I miss MTV

God I'm stupid. In the middle of this particular entry the kid asked me to check her blog to see if her audio post went through. Without thinking I opened another browser and logged out of blogger and back in as her. Her entry was there, and I came back to this window to finish my blog. It was good too. But as soon as I hit 'publish' I was taken to the goddamned login screen and promptly lost the entire blog. *sigh* My bad..

Anyway I was just waxing philosophical on the fact that MTV is becoming a bit of a joke in that it rarely shows videos anymore. It's bread and butter has fallen victim to a hungry audience's appetite for mostly reality programming. I blame Real World.

I remember when MTV first debuted. What a revolution that was. I was at the perfect age too because I was just beginning to enjoy more mature music and learning to put bands with songs I heard on the radio. With MTV I was able to put faces with the bands as well because I didn't keep up with the music rags at that age.

A lot of the videos in the beginning were made on the cheap and consisted mostly of concert footage but gradually, with the success of MTV and the greater access to the bands for fans the videos began to improve. I think Duran Duran were great pioneers of the artistic music video. I know their vids combined with their sex appeal is what did me in.

God I totally remember fighting my family for use of the only TV in the house so I could watch my MTV. I really did want my MTV damnit but most of the time I had to wait for the weekend after the parentals had gone to bed to get the most access to it. Then I'd sit for hours watching the videos and I remember the agonizing waits I had to endure waiting for a favourite one to play. The Vee-jays were the epitome of cool. I'd even watch the USA channel's attempt to combat MTV's popularity with their Night Flight programming which consisted of video and bad Andy Warhol movies.

Ahhh to be young again.

When did MTV stop showing videos? Was the Real World really the video's downfall? It certainly seemd to be another revolution for the young network. Throw some hipsters into a fishbowl and let the world watch. How cool! Slowly over time more and more programming began to invade the airtime and it became difficult to catch blocks of videos until one day, they were gone.

Oh sure I know they show some occasionally but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit through crap programming to get to them. So I stopped watching.

I have a coworker who will ask me now and again if I've seen some show on MTV and I have to woefully tell her that I haven't. To me, MTV's just not as cool as it once was. It's just not the same. And I don't think it's an age issue, though what the hell do I know. Maybe it is. Maybe what they sho today is what the kids want.

It just doesn't appeal to me.

Out and about

Damn it was hot out today.

Week's end

This week? Sucked. I'm not going to go into detail though, I just wanted it on the record that the only bright spot in the week for me this week was the writing workshop I went to today. It was brilliant. Other than that, I would be very happy to forget this entire week.

Moving on though I see that Blogger's added a new feature with the image button in this editor. Very cool. They were using picasa originally, but it looks like that won't be needed for users without their own server space. Very excellent. I think Google buying Blogger was a great move. I love this service. Now if they would just allow unlimited team members in a group blog and turned the stat service back on it would be perfect :)

Let's see... I'll be finishing up S3 of Soprano's this weekend and I'm going to force myself to hold off for a bit on asking to borrow season 5. I'm just zipping through this show because it's like Pringles. Once you popped, you can't stop. I meant to watch one ep tonight, instead I watch three. Now it's late and I'm going to be a zombie in the morning.

I hate mornings. I hate the fuzzy disorientation you get when the alrm goes off. Then the grogginess and the dread of having to move robotically through your morning routine to get ready to face the day. I'm fine once I get my contacts in but before that I'm a grouchy bitch. Something about putting something cold and wet directly onto my eyeballs sort of zings mee into wakefulness.

It's 10:30 pm -ish and I wish I could just stay up 'til 3 or so doing whatever. watch late night telly, read one of the books I picked up at the library tonight, or just lie in bed, listen to music and stare at the ceiling not thinking about anything in particular. But I have to get up at 6am, go through grouchy bitch mode, get to work and somehow lose grouchy bitch mode before I get there lest my coworkers think I'm that way all the time. I dunno. I feel lethargic right now I guess.

So I go to bed. Gnighty.

Oh wait. I want to play with the image thingie really quick:


Hayden's so pretty here :)

Ohhh Maddon'!

So I'm on the third season of Soprano's now (thanks Mike!) Joey pants has shown up and looks like he'll be gumming up the works so I'm looking forward to that. I'm really digging the show and I never thought I would.

I'm going to admit something here, and I don't want to hear any collective gasps or cries of disbelief:

I've never seen any of the Godfather movies.

There. I said it. I've never seen those, or Goodfellas or any other "serious" mobster flick. I think the last mafia movie I saw was "Married to the Mob" with Michelle Pfeiffer. It's not really a genre I've been interested in - not something I could identify with. I'm Irish for crying out loud :)

And so I never made any real effort to check out Tony Soprano and his families despite critical acclaim and rave reviews from people I know. I know the DVDs have been out for rent for ages now but I figured, 'Meh.' But then I was made an offer I couldn't refuse (sorry, had to be done) of borrowing all five glorious seasons on DVD and I was not sorry.

It's a fuckin' brilliant show. Full stop. Although I did have to Google 'mobspeak' so that I could understand the lingo. Now I know what a 'Goomah' is and that some gabagool would be quite nice right about now. Since my finances this weekend dictated that I stay home, I watched Season 2 all day and I swear by the end of the day I had that distinctive Jersey twang in my speech :)

Tonight, I just finished the episode where (SPOILER ALERT if you've been under my rock with me and haven't seen the show) Dr. Melfi is raped. It was powerful. At the end when she nearly tells Tony what really happened to her I found myself wanting her to tell him so he'd whack the asshole. And then I was totally taken aback by that. That would be wrong. Of course she can't tell him and use him like that to satisfy her own need for revenge. But the damn show made me actually care about these mafiosos and I wanted Tony to take care of it for Melfi.

I'm still dumbfounded I felt that way. The show ended with her not telling him of course, but I was disappointed by that. And then my conscience said "Woooah there. She did the right thing you eejit."

It was a powerful ep.

I'd go on about it, but my computer's being a bitch and I've had a whole damn day of computer problems at work and I don't wanna mess with this one right now. Gnighty.

Roadbloggin'

Last time I blog and drive at the same time, I promise.

My first (lame) audioblog

Bless me blogger...

I don't know what it is, I don't know why I'm fixated on it, but the whole fallen priest theme fascinates me. Maybe because it's a little bit wrong to find that particular theme attractive. Maybe it's the whole forbidden thing, or even the obligatory angst (and we all know how I feel about the angst) that theme presents. I don't know. Damn Thorn Birds.


Father Ralph

So I'm watching The Sopranos (Thanks Mike!) for the first time ever (hey I don't have HBO. Blow me.) last night, mostly because of course it's one of those shows that's become ingrained into American culture and I'm continuing my habit of getting into a series a few years after it begins. Of course it's great show and after 5 episodes I can safely say I'm hooked (Argh, thanks Mike.) Of course episode 5 of the first season features Carmela and Father Phil getting just a little too cozy.


Father Phil

I loved it. I hope there's more of that in the series because - and I might just be a little twisted - I dig on that quite a lot. I could wax on about the whole evil Eve tempting Adam causing his downfall and so women are forever punished because of that, or seen as wicked seductresses, and because that pisses me off, I want to see the holy man fail the test.

That's the first thing that comes to mind. The other thing is that it's just hot. Hot hot hot. Blasphemous? Probably. Will I burn in hell? If there is a hell, I'll have a window seat please because I think I'll always be interested in the theme.

I think I do blame Thorn Birds for the fixation on it. It's really quite an epic struggle between a man and his God and his belief that he's something more than a man and to give in to temptation would burst that bubble. Very interesting.

Anyway, enough blather, just had to get all that out.

Gunt, I dig the audio blogs btw :) Were they difficult to do?

Harry Potter release party

As I was writing the previous entry my daughter wandered into the room and I was telling her about some plans we might have to talk to her and her friends about the HP 6 midnight release party for the paper.

Then we got to talking about how much we enjoyed the last one. Here's how we spent some great time together thanks to my hero, JK Rowling:

We showed up at Hastings somewhere between 11pm and 12am and ran into fellow diehard fans we knew from work. The grownups chatted while the kids ran amok in the store having fun and anxiously waiting for their books. There were games and prizes and it was generally a lot of fun.

We got our grubby mitts on 2 copies and raced home and began to read together in my room, me from my book, Shan from hers.

Unfortunately it was so late that we didn't read for long before burning eyes and jaw-cracking yawns reminded us that we needed sleep. So we slept, but both of us were up early despite that so we could devour the book whole.

I sat in my chair and Shan lazed on the bed and we spent the entire day reading Order of the Phoenix. This is an 800-ish page book mind you. But I really cherish that day we spent reading. Into the wee hours of the next morning we carried on reading. But with only a few chapters to go, Shan could no longer prop up her eyelids and she reluctantly went to bed. However, I just couldn't do it. I had to finish it and I didn't have as much to go as she did so I ended up finishing the book about 17 hours after starting it.

To some it might seem quite sad to spend a whole day inside reading a book, but for Shan and me, it was heaven. And in about a month, we get to do it again. So thanks JK :)

Alt-Tab issues

Since I'm so intrigued with the Piano Man, and I've got such itchy fingers tonight I thought I'd get some stuff out of my head about the case. A sort of fan fiction experiment on this enigmatic, lost man.

I wrote the above paragraph about 10 minutes ago, and then I somehow got distracted by Trading Spouses. Why I don't know, I meant to turn the TV off. I think the alt-tab world in which I live has weakened my attention span. When I finally came back to my screen here, I lost the mood to write something.

There. TV off. I always seem to have it on when I get home, but I never really watch it. I've talked about this before, but for some reason the quietness is louder than having the TV on. The throbbing hum of the AC in the hall outside my bedroom is a steady noise until it shuts off for a cycle. While it's on it causes enough vibration to make the large picture I have hanging above my bed vibrate like a fingernail tapping on a desk. Occasionally I can hear the kid tapping on the computer in the living room. She's in the middle of attepting to write a book and has excerpts and ideas throughout a myriad of old spiral notebooks and she's trying to get them into a cohesive order in Word.

Either that or she's on Neopets again. I hate it when she's on that site because I agree with Wil Wheaton when he says the Internet(s) is full of freaks, present company excluded of course :) But I have rather disturbing images of a 45 year old hairy man with glasses masturbating as he pretends to be a 13 year old girl on Neopets chatting to my daughter. I don't know why the perv has glasses apart from most of the images of serial killers and pedophiles I've seen, they're wearing unobtrusive but large glasses with wire frames.

But I know her passwords, usernames and all that and check her regularly (which she knows) and so far nothing quite that obscene.

Changing the subject... I used to have a blog where I kept most of my writing attempts, iedas, exrcises etc. Maybe I should dust it off and use it again. But I always start stuff like that with good intentions, and then gradually I end up distracted by other things until the dust begins to gather again and I put it away.

Anyone who might have read some of my old entries here might see a pattern in my enthusiasm for writing. The desire washes over me in great thundering waves and I become "serious" about writing and sometimes I do even make some progress. Or I get some grand idea like, "How about if I start a blog about my writing process, the ups, he downs, the in-betweens. It could be a repository for ideas, a virtual sounding board!"

Sounds good in theory, at least to me. So I start it, I write in it. I collect story ideas, I bitch about the lack of story ideas, or the lack of progression in a particular one. I force myself to freewrite for 10 minutes to let the ideas flow. Pretty soon the desire dries up, the waves recede and I retreat into my mundane life for a while, mindlessly getting up, going to work, coming home, watching a bit of TV, reading, then going to sleep.

Why does that happen? Is it because I maybe doubt myself too much. Even writing this silly blog I deleted some things I wrote because I know a few of the people who read this and I don't want to 'come off' a certain way. How stupid is that? Pretty damn stupid quite frankly.

And how's this for an abrupt ending? I want to blog about something else but in a different entry.

Why?

Why do I torture myself over silly things? The column thing was just an honest goof between a couple of editors which makes me feel so much better. I'd totally rather it be something innocuous like that than find out what I wrote was shite. Not that I'm incapable of writing shite :) My nanoblogmo attempt is a case in point of shite writing.

Of course shite is subjective but there you go. Anyway, all is well column-wise and I stressed about it for absolutely no reason and you'd think I'd know better but apparently I don't.

Piano man is still an enigma. The google alerts have trickled off so I don't know much about the progress on his case. I'm still intrigued though. I'd love to sort of adapt his story into some kind of fiction and make up my own ending to his case. Maybe I'll putter around with that for the evening.

Anyway (and sorry Gunter) I'm boring myself with this entry. A sure sign I should stop.

Panic in GI

Argh column due, column due. I've got about 300 words and now I'm stuck. Filling 22 column inches on short notice is difficult. But I thrive under pressure. No really, I do.

But the cool news of the day today is that my boss is sending me to a writing workshop geared towards people like me who work in the news biz, but have no formal training in writing for a paper. I'm stoked :) Maybe I will learn a few tips (like it's impossible to be interesting for 800 words on a tv show. 500 maybe but that's pushing it.)

Anyway, an update on my Piano man: They still don't know who he is.

Okay enough stalling. Back to work.