Saturday, February 07, 2004
I have not blogged in a very long time. For this I apologize most profusely. I was (am) ill, you see, and when I'm sick all I tend to blog about is how much it sucks to be sick. It sucks a great deal, my friends, it sucks a great deal. But much has occurred, and I figured that if I waited to blog until I was entirely healthy, there might never be another blog again. And that would be a sadness.
So.
PATRIOTS WIN THE SUPERBOWL!
Yes, I know I am a little late with that. But, as I said, illness. Anyways, it was a gloriously good game, despite the slowness of the first half. Vinatieri made all Pats fans want to kill him (who misses those kinds of kicks?), but he redeemed himself when he made the one that mattered. Still, if he'd made the earlier ones, maybe it wouldn't have had to come down to a kick like that mutter mutter mutter.
Bruschi played, which made me happy, since I was still a little worried about his leg injury. Brady was his usual steadfast self, and the offensive line did quite a good job of protecting him (as opposed to the Panthers line, since Delhomme was sacked several times). Vrabel got a touchdown, which made me unaccountably happy. And that slow first half served to show that this was a good SuperBowl win. It wasn't as though the Pats were playing some throw-away team, the Panthers were a team that could play them to a standstill for an entire half. That's some damn fine football there, folks.
I probably could have put in better analysis if I'd blogged right after the game, but at that point I was already sick, and all the screaming I'd done during the game left me in no condition to blog. Ah well.
if that isn't a beautiful sight, i don't know what is
image courtesy of nfl.com
The night before the SuperBowl Heather and I went to the midnight showing of Donnie Darko at the State Theater. It was incredible. We got there early and thusly got good seats. We kept looking for other art students in the crowd, but we only saw one other, and he wasn't one whom we personally knew. We were very disappointed in the art student community as a whole for missing such a typically art studenty experience. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Anyways, the movie was spectacularly good, as one would expect. It's the sort of storyline that resolves itself in such a way that you find yourself thinking that the script writers were as surprised by how things tied in at the end as the audience was. Wow. That sentence barely made sense. Illness still present in my brain. Also in the number of tissues being used and the way my entire head feels like it's wrapped in cotton.
The best bit about Donnie Darko was how the entire first reel (therefore the first 20 minutes of the movie) was backwards and upside down. Something about the reel being messed up. Anyways, it put a whole new spin on the film and, in my esteemed opinion, made it several hundred times better. People's mouths started looking like eyes, and the road looked like some demented kind of ceiling, and everyone went backwards. Oh, it was most wonderous.
The crowd was, if lacking in art students, full of all kinds of insane people. One fine fellow had a shirt on which read 'Crew of the Enterprise'. There were people with every hair style and color you can imagine. Some people had stuff on their heads that you assumed was hair because it was still there when they took their hats off, although there was no other confirming evidence. A great many people were high when they got to the theater, and a number of people contrived to get high while they were in the theater. Apparently Donnie Darko translates well under the influence of various mildly hallucinogenic drugs.
Some of these people interacted most amusingly with the entirely sober Heather and me. The people in front of us kept turning around to talk to us, and the people behind us had all sorts of odd conversations about chewing gum. After the movie a gentleman came up to us and asked, very politely, if we could drive him back to his apartment, as he had smoked himself right out of driving condition. We just as politely declined, since we hadn't driven to the theater.
Overall, a thoroughly excellent moviegoing experience.
Our current project in CFC class is to make a tshirt that makes people want to vote. I had a design with a missile that said "You can't complain about it if you don't vote", but I discarded that idea because I can't draw in Illustrator and the missile was shit. So I changed it a purely text one that said "VOTE or the small middle-eastern country gets it!" Better, we hope.
If you are looking for things on the Internet to make you laugh, I have such things.
Here is a fellow who did not study for his chemistry final. He decided to make things interesting anyways. And we reap the benefits!
Joel Veitch continues to be obscenely awesome, even though he is now a money-making big shot who makes commercials for Quizno's and VH1. Here is a short, cleverly worded, highly pleasing little animation about mango biscuits, and the pandas who yearn for them. Woo.
I don't really know what the heck is going on here, but it's ace. The animation is pretty long, so dial uppers be warned! But worth it, utterly worth it. The song is more or less about a fucking dwarf, but don't let that stop you. The dancing mushroom was my favorite bit.
Continuing the theme of longish animations with songs, we have this little gem. The song is by a band called Small Faces, and I'd never heard of them, but lots of folks on b3ta seem to know them, so perhaps it's a british thing. Compared to the last one, this is much more cheery and whimsical, both in song and animation style. Starring a potato-like creature.
An extremely restful game, where you're in charge of a submarine. You float around and look at things. Restful music plays. Easy, nice, no point to it really, other than to be nice and relaxing. I enjoy it greatly. Go here, and have fun.
A personal achievement. I finally got to 1000 posts on b3ta. Huzzah! Here you may see my triumphant, if somewhat lame, 1000th post thread. At least, you can see it until ukdragon takes down the image. Should be there for a couple of days, at least.
These are some of the funniest things I've ever read. They're the Random Student Interviews that the Michigan Daily does. For cats sake, go read them. Read them all. Some are funnier than others, depending on the interviewer and/or interviewee, but the vast majority of them are frelling hilarious. Go read. Right now. All of them.
Today I had the joy of having to shower in the 5th floor bathrooms. This was because there was a Hazmat team in our bathroom. Yes, a Hazmat team. Men in those white containment suits and all. They also had some cleansing device or other that kept blowing a fuse in the hall, plunging us into occasional darkness.
Why, you ask, was there a Hazmat team in your bathroom? You see, there is currently an epidemic of stomach flu going around the University of Michigan. This is a lovely virulent disease involving copious vomiting, diarrhea, cramping, fever, and general you're-not-going-anywhere-other-than-your-bed-and-the-bathroom-for-a-week-ness. If you get it you may not die, but you will want to. It started in Markley (the filthy bastards, no one was surprised), and despite the university's best efforts to contain it, it soon spread.
To MoJo. This was probably because lots of kids from Markley started going to Stockwell and MoJo to eat, since they didn't feel safe eating in their own dining hall anymore. Reasonable, maybe, but their coming over means that the slimy gits infected us.
Anyways, someone apparently vomited in our bathroom last night. It was probably just a drunk person. Loud Sarah had people around very late last night, so it might have been one of them. However, some of them were from Markley, so there's also a chance that one of them had the flu. Elisa, who lives next door to me, actually has the stomach flu but was, thankfully, at home this weekend. We love her to bits, but we're praying she'll stay there for a while. Her roommate, Sara, is flipping out about the possibility of getting sick. Anywho, there was a chance that it could be someone with stomach flu, so Hazmat was called in. The whole place was stripped and disinfected, and now we've got a toilet stall that's marked off with signs declaring it to be the 'sick person stall'. We also now have a cordoned-off shower for sick kids to use.
Which is problematic, because there are only two showers in our bathroom, and now there's only one that non-flu-afflicted folk may use. I don't know what the heck is going to happen in the morning during the week.
Pretty much everyone is going insane over this epidemic. The place where you swipe your card to get food at Stockwell has this little pump of antibacterial hand goo, and you've got to take some in order to get food. Damn good idea. Everyone on my hall has become an obsessive hand washer (myself included). I just did all the laundry I could possibly do today, including bed sheets and sitting futon sheets. I also washed all dishes and mugs.
See, this is the sort of thing where, if I catch it, I am Doomed with a capital D. Lots of people here, if they catch it, yes they'll be miserable, but they can go home and be miserable. Not something I can do. I'd have to stay here in the dorm and be miserable. Lord only knows how I'd even survive. Also, I would miss class. If my classes were all just lectures that would be OK, I could get the notes off of someone and that would be that. But you can't miss studio art classes. You just can't. They're one-time things that can't be made up. If I missed more than one of each class I would start failing. And there wouldn't be anything I could make up, really, because it doesn't work that way.
So I am stressing out over this illness, and that's probably making me more open to illness, and probably also stopping me from shaking off this Cold of Death that has me in it's fangs right now. Oh dear.
Oh, I was reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Normally I am wary of books by two authors, but this one was above and beyond even my tentatively good expectations. Gaiman and Pratchett are better known for their work on the odd and devoutly followed comic book, Sandman. I've read some Sandman, and this was completely different. It was a highly excellent book. Very much in the style of Douglas Adams (may his memory be forever untarnished). Very funny, very engaging, very well-written. The two main characters, Aziraphale and Crowley, just might be two of the best literary characters ever created. I love these guys. Lots. Go get the book! Read it! Only illiterates will not like it.
The one thing that confused me for a little bit was the ansaphone. I didn't know what it was, and it took me a bit to figure it out. It's an answering machine. Answer phone, ansaphone, see. I'm pretty good with british slang, since I spend some time on b3ta and read Scaryduck, but I hadn't run across ansaphone until Good Omens. Anyways, now you know, so there's nothing to stop you from rushing out right this very moment and getting the book.
Oh, and in other news, I had my finger broken for me. Dislocated, I think, actually. It's the pinky on my left hand, so it's not terribly bad, except for typing. A gentleman closed the door leading to the outside of my dorm very inexplicably fast, without looking behind him, and my poor digit paid the price. I had it taped up yesterday because it was hurting like silly buggers, and I'm trying it without tape today. Still quite sore and not moving properly. We'll see how it's doing tomorrow.
I'm sure there's more that happened that I wanted to blog about, but I've dredged my mind, and that's all I've got. Until the next.
Pray for my health.
10:10 PM
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