Bill State Jounral of Crap

It should come as no surprise to anybody that I believe Pearl Jam is the greatest band to ever inhabit the universe.  Suzanne asked me to rank their albums on our car ride home yesterday, and seemed to be surprised by my rankings.  Here is my ranking of their albums with the best song off an album in parenthesis.

1. No Code (Red Mosquito)
2. Riot Act (Love Boat Captain)
3. Yield (Do the Evolution)
4. Vitalogy (Nothng Man)
5. Ten (Porch)
6. Pearl Jam (Inside Job)
7. Vs. (Rearviewmirror)
8. Binaural (Grievance)

Some people will take this to mean that I don’t like Vs. and Binaural, but considering in my own personal rating books they both get 8 out of 10, I think that is a little overstated.

I’m bored at work by the way.

The Internet scares me.  Last summer a woman in Minneapolis was killed after she answered a Craig’s List personal looking for a baby sitter.  The poster used the personal ad, to lure a woman to his house, and then shot her.  A few days ago, a man in an outlying suburb ordered an “erotic escort” on Craig’s List.  He called to cancel it and ended up getting shot, not because he tried to cancel but because the posting was a scam to rob somebody to begin with.

Last week a bunch of morons in Florida beat the hell out of a girl and recorded it so they could post it on YouTube.  I’ve always said, and studies have backed me up, that TV, Movie and Video Game violence is not a significant factor in our society’s violent tendencies.  Yes, some people are affected by those things quite negatively but they are such a stunning minority that punishing the media creators would be irresponsible.

The problem I have now is that the Internet, and sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc are more pervasive and widespread.  The same people play most video games, the same people watch certain movie genres.  These days it seems like everybody is on some social networking site, or video sharing site, exposing their entire lives for the rest of the world to see.

I don’t like it.  It makes me uncomfortable.  There is a reason suicides don’t get to be front page news.  There is a reason streakers aren’t shown on TV during sporting events.  Showing these actions promotes further actions of the same type.  The people who commit these actions generally want attention more than anything else.  The same can be said for the three examples of Internet-based, real-life violence above.

I realize that I’m rambling with no coherent thought or argument, but I don’t care.  This is a cycle that can’t be fixed until we fix the shit that is going on in our society.  The murderer in the first example will get his prison term.  So will the attackers in the second example.  Personally, I’d like to see the victim face solicitation charges as well, since he was soliciting a hooker.  In the third, those kids should be charged as adults.

Americans live in one of the most violent societies in the world and the Internet is becoming an increasingly popular outlet for crazy people to do crazy things and hurt other people.  Given that I spend at least 50% of my day on the Internet (8 hours at work, 4 at home) everyday, I’m going to go hide under my desk. (on the plus side I don’t need a baby sitter, I don’t need a hooker, and I don’t have any friends or enemies who would consider beating me for an Internet video)

I want to define my purpose of writing here. This will not be a blog about how great I am. Asking any reader to partake in my blathering about how great my life is, how boring my life is, or how sad my life is seems masturbatory. I am writing to the vacuum of the internet. I am writing to the abyss until the abyss writes back. Which it does, how do you explain spam emails?

I will write about random things which strike me. I am currently work on three things to post here all in various stages of writing, (some stuff written, one sentences written, just talked about). Part of what will be my issue with writing here is my struggle with the writing process. I still believe amazing works of writing, art, music, anything comes fully formed out of a person’s brain. This is a frustration for my husband and my thesis adviser. I want my function here to be more of a cultural criticism, because that is what I truly adore.

Things which strike me today.

1. I got to spend three hours today eating cheese and getting paid for it. I love faculty development.

2. I finished Diablo Cody’s Memoir. I learned many things about stripping/strippers/sex work ad nauseum. The most intriguing thing is Cody argues she was a lost privileged princess looking for a purpose. I feel that way, but I don’t think stripping is the answer for me. So far all I have found is knitting. Which is why I am going to install one of those knitting trackers I see on all of those fancy knitting blogs. As soon as I find out where I can download one and convince Bill to install it.
P.S. I find this hilarious, see it is just that easy!

3. I have awesome purple shoes.

4. Don’t buy Haagen Daaz Green Tea Ice Cream. Seriously don’t.

5. The premiere of Battlestar Galactica can’t come soon enough.

6. Why didn’t someone tell me about Death Cab for Cutie when Transatlantism came out? That album is amazing. It makes me sad over all of the years I have not listened to Death Cab. I feel I misused my ears.

My wife bitches constantly when she’s watching Top Chef. “This show is stupid,” isn’t an uncommon phrase around the house. Neither is “I hate all these people.” Yet she continues to watch this show every week. Every god-damn week. I wish she wouldn’t because I actually hate this show and she’s stealing an hour from my life. People being that shallow that consistently isn’t something I can enjoy.

Back to Suzanne though. She insists that she is only watching this show “to keep up with the talk at school,” but somehow that doesn’t stop her from crying, swearing and cheering every week when somebody gets named the winner and someboy gets kicked off the show.

“I have never once cried over Top Chef,” just came flying over my shoulder, so apparently she can still read, and the show hasn’t completely sapped her of her mind. She’s wrong though, she’s cried. She cried with the world’s tallest Nebraskan was kicked off the show last season. I’m sure the guy had a name, but I can only remember him as the world’s tallest Nebraskan.

The bigger question is how anybody can watch these shows. In the three seasons of this crap I’ve had to go through, I haven’t seen a single food item that I haven’t seen some 1/2-hour-cooking-show host make on Food Network. And on a cooking show I don’t have to deal with a bunch of shallow chefs trying to kill each other for the fabulous prize of $100,000. That is barely a business loan. So it can’t be the food.

Maybe people enjoy watching other people be shallow….

“I DID NOT CRY, I yelled NOOOOOOOOO!, when C.J. got kicked off the show, but I didn’t cry” sorry, she’s yelling over my shoulder again. She totally cried. Cried like a baby. She cried like Denny died on Grey’s all over again… actually, I laughed when Denny died. That was good stuff.

I can’t talk about this any more. I feel myself getting dumber.

SIDE NOTE: When you are reading the blog title, you need to add “and a hot plate” to the end. This one for example would be “My wife is a liar and a hot plate.” It is just more fun that way.

I blame Bill for this, as I do for most things. Bill decided he will not blog unless I work out. Over the last three months I have lost twenty five pounds. However I was sick for most of the month of February and did not work out. I want to add I still lost weight, but mainly from not eating. The flu blows. This morning I rode the bike will watching a half hour of Across the Universe. Now, Bill will write about something, because he is far more interesting.

Random statement: We are watching all four seasons of Futurama with commentary. Here is the nutty thing, all 72 episodes have commentary. Who does that? Who has time? Apparently Matt Groening has nothing better to do, because he is on every episode. David X. Cohen it makes sense that he is on every episode, because he is a massive nerd. But Matt Groening has a cartoon empire to run. This is not the point. Last night I had a dream, and Matt Groening and David X. Cohen were doing commentary about my dream. Once again, I blame Bill for this.

I want to provide a two part of explanation of the titled this blog. First, “…and a hot plate,” comes from George Plimpton’s cameo on the spelling bee episode of the Simpson’s. I adore George Plimpton’s writing. I wrote at length in the previous incarnation of this blog about his writing, specifically his collection of essays. I often quote another line from this Simpson’s episode, “I am now off to whatever it is I do.” My passionate love of Plimpton resurged when I was prepping for class and tripped over this article.

But the conversation which proceeded the naming of this blog went as follows:

Bill: What should we name the blog?

Me: Not something from Futurama, we always have Futurama things.

Bill: “And a hot plate!”

Me: I like that, make sure to put the ellipses in it, that makes it funnier.

That is how we titled the blog. The subtitle came along much the same. If you have not noticed our subtitle is “We are not the Huffington Post.” I do not read the Huffington Post, but I do know of it existence and I still don’t care.

So the conversation of the subtitle went as follows, roughly.

Bill: Do you want a subtitle?

Me: Sure.

Bill: What should it say?

Me: Well…what are we going to write about? Do we have a theme or a purpose for writing?

Bill: (Disgusted and annoyed) We are not the Huffington Post.

Me: I like that, because we are not.

I know what you are thinking.  Yes, the links were present in our original conversation.  While we talk to each other we use the links to further understanding.  It can work for you too, but only if you have Firefox.  That is how all of this began again. Isn’t it magical. I like this new version of the site for the following reasons. First, you don’t have to be a member of the site to make comments. Second, it isn’t hideously yellow and stupid looking. Finally, I can change the color, my version is green.

Suzanne has been hounding me for weeks, months, perhaps even years that I don’t write anymore. Plus I kind of killed our site without really giving her any say-so (actually, our phpbb was hacked and rather than deal with that kind of crap, I just killed it).

Anyhoo, we’re back and that should be fun. Suzanne wants me to go through my fairly extensive game collection and write about all the games, while playing them all over again. Start with the Atari (if I can get it working) and move on up I guess. Turning down an excuse to play more video games would be supremely stupid.

She’ll be posting here as well, but it is hard to get excited about that.