I'd like to teach the world to choke.
  But, I'm settling for teaching myself Flash. I spent all god damn day on this little 20 second bit of animation, and I have a newfound respect for the people at Homestarrunner. If you want to check out my freaky little banana/Twinkie guy, speaking in the voice of Michael Mills, click here.

Huzzah for Promotions.
  The store closing, while sad and awful and all that, has at least one bright spot. Amy and I both get promotions because our Assistant Manager is leaving to go to a new Barnes and Noble. We both get a 10% raise, and Amy gets more hours, so our little household is doing pretty well, financially. This is good news for those of you expecting Christmas presents. =)

For once, they're right.

discover your jack-o-lantern face @ quiz me

Philly Phetish.
  I like Philadelphia. It's crude, noisy and stinky, but in a charming sort of way. It's positively drowning in history, has an awful lot of culture and entertainment choices, and its politics are nothing if not entertaining. Philly has always been the planet that my moon has orbited around, from my default interest in the Eagles to the way I've always referred to it as "the city." I enjoy Philly, a city that is not quite as thoroughly maligned as my home state of New Jersey.
  Having said all that, I demand to know why the fuck everybody and their humpbacked, web-footed, sub-70 IQ cousins had to start mackin' on the Philly cheesesteak?
  It's happened in fits and starts over the years. This time around, I first noticed it when I started seeing commercials for Domino's Philly Cheesesteak pizza. You know, the one which suggests that Pavlov would have made a killing delivering pizzas? I was intrigued enough to try it, and I wasn't impressed. I liked the toppings, but american cheese and no tomato sauce on a pizza is just wrong on both a taste and texture level.
  The next one I became aware of was the Quiznos ad for their Toasted Philly Cheesesteak. I have been long interested in Quiznos, since the idea of toasted subs intrigues me. Alas, there aren't any around here, nor have I stumbled across one in my travels. The sandwich sounds like it might be good, actually, but the ad is slightly creepy. The guy eating the Quiznos sub asks the man eating the (implied inferior) sandwich if he was raised by wolves. The second man has a mini flashback, and then replies that yes, he was.
  I know that I said the american cheese and no tomato sauce on a pizza was wrong, but the Quiznos ad is so wrong it's tainting surrounding advertisements. Not only is the image of a grown man in a suit suckling along with a litter of wolf cubs kind of disturbing, the fact that it appears he was raised by wolves, whom I'm sure he cares for and identifies with, makes the Quiznos-eater look kind of like a jerk. It's not good to make your pitch-man look like an asshole. He can look stupid, sure, but I don't want to buy something because a big meanie-insulter-face says I should!
  I didn't even get riled up about the McDonald's Philly Cheesesteak. I don't think anyone, least of all me, expects the McCrapSteak* to be any better then their burgers, which isn't really saying much, and I highly doubt that their steak sandwich is going to be so wildly popular that it will drive the privately owned shops in Philly out of business.
  The last straw was when Arby's started getting in my face with ads for their Philly Beef 'n Swiss. Come on! Fucking Arby's? Arby's is the slack-jawed, hairy-backed, vestigial-tailed mutant of national fast food chains! Why do they have to step to a Philly steak?
  I can just about boil water and add pasta without a recipe. I don't know much about food beyond the fact that my mother and my girlfriend are both quite good at making it. But I do know that what makes a steak sandwich a Philly cheesesteak is as much the experience as it is the ingredients. Standing at a counter, watching a guy standing over a grill making your sandwich. Smelling the juices sizzling in great clouds of greasy steam off of the grill two feet away from you. Picking your toppings, knowing that they were sliced or diced or shredded by somebody that morning. Warm rolls, baked somewhere around the block. Hell, even the sometimes dubious sanitation of the dining room. It's all of these things that make it a Philly cheesesteak. I(f you want to get really picky, you could argue that it's the Cheese Whiz, but the idea of putting that on a cheesesteak appalls me, so I'm going to stay out of that debate.)
  I'm not ruling out the possibility that any of these foods could be good. They might, in fact, be quite tasty. But they're about as genuinely Philly as my landlord is competent and considerate. And that's not very much.
  *I think it's interesting to note that the Blogger spellchecker tried to change McCrapSteak to McGreevey's. I won't speculate on what that means, I just thought it was fun.

I like to score.
  So, the GRE did not kick my ass. It glared at me some, but it knew not to start shit. I think I did pretty well, considering the long years I've gone with out studying any math. They give you the scores to the verbal and math sections right away, and I did slightly better than I did when I took the practice test, so I am pleased. I will await my scores on the writing section patiently. Very... very... patiently. *twitch*
  By the way, I love that they don't even call it "math" anymore. Now it's called "quantitative reasoning," because seven syllables are always better than one, and are especially not any more intimidating.
  Thanks to all of you who offered encouragement. You are appreciated. I must take this opportunity to single out my wonderful girlfriend, who put up with my poorly-hidden anxiety, my insomnia, and my tendency to get defensive when I'm nervous. She always has more faith in me than I do, and this experience would have been far more nerve-wracking without her patient insistence that I would do well. She is beautiful and wonderful, and far too good to me, and I love her very much.

Nerves of Pudding!
  Today I am taking the GRE test, which is the second to last step in applying to Grad school. I test fairly well (I don't get the shakes or the dry heaves or anything), and everybody tells me it's like taking the SAT all over again, and I did pretty well on the SAT, so all in all I'm not worried.
  Much.
  Okay, so I'm a smidgen concerned. After all, I want to get into a good school, and I want them to give me an assistantship or a fellowship or a scholarship or a battleship or something. I can't really afford another $25k in student loans, and if I don't get really good aid, I'm not going. So I sweat just a bit. Luckily, I have a solution.
  I'm going in there like I own the place. I'm wearing my sweatpants and a big comfy shirt. Two comfy shirts, actually, in case they have either the heat or the air conditioner running. (And a shout out to my Mom. Dressing in layers really does work.) I'm going to wear my sunglasses until the last possible moment, and I'm not even going to be concerned that they'll want to see my driver's license, with that goofy-ass grin I had on my face. I will be so cool that hail will fall out of the sky, just to hang out and ask me for tips in being so chilly.
  And I won't, absolutely not, never, no how, think about how I haven't had a math class in 8 years.

Gimme a "B"
  I've decided, as an experiment, to let my hair grow for a few months. I figure it's cheap insulation for the imminent Jersey winter. It leaves me with a slight dilemma, though. Having hair technically keeps me from being the Little Bald Bastard, and since I'm so picky with other people about technicalities, it only seems right that I should acknowledge my own personally discontinuity with... a contest!
  I'm hereby soliciting for suggestions to replace the first "B" in LBB. Post suggestions here, and I'll pick some that I like and have a vote later on. Enjoy.
- LB?B

I thoroughly enjoyed School of Rock.
  Despite the fact that Jack Black is almost embarrasingly over the top, even when he's not on camera, SOR was funny, smart, and surprisingly warm. There seemed to be a real connection between Black as the music-obsessed counterfeit substitute teacher and his class of prep-school kids. I realize that I'm getting a little old, because the over-use of the word ass from a group of ten-year-olds made me cringe a bit, but on the whole it was worth the money. Not really worth the accident Amy and I almost got into, but that wasn't the movie's fault.

Amanda Jan Got Married.
  Let's get something straight right off the bat. My friends, younger and older, have been getting married and having babies (sometimes in that order, sometimes not) for years. But something about it still freaks me out just a little.
  Amanda was the youngest member of the DoomSpork V, a group of friends/imaginary superheroes that I helped to found when I was attending Cumberland County College. There were, as I'm sure you've guessed, six of us. =) We started with five, added one later, and generally jumbled things about. We were the coolest thing on campus, and in the surrounding three counties. I'll tell you more about the group and its members later.
  Anywho, Amanda was the youngest of us. She was a bit of a hellion, and now she's all grown up and responsible and married. We haven't hung out as a group more than once in about five years, and now we never really can again. We weren't exactly a coherent unit anymore, but this is sort of the last nail in the coffin.
  Amanda isn't just Amanda anymore, she's half of Amanda + Rob. I am very, very happy for her. For a long time it looked like she couldn't possibly find a functional partner, and Rob seems like a really fantastic guy. Together, they prove that opposites can go beyond attracting to complimenting each other. Still, their marriage makes concrete a reality than, deep down, I have been studiously avoiding.

I am still a national radio star.
  Check out The Pab Sungenis Project, featuring yours surly as guest host for two weeks.

Some things disturb me more than others.
  Granted, the list of things that bother me, even single-spaced and in a very small font, would likely fill a mid-size athletic stadium. There are some items, though, that would definitely warrant a bullet or boldfaced type or something. One of those standout entries is definitely "being used by a parent as a tool of discipline."
  I'm sure you're tired of hearing about how I work in a bookstore, but we're trying to keep this thing relatively stranger-friendly, on the off chance that someone I don't know has wandered in off the street and has gotten this far without wandering out again, clutching a pair of bleeding eyeballs and screaming for an ambulance or a mercy shooting. (Ask the Little Bald Bastard, brought to you in fabulous Run-On-Vision!) At work, I am quite frequently presented with challenging young people. Parenting appears, to my untrained eye, to be getting more indulgent these days, and the frequency of tantrums and disruptive behavior seems to be on the rise. I usually welcome parental intercession, but I dislike being used as a symbol of said discipline.
  The child was climbing on a shelf. Or chewing on a book. Or heading for the exit with a book that she didn't realize wasn't yet paid for. Or something. I don't remember clearly what the infraction was. What I do remember is the child's older male escort (who I assumed was her father) telling his (hopefully) offspring that "the man is going to beat your butt." By "the man," he meant me. I don't exactly know what he meant by "beat your butt," but I'm guessing that it wasn't a euphemism for "buy you ice cream."
  I wanted to believe that this pass-the-bad-guy-mask was better than nothing, but I couldn't do it. Ignoring the question of "butt-beating" as an appropriate child-rearing tactic for the moment, what if I hadn't been in sight? Would he have invoked a phantom "man," with whom to threaten his daughter with corporal punishment? Or would her absent mother have been made the scapegoat? Ooh, maybe it would have been God in the role of butt-beater, which is essentially the part he's been playing in some capacity for thousands of years. Or, would he have sucked up his reluctance and actually relied on his own authority to correct his child's behavior?
  The answer is, of course, that I don't know. (And neither do you, smartie!) Since I'll never see the family in question again, it's a rhetorical question. Still, I can't help but wonder, and my feeling is that he would have passed the butt-beater-buck to something, corporeal or not. From my split-second observation, I suspect that this man, like a lot of parents, dislikes the idea of being the bad guy in a disciplinary situation, so he made me his convenient bogeyman.
  I've voluntarily opted out of the child-rearing game, so I try not to offer advice on the topic. Yet, I am compelled to point out that it is impossible to raise a child right without occasionally making them do things they don't want to do. My belief is that indulging a child's every whim, or chickening out of your role as disciplinarian, is a sure way to raise self-absorbed anti-socialites.
  Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe it's the hormones in the beef or something.

L.A. waist wit' an Oakland booty...
  I went to a cast party on Saturday night. It had been an extremely long day, without much sleep the night before, and Amy and I were really going to just put in an appearance. Anyway, after all of the usual self-congratulatory stuff was over, Amy was catching up with some friends, and I ended up sitting on the couch next to my friend Angie.
  Angie and I worked together in The God of All Things, a performance piece that Amy wrote and directed for a class. I was cast as a middle-aged diplomat, and Angie played my pre-adolescent daughter, quite convincingly, I might add. Her role in the show we were cast-party-crashing was considerably more mature, and she tackled that with equal aplomb. Still, Angie is rather youthful in appearance, even younger than her actual 19 years. I still feel strangely paternal toward her, and I was vaguely proud as we discussed her lack of interest in drinking and her progress in school. Then, things got a little strange.
  As at most theater parties I've attended, the music was extremely eclectic. Although, bonus, no showtunes. Eventually, that classic of my misspent youth, "Baby Got Back," came on. I feel my age when I hear it lately, because it came out as I was firing my boosters and leaving the orbit of high school. Despite its ubiquity as a dance party staple, I identify it with a very specific time in my life, a time during which most of current social group, including my girlfriend, were in middle school. But that's not the strange part.
  Angie knew all the words. This song came out when she was in third grade, and she could sing along with every syllable. She could even make this sort of eerily accurate "wheep" sound and sing along with the record scratches.
  I know I'm probably overreacting, but there's an ironic overtone to the fact that she and I have this in common. I owned... hell, if I look hard enough I probably still own the song on a cassette single. Angie has never even seen a cassette single. To her credit, she didn't laugh at me when I asked her, but still. Of all the things we could have in common, it's Sir Mix-A-Lot that bridges our particular generation gap.
  When I am old and grey (or gray) and so riddled with Alzheimer's that I ask the nurse my middle name after a 20-minute nap, I will still remember listening to Angie proclaim that her anaconda didn't want none unless you got buns hon, and thinking that somewhere in our unlikely musical commonality was the key to solving the riddle of why people suck at getting along with other people. If only I could figure out how to get that message to the world, maybe we could all bond over amusingly cheesy hip-hop. Until then, it'll be our little secret, Angie.

I got an email today.
  As some of you know, I used to work in talk radio. I got an email today from the host of the talk show for which I used to produce, asking me what I though of the whole Rush Limbaugh thing. Here's what I said.

  My view on Rush is pretty simple. I don't think he's a racist. I think he's an elitist, but that opinion was cemented a long time ago. In fact, I believe him when he claims that he wasn't knocking McNabb as much as the media coverage and the fact that McNabb is so highly rated.
  The thing is, I don't agree that McNabb is overrated because he's black. I think he's just overrated. I don't have any love for the media in terms of its sophistication or its objectivity, but can you honestly tell me there aren't any white quarterbacks who aren't performing to the level that they were expected to reach?
  I heard something on NPR that really struck home for me. It would have been very easy for Rush to say that he thinks the media has overrated McNabb. Rush made a conscious decision to focus on a claim that his race as the reason, thus making it a racial issue. It was either pigheaded and insensitive, or deliberately provocative, and I'm really not sure which way is better. And his claim that the uproar he's caused somehow proves that he said something true is completely baseless. I get upset when Neo-Nazis claim that the Holocaust never happened, or when creationists claim that the Second law of Thermodynamics rules out evolution, or when conspiracy nuts claim that the black, featureless backgrounds in the pictures taken by the Apollo crews prove that the moon landings were staged, but my outrage doesn't make them right.

  Before you start, I used to produce our rebroadcast of Rush's show five days a week, so I have listened to him. I'm not relying solely on what I've heard about his comments. While I agree with him about as often as I shit golden statues of the Dalai Lama, I respect his ability to find and hold an audience. Frankly, I believe that his reluctance to ever admit that he could be even the slightest bit wrong has a lot to do with how popular he is. He simply powers ahead, and his confidence and self-assurance are attractive. People like someone who sounds as if he believes in himself, and Rush seems to possess the kind of self confidence that would have made Jesus Christ feel like a bit of a charlatan. So I'm not surprised that he hasn't tried to diffuse his comments beyond apologizing for the discomfort he caused the ESPN crew. His show would probably drop in the ratings if he appeared to be wavering or backing down. Still, I can't help but wonder exactly how the man sleeps at night.
  Wait a minute. I'll bet he sleeps on piles and piles of money. *sigh*

It's official...
  In this month's Journal of the American Mofo, I am listed among the top ten laziest mofos of all time. No, seriously, it's true!
  Okay, so there is no JAM, at least not yet. I'm trying to teach myself Flash, so there may be one at some point. If there were such a publication, I'd certainly be on their lazy list. I was off for two days, and I didn't leave the apartment for something like 36 hours. I only left to take a bag of trash over to a dumpster across the street. I stayed in my pajamas all day on Tuesday. I am a lazy, lazy mofo.
  In my defense, I did do some things while I was inside. I applied for some jobs, and I started trying to teach myself to use Flash. I also swept and emptied the trash. But I still feel like a special kind of slack ass for hanging around in my pajamas all day.
  Truth be told, it's not entirely my fault. My landlord decided to have the sidewalk in front of the apartment torn up and replaced. So, there was a one hundred square foot plot of wet cement outside my door for the majority of the day, which would have made leaving kind of a pain. (There's a funny story about how Amy had to have one of the workers carry her piggyback across the wet cement when she left for work, but I'm probably not supposed to tell you about that.) It probably would have been nice if my landlord had warned us that out sidewalk was being replaced, but that would have been considerate, and thus completely out of character. Some day, I will not live in the ghetto, with a crackhead for a landlord.

I'm kitty-sitting.
  The Barrymore is about one and a half, and Charlatan is around a half, so neither of them are kittens in that "Look, she fits my shoe! And in that saucer! And in the fold-up couch! Hey, where'd the kitten go?" sort of way. Still, they are young enough that they get pretty rambunctious. Putting a paper bag on the floor is a quick way of sentencing it to death, and anything that rattles or rolls on the floor will get batted around until it gets stuck under the couch.
  It's all hunting, really. They get some exercise, and it's much better than stumbling over headless rodents they've deposited on our doorstep. Still, it sometimes gets a bit scary when they run out of toys. If there's nothing worth batting about, they'll start harrassing each other. I've been assured by two sets of experienced cat-owning parents and someone at our vet's office that this is natural. The consensus seems to be that, as long as they aren't actually clawing each other, then they're just playing a little rough, and it's fine. Still, I can't help but be concerned when they're wrapped around each other, hissing or yowling like they're trying to kill each other. So I find myself compelled to drop whatever I'm doing and go distract them when they start to get too hostile.
  I do mean whatever I'm doing. Eating, web-surfing, sleeping. I'm supposed to go to the grocery store while Amy's at work, and I've been reluctant to leave them alone. They are certainly as cute as drastically mismatched buttons, but I won't be disappointed when they're old enough to be as lazy as I am.