Go to Bed Old New Age Man

I am listening to the latest Vangelis album, Rosetta. Some people put entire albums up on YouTube, or so I hear.

I had a vision of my sixteen year-old self realizing that some thirty years on, he would be listening to Vangelis and Tangerine Dream a lot and what would he think? That fresh-faced Cure fan in 1987?

I like to think he'd whisper softly "Awesome!"

Saw II

I cut down a tree in our backyard this weekend. Or, more accurately, I cut lots of gigantic heavy branches off a tree armed only with a woodsaw (not unlike the ones you get for precocious toddlers), and dodged quickly out of the way as the limbs crashed earthward. Somehow, I managed to avoid crippling injury.

This is a black pine that a landscaper planted about ten years ago, when we had our back yard redone, taking it from a nightmarish jungle that probably housed at least one tribe of tiny devil-men into an alarmingly well-groomed paradise. (It has since reverted to just kind of unkempt and dead, but I took lots of pictures of it when it was just done so I have the proof.) He planted the tree and assured us that it would get to be "no more than ten or twelve feet". Of course it is now closer to twenty feet and now represents everything our neighbor resents about us, as it stretches into their yard, threatening their electrical wires and casting a lightless pallor over their once-beautiful hydrangea.

What I want to say is that I have grown as a person, because even though I formed a cunning plan for how to fell a twenty-foot tall pine tree without maiming myself, I recognized that it was fairly likely I would end up maimed in this scenario and chose not to do it.

This represents a significant step forward.

Futility

I admit it. I am not very good at video games. I used to play them a lot. And I mean a lot. Your Colecovision. Your ROB the Video Robot. But when I look back at my greatest video game accomplishments, probably #1 is finishing Pitfall on the Atari 2600 when I was 11. And I went backwards, which somehow seems less honorable.

I am just now--just now!--playing HalfLife 2 Episode 1, despite the fact that I have owned the game for years. I have a stack of games I started playing a good five years ago and kind of dicked around with for a week or a month before completely forgetting what I was doing.

Every once in a while I'll start up DragonAge: Origins again and it takes me an hour of confusion to remember that I'm supposed to be defeating some dwarf champion in the Battle Arena so I can oust a corrupt dwarf politician. And I have this terrible feeling that I should be able to make potions or something but I can't even remember what button to press to make that happen. And which dwarf politician is the good one? So much pressure.

My daughter plays Animal Crossing with a slavish devotion. I envy her this focus, which I seem to remember having when I spent entire afternoons playing Cosmic Ark in 1983.

*sigh*

At least there's always Katamari Damacy.

What is this thing again?

I think it may be time. Time enough has passed that virtually all blogs have disappeared. This is provably true because just now I looked at the list of blogs I had linked on my Blogger template and all but maybe one was gone (and one was now a link to a porn site). Possibly everyone assumes that this site has disappeared as well, so I can finally get back to blathering away here, safe from the prying eyes of the internet. I have been roused from my cryosleep, secure in the knowledge that we have achieved a beautiful utopia, where freakish pig-men could not possibly get really really close to being elected president. Wait...what?!

Ow!

Would you like to see a video of a guy intentionally getting stung by a tarantula hawk? You would probably think "If I have to watch a guy get stung by a huge, monster-like insect, I'd prefer that he has a really dumb name." Maybe a name like Coyote Peterson?

Well, you're in luck.

Not to spoil the delights of watching this video, but you get to see this guy rolling around on the ground and going AAAAAAAAAGH. And that's not to mention the really unnecessarily long intro section where you get to see him getting bitten by a crocodile on purpose and sucked on by leeches, also on purpose.

I challenge you not to laugh while watching that, especially with the subtitles on.

Coyote Man: AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH
Subtitle: [groaning]

Also, Coyote Man says it's for science, this getting stung by things and bitten by other things. Very scientific!
Cameraman: Are you ok? Does it hurt bad?
Coyote Man: OH MY GOD IT HURTS SO BAD!

Science!