The Center of the Anomaly

Meet The Twins September 26, 2010

Serious Yorling Business

I meant to post about this ages ago, but for some reason I never got around to it until now.  Just before I went on vacation in August I bought these:

These are nigh top of the line Kenmore Elite clothes washer & dryer.  Yes, they are VERY expensive.  My old dryer decided that it didn’t want to dry anymore and I had issues with my washer; lately it had started putting random rust-like stains on my clothes.  Pfeh.  I didn’t even bother to get them looked at, I wanted New Stuff.  So after a couple days of going to all the usual places and pricing things out I just decided to go with Sears and a pair of top-end things.

My previous washer was one of those high-efficiency front loader deals. Both of these machines qualify as high-efficiency too. The washer detects how much water is needed for the load and automatically selects the best level.  It doesn’t have a big central agitator, so it’s more gentle on clothes and had a HUGE capacity. The dryer knows when its load is dry and automatically shuts off, but will still tumble the clothes periodically to keep them from wrinkling. On top of that it has steam functions for wrinkle removing, refreshing, and sanitizing. Neat!

Here Are My Peeves September 17, 2010

Yes, You May Pet Them

L.C. Aggie Sith put up a post about her pet peeves today. I’ve had this one sitting around for a while waiting for me to finish it, so I guess today is a good day to do it.

Ok, here are some things that annoy me, or that I’ve become tired of because of pop-cultural overuse to the point where they’ve become tedious clichés and/or that I Just Don’t Get.  I’ve narrowed it down to the typical Lettermanitarian Top Ten:

1.   Blade Runner is a really good movie.
No, it’s not. It’s long (and getting longer), slow (oh so slow), uninteresting box-office bomb of a film filled with uninspired actors and insipid performances. But, it has a dedicated core of fans who insist quite insistently that this is one of the greatest masterpieces of cinema. Somewhere there’s an alternate universe where Ridley Scott didn’t make the fatal mistake of feeding mega-doses of Valium to his cast before filming and perhaps that version of Bladerunner does not suck. Alas, this is not that universe and there is no editing room wizardry that Scott can pull off to make an unsuckable version in this space/time continuum. There are no less than SEVEN versions of this movie that have been released over the years since it came out in ’82. Dude. Let. It. Go.  Oh, and don’t get me started on the title. Blade? Runner?  He’s a cop, who kills (sorry, retires) artificial people.  I guess that doesn’t sound so cool though. In unrelated news I’m no longer a data analyst.  I’m a Scimitar Snorkeler.

2.   The Big Lebowski is a really good movie.
It’s about a lazy pothead and his beloved rug. Oh, and he likes bowling. Mostly though it’s just a stupid, pointless movie that a lot of people like to quote from for some reason. “The Dude abides” is the usual one. Plot-wise it has all the depth of a Three’s Company episode stretched over two hours. If you’ve somehow avoided the suckfest that is TBL but wondered what the big deal was it can be summed up in three words: rug, bowling, abiding. Bam! You now know everything there is to know about The Big Lebowski.

3. Anchorman is a really funny movie
Yeah, I know – this is one of the Ewok In Chief’s favorite movies, and I’ve tried to watch it twice. I can last about 30 minutes before I have to turn it off. I find absolutely nothing funny about this film. There is absolutely nothing funny about Will Farrell.

4.  Bacon is ZOMFG THE MOST AWESOMEST THING EVARRRR!
The complete, beyond-over-the-top love that people profess over this simple breakfast fare all over the interwebs has baffled me for years. Yeah, I understand that it’s tasty and it has that poke-in-the-health-nazi-eye appeal, but come on folks, really? The bacon flavored this, and the bacon flavored that that get endlessly linked and all the things made out of bacon. And of course, all the comments of people who want to have sexual intercourse with said baconized product. I dunno, it’s just too much. Don’t get me wrong, I like bacon, but it’s all too, too much. And to be honest, when I’m at a restaurant for breakfast I usually order sausage or ham as my breakfast pork of preference. Isn’t it time to fetishize something else now? How about kiwi fruit for a change?  ZOMFG THIS IS LIKE THE MOST HEALTHIEST FRUIT EVARRRRR! Yes? No?

5. Vampires in books, movies, TV shows.
OK. Can we be DONE with the vampire shit now? I am so sick and tired of vampires. Let’s move on to something, ANYTHING else. There has to be other monsters we can explore: Chupacabras or Mansquitos perhaps.

6. Zombies in anything
This is one of those I Do Not Get things. Can somebody please explain the fascination with this stuff?

7. Homophones:  Their, There, They’re / Too & To
Yeah I know, English is kind of a messed up language but still I don’t get the common confusion I see with these particular words. Surely if you have even just a basic literacy you MUST be aware of these words. And with that awareness comes along another awareness that there are real distinctions between them yes? When I was a kid learning how to read and write I became aware of these sneaky little landmines and I made damn certain I knew how to use them properly.

8. The whole “I hate clowns” thing.
In the Age Before Internets people who hated/feared clowns were pitied and rightfully regarded as odd. Now, anytime an image of a clown or even just a casual mention of the word in a forum invariably draws the “I hate clowns” people out of the woodwork and gets a chorus of “Oh, yeah I hate them too” people. No. This is wrong. Clowns are not scary or evil. Well, yes there was that Gacy dude, but come on! That was a long time ago. Get over it already!

9. Excessive amounts of Girl Power!!
I’ll probably catch some flak over this one, but I don’t care. Don’t get me wrong here though. I liked Buffy, and Xena and what’s-her-name from Firefly, and many of the other many, many girls & women who can beat the snot out of dozens of dudes twice their size without a scratch or even mussed up hair. But much like the whole bacon thing, it’s just too much. And the girls keep getting younger and smaller as in the recent movie Kick Ass. Can they get any younger and smaller? Hmm. Yes. I betcha there’s a live-action Powerpuff Girls movie in the works somewhere that will feature six year old girls beating the snot out of everyone. You read it here first.

10. People who don’t finish “Top 10” lists.
Seriously, how hard is it to come up with ten things? Lame.

Ok, I gotta go get some lunch and buy a gun. See y’all around!