the assumption that writing about family/work life implies strict adherence to the truth, and that there shouldn’t be fiction that has vague roots in a “typical” and some might say “boring” everyday situations? If so, I missed that day of… whatever class I didn’t take that would have discussed this topic.

If so, the potential global pool of potential authors would be reduced to Noam Chomsky, and him… only maybe. I’m reading Hegemony or Survival right now, and who else has ever heard of this so-called “Cuban Missle Crisis”? You’re not Tom Clancy, Noam — stick to the facts.

What, you say? Gawker is a highly ironic, metrosexually-oriented “news” site, primarily focused on the discussion of people (like, ehr, David Sedaris) that most of non-metrosexual America has never heard of? And that this exaggerated “outing” of Sedaris’s lies is, itself, meant to be ironic? I might, like Alanis Morrissette, have a problem with the whole irony concept.

[1] There, I exaggerated. Did it kill you?