The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy (movie)

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Last night Kim and I went to go see the screen adaptation of HHGTTG(The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy). _[Insert generic statement about what a big fan of the series I am, blah blah blah]_ It certainly wasn't a bad movie, but I'd be hard pressed to say that it was particularly good. Yes, a lot of the elements of the book(s) were there. Yes, I understand that Hollywood movies are generally an hour and a half, so you can't put in everything. That said, I think they went a little nuts with the editing. There were so many places that had a punchline without the buildup, so many places where the dry British wit so evident in the book just wasn't there. However, there were a couple of nice nods along the way. One was using the original BBC radio show theme music when introducing the Guide. The other, of course, was showing Douglas Adams' face right at the very end. Oh, and the "Lightsaber reference":http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/lightsaber5.htm was pretty funny too.

Zooey Deschanel = best eyes ever Sam Rockwell = a good choice for Zaphod Alan Rickman = "pwn3d":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn3d the movie

Also, the whole evening was free, courtesy of the bad players at the Desert Diamond, where I made a brief stop while waiting for Kim to get off of work. Thank you, set of 4s vs agressive player with top pair!

Truly Racist

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This morning I saw a truck for the area pest control company "Truly Nolen":http://trulynolen.com. Their car ads are everywhere, from the "yellow bugs":http://www.trulynolen.com/AboutUs/index.asp?c=mouse_cars.html to yellow work trucks to "antiques":http://flickr.com/photos/tags/trulynolen/ with the logo on the side. It's fairly effective advertising, as I wouldn't be able to name another local pest control service. The work truck I saw this morning was different. It was a little too far away to get a cameraphone snap, but it was a white truck with a green stripe down the length of the side. In fact, it looked exactly like a "US Border Patrol":http://www.cbp.gov/ vehicle.

border patrol vehicles

Towards the back, instead of saying "Border Patrol":http://www.palominas.com/images/ds_photos4/bp_otj1.jpg in the stripe it said "Pest Prevention". Now, I don't want to be part of the alarmist left-wing blogger media, but I found that fairly offensive. Just being here for the short time that I have, I'm pretty aware of the uneasy _menage a trois_ between Arizona residents, illegal immigrants slipping over the border to work and live, and the Border Patrol agents. Witness the recent flap over the "Minutemen Project":http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=minutemen+arizona&btnG=Search+News, which was quite a large story in this part of the country. So it's hard for me to think of this particular paint scheme as anything but a xenophobic view of Mexican immigrants as pests or lower creatures. Not cool.

Quote of the day

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"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." -- "Ellen DeGeneres":http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Ellen_DeGeneres

All this hoop-jumping to get the mortgage squared away is getting to be annoying at this point. I'll just be happy when it's over. Apparently my cable modem service is already turned on(!), so I'll be starting same day we get the keys, next Friday. After that it's just going to be lots of moving of boxes at lunch and in the evening, and then when Kim's lease is up at the end of the month we'll rent a truck and do all the furniture moving in one day and get that done. Then it's going to be renovation time! Woo!

Coachella capsule review

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Highlights: * Bauhaus * New Order * Coldplay * The homefries at a Palm Springs breakfast place * Winning $50 very quickly at a super-loose California "cardroom":http://www.hotwatercasino.com/ Saturday

Lowlights:

* The fucker from "craigslist":http://phoenix.craigslist.com/ who never got back in touch about camping tickets * Selling one too many extra Sunday tickets on Saturday, and having to buy another one Sunday * Forgetting my ticket at the condo Saturday and having to go back for it * Chemical Brothers * Losing $150 not as quickly at a super-loose California "cardroom":http://www.hotwatercasino.com/ Sunday * The 5 hour drive back last night, and getting in at 3 a.m. * The realization that I am now officially old and un-hip

New neighbors

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I went over to the house Monday morning to get measurements for all the rooms that we're going to be reflooring to get an idea of how many square feet of material we're going to need. While I was there with the realtor, she told me an interesting story. Apparently the selling agent had called her all in a snit because someone "matching my description" was at the house, and screwed up something with the pool, yadda, yadda. She was being coarse and rude, threatening to call the cops if I showed up at the house again, and my agent basically told her that I wouldn't have shown up at the house without an agent there. A little backstory: when I went to the general inspection, the inspector (who used to be in the pool business) was walking me through how to keep the pool clean, and noticed on the "filter timer":http://www.flickr.com/photos/feralboy/9974282/in/set-246911/ that it was set to only run for about 2 hours a day, which is part of why it looked "like it did":http://www.flickr.com/photos/feralboy/9974432/in/set-246911/. There were two small screws on the timer's clock face.. basically you just move the screws around to whatever time you want the filter to kick on or off. Because he knew that the sellers' pool service was coming the next day, the inspector left the one screw off so it would just run until the guy got there. I guess this turned into me sabotaging the pool.

And how did the selling agent know that it was me? Why, because one of my darling new neighbors took pictures of me, my car and "my license plate":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/001289/. Now, I'm all for neighbors looking out for each other, but if a house has a fucking "For Sale":http://www.flickr.com/photos/feralboy/10888666/ sign out in front of it, my guess is that there are going to be strange people looking at it. So, we have some busybody crusty old bags who like being in other people's business. I can't wait to get all up in their little passive-aggressive faces.

The thing is, the selling agent should know better. We're enabling her to make a good chunk of money by buying the house, so I don't know why she's being so difficult with us (not having the locks fixed on the house among other problems) and not telling the busybody neighbor to just mind their own business when they called. Kim's new co-worker (who happens to actually live 2 doors down from our new place and pretty much fingered the nosy neighbors) theorized that perhaps the selling agent brought in a new, higher offer and was hoping to pick up all 6% for herself. Whatever. I'm planning on calling her manager and starting the reaming shitstorm. Plus, she'll be at the closing, so I get to call her an unprofessional cunt to her face.

In happier news, the mortgage company's appraisal of the house came in at about $10k higher than the selling price. Built-in equity!

Gah!

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I'm working away, and Sydney hops up on the desk, pacing back and forth looking for attention like he likes to do; entwining himself through my arms while I try and get all my stored procedures to fucking cooperate. Then he starts rubbing the side of his face on everything around, which is all fine and good until he gets to my full bottle of diet dr. pepper. All over the mouse and my virgin mary mousepad. All over the desk and on my collection of casino chips. I was so pissed I threw him halfway across the room, nearly breaking my headphones and glasses in the process. Everything's rinsed off and drying, but my mouse left-click button seems to be dead. I ran it under a bunch of hot water and hung it outside to dry, and am using my other mouse as a backup in the meantime. Frickin' cats.

*Update:* Ok, just to clarify I didn't hurt him or throw him INTO anything... I just yanked on my headphones while tossing him, which pulled off my glasses too. He landed about 4 feet away, on his feet. A half hour later he was in my lap cuddling, and my mouse dried off and worked fine, so we're all cool.

Coachella

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This weekend I'm going to be heading off, along with Kim and two friends, to the "Coachella Valley Music Festival":http://www.coachella.com/ thingy dealie. It's sort of Lollapalooza on steroids, or Burning Man but less dusty, or even Bumbershoot without all the rain. I'm currently "bidding on":http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6526713282 camping tickets for all of us, which will probably be a lot better than trying to negotiate the clusterfuck in and out both days. Granted, it's still going to be a clusterfuck with "all those bands":http://www.coachella.com/artists/, but hopefully a slightly more managable one. Plus, if we camp we actually get to "bring in food and water":http://www.coachella.com/camping/?onsite, instead of paying $8 for a bottle of water or whatever it was that caused the Woodstock riot a few years back. It's a lot of bands, and there's quite a few that I would like to see, but it sounds like it's going to be a really, REALLY big crowd, which always makes me a little nervous. I wish there was going to be WiFi there, but there ain't... so all my "pictures":http://flickr.com/photos/tags/coachella will have to wait until I get home to get uploaded.

*Update:* Well, I didn't win the auction for the tickets, but only because some fucking asshole bid me out of them, thinking they were tickets to the _event_! Um, $100 to get 4 tickets that cost $175 each? "If it seems to good to be true..." Fucker. Now the original seller is trying to sell them to me for a Buy It Now of $100. No way, not when individual camping passes are going for less than $20 each.

Wow

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Remind me again why I'm grinding it out at $3/6 limit while my sister is "tripling up at $1-2 no limit":http://www.livejournal.com/users/fuzzyfruit/408811.html? *update:* Ok, maybe it's not so bad. A few hours work, and I made like $400. It was a crazy action table, so I just picked my spots and got lucky a few times too, like when I flopped a straight flush with Q-10s. Too bad I didn't get much action on _that_ hand.

Cheap?

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My work machine has been pretty slow as of late, and after running a spyware scan I concluded that it's because I'm a little low on memory (only 1GB). So, just for an experiment I cannibalized my home machine and threw some more memory in the work one. Now, with 1.5GB it seems to run much faster, so I went online and found another 1GB (2 512MB modules) for $80, shipped. It's a wonderous age in which we live.