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DVD • Pulp Fiction
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Carousel:
• NIN - The Downward Spiral
• Sevendust - Sevendust
• Alice in Chains - Facelift
• Rammstein - Sehnsucht
• Slayer - South of Heaven

Free Internet Tunes
• Fat Boy Slim Mixes
• Resident Evil Soundtrack

What's For Lunch?
• Veggie burger with grilled vidalas.  B+

Daily Blog
Harry the Knowles review makes Episode Two sound decent.  Amazingly enough.  It's also the most readable review I've ever seen him write.  Most of his stuff is so poorly-written and "everywhere at once" that it's a chore to wade through.  Enthusiasm and amateurish writing is fine at times, but it does get tiring.

Then again, Harry likes pretty much every movie, and he's definitely not so jaded yet that a private screening of SW #2 wouldn't blow his giant sweaty sockies off.  Not that I'd be all that much more cynical about it if given the preferential treatment of an advance screening.

Blade 2 even sounds okay.  The first one was so totally off my radar, I never even considered watching it.  Seemed like another silly cartoon, ala the horrible Batman movies, but cheesier.  Sort of pro wrestling Matrix/Spawn wannabe vampire thing.  I've never seen it.  Assumed Blade 2 would be more of the same, but earlier reviews are that it's pretty good.  The trailer doesn't do anything for me.  Too many fake huge triple spinning leaps with the camera following along in scenes that never have any vermislitude.  They look sort of cool, but you never for an instant aren't thinking, "nice effect, amazing what computers can do now." I.E. it looks pretty, but it's impossible to suspect your disbelief and enjoy the movie, when it's so obviously a special effect.

There are five reviews of it now on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as a positive one on AICN, and the only negative review on Rotten Tomatoes concludes with:

For all the admiration one can have for the superior level of filmmaking and clarity of vision, "Blade II" is an abominably imaginative celebration of violence that revels in guns and all the current gadgetry for hunting and killing. Sickening and utterly pointless, when it's not just outrageously tweaked for shock value, the film is soulless and caters to the darkest of human instincts.

Which makes me want to see it more than the various mildly-positive reviews.  Soulless nihilism and gore is the whole point!  Duh.

I wonder at times if any "real" people are reading anything on the internet other than ESPN.com and porn sites.  It seems that virtually anything on any site will be commented on by some other site, and that commenting on will be commented on by a 3rd or 4th site, and so on.

I hear that the Onion has somewhere in the vicinity of 40,000 readers.  That's their unique visitors anyway, which seems really low given that they have best selling books and are mentioned in every other major news publication on a monthly basis.  But anyway, let's just go with 40k for the example.  Being as everyone with a blog reads it, everyone with any political sort of site reads it, every journalist or person in politics seems to read it... who is left?  That has to be like 95% of their total readership, eh?

Most blogs seem to be read almost entirely by people who have their own blogs.  I read one other blog before I started doing this one, and I now read a dozen or so semi-regularly, and often read at least a few items on a half dozen more each day, as I see interesting links from one I read to one I don't and follow them.

Yet there are millions and millions of people using the internet.  Where are they all going?  Episode 2 trailer downloads and mtv.com?  I don't know.

The genesis of this pointless rambling is an apparently-ignominious remark Lileks made in his blog on Tuesday.  If you don't read him regularly, a very common theme in his bleating/blogging is sales clerks.  In particular the general idiocy, sloth, disinterest, aversion to eye-contact and fake smiles, etc that people in such professions exhibit.

I personally have no problem with that.  I don't particularly want to look at or interact with a person when I buy soap; I'd be fine just putting money in a machine.  I'm busy thinking about myself, I don't need to be jarred out of my reverie by some artificially-cheerful sales person.  Unless she's like really cute, 'n stuff.

But Lileks is a bear about it, he expects, nay demands! a smile and actual human interaction.  The nerve.  Anyway, his mini-tirade Tuesday was about some hapless librarian who would only let him check out two books until he had a real library card.  He'd changed addresses or something, you see.  I didn't think her (the librarian) reaction was untoward, just following the policy, and he (Lileks) was annoyed mostly since he had his grub in tow, and had to therefore only give her 2 of the 4 books she wanted.  Now overlooking, for the moment, the fact that he could almost certainly have put 4 books on the counter, brought 2 books back down, and left the library with the child none the wiser, he was, as all parents are, 500x more concerned about anything that inconveniences their child than they would about something that inconveniences them.  And he poked a bit of ridicule at the librarian's inability to deviate from her instructions.

I thought it was amusing and a bit picky, (identification requires a photo ID or a utility bill; a photo in the paper isn't on the list) but relatively harmless.

Nevertheless, his writing about that (as part of the rest of the stuff he wrote about that day, he definitely didn't make a big deal about the incident) touched off a rebuttal of sorts on another blog (this would be one of the few items on the half dozen new blogs I mentioned above) which you can see here.  I only know about it since Lileks mentioned it in his Wednesday blog.

The other site is called the Midwest Conservative Journal (as opposed to the Midwest what exactly, "Midwest Communist Handbook"?  This rhetorical question is only funny if you've been to the Midwest.) and the writer of it claims to be a librarian.  Or perhaps he just works in a library.

Anyway, he gives 6 reasons why service employees hate the public.  Having worked part time at the stadium for the last 11ish years, I could probably add about 94 more reasons to his list, but anyway, his 6 points are all more or less valid.  The only one that really applies to Lileks is #1, Believe that Rules Don't Apply to You, with partial credit on #6, "Rip your ludicrously-underpaid service prole a new one about things he/she can't change.  Partial credit since he (Lileks) didn't rip in person, but on his website, and he didn't really rip; it was at best a light spindling.

If we can return to the initial point of this rambling, which was that no one reads blogs but other bloggers.  Or so it seems at times.   Actually that's not a very good point, it's more of a half-assed observation, based on the fact that seemingly every other blog on earth spends half their time talking about some other better-known blog.

Since that point is admittedly lacking, here's my take on service industry people.  Which doesn't really include librarians in my mind, since that's more of a profession taken by choice, with some passion for it, rather than purely of financial necessity.  But anyway:

1) Service workers are tremendously stupid.  They didn't go to college, they barely went to high school, they don't read, they watch idiotic crap on TV, and they don't care at all about their job.  It's a way to earn $6.50 (or whatever) an hour, and if you work all day you might clear enough for a sixer of whatever is on sale, and a couple of new CDs.  Or just one CD, with the comically high prices new ones are going for now.

I've been perpetually amazed at how dumb my co-workers at the San Diego Stadium (Qualcomm Stadium now, to be precise) are ever since I've worked there, and trust me, they aren't getting any smarter.

The problem with them being so dumb is that management can not allow them any leeway in policy.  Management must drum into their half-stoned little brains exactly how to do things at all times, and make sure they adhere to the rules like double-sided tape between two hairy thighs.  If the workers are allowed to do things their way, or make exceptions to the rules, they will screw something up, you can just count on it.

This means that, unfortunately, rules are rules, and must be held rigidly.

Of course the occasional smart employee can pretty well do whatever the hell he wants, since he's able to see things objectively and see which rules are important and which can be ignored.  The problem is that management can't very well go around setting lists of who must and who mustn't follow the rules; and they will try to punish any smart employees who do their own thing.

Fortunately...

2) Management is nearly as stupid.  They are in charge and make the policies, but they don't have any intelligence to do anything in an enlightened fashion.  Why are they are in charge?  Because all the smart people who work there move on to a real job after college, and smart people don't want to work in boring, menial supervisor positions.  So the only people available for management in service industry are the same slack-jawed clue-free rules-are-rules troglodytes who started there at 16, and stuck around long enough to move up.

They're 30, or 40, or 50, and have no practical job skills, certainly nothing that would get them hired at a real company, doing anything important.  Their only hope is to stick it out long enough that their boss will quit so they can move up.  They have no initiative, no creativity, no imagination, and are extremely unwilling to try anything new or give anyone working there any leeway.

If you happen to work in a real job, surrounded by intelligent, motivated people, and start to think that humans are actually intelligent creatures, able to adapt and thrive in a variety of situations, you should work for a few weeks in a fast food restaurant, or a high school.  A dose of reality in just how stupid and useless most humans are will do you good.

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