Bathing the Cat and Thinking

I just gave Renton the Cat a bath. He’s off sulking and cleaning himself the old-fashioned way, apalled I would do such a thing to his fine fur coat. At least he tolerates baths; I am lucky in that.

Long before I even got Renton, I had a vision of how my cat (I knew someday I was gonna get another cat) was going to be. There was a list of things it was going to do, or not do. Let’s see how Young Renton compares:

Going to be Siamese — bingo on that, I did manage to find a Siamese

Going to be named Splat — I was nixed on this by my whole set of family, friends, and aquaintances; they said he’d be hit by a car or a steamroller, or fall out of a really tall window

Going to take a shower with me every morning, love water in general — that’s a no on the shower, and I don’t think he likes water in general, but he does tolerate his weekly bath, so I give myself half credit on that one

Going to use the toliet, no litterbox for me — Uhh, we’re working on that. . . (half-credit)

Going to love everybody — That’s usually true, he hasn’t met a stranger. He does hiss at Willis, but I think he does that for kicks

Going to have his own little kitty room — Kitty room?? He’s taken over the whole house!

Going to travel well — Yes, he does travel quite well; I’m always carting him off to Birmingham or Auburn

So that’s a four out of seven, all total. He didn’t do too bad. Of course, I didn’t think about all the little pasttimes he would aquire, like eating red sweaters, knocking contents of my purse under the couch, and wreaking havoc on the kitchen counters. Maybe that’s just the price I’ll pay for him to be toliet trained (come on, Renton, it’s a simple concept. . .)

And now I must go. Carrie the Counselor’s job is never done. . .

Best Commercial Auburn’s Ever Made

I forgot to include this with my weekend sum-up. Oops. I randomly remembered it while coloring a wax myrtle a lovely dark green this afternoon.

We’re watching the game last Saturday, Auburn vs. Vanderbilt, eatin’ pizza (with newspaper under us, so Mom doesn’t throw us into the wall), and they go to a commercial break. And on comes this commercial for Auburn as a university, a we’re-part-of-the-future inspiration sort of thing. And as it’s going, here is how the conversation went (more or less):

Me: Hey, that’s the inside of Comer Hall!

Steven: Band people!

Me: Ahhh! That’s Dr. Hitchcock, my old English professor!

Both Me and Steven: Hey that’s Asian Brad!!!

Steven: I know that girl, she’s in one of my computer classes!

Mom: So that’s what Asian Brad looks like.

It was weird; every scene we knew somebody or something like that. I was greatly amused. Even more amused to see Asian Brad look all nice-kid and say something serious. Wonder if they paid him anything. Wonder if he was drunk.

At least we know they used real Auburn people, and not actors portraying Auburn people. You gotta have the real thing, man. And this commercial did. Yay, and kudos.

It’s about bloody time

War Damn Eagle! I never thought I’d be so excited over beating Vanderbilt, but I am, I am. I’m so estatic that we did not lose! Not only did we not lose, we creamed them. Just ignore the mess that was the first quarter, and that was the team I knew from last year, penalties included. We do like to seem to get quite a collection of those. But who cares, we won! Evil laugh: Mwahahahahaha! Football season has finally begun! Can’t believe I’ve gotta wait two weeks for another game. I get to go to that one at least; it’s at home.

And what did I do with my weekend? Steven came up here to Forted Pain, and we went down to Birmingham on Saturday, so we could get some things done in the Big City. Renton was left here, as his toliet training is still going frighteningly slowly. We mostly had wedding errands to do. Steven picked out his tuxes for himself and the groomsman (Willis, I’m sorry, you’ve gotta wear a Florida-orange tux), and I got the underthings for my dress (i.e. sexy lingerie, ha) and some shoes (I hope they work; shoe shopping sucks when you have a foot shaped as weird as mine, and all you want to do is be barefoot. Or wear flip flops). And we watched the first half of the game, and listened to the third quarter on the radio on the way to the mall. War eagle, man. And we ate, a lot. Pizza for lunch and wings for dinner, and fried cheesecake for dessert. Boy was that good; never woulda thought it. All in all, a fun-filled Saturday.

Is thirty cents really all that much money? I mean that won’t even buy you a coke. Thirty cents is something you find as you’re cleaning underneath your bed, and (unless it involves a quarter) you just throw it away with the rest of the trash cause it’s easier than finding a way to spend it. Thirty cents is not much money. Nevertheless, at the grocery store, Steven and I got behind some lady who thought otherwise. She was buying some corn meal, a box of cereal, and something else that I cannot recall. We only had a few things ourselves, and were ready to just go home. As the lady in front of us is being ringed up, she notices a discrepancy on the visual computer-screen recipt. “That rang up as $2.89,” she says, “There’s a sign by the cereal that said it was $2.59.” Oh no. So the bag boy goes to check, while we wait. He soon comes back, saying he didn’t see a sign. “Oh, I”ll show ya” says the lady, and goes off, taking the bag boy with her. Maybe she is only carrying cash, and she truly doesn’t have thirty cents. I look at Steven and whisper, “Thirty cents? I’d give her thirty cents.” But of course I don’t have thirty cents; who carries money around anymore? Not I, says the debit-card user. Finally the lady and bag boy are back, having confirmed her thirty cent claim. So now they gotta get the manager to stick her key in the register, type in some voiding code, and start over. So they ring up everything just right this time, thank goodness. “That’ll be $4.85,” says the check-out girl, and the lady hands over $5.85. In cash. So she can get a dollar. It wasn’t a matter of her having thirty cents at all. Six minutes of running around looking for price statements and holding up lines for thirty cents that she already had. Wow. Somebody make her the Secretary of the Treasury; that’ll solve the budget crap. Save us thirty cents on a new aircraft carrier, just don’t hold up the line to tour the Capitol while you’re at it.

Musing on the RIAA

Here’s an interesting side note from the whole “RIAA Sues The World” saga (surely you heard they sued a 12 year old girl):

“Meanwhile, several internet music services have offered to pay the $2,000 (£1,255) fine paid by the mother of 12-year-old Brianna LaHara to settle the lawsuit the RIAA had filed against the girl.

Grokster president Wayne Rosso, a member of the peer-to-peer services trade group P2P United, said he felt the RIAA were acting like “bullies” by targeting a young girl, which is why it was offering to pay the money. ” (source: BBC)

This whole mess does make for interesting reading in the news. Every day there’s some new blurb someone said that either justifies or condemns the sharing of files, or a new lawsuit served out, protested, or settled. And then there’s that whole amnesty thing. . . please.

It seems to me that the RIAA might be hurting itself more than the people they’re out to get, though. They’re suing these people in hope that they will become their customers again. And man, the analogies are abound on this subject like RIAA subpoenas in courts. The more I read them the more I figure you can make any analogy to suit your purpose. RIAA says “you wouldn’t steal a BMW because you thought the price was too high,” and the file sharers spit back “yeah but you get to test-drive a BMW, and there are cheaper cars on the market.” Both sides make it a question of ethics, right and wrong, wwjd? and that sort of thing. Well, wtfwjd?

I think the bare truth of it is it’s just incredibly easy to get a music file for free off the internet. Why get dressed and go out to hunt up some obscure CD when you can do a quick search for the file in your jammies? Easy easy easy. And cheap, which is always good for the college students. More money for beer. Simple as that man, not a matter of ethics, matter of convenience. Just recently have there been some legitimate music services out there where you can listen to all the music you want. You do pay money, yes, but it’s cheaper than going the CD route. For Mac users, there’s Apple’s I Tunes. Well, that covers about 8% of the computer population. Well done. Right now I’m using a service called Rhapsody. Nine bucks a month or 25 bucks for three, listen to whatever you want (that they have, and might I add that their selection of film scores is lacking), and you can download for under a buck a song. Best that I know of for Windows people right now. However, the free stuff is still out there. Why pay nine bucks a month when you can get it for free? Where does it all end? (Stop the internet please, I’d like to get off. . .)

The internet has instituted a whole new way of doing things, and there is no precedent. It’s changing the way we exchange information (for the better, I think), and we will have to change some ourselves to keep up. Copyright laws included in that statement. Now it’s not only information we’re exchanging now, its things like movies, music, computer programs, and pictures. In other words, intellectual property, which can be very vague in definition anyway. How in the world can you control use of this intellectual property when it’s so easy to copy and distribute among the masses? There is no clear answer as of yet, but one surefire way of not doing things is to go around like Big Brother, watching every move you do, waiting for you to do something ‘against the rules.’ Read 1984. It’s just not right.

Not only can you partake of other people’s intellectual property, now you can just as easily create your own. With the internet, anybody, and boy do I mean anybody, can write songs, create art, write fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journals, whatever man, and publish it in the internet. It’s cheap, instantaneous, and anybody can do it. It rules out the middle man entirely. No publishers, managers, distributors, or (unfortunately) proofreaders. The creator of all this stuff becomes all of these things, and therefore, they get more control. Granted, there is a lot of absolute shit on the internet, and something like over half of it is porn, but those few shining stars do make their way out of the sludge. Weird crazy stuff that you’d never see in mainstream. There’s the hilarious All Your Base Are Belong To Us video thing, and explodingdog.com, to name a few popular things in the internet culture. I doubt this stuff could have come to the forefront of our culture through the snail-media (smedia, hahaha).

What it comes down to, is no middle man equals no RIAA and similar organizations, and I believe they know it. I think this lawsuit crackdown is done out of desperation and fear, and possibly a little loathing. A how-come-they-didnt-see-this-coming sort of thing. I don’t think anybody did. The internet was originally just a group of researcher’s computers, networked so they could more easily exchange stale, academia-style information. And now, just look what has happened. In just a short amount of time, too. I don’t believe it’s the end of the world as we know it, like the RIAA would have us to believe. They thought similar things with the advent of recordable cassette tapes. This little snag will work itself out in the next three years, and some new revolutionary event will explode again. Who knows what would happen next? I can’t even begin to imagine.

A Plea for Victory

Almost Gameday! Woo-hoo! Man, I do hope we win this week. Auburn is playing Vanderbilt, at Vanderbilt. Come on, Auburn, surely you can win this week. Even my freshmen year in college, when we went 3 and 8, we beat Vandy. It’s Vandy; please please let us win, or we will be on our worst start since 1950 something, and that’s a sad thing. War damn eagle; beat Vandy; end the laughter.

Sept 11 and Drug-induced Dreams

On this day in 2001, it was a clear, crisp, sunny morning in New York City. Students were in their second week of school. People were getting to work in cars, buses, and trains. Alessandra Fremura had planned on leaving for work at 8:00, but her babysitter was 20 minutes late. Virginia DiChiara couldn’t get her golden retrievers to come in from the backyard, so she decided to have another cup of coffee. Kenneth Merlo was supposed to go in the office, but he decided to spend the morning helping a friend hook up her computer instead of going to his office. Michael Lomonaco stopped in the lobby of the World Trade Center to order some reading glasses from the one-hour eyeglass store. Michael Jacobs was running late when he reached the Trade Center lobby. He rushed to make the elevator, but the doors slid shut in his face. A musician named Michelle Wiley was at home in her apartment. She sat down at her piano in her nightgown and shower shoes, and stared out her window at the Twin Towers before beginning to play.

This was in the Writer’s Almanac for today. I get the Writer’s Almanac every day in my email; it’s a nice thing to wake up to. I like how they broached the subject of today. Doesn’t say what happened, but we all know it. It literally goes without saying.

I had the weirdest, most vivid dream last night, and I must write it down before I forget it. In my dream, Crazy Governor Bush got this splendid idea to have every citizen in America carry these identification badges, called, oddly enough, muffins; he said it was for head-counting purposes in case of a terror attack. They were black with a yellow star on them. Yeah, like the star the Nazis had the Jews wear. I didn’t notice the connection ’till I woke up. Anyway, we were required to have these ‘muffins’ with us wherever we went. I thought it was a stupid idea, and so did my dad. He didn’t wear his at all, and so he was kicked off the beach, and also kicked out of an Auburn game. My sister and mom wore theirs, and I had mine, but I had cut it so it was smaller and put it in my back pocket. Wonder what that means. Maybe that dad is corageous, mom and my sister follow the rules, and I am a coward. I dunno. Anyway, the whole time I was thinking how stupid this is, and it doesn’t make the public feel any safer knowing that our president was worried so much about a terrorist attack that he’d be thinking about head-counts in the case of one. Besides, what if there not really for that at all, but for tracking purposes, like Big Brother. At about that point, the badges turned into real muffins, strawberry ones, and I thought again what an idiot this man is, to think that no one would be able to resist eating their muffin! They were warm and looked delicious. Then I woke up.

Now where the heck did all that come from? Wonder if it means anything? Maybe it does, or maybe it was just the Melatonin I took the night before, which promises sleep but has a side effects of vivid dreams. If it was the Melatonin, that is some good shit; give me some more. Interesting dreams interest me to no end. How interesting.

Remembering Sleeping Beauty

Sorry about the link-fest I had going on those last few posts. Every once in a while I find a link and post it up; these just happened to come in clusters. They are neat links, though. You should visit them, yo.

I was bad yesterday; I bought a DVD. But I had to, this wasn’t just any DVD, it was Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Special Edition DVD. Not only was this the first Disney movie our family owned (in VHS form; got it in 1985 or ’86), this is one of those movies, one of the ones my sister and I know by heart, word for word. This is her movie more than mine; I suppose mine is Disney’s Robin Hood, which we also can recite. But Sleeping Beauty, this was the first. And watching it last night, hearing the words in my head the moment before they were spoken, recognizing the music note for note (I liked Tchaikovsky before I knew what ‘Russian’ meant), memories came flying through my head, if you could really call them memories. It was more like feelings, sensing a different point of time. I was back in first grade, in the living room in Alabaster, laughing with my sister as we skated across the carpet, using the torn-in-two Sleeping Beauty VHS case for skates. I was behind the Brown Chair, too creeped out to watch the part where Mileficent comes out of the fireplace, only her eyes showing. We were playing with the remote, rewinding ‘that scene’ over and over again, just to watch Merriwether take the peanut out of her mouth instead. It was a bit fuzzy, and would have those lines running through the picture as you rewound it, but we saw through those lines to the humor of it.

Of course, with this newer DVD technology, not only can you go backwards, frame by frame crystally clear, you can take still pictures of a frame and save it on your computer for later photoshop fun, or even record bits of the movie, just those funniest scenes, to watch again and again. Record sounds for your computer, so “Good gracious! Who left the mop running?” blares out of your speakers when Windows has that inevitable error. It’s amusing, and you laugh, but its not quite the same as when you were six, with your sister laughing beside you, watching the film for the fourth time that day.