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| Just won two Henry Rollins tickets on eBay for $10! Face value is $25 each! Friggin sweet! Rollins rules! Can t wait till Tuesday. There s another set that s still up for bids if anyone else is as big a Rollins fan as we are. Just search on eBay for Henry Rollins Tickets. -b PS... this is for his Philly show. He s also playing next week in Lancaster for you mid-state readers. Go support everyone s favorite punk rocker turned bad ass comedian! | ||
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A neat little gizmo that Zephrin pointed out on her site- a map of states visited: Looking at that I feel lame and ineffectual. Mind you two of those states (IL and TX were visited only on business trips... good business trips but business trips none the less). Man, I m just not well traveled at all. Tack onto that I ve only been in four countries outside the US (five if you count Vatican City but one of the four was only for an airport layover so they cancel out) I feel even more ineffectual... damn. Maybe someday. Hopefully before retirement age, I ll be able to rectify some of this. We ll see. -b | ||
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| I m happy to see that the BampfBlog has made it onto the list of worthy links over at the BUG!! s Temple of Squa Tront (for those poor unenlightened sods who are not up to speed on your Chrononauts lore The BUG!! and Squa Tront are one and the same). It always interesting to note how other perceive you... and I was particularly amused by his descriptors. I quote: www.bampf.com - The website of Jeremy Smith, AKA Mongo, AKA J Smizzles. He is a badass and has a well maintained Blog. Jeremy's interests include the SCA (beating people with sticks), Roleplaying, Gaming of other sorts, and his beautiful wife. Jeremy is sorta like a barbarian king: Mighty of Build, Clever of Mind, Carnal in Lust! Fucking-A right. Glad to see all my Conan adulation is finally paying off. -bampf, Barbarian King | ||
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| The countdown has begun. T-Minus 6 hours and counting till my wife is of legal drinking age in the state of Pennsylvania. Huzzah. I encourage all to go to her blog (it hasn t been updated in a long time as she has no internet at work and doesn t dare brave the bitter climes of the manhole to use my PC) but I ve created a Birthday well-wishing entry for all to comment in. At long last part of my crib-robbing incestuous pedophile stigma will erode away... not all, but a part. Sounds like she ll be at Morimoto s (yeah, The Iron Chef) tonight with her co-workers (working for lawyers has it s benefits). Yup... she ll be enjoying $80 entrees and expensive bottles of sake while her dutiful husband dines on a can of corn home alone... sigh. To be honest... I think I prefer corn to Iron Chef food... have you seen the edible crap they make on that show? And I think it s awesome that she s getting to go... she s longed to for quite some time... added bonus that it s not on my dime. Anyway, Happy 21st, baby! Love you! -b PS... remember, the rest of you-- make with the well wishing here! | ||
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| There was a really important detail of last weekend s adventures that I somehow failed to mention in my previous post... the venture into the neighbor s house!! Yes. Chris and I boldly explored the nasty, condemned, COPS episode neighbor s hastily abandoned house. It was great. I was eager to explore ransacking possibilities. We entered through the basement. The basement was chocked full of crap. Broken down equipment (bicycles, weed-whackers, mowers, you name it), boxes and bins full of crap, shelves full of nasty household wares. All kinds of stuff. From there we went upstairs to the first floor. There was trash strewn everywhere. The carpet was stained and nasty. Empty beer cans and cigarette butts littered the landscape. The kitchen was plain scary. Nasty sink, rotting food still in the fridge. The main bedroom was inaccessible. There was still a bed there and dressers, but the floor was buried under mounds of cloths and boxes of crap. Crazy. Upstairs was a giant ferret cage full of ferret feces (at least I assume it was ferret feces). The other bedrooms weren t as bad as the first, but they too were certainly full of trash. There were boxes and bags of stuff that looked like they had been packed and then just randomly left behind... like a box full of toys and garbage bag full of stuffed animals. The older daughter s room was gaudily decorated in Britney Spears inspired fineries. A bulletin board with pictures and bad poetry inexplicably remained in the otherwise emptied room. It was funny and horrific and yet quite sad to think that a gaggle of kids lived in that squalor. On the way back out I noticed some picture frames in the basement and pulled one out in hopes of finding a salvagable frame... it was a velvet painting of unicorns! Priceless. We took it back to the house as loot and presented it as a gift to Kathy (remember she s an art teacher and a lover of fine art). Sadly she spurned our gift and Kristyn attacked it with a knife to echo her disapproval. The only other booty I claimed was a garden hose sprayer (I have an outdoor spigot but no hose, so I figure I may need one someday) and a roll of string... I figured you never know when you ll need string. I plan to return for a more exhaustive ransacking. Maybe this weekend. I ll try to take some pics so all can share in the glory of the bygone crackhead neighbors. -bampf | ||
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| I m gonna pull a blatant copy cat move on bangpitcher (remorselessly, as we do it to each other all the time) and rate my top movies of 2003. By my accounting I made 17 trips to the theatre in '03 to see 14 different movies. As far as movie years go it was a quality over quantity year. A couple of instant classic, fantastic movies. Several good ones. And then a quick drop off into the cinematic abyss. So here are my top 10: 1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Easy. Saw it three times, plan to see it a couple more. Greatest film ever. Wonderfully wrapping up the greatest trilogy ever. A new classic. A new benchmark for all future films and a true achievement in cinema. 2. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Saw it twice. Let s face it, without Johnny Depp, we are lost. The man is amazing. A good film made great film by his presence. 3. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 Quentin, we missed ya, dammit. An amazing vision come to reality. Glad to see someone push the style envelope. Can t wait for Vol 2. 4. Once Upon a Time in Mexico Did I mention Johnny Depp is amazing? Yeah I did, but it s worth repeating. A fitting ending to another trilogy. Although I would like to tally the number of actors/roles that were killed only to return in the next movie in the series... I can think of at least 5. 5. X-Men 2: X-Men United Bampf, man. Fucking-A right, Bampf. 6. Big Fish Excellent Burton opus. Glad to see him rebound from the monkey movie. Also the last movie on this list that I would categorize as 'good'. 7. The Matrix Reloaded Sure it was a let down, but still had some sweet scenes (of which that shitty freeway sequence is not one of) and some really abstruse dialog. 8.The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I m a sucker for an Alan Moore comic turned movie. His work is so good... and you could see his brilliance just under the surface of this movie... trying to break free, it just couldn t. Too bad. One of these days they ll come up with a Moore adaptation that stays true to the original (I ll mention although From Hell is a vast departure from the source material it still made for an excellent movie... <cough>Depp<cough>). 9. Underworld Despite degrading to the point of silliness from time to time this was still an enjoyable movie. Great visual style and sound. Even some of the ideas were novel, just others were dumb. 10. Daredevil I honestly thought Affleck was a pretty good Daredevil. It helped that he s a longtime fan of the comic (not unlike me). Good casting of most of the characters (though Bad Boy(tm) Colin Farrel can go to hell), if only the story and action didn t also devolve into silliness. Worst Movie of 2003 I saw in the theatre: Finding Nemo I wouldn t really call it bad... it was just... there. Dull. Story, dialog, visually... dull. Worst Movie of 2003 I ve seen at home: The Life of David Gale Really bad. Terrible direction. Predictable. And most baffling, it tries to deliver a morale message that the movie itself proves wrong in the end. WTF? So that was 2003. I ll note that this is based on release dates (I believe I saw 28 Days later in 03 but it s release date was in 02... I m thinking about making lists for 02 and 01 as well... we ll see). For now, time to press the button, Frank. -bampf | ||
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| Eventful weekend with Kristyn s family. The inlaws came down to visit Friday night. First item on the docket was a new sink. Our current sink was pretty damn nasty. It was an ugly brown sink when we moved in. Kristyn and Kathy repainted it white (or a cream color) using appliance paint. Over time the paint started to peel (revealing the brown beneath) and get gooey and just plain nasty. So we grabbed a new stainless steel sink and faucet at Home Depot. Installation wasn t too bad... Chris did the vast majority of the work... he is the Uber handy mensch. Looks a lot better. Plus no more leaky faucet and the sprayer now actually works so joy all around. Saturday night Kristyn s aunt in Bucks county hosted us for a birthday dinner and lots of cake. Got to play some Soul Calibur 2 while Kristyn frolicked with her cousin. That was cool. Sunday we embarked to the manliest place on the face of the planet. The new Cabellas store in Reading. The place is friggin huge. It s like Disneyland for men. Not only do they have every manner of sporting gear imaginable there but they have huge displays with hundreds of stuffed animals from just about every climate and region you could imagine. It was like the Museum of Natural History only bigger and you could buy guns! There was even an african safari display with stuffed lions, elephants, rhinos and more. There was a big walk-through aquirium. One wing was devoted solely to deer. All told there were problem 3 or 4 hundred stuffed animals. On top of that there were probably another 200 heads mounted at various places. They had a gun library! A whole room of nothing but gun displays. So cool. The gun selection was awe-inspiring. Although their range of assault weapons was disappointing (only a few Bushmaster and Colt AR series weapons... alas no Kalishnikovs). And the antlers. They were everywhere. And you could buy just about anything you wanted made out of antlers... Antler coffee tables, Antler Xmas trees, Antler coat racks, Antler chandeliers (I m not kidding)... we couldn t help but repeatedly break into Gaston inspired song... "I use antlers in all my decorating... Gee what a guy, that Gaston!" Anyway. I somehow managed to supress the urge to buy a gun. I even eschewed purchasing any gun accessories... I was giving serious thought to a concealed carry shoulder holster. But alas it was not to be. We left for the journey home having purchased only a kitchen rack thing... not sure how Kristyn ended up finding something for her kitchen amongst the ankle deep pools of testosterone, but she did. Sunday evening we relaxed around the house with tasty burgers and onion rings as Mena and Zephrin stopped by. I fdisked and rebuilt Zephrin s PC to cure her of a nasty case of the Pirate Virus. Hopefully she ll be online soon and her blog will rise from the ashes. All in all an eventful but good weekend. -b | ||
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| They had Ben Stiller on Y100 this morning. He s such a smart, quirky, classic geek kinda guy. It makes me incredibly sad that he s the new Pauly Shore/Jim Carey. As I ve mentioned tangentially we recently purchased the Ben Stiller Show DVD. That show was so damn funny. Everyone on that show was awesome... and all of them have stuck to their roots, doing intelligent, quirky humor... Jeneanne Garofaolo, Bob Odenkirk, Andy Dick. But not Ben, he had to go and sell his soul... now he s pigeon holed to make moron movies for the rest of his life. Makes me so sad... To be fair if someone waved a 7 figure salary in front of me I d be willing to act like a retarded monkey to bemuse a country full of troglodytes as well. But still, it s a sad commentary on the soul sucking beast that is Hollywood. We miss you, Ben. -b | ||
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| I ll mention a few changes around Bampfland. The BlogFriends seems to be in a constant state of flux, as I ve been adding and deleting as blogs fall inactive. Colin has been added, The Bug got the axe for inactivity and then returned when Robb got his own domain (in truth everyone should have their own domain... I mean it is the 21st century, people). I finally nixed the Klog... silly Kent. I also uploaded some new pics to the images folder. Including some pics from the Balt Museum of Art, some pics of us all being all schwanky from our murder mystery weekend (whowow) and a bunch of me fighting at the Enola Pumpkin Festival back in October (or was it Nov?). So peruse at yer leisure. -bampf | ||
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| Let s see, around last Thursday we had cleared our calendar for the weekend and had set plans to clean the Man-Hole and the basement. By the end of the weekend we had been all over the place with lots of different people and even had to unfortunately turn down offers to hang out with multiple groups of friends... when did a couple of uber-nerds like the two of us become so popular... it really defies reason. So anyway, Friday night I did clean out my Man-Hole... call it a colonic of sorts maybe. The space is nominally presentable now. Not bad. Saturday we helped one of Kristyn s co-workers move. I tried to explain the important dynamics about helping people move... asking for such help is a sacred pact... one shared amongst close friends, loved ones, people you ve known for ages. Kristyn has known this person less than two weeks and agrees to help move... major social faux pas if you ask me, but as a female I don t think she really understood what I was trying to say. Oh well. So I was brawny and lifted many things about. I m good at that. It took longer than expected... Kristyn had promised we d be done by noon at the latest... she was off by 3 or 4 hours. I also tried to explain that moving estimates are kinda akin to campaign promises, purely done for show with the complete understanding by all parties that they will never ever come to fruition. A bit later, Lord Humungous and Erica came by to visit. Months ago the Humungous one had made promises to introduce us to the wonders of Philly jew fish and meant to make good on his promise. So we had a good time hanging out with them and being generally nerdy/geeky/sad pseudo-intellectuals... fun fun fun. On Sunday Kristyn had to work in the morning and then we did the Famous 4th Street Diner for lunch where we devoured heaping mounds of jew fish and bagels... lox, kippered salmon, white fish... the whole jew fish gamut, with latkes and blintzes to boot. Good stuff. I d never had any of it before so it was a cool introduction. Much gratitude to Lord Humungous on that one. Sunday evening after some South Street meandering we watched the Eagles stink up the place... sad. Down right pathetic actually. Poor play, poor coaching, poor everything. McNabb will never be more than a great sandlot QB... especially when all of his receivers are liabilities. So anyway, good eventful weekend... never did get to the basement. All the last minute activities meant we weren t able to hang out with Kenn, Daphne, Angus and Trish (d'oh!) while they were in town (hope you guys enjoyed the freaks at the Mutter, we were there three weeks ago), and we also canceled on Dan and Karri Sunday night. We felt bad... being in such demand is a new experience for us. Sorry to all of you... next time... really. -bampf | ||
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| Weathermen are fucking liars. No two ways around it. They re all overpaid liars and I hate them all... save maybe Chuck Rhoades. Anyway, where s my damn snow? What a jip. -bampf | ||
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| I knew there was some big news that I wanted to write about but kept forgetting... I just remembered: No more crackhead neighbors! That s right, the continuous COPS episode that was our next door neighbors has been canceled. "You, sir, have nothing. You've been canceled." -Space Ghost to Adam West So yeah, some time last week it appeared that power had been cut off from the place (supposedly they had been squatting for months). I guess the township finally got sick of them and decided to get serious (eviction notices and condemning the place had no appreciable effect). It was pretty amusing seeing em trying to pack and move by flashlight. So now there s still lots of garbage and such strewn about and there s still a broken down car in their backyard but Ding Dong the witch is dead! So long dirtbags. Added bonus is our property value just took a quantum leap forward without me having to pick up a hammer! Nice. -bampf | ||
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| Good weekend all around for sure. Had a birthday party Friday night for Zephrin which was quite fun. Kristyn whipped up some awesome vittles as usual. Our late night frolicking and an evening commitment to hang out with Kristyn s parents meant we missed the Saturday SCA event... apparently it wasn t that spectacular so no biggie. The evening with the in-laws was pretty boring. Usually (and I m gonna sound lame saying this) hanging out with Kristyn s parents is a good time... since I am kind of a strange amalgamation of Kristyn s manly man father and artsy introvert mother (I m sure Freud would be abuzz with that one). However we were hanging out with some (older) friends of the family (my middle school english teacher to be exact)... who are frightfully dull and we had bad pizza and watched a bad movie (Life of David Gale) so that was kinda disappointing... even more so when you consider while we were watching a poopy movie maybe the most exciting playoff game of all time was taking place mere channels away! Anyway, Sunday s excitement made up for the Saturday lull. Huge fighter practice at our indoor soccer field site. There was much grand bashing. I even shield bashed Gregor into the boards at one point (kinda frowned on, and I really didn t mean to do it, but he did smash me in the face moments earlier in one of the most cowardly incidents I had ever witnessed on the list so I wasn t too sorry about the ordeal). All in all great fun, lots of melees, lots of new faces. Very cool. Once again (I think this is number four or five) I got a nasty welt on my ribs from Angus (I think he s still bitter about me breaking my sword over his (unarmoured) shoulder last year... mangy Scots git). After we had a customary Angies dinner with Josh and Alan and then drove home in time to see the Eagles somehow come back and defeat the Pack in an amazing game... mmmm... playoff football. The night wrapped up with an absolutely brilliant episode of Home Movies (still the most underrated Adult Swim toon) with John and John guest starring not only with song but as actual characters... so damn cool!! This week I m in training at work as I prepare for a minor departmental switch. So that s pretty cool... knowledge is power and all. Downside is I need to be at work before 9:00... egad... the humanity! Had to get up at 7:30 AM this morning! AM!! There s a 7 o clock AM!! WTF?! Hopefully I ll survive the week. The other upside is I m at work in time to get the company-paid breakfast from the deli downstairs... this morning I had a Brownie-Cheesecake muffin and a bottle of chocolate milk... now that is a true breakfast of champions! Damn straight. -bampf | ||
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| Oh the ignomy! My run at the Adventurer s Guild BloodBowl League title came to a screeching halt Wednesday. I was defeated soundly 3-1 by Tipping. On the very first roll of the game I failed a roll that I had a 97.2% chance of succeeding... and things went downhill from there. I rolled consistently poor and Tipping consistently well (failing only a single action all game... I took advantage of that one failing to knock the ball free only to have him make a 5+ roll for an unlikely recovery... yes it was that kind of day). In a game of that level (and with players as good as Tipp) there was just no recovering from that kinda luck. By the end of the game my defeat was unavoidable and I just started doing stupid moves to expediate the game... allowing Tipp s dwarves to brutalize my team. When all was said and done I had three players dead and two others that would miss next game (if there was a next game) due to injuries. Bad! So alas, Uthus Bathu, the League s Favorite Son and greatest AGBBL player of all time walked away from the game. Forever retiring... yet his legend will live on. I m basically retiring the team as well. It ll be a long time before I play em again. Not that it s a bad team or that I couldn t win with em, but there are several other teams I wanna field (and others I just enjoy playing more). So alas, no more real BloodBowl till the spring league (probably starting in April). Damn. Anyway, enough about BloodBowl. Birthday party tonight for Amanda and then we head to central PA for a weekend of heavy fighting!! Probably both Saturday and Sunday! Sweet! Bash bash bash bash!! -b | ||
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| For some reason I ve been completely unmotivated to blog lately. No explanation for it whatsoever. As I ve said in the past, I guess it s one of those cyclic things. Anyway, been exceedingly busy as of late. Surprise surprise. My sister and her boyfriend visited last weekend, so that was very cool. We hung out and did the micro-Philly tour on Saturday... The Mutter, South Street and Dave & Busters in rapid succession. Mike and I watched some playoff football. All in all an excellent weekend. I don t get to see April near enough. We ve been playing some Werewolf over the last couple of days. That s been fun. This may become my first prolonged White Wolf game... kinda late, especially since the universe is set to blow up in just a couple of days. Got to hang out with Dan and Karri as well after a long absence. Cool. Best of luck to Dan as he scrambles to finish his book. His sword of Damocles deadline is probably already starting to muss his hair. This evening is my rematch with Tipping in our BloodBowl Semi-Finals game. I m really excited to play (and maybe even a bit nervous). This game will be huge and exceptionally hard fought. Tipping has long been the best player at the Guild so the three of us still alive in the playoff hunt are eager to knock off the reigning king. We ll see how it shapes up. In all likelihood the game will be decided by the dice... although his team is slightly better developed than mine... that worries me a bit. Well, that s it for now, I ll try to be more dedicated to updates in the near future. -b | ||
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| Had an excellent New Year celebration. Started New Years Eve day with another resounding BloodBowl thumpin of Kent, and then grabbed Kristyn in Shippensburg and headed to Alanna and Barktooth s. After much wandering in the dark we found the place. The party was Pirate themed so I donned my damsel in distress garb (rehashed from Halloween) and thrilled all with my corsetted body. As midnight approached we headed to my parent s for some more food and the traditional firing of guns. To educate our non-Pennsyltucky friends, the original gun thing which is very prevalent in rural PA is that at midnight you fire a gun into the air twice... first shot to shoot the old year out, second to shoot the new year in (I don t know who came up with these rules, obviously a very sage-like redneck). I think I was about 5 when I first partook of this tradition. There have only been two years since then that I missed out on the shooting (once when I spent a New Years with a girlfriend and her sadly gunless parents and last year... I assumed random gunfire is frowned upon in suburban Philadelphia). I should mention that somewhere along the line, we morphed the two shot thing into shoot several times. Later, as my brother and I slowly accumulated assault weapons the several morphed into a whole clip or two (of 30 each). So we re now to the point that midnight means we burn through several hundred rounds in a few minutes. Good stuff. We also eschewed the shooting into the air for the safer shooting into the ground as more and more houses and developments now dot our once extremely rural neighborhood. So, there was much shooting and then we returned to the Luper party for much more celebration. Lord Corwin only allowed me to leave in the first place if I promised to return and drink heavily with him. So I did so (it s extremely rare that I drink to any kind of excess-- so Kristyn was strangley pleased to see me in some kind of drunken state for pretty much the first time ever). The festivities were paused long enough to hold a house meeting where Kristyn (er.. Ulla... or Ukla) was inducted into the Household! Yay!! All in all a pretty good New Years. -bampf |
