brykmantra.com

Okay, I haven’t posted all weekend, I’ve been cooking. A LOT. Like blackened chicken tonight, and chili last night. I also started brownies tonight (no, not that kind of brownies, grow up), but my wife, who doesn’t even eat sugary things any more, supermanded my kitchen authority and insisted on cooking them herself, since, she argued, that it needed to be done right.

And who am I to argue?

At least I got brownies out of the deal.

I’ve also been listening to more of last year’s entries at the RPM Challenge; I’m particularly intrigued by a band called Bee Sting Proof Suit. Their recordings are very rough, but also very suited to late nights with the headphones on. They’re sort of like Sigur Ros, but less glacial.

Speaking of Sigur Ros, our Newcastle pal ILuvNUFC has rounded up some excellent S.R. music videos, so go check ‘em out.

He also found some excellent games, one of which I hereby challenge The Spook to, he being trained in drafting/mechanical drawing from way back: Dupligon, a game where you’re shown a geometric figure, then have to draw it from memory.

But my original point here tonight, from which I have sorely digressed, is that I’ve been busy this weekend micro-crafting my resume for a job that sounds really cool, for a change: Working in a small office – a NON-CORPORATE environment! — sysopping the LAN and webmastering the website. I want it so bad I can taste it.

But then we shall just see, shan’t we?

Yes.

We shan.

This is for The Spook, his favorite song (slightly different version):

I don’t care if it is Chinese, the tune still takes me back to that college-age Happy Place.

Good times …

But yes, I know you like the original better, so here ya go:

Couple of different things:

The Spook tells me that country singer Jake Kellen is backing Ron Paul for President, and has recorded a song (based on one of his existing songs) about how Congressman Paul is going to win in a landslide.

Eventually, it is assumed.

You can check out the song on the Ron Paul 2008 MySpace page.

The reason I mention this is because it gives me a chance to mention that I went to high school with Kellen’s mom, Debbie (who occasionally leaves comments here), and his uncle, Guy, who is also his producer and possibly his management Svengali. Also, it was my best bud from college that bankrolled Kellen’s first album, and it says so in the liner notes.

Seriously, this is the closest brush with fame I’ve ever had. We can’t all have a boss who ran for governor, you know …

Next: My wife likes Steve Zahn and what’s not to like?), who co-starred in the miniseries “Comanche Moon” this week. That gives me an opportunity to mention Zahn’s new movie, Strange Wilderness.

The reason I bring it up is because it gives me opportunity to show this part of the movies trailer — the part that had me cackling out loud:

Okay, okay, so it’s an acquired taste. Anyway, here’s the whole trailer, if you insist:

And finally, via Attack of the Show: Rubber band machine gun!

Today is my Five-Year Blogiversary! Yes, it was on this day in 2002 that I figured I had nothing better to do with my life, so I might as well waste it nattering away about nothing to people who don’t care.

And so far, so good.

Which is to say, I can’t believe I’m still at it.

But since I am, let’s get down to a big old pile of that nattering away about random personal things, just like we used to blog when it was still old-school:

Sure, this blog (and domain) only goes back to April 2005, but my first three years — my Blogging Glory Days! (BGD) — were on Blogger, with mutiple posts every day. Unfortunately, Blogger/Blogspot somehow ate that old blog, but I was able to save all three years, and I’m making it available in a zipped-file format. Just right-click here then click Save-As. A lot of the layout doesn’t work like it should, since you won’t be accessing it on the same server on which the links were written, but it’s still all there.

Ah, those were the days, when not every fourth-grader and their pet lemur had a blog, when blogging was new and exciting, and when everybody, bloggers and civilians too, spent several hours a day checking out other people’s blogs.

Yes, it was a veritable Golden Age of lost productivity.

And I made lots of blogging friends then, many of whom are still around and still checking in here occasionally: Yay Kim, Pamibe, Gigglechick, RennyBA, The Presurfer … but back then I had several dozen blogfriends, all of whom checked out my blog (and I theirs) daily. Everybody was always frantically searching for fresh content to post, and that led to more and more blogs and sites to have to monitor, and more friends, most of whom don’t stop by here any more, just like I don’t stop by there.

But blogging has cooled a lot since that heyday, and most of us are just casually posting now. I guess it’s the nature of red-hot trends to burn brightly until they finally burn out.

So why am I still doing this? Here’s why: It’s a map of my 100 latest visitors, according to SiteMeter:

Pretty cool, huh? Look at that: Two in the Russian Federation! Turkey! Hong Kong! The Philippines! A veritable squadron of visitors from Germany!

People in Egypt are reading about me cooking a big pot of beans for the first time in two years!

Somebody in Taiwan knows about Bristol tearing up my wife’s barley-hull pillow!

My accounts of my pointless goings-on are boring somebody in Italy! And the Czech Republic! Brasil! Israel! Thailand!

There’s somebody checking me out in The Netherlands! (That’s The Presurfer, of course, which doesn’t make it any less amazing.)

Of course, the bulk of my readers are right here in the good old You Ess of Ay: Several wise-guy types in New Jersey and Jamaica, New York, have checked in today, as well as a half dozen or so people in Florida.

And I can’t figure out who is out there in Gouldbusk, Texas, apparently getting here from typing in the URL, and not from a link or search engine. The town is close to where my old college friend Terry lives now, and I think it’s also not far from where The Spook currently resides. (It might also be close to where Mollie is …)

And for that matter: If you’re the person out there in Louth, Ireland, who visits here fairly regularly without hitting a link somehow — leave a comment and let me know how you got here, how you found out about me. If you’re shy, just send me an email at brykmantra[at]gmail.com.

And for that matter, whoever is out there reading this, leave a comments!

This post wouldn’t be complete without some boring nonsense about my personal life, so here goes:

Today I raked about half the leaves in our back yard; I quit there because I had completely filled up our entire trash tote, as well as a 30-gallon paper leaf bag. Plus, if i overdo the squatting and lifting, I can really overdo those thigh muscles.

We finally got around to watching Casino Royale tonight. Daniel Craig takes some getting used to — he looks like some scruffy version of Kevin Costner that a cat dug up in the back yard — but I like the new Bond character better than all the old ones. This one has to actually work for his pay, and he gets pretty roughed up. This version of Bond is much grittier and down to earth; it just might work out pretty well.

We also watched lots of movies over the Christmas weekend: Die Hard 4 (eh — same old stuff), The Bourne Ultimatum (superhuman guy is three steps ahead of the entire U.S. intelligence community, with lots of formulaic foot- and car-chases in stock urban and exotic locales; this is the epitome of a color-by-numbers movie) , Transformers and Superbad. Those last two were okay, but nothing special.

Oh, and we also watched Ratatouille, which is excellent and hilarious, and which is serious about being about food. We definitely recommend it.

Okay, that’s all for now. Thanks for checking in on my Blogiversary, and please keep checking back.

Here are a bunch of mostly unrelated things, many of them I’ve been saving up for a while, waiting for a chance to post unrelated things …

So here we go:

I didn’t post this with my last post because the video part isn’t much — it’s just the end credits of the video game Portal — but what’s important is the excellent song, “Still Alive”, sung by Ellen McLain (a voice actor in Portal, as well as the other two “Orange Box” games) and written by Jonathan Coulton, who also wrote the song that became the theme for the G4TV animated series, Code Monkeys.

Anyway: “Still Alive” is excellent, so run the video and listen to it:

Speaking of good music, we’ve been watching The Next Great American Band on Fox (mainly because there’s not much else TV on on Friday nights), and except for the mediocre “artists” they make the bands cover (especially Billy Joel and Rod Stewart), it’s pretty good. We’re especially impressed by Light of Doom, a hard-rocking group of kids with a great work ethic and a healthy respect for the classic rock acts.

Hey Spook, Here’s the business we should have gotten into: Selling tumbleweeds for $25 a pop. This woman was learning HTML a few years ago, and had to pick a subject to build a test site around, so she constructed a fake tumbleweed-selling site, offering the rolling shrubs at $25 each.

That is, it was fake, until people (Yankees?) with more money that sense started sending in orders …

Now she’s making a good living at it.

Maybe you can figure out how to sell sandstorms.

Remember, target Yankees.

One interesting by-product of the writer’s strike is the fact that the Tonight Show is showing reruns from Leno’s first year on the job. It’s interesting seeing Jay with dark hair and wide lapels, trying to make Johnny Carson’s old formula work.

His current strategy fits him much better, standing closer to the audience, and interspersing the monologue with skits and props.

Carson’s routine wouldn’t work for everybody — in fact, there were a lot of times it didn’t work for him.

What are the odds that Evel Knievel would die of something as mundane as diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis? He spent almost half his life doing crazy dangerous stunts, but death couldn’t claim him during that time.

Just goes to show you: You never can tell …

Do you have too much time on your hands? This person does: Cowscapes.

Things keep happening, and there’s never been any time to spell it all out, but here’s the big thing from the past weekend: My cousin from Austin was in town with her husband to see an old school friend on friday, but her husband fell in the hotel shower and hit his head, so he’s been in ICU here locally ever since then.

So I’ve been going up there everyday and just sitting around with them, and catching up with her and her daughters. It’s especially good to see Becca again, who I practically grew up with (during holidays and vacations, anyway), but who lately I’ve been seeing about everyh 6 or 7 years: Last year at Thanksgiving, before that in 2000, and before that in 1993. I’ve got other relationships like that too — Spook, Terry, James — friends that I spent a lot of time with for years, and now I’ll see or communicate with them about once every two presidential terms (or more) , and we’ll catch each other up on our lives in the interim, then we’ll go our ways again. (Except for the Spook, of course, who has been keeping contact by email these past five years.) I think that must be a common experience these days.

It’s like a really good TV series that you used to watch, but now they only make two episodes a year. It’s kind of a weird feeling, but it’s better than no contact at all.

Anyway, this next thing is unrelated, but I saw it today, and if I wait until it’s on-topic, I’ll never remember it so here goes (via Attack of the Show:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been trying to find something to differentiate himself from the rest of the GOP pack, and it looks like he’s found TWO things: 1) Chuck Norris, and 2) A sense of humor.

Anyway, tomorrow’s another day of job-hunting, and I’ve got a lead on a place that’s only five miles from my house. I can put up with a lot of crap for only a five-mile drive. Wish me luck.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 30 years today since Star Wars was unleashed upon the world. I didn’t see it on this day — it took it a month to hit Lubbock back then — but I did see it on the big screen, back when Darth Vader and R2D2 were still not household words, and like everybody else, I was totally hooked the minute I saw that huge Imperial battle cruiser fill the screen.

I’m also proud to say that I saw the final Star Wars installment, on my 50th birthday, which happened to be the day it premiered.

A more bizarre coincidence was never known.

Anyway, here are a few interesting Star Wars things …

Star Wars Chicks.

Ewok links. No, not sausages, WEB links.

Star Wars blogs. And you thought nobody needed to get a life more than us regular bloggers.

The Tao of Star Wars.

Star Wars toilet paper.

Star Wars cake.

Star Wars on Flickr.

Hundreds of cool SW links from our friend Steve at Look at This. (Be sure you check out all four pages of links; scroll down to the bottom of the page for links to the other three.)

Here’s a great comedy bit about Darth Vader visiting the cafeteria on the Death Star to try to grab some lunch. (And yes, that’s Eddie Izzard from The Riches; if all you know about him is from that show, this might be a BIG surprise for you …)

And finally: Thanks to the Inter-Nets, I can finally read this Star Wars article in Rolling Stone. I actually bought the issue 30 years ago, but The Spook “borrowed” it, and couldn’t seem to find it when I asked for it back; he blamed his roommates.

I suspect he was getting back at me for stealing a couple of his girlfriends in college …

If so … it was totally worth it.

Yes, I didn’t post for two weeks, and now I’m posting twice in less than 24 hours.

Can’t be helped.

See, this is The Spook’s birthday (old college bud, in case you’re just tuning in), and I get the feeling that he’s already checked this site 10 times so far this morning, so here goes:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SPOOK!

(For more info, see last year’s post …)

Anyway, I haven’t heard from The Spooker in a month or so, and he’s been in the process of moving to San Angelo — hey, they’ve got Los Lonely Boys, so surely they’ve got Internet access too, right?

So everybody leave the old boy some nice birthday wishes in the comments, and congratulate him on not having self-destructed before now …

Since several of my readers have more interesting lives than myself, here’s what some of them have been up to:

Todn8r, who I mentioned last month was given the promise of a Playstation 3 for his birthday, today finally announced the arrival of a bouncing baby console, which he says is “awesome”.

He also says that someday he might actually get off his lazy buttocks and post some screenshots on Flickr.

Those might not have been his exact words …

The Spook — old college bud, country music financier, and our Lubbock correspondent — has also promised pictures, since he has finally gotten around to getting a new camera

That makes TWO sets of pictures that I’m not holding my breath in anticipation of.

No, seriously, to be fair, he has shown me some thumbnails of four of his shots, and they look pretty crisp, but I won’t be satisfied until I’ve got him totally addicted to Flickr …

Vickie sends this cool Christmas link: Simon Sez Santa 2.0. She knows my fondness for funny “subservient” websites, and this is one I hadn’t heard of before.

So you know the drill: Go there and boss Santa around. No imagination? Start with dance, jump, fly, eat, and destroy, and go from there.

We got our first Christmas cards today, and one of them was from our pal Yay! Kim. Kim and I were in each other’s neighborhoods recently (she drove through Dallas the day after our ice storm, and I was south of Austin just before Thanksgiving), but we’ve still never met, even though we’ve been blogging buddies for close to four years now. (She’s the closes thing I’ve had to a penpanl since high school!)

Pamibe is a grandma!

And finally: A reader that I see in person regularly — let’s call her “Sally” — said to me the other day, “I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready for (So-and-So)’s plane to go down!”, with “So-and-So” in this case being someone that we both know, and who has caused both of us (and many others) much grief lately.

And if you knew Sally, you’d know that it takes a lot to push this easy-going lady to the point of wishing ill-will — but apparently that has happened.

And of course So-and-So has no clue.

Tomorrow’s the first day of autumn, and yet it almost hit 100 degrees here today.

Welcome to Texas.

But fortunately, a cold front (and rain!) is supposed to blow in tonight, so let’s haul out the blazing sun icon for hopefully the last time this year:

The Spook sends this link: Doonesbury strips through the years, in five year intervals. On the day he sent it to me, it was the day of Boopsie’s first appearance in 1971.

He and I hadn’t started reading the strip at the time, not starting college until a couple of years later, but D’bury was a big part of our college experience during the Watergate era, so seeing these old episodes is a big monochrome flashback.

And here’s something back at The Spook: The Beer Cannon. There are several videos, but I picked the Best-Of montage as a good sampling of the weapon’s capabilities, and because it shows slow motion destruction to the tune of the 1812 Overture.

The downside: A lot of beer is wasted.

Mitigating factor: It’s Milwaukee’s Best Light.

Bonus points: Sometimes they fire sausage instead of beer, which is not ruined by the process, and in fact might often be improved.

And speaking of The Spook, and videos of destruction set to powerful classical music:

Hey Spook, did you get the CD I mailed you, and did you watch the animation?? If so, why no response?

Since I sent it, I’ve added the Green Army’s battlefront (consisting of several bad-ass tanks), plus their jets, plus moutains in the background of both fronts, and a grove of trees on the purple side.

Plus, one of the tanks blowed up real good.

Anyway, let me know if you got it.

Check out this Flickr set: Photos of the Washington state town (Roslyn) that posed as Cicely, Alaska, on Northern Exposure, one of my all-time favorite shows.

And finally, here’s a shout to one of my newest readers: My newest co-worker, Misty, who is that rarest of humans: Someone who laughs at my jokes. I know she’ll get real tired of my humor real quick, like everybody else in the office, but for now it’s good to have an audience.