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Sposed ta see the Phils today... friggin raining. Hope it subsides soon.
I liked last year better when we were lamenting the oppressive drought conditions. All this rain sucks.
-b |
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New feature here at bampfblog... the ever popular Lists... presented in easy to navigate table format on your left.
As an offshoot there s now a mechanism to link to a single entry (and its accompanying comments) using the entry.asp page (both grm and myself have made alusions to previous posts... able only to give a date forcing a reader to search through the archives... so that should remedy that).
My work here is done.
-b |
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I saw the following headline on CNN today:
Wired van to catch spitters in SARS fight
The headline really dumbfounded me. I understood all the terms individually in that sentence, but in no way could my mind connect them into any remotely meaningful way.
After reading the article it made much more sense... something about China and a police crackdown on people spitting, which promotes SARSs communicability. Whatever. I m just glad my brain was able to recover from the initial bewilderment caused by that headline.
For those who may care, today is shaping up considerably better than yesterday. Got my tire patched this morning at the garage located just a few doors down for $10. I m wearing shorts at work (a lifelong dream realized, albeit only momentarily). My sinus headache is subsiding. It s Friday. Plans have been solidified to go see the Phils tommorrow... things are generally looking up.
There was one other unrelated item I wanted to bring up... the topic is those Police Chief stickers. You know the ones I m talking about? The stickers you get for donating money to local cops. Chad had always sported them and extoled their ability to sway cop opinion. I never paid them much mind as you never saw them in central PA. Well, a couple months back I was solicited to donote and jumped at the chance (I m oft ticketed so I wasn t gonna pass on a potential Get Out of Jail Free card). So my car now proudly sports a Delaware County Police Chiefs sticker.
Getting to the point... last week I got pulled over. I was on my way to work and pretty blatantly ran a red light (I entered the intersection probably a full second after the yellow). I made a left at the intersection... if I had made a right I would passed right by the cop who quickly pulled me over. D'oh. Now here s the rub... he let me go. I have never gotten off with a warning from a PA cop (I m a perfect 0 for 2 with NJ cops where I assume you need to be an atrociously bad driver to arouse their ire) ... anyway I ve been ticketed a lot... at least 7 or 8 times (I ve honestly lost track) and he let me go. To make matters worse, my insurance card was 5 days expired (the new card was resting safely on my desk at home) and my driver s license had a different address than my insurance and registration (still showing my Carlisle address)... despite all of this he still let me go. Nice!
I m forced to conclude that the stickers work! So if given the opportunity, donate to the police and get your own Sticker of Free Passage... especially if you are wont to disregard traffic regulations on a daily basis.
That s my advice as I speed off into the sunset.
-b |
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Talk about a shitty day. Nothing worked at work today. Every problem I fixed revealed three more. My head still ached from this illness. When I went to my car after work my right rear tire was completely flat. The tiny little jack thing sucked... at one point it slipped off the axle and I had to go find a rock to prop up the car so I could free the pinned jack. It sucked. Tire is brand new too. Arg.
I m holding out for a cheery Friday... it s shorts and free beer Friday tommorrow at work, and they re including girly drinks along with the free beer so that s something to look forward to indeed.
-bampf |
| 5/28/2003 7:31:24 PM Silence is not even a precious metal | Comments (4) |
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Quiet Blog lately. Sorry. Busy Memorial weekend, host servers were REAL screwy on Tuesday and I ve been under the weather the last couple of days (Kristyn too... she was kind enough to share her illness... although maybe I should have had enough foresight to stop kissing her once she started looking so peaked).
See I have an excuse for everything. Hopefully more Blog activity in the coming days...
Til then,
-bampf |
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Way things are shaping up this is quickly turning into a summer of madness. Got all kinds of crazy crap coming up... parties, SCA events, Guild Con, Philly events, my wedding, a Vegas wedding, honeymoon... the list goes on and on.
Rare free weekends are instantly crammed full with the stuff that had to be put off due to other weekend festivities. All I know is that by summer s end I will NEED that honeymoon just to wind down.
I guess this all isn t necessarily a bad thing. Would probably be a much worse thing to have NOTHING going on. I don t wanna sound like a whiny bitch.
-bampf the busy |
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Finally saw The Matrix last night. It was quite excellent. I m still trying to wrap my mind around all the ramifications of the various plot twists and meta-physics. It went a bit heavy on the Free Will vs Determinism thing, but I think it worked. I ll definitely have to see it a time or two more to really appreciate the movie in its entirity.
The action sequences were (as expected) incredible. I didn t like that a lot of the fighting was exclusively digital, rather than the live action digitally enhanced mode of the first film. I also thought the Merovingian was unnecessary and actually just rather silly... although he was worth it as a catalyst for the staircase fight scene and the albino non-corporeal twins.
The Oracle was awesome again! I would really like to find out what her role was originally, as I know the actress died before they filmed all of her scenes... so you know some good stuff never got filmed.
Another minor complaint was the music... I thought the music was much better in the first film. There seemed to be a lot more of orchestra-led typcial big budget movie music instead of the heart pounding techno that I thought really brought the first one alive. Although the Crouching Tiger-esque eastern drums was very cool in the one fight scene.
I didn t expect as big of cliff-hanger as we were left with. figured there would be more of a resolution-- damn it s gonna be a long 6 months to wait for Revolution.
For those who don t sit thru the movie s credits (something I always do, often to Kristyn s dismay... a habit I picked up off of Chad), stick around, as there s a Revolution preview at the end of the reel.
So that s my review. Overall- Excellent. I need to see it a couple more times, and I m more than willing to overlook my couple of minor gripes.
-bampf |
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I was perusing my site statistics (something I don t do very often) and came across some interesting phenomena. As many of you know, the Guild s website is hosted here at bampf.com. Not surprisingly, about 2/3 of my hits are from it. An astounding 91% of all hits are via Internet Explorer... the store site, incidentally, looks horrendous in Netscape... I m not sure if that contributes to that number, or if that number just re-inforces that I shouldn t bother to look into the problems.
Anyway, the most interesting results were search engine hits. The key words and phrases that some one typed into a search engine to find bampf.com are really amusing.
Some interesting words:
bampf (the most frequent word, thankfully)
ass (God bless the internet and its single minded porn obsession)
SeaLab
s (yeah, just the letter 's')
scenery (sic)
movies
mordheim
song
warhammer
etymology
guild
mongo
gothic
Conan
cerebral
steeler
auschwietz
nightcrawler
sumarai
lamentation
sloth
krusty
mojo
postmodernism
lebowski
genesis
tuchux
hines
geek
jillette
streetfighter
tec-9
horrocious (yes KN s ficticious word scored a hit)
thulsa
gnostic
Hmmm... makes for a pretty good synopsis of the site at large don t it?
Here are some of the key phrases:
best ass competition (this was the most frequently used phrase... only 5 hits, but still, it really tells you something about the nature of the internet)
woot etymology (amazingly this yielded 3 hits... people are strange)
movies quotes >conan > lamentation (nice!)
mickey o neal dialog
bampf nightcrawler
simpsons krusty robert frost we discussed (wtf?)
pennsic battle shots
ed grimley quotes
wh40k event
half wits holiday bruce campbell
pearl jam gnostic
slingblade upbringing (this one worries me)
sisters boobs (before you start to wonder this was a topic of discussion on the Klog... about KN s sister, not mine)
thulsa of doom pictures
games workshop grand tournament baltimore
origins of w00t (people are really obsessed with woot, apparently)
sam elliot roadhouse pictures
traditional archery king of prussia (I m still trying to figure out what this person was trying to unearth)
steelers hines ward married? (nice, and for the record I think Hines is single)
movie/with mongo only pawn in the game of life
infidel defilers
john woo postmodernism (again, where s the connection?)
jesus big lebowski (No one fucks with the Jesus)
anal cavity
bampf vacation (apparently some one wanted to take a holiday in the Danger Room or something)
eminem and a new hegemony (I can t imagine anyone remotely interested in Eminem even knowing what hegemony means)
family guy candle blaster (what?)
fascination with boobs
etymology woot|w00t (again!)
sapho blog ( ...it is by will alone...)
fat guys lard ass
2003 emails of german baby wears (I m not even gonna try to decipher this one)
greek god pan one half goat
antisemtism pictures (sic)
bad ass quotes
history of woot (and one last time)
Pretty amazing list. There were a lot more, some amusing, many not. It s very interesting to see various words and terms from different posts linked together. I think it s pretty cool. Maybe I should do this with every month s site stats.
-bampf |
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Thought I d just mention to those that might care, that Blogfriend, Klog, has returned after an extended hiatus... so swing by and mock his poor typing skills or something...
I command it.
-b |
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Johnny Mneumonic was on TV this past weekend and a watched a bit of it. I remembering being excited about its release oh so many years ago. The concept was great... very ShadowRun-esque, it had Dolph Lundgren as a crazed prophet, Henry Rollins as an underground scientist/dissident. The movie really should have been good. It wasn t. As a matter of fact it was bloody awful. Unfortunately it had slipped from my memory otherwise it would have easily made my All-Time Worst Movies List (see Jan 2003).
There had been a number of Cyber-Punk movies at the time (Hackers, Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity etc) and much to gamers and geeks (and especially gamer-geeks) delight it seemed that Cyber-Punk was about to become its own ligitimate genre. Then Johnny Mneumonic came out and single handedly killed the movement.
I was recanting this sad death to Kristyn when she astutely pointed out that The Matrix was Cyber-Punk to a T. I hadn t though about it, but of course it is. So, based on the film s success and the amazing fanfare surrounding the sequels, you d think the genre would be rebirthed. What s the deal?
Just one more reason to hate Hollywood...
-b |
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With the wedding looming, I have been charged with booking the honeymoon. This, really, is the one wedding related task that I have been fully entrusted with. We weighed a lot of options but were really interested in a relaxing Caribbean cruise. This slowly gave way to the idea of a Caribbean resort... which is pretty much the same as the cruise minus the boat bit.
Right now we re looking pretty seriously at Jamaica. The only complaints we here about the island is how poor and dirty it is. However, we re gonna be staying at a luxury resort... I don t mind that we ll be living in lavish quarters while the rest of the country toils in squalor... if anything it s a bonus since our ammenities will only seem nicer in comparison. If we re overcome with guilt (however unlikely), we just need remind oursleves that by visiting the island, we re contributing to the needy Jamaican economy.
There are several Jamaican resorts that boast (or even feature) 'au natural' nude beaches. For some reason I have a longing to hit a nude beach. It s not that I m a nudist at heart or endorse the nudist mindset (my proclivity for sharing the goodness that is my ass not withstanding) it s just one of those things that I think everyone should do at least once before they shuffle off the mortal coil (that s another potential list, things you should do before you die).
Plus the nude beach opens up the possibility of being "that guy"... the leering, pervert sporting the satyr-esque permanent erection. I m really enamored by the "that guy" concept, as it really deconstructs the whole 'natural freedom' ideology. A stark reminder that the idea of a nudist utopia is extremely deluded and really just a tenuous facade over our base desires.
After much deliberation I m thinking the best "that guy" would just randomly and overtly follow around hot women (or even men, too, hell why not?), ogling them, drooling, and masturbating.
Yeah, that s the good stuff.
Aspiring "that guy"
-bampf
PS comment boards have been quite lately... let s see if this post remedies that. |
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Kristyn and I had a busy day Saturday. It was an all day shopping spree as we hit both South Street and King of Prussia in one fell (and prolonged) swoop. Eight hours of shopping in all. Ow. The highlight though was we tried out a new restaurant off of South Street. It was awesome, a very trendy little spot called The Latest Dish. Food was absolutely fantastic, and reasonably priced considering the gourmet quality. Kristyn and I both had a seared tuna dish with banana chutney and a coconut cream sauce. It was divine! We both agreed it was probably the best thing we d ever eaten. I really can t say enough about it.
We were both exceedingly happy to be enjoying not only the phenonemal food but the setting and center city ambience. It really served to whet our appetite for exploring the city. We wandered off onto numerous side streets, discovering new stores and restaurants along the way.
We re slowly cleansing ourselves of our rural redneck vestiges. Huzzah. However, I m not sure what happens when we return home in the fall to butcher pigs... there may be a complete reversion for both of us.
-bampf |
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Finally got to see X2 last night... bampfing incredible!! Absolutely loved it. The bampfing er...Nightcrawler really stole the show. He was amazingly well done. It was also nice to see some hardy glimpses of Wolverine s feral tendencies, very true to the comic... he was always the only X-Man who would kill without pause or remorse.
The cameo appearances were cool. Colossus was awesome, although I agree with bp that his Russian accent was a glaring omission. The breif appearance by Dr. Hank McCoy (aka Beast) was a nice subtle reference for us Marvel fanboys. Let s also hope that we see more of Kitty Pride in future films.
I m already excited about X3. This is very clearly a franchise with no signs of slowing down. I m anxious to see how they handle the Phoenix thing. My Marvel geekdom was in overdrive, as soon as they showed the first glimpses of flames in Jean Grey s eyes about half way into the movie I knew where they were heading. Kristyn was begging me for more info on who/what Phoenix is... she ll just have to wait and see.
The success of these films along with Spiderman and Daredevil s returns really begs the question, when are we gonna start seeing crossovers? We have the Hulk coming. Punisher is in development. There have been Fantastic Four and a new and imporved Captain America rumors around. There s a lot of opportunity to start inserting cameos into the different films. How sweet would that be?
Well, anyway, exciting times ahead for geeks. It s time to start gearing up for the Matrix... oh yeah. Can t wait.
-bampf
PS I didn t spot Stan Lee, he always makes a Hitchcock-esque appearance in all the Marvel films... did anyone else see him? |
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For the first time in well over a month Kristyn and I have no wedding obligations to see to this weekend. No dress fittings, no invitations to assemble/label/address/fold, no meetings with reverends, no practice hair appointments (yes, I said practice hair appointments), no nuttin. So finally we can stay at home, rest, and relax. Finally.
I m looking forward to it. Maybe best of all, no driving to and fro Shippensburg. That trip was starting to really wear on me. I mean staying with Kristyn s parents is really enjoyable but it s such a long trip. Then if I wanna stop by the Guild on Saturday... that s another almost 2 hours of driving. After the horrible commutes I ve been subjected to lately that s the last thing I need.
Did I mention Philly traffic sucks? Yeah, it does. By far the worst part of living near Philly... crime, urban sprawl, noice, pollution, higher cost of living... all collectively pale in comparison to the traffic.
I m gonna stop now before I go into a berzerker rage...
-b
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| 5/6/2003 10:34:36 AM What the hell is Live Wire? | Comments (7) |
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So I m warming up my lunch and see in our soda fridge we have Mt. Dew Live Wire. What the hell is that? A new Mt Dew and I didn t know about it? I feel so ashamed. It s an orange flavored Mt Dew. Intriguing. I grabbed a Code Red for now to allow the Live Wires to get cold (don t want to sully the momentous first tasting). So now I have something to look forward to this afternoon... a new Mt Dew.
It s important to appreciate the little things in life.
-b |
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Since Monday we ve been entertaining Aussies. One of Kristyn s best friends from her exchange student days in Japan (another exchange student from Oz) happened to be visiting the states with her boyfriend and hung out with us for a few days. Nice people. It was cool to hang out with em (for their nifty Aussie accents if nothing else). We introduced them to the wonders of Hut Hoagies, South Street, The Onion, and NFL 2k3 for the PS2 while they were here.
It was also cool just to entertain in general and make use of the spare bedroom, normally used exclusively as a place of respite for the cats. They left today for New York and tomorrow embark on the 32 hour journey home... egad.
They had been staying with family in Washington (state) and in their brief time here had managed to see a sizable portion of both the West and Easts coasts. I felt almost embarassed that they had traversed about as much of the country in six months as I have in 28 years. Oh well. I felt somewhat vindicated when I learned that where they re from they only get about four television stations... ensuring that I ve managed to watch a lot more quality television in my days than they ever will, and as we all know that is the true measure of human experience...
Yeah.
-bampf |