Issue 198

News: My Mensis Horribilis. Things have not been easy for me since my family and I got back from Door County. A few days after we left for our yearly 2-week vacation in Door County, we heard reports about flooding around where I lived. The woman who was house-sitting for us at the time claimed that our house was not affected. However, it turned out that she only said that because she couldn't actually access the house itself. We arrived to find an odd smell coming from the basement, and we managed to find that the carpet was moist, there was mold on the walls and that some boxes of magazines that I had put on the floor had gotten damaged. Fortunately, I managed to get them all into the attic and I managed to save them all, with nary a sign of mold on any of them. That said, it seems like at least one magazine is M.I.A.: A 2005 issue of Guitar Player with Paul McCartney on the cover, which leads to another unfortunate thing that happened: It turned out that on August 1, we had two important things happening the same day that we had to go downtown for, but with all that was going on, we could do neither: One was to go to my orientation for Columbia College and the other was to go to the Paul McCartney concert that was happening at Wrigley Field. We had to reschedule the orientation (they had a last-ditch orientation date on the 29th, and I managed to get a class schedule put together in the meantime), and I had to miss out on seeing Paul McCartney live for the fourth time in my life. Given that, in all likelihood, I would have been dragged to the Chicago Diner (a place of which I have made my views abundantly clear a few blog entries ago), I think it might not be as bad as I thought it would be. Later, we had to move everything that was in the basement into the POD that we had rented specifically for the occasion. It was difficult directing a crew of six on the right way to clear the basement, and it was shocking to see them removing the carpet and large parts of the walls, and it was even more difficult getting everything in the pod by myself. Of course, even getting the basement in a condition where we could clear the pod was difficult, considering my mother's changing ideas on how to paint the floor, and the paint company's apparently giving two different shades of blue the same name. At one point, I managed to get a DVD copy of the play of mine that had been performed while I was in Wisconsin, and while I must say that the cops did pretty well, the homeless man somehow managed to think that the character was supposed to be a leprechaun. I have since revised this play in the hopes that this mistake is never repeated. Then, after all that was done, two things managed to break down. The first was my clothes dryer, which was fixed easily enough by a repairman, and then the second was my laptop: I accidentally dropped it and, while at first, it seemed to be fine (even if my internet browser did stall occasionally), it kept asking for a diskcheck, and so, I decided to do it. The diskcheck wound up going on for almost two days and, by the end of it, Windows managed to stop working completely on the computer, and we had to remove the hard drive. At work, some guys that Dad worked with claimed that nothing could be removed from it, but, as of now, he has managed to move my emails, my bookmarks, my MP3s, and my documents (although I haven't uploaded the former two on my backup laptop), and even though he has yet to get several folders, (the downloads [which contains the complete Ricky Gervais show podcasts], the pictures, and the videos) off the hard drive yet, this means that, unlike what I feared, the new feature I had put on the blog will not be stopped after just one installment. I honestly hope that, in the next few days, Dad can get everything else off of the hard drive that needs to be taken off it. Film Review: The Guard. This is the film debut of John Martin McDonagh, the brother of Martin McDonagh, a playwright/film director whom I think may be one of the greatest living playwrights (certainly one of the best under 50), and the film is still in very much the same style as his brother's work: Irishmen curse up a storm and commit violence. Hilarity and Tragedy ensue. In this case, Brendan Gleeson (Harry Potter's Mad-Eye Moody) plays a sleazy cop with a tendency to steal from dead people (his opening scene has him raiding the pockets of the victim of a car crash for a tab of LSD), play arcade games instead of working, and taking days off to have sex with hookers. He is paired with a straight-laced FBI agent (played by Don Cheadle) to capture the drug smugglers who (we eventually find out) killed his partner. Meanwhile, despite having a subplot about the lead character's mother dying, the movie is actually quite hilarious. One scene in particular had me in stitches; on Gleeson's day off, Cheadle sets off to Connamera on his own to question the locals. Nobody told him that in Connamera, nobody speaks English, and he doesn't speak any Gaelic. In a moment of desperation, he actually questions a horse whether he saw anything or not. Meditations of Dirkus Aurelius Part II: 26.Just because there are no laws on the books against necrophilia doesn't mean that you are immune from getting stuck with some charge. 27.I cannot convince anyone that any incident that I do not wish to hear about is a dream. 28.Any film that has two girls snogging automatically has one redeeming feature. 29.Filling an artificial vagina with hair chafes like hell. 30.Australians do not need you to remind you that every living thing on the island can kill you, the sheep included. 31.There are better things to make fun of the Mormons for than long underwear. 32.Renee Zellweger is, in fact, female. 33.“Try the cock, you know where it's been,” is not one of the ten commandments. 34.It takes hard work to create a Black Ops squad to do things that make no sense whatsoever. 35.Sam Shephard is the Chuck Norris of American Playwrights. 36.The more improbable the deed, the less likely you are to be punished. 37.The thin breadknife in the basement is not a machete. 38.If crossdressing, please try to make as little sense as possible. 39.“Fuck Robots, dahl-ink” is not a good slogan for anything. 40.More of this is true than you want to know. 41.If we take the time to get to know them, we would all find a lot of reasons to hate everyone else. 42.Nobody knows who Alexander Nevsky is, so try to not reference him too much. 43.Fish are not a lethal weapon when used on dry land. 44.Unless otherwise noted, all bishops will be presumed to believe in God. 45.Having a big pecker is not necessarily a good thing. 46.Anything that makes my mother uneasy is automatically a good thing. 47.Mentioning Richard Gere's Breathless in front of a film buff may be hazardous for your health. 48.Just because I can legally perform marriages doesn't necessarily mean I have to approve of them. 49.Lesson #2 still applies even if it's put in a phial with the directions to the nearest sperm bank attached to it. 50.Americans do not tend to get British spelling.