John’s Crawlspace

The news article that I just read is definitely one of the more bizzare ones I’ve seen in a while.

A Bakersfield father has been accused of biting out one of his 4-year-old child’s eyes. He then mutilating the other eye, leaving his son blind. The child latet old police, “My daddy ate my eyes.” Okay, so that’s pretty weird.

After attacking his child, he wheeled out of his apartment in a wheelchair, and made his way into a the backyard of a nearby apartment, where he proceeded to attack his own legs with an axe. Even weirder, right?

So what’s the inspiration for all of this? PCP, of course.

He’s being charged with “mayhem, torture, child cruelty and inflicting an injury to a child.” What kind of charge is mayhem?

Anyway, I just wanted to share that wonderully uplifting story with you all, as it surely brought some cheer to my morning.

Can someone explain to me what’s going on here? Take a few minutes and read some of these threads. I’m not sure I can believe that this is real. It seems like an elaborate joke by 4chan or something. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve accepted Obama as my personal savior and all, but these people are beyond fanatical. I’ve already seen a lot of people acting like he’s the Messiah, but this just takes it one step further. Can this possibly be real?

While I’m asking questions to no one in particular, what’s going on with Twitter? I signed up in early 2007 after noticing some buzz about the site. Signs indicated that it had potential to be the next big thing, but after messing with it (albeit briefly) I just couldn’t get into it. I suppose I understand the appeal, but it didn’t do anything for me. Anyway, over the last month or so, it seems like Twitter has absolutely blown up. I only know a few people personally that use it, but it’s all over the media. Every TV show seems to have one. Businesses are embracing it (I convinced my company we needed one for reputation management/customer interaction and created one) and I feel like I see it/hear about it everywhere I go. Can anyone pinpoint what triggered this? I don’t think the site has changed much since I originally signed up, so why did it take so long for people to embrace it? For the record, I still think it’s as lame as I did on day one. That being said, you can follow me here: w00t. What’s does the word ‘hypocrite’ mean? As you can see, I’m trying to embrace it.

Finally, a trailer for Where The Wild Things Are. That looks awesome. I loved this book as a kid, so I can’t wait to check it out.

I checked out Friendly Fires (and White Lies) at the First Unitarian last night… Pretty good show. I love going to that place, it’s pretty small and intimate, and you can bring beer in with you. It’s awesome to catch bands there before they get too big to play in venues of that size. Friendly Fires is what you could call a guilty pleasure for me. They’re very poppy, but the songs are catchy as hell. I can’t help but like them.

So Bonnaroo just made a bunch of additions to their lineup… Notably Dillinger Escape Plan, MURS, Passion Pit, High on Fire, Shadows Fall, and Public Enemy. They also added a bunch of comedians, though the only one’s I care about are Michael Ian Black & Michael Showalter. I can’t believe that High on Fire and DEP were added, I think that’s awesome. It’s definitely cool that they’re broadening their horizons. I really hope that Rothbury follows suite and adds some decent metal (let’s forget that Shadows Fall is on there for now) because I already got my ticket.

Well let’s see… Not much else worth mentioning has happened recently. My phone got run over by a car over the weekend… Yep. I did manage to keep that phone for almost an entire year though, so that’s got to be some kind of record for me. I pay insurance on my phone every month for this exact reason. Anyway, I went to the Verizon store on Sunday and they still wanted $50 for a replacement phone, and they’re gonna give me the exact same crappy model (the VX8350). So I decided to protest this by not getting a new phone. But then I realized that I’m still paying for service, but I have no phone to use it on, so Verizon wins. I broke down and ordered a new phone today… Lame.

Here’s a headline for you: Shippensburg couple finds likeness of Christ in potato chip. When I graduated, I was hesitant to leave Shippensburg, but boy am I glad to be out of there. Oh, Shippensburg.

Saw Gene Ween band last night at World Cafe Live, awesome. Soaring into my second consecutive weekend of sobriety. I wouldn’t recommend it.

What do you listen to when you’re at the gym? I thought that this article was pretty funny, and spot-on in some ways too, as metal is great gym music. Some good recommendations in there. That site (Metal Inquisition) has some pretty funny articles. Holy crap.

New Mastodon track (“Divinations”) leaked… No more needs to be said, check it out here.

More music? Queens of the Stone Age and Friends played a memorial show for Natash Shneider last August. Tenacious D, Desert Sessions, and more, worth checking out in my opinion. Not the best quality, but it’s definitely listenable… And you can grab it here. The password to the .rar file is ‘mundoeleven’. I absolutely love Queens of the Stone Age, and though I don’t listen to Tenacioud D as much as I used to, I know all the songs by heart, so this is pretty damn cool.

Back in December I decided I was gonna take a month off from drinking. I don’t think I have a problem or anything like that, but I’ve been drinking pretty consistently since I first started back in my teens. I know for a fact that I’ve never gone more than a week or so without drinking. I know that I can do it, but I decided I’d actually give it a shot. January wasn’t going to work because I already had some plans, so I decided that February would be the month. Feel free to point out to me that February is the shortest month of the year – That actually didn’t dawn on me when I was making the decision, but it works out rather nicely. So this is my last weekend of drinking for 28 days. A sober Superbowl Sunday? I can deal with that. I’m already going to be missing out on a bunch of stuff in Feb, but that is always going to be the case. No one month will ever be a convenient one for sobriety. I got a digital SLR for Christmas that I haven’t really had a chance to play with yet, so hopefully my newfound sobriety will allow some time for that.

A long-time friend of mine’s father passed away this week. I can’t even fathom what dealing with that at this age must be like. The funeral is on Saturday, so I’ll be making the drive for that. I don’t really know what kind of support you can offer someone as a friend other than just being there. What else can you do? My grandfather passed away last week as well. Of course it’s sad, and definitely not an easy thing to deal with, but he had been in and out of the hospital for years now, so we knew it was coming. So last week was my first time as a pallbearer. I actually took off of work on my birthday in December to drive up and see him, and I’m so glad that I did. I had a feeling that he wouldn’t be around much longer, so it was nice to spend some time with him, and I actually talked to him a whole lot more than I ever did when I was younger. I realize that this paragraph is all over the place, I’m just sort of typing as it comes to my head. There is a lot more to be said about both things that I just mentioned, but this probably isn’t an appropriate outlet.

I’m going to see Sound Tribe Sector 9 in West Chester tonight. They’re playing at a new venue that Bam Margera opened sometime last year. I haven’t been there yet, but it should be a good time. That’s all for now.

Check out this chart, it maps the wires that the interwebs travel through from one country to the next. Check out Africa… No wonder the internet was so painfully slow in Ghana! It reminded me of the days of AOL 2.5 and dialing up using a 14.4 modem.

“Hack your brain” – Want to hallucinate without taking drugs? Read up on some rather interesting methods of “opening the doors of perception” without ingesting mind-altering substances.

Wouldn’t it suck to get shot in the arm? It definitely would, especially if you were minding your own business. Say you were in a movie theatre… On Christmas Day. Damn. A little late on reporting that one, I know, I forgot about it until now.

Check out the second paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for “Graham Cracker”. How is it possible that I never knew this until now? Usually I indulge in sinful activities while eating graham crackers, and sometimes I just smash them into my face.

Since I’m “catching up” anyway… I spent this past New Years in Wildwood, NJ with a small group of friends. It was different, since not many people were around, but I had a good time. I think there were 8 of us there. Last year I was in a crowded bar/club in Montreal. I hope you all enjoyed your New Years in the US, because according to this dude, we only have about 2 of them left.

An Ohio teenager killed his Mom when she took away his copy of Halo 3. I’m really not sure what to say about this story – There are a few obvious video game jokes that could be made here, but they’d be in extremely poor taste, and it’s a pretty sad story to begin with.

I ran my first 10k this past Sunday. “Shiver By The River” in Reading, PA. It was freezing cold out, and I was a little underdressed, but I still enjoyed it… Until the last mile or so, when I started getting terrible stomach pains. I don’t know if it was because of something I ate the night before or what, but I thought I was going to make a mess of my pants. I started walking when I had about half of a mile left. Some guy ran past me when I slowed down and said something along the lines of “come on man, only half a mile left, you can do it” – As lame as it may sound, he inspired me to push through the doo-doo brown pains and finish up the race at a decent pace. As soon as I started running again (about five seconds after I stopped) I took off and flew past this guy, and about 10 other people. I finished in 100th place (out of 350+ people) with a total time of 52:11. I can definitely do a faster 10k than this, but considering the conditions I think I did pretty well… Regardless of the fact that I got smoked by a bunch of 60 year old dudes (no homo).

Check out this basejumping video. That looks absolutely incredible. Where do I sign up?