Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

isc "how was my day" type bullshit up here, with a worthless 3D card rant, and one amusing news item about the disastrous Dennis Miller TV show. With film clip.  Below we've got reader mail, of the long form variety, and my, as-usual, long-winded and wide-ranging replies.

Monday was a pretty shitty day.  The evening was fine, but the day sucked. And since misery loves company, here's the summary.

I woke up feeling like shit.  Not much sleep, about my usual 5-6 hours, and that was after I spent over 11 hours in bed Saturday night/Sunday morning, when I was exhausted and went to bed early with Malaya, and ended up getting up late with her too. It was nearly 2pm, owing to my 8am bedtime, and I had a quick breakfast that I didn't enjoy, then headed out the door, since I'd promised Malaya a Jamba Juice.  Unfortunately it was just past the time the schools were getting out, and there was a ton of very slow housewife traffic heading to downtown Lafayette.  People who can't drive always put me on edge, at least when I'm stuck behind them on the slow residential streets in this whitebread community.

We browsed a bit at the overpriced sports store, wondering who the hell they expected to buy last season's mid-range Burton snowboards for $470, 25% off sale or not, when the same boards were $320 and 40% off at SportsMart in Concord, then headed home.  Still stuck in the no-acceleration, stop on yellow, don't bother signaling turns, housewife crowd. I was planning on a jog Monday afternoon, since I'd been due to head out again last weekend, but never had time with lots of errands and out of the house activities Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoon.  Waking up well past noon doesn't help with daylight exercise either, I must admit.

Malaya poked me to finally call my tax guy when we got home, so I endured a short phone call with him in which I found out how much money I'm likely to owe and how much more hassle I must endure this year.  I hate organizing paperwork more than just about anything, for no clear reason, and collecting my stuff for the IRS always makes me very pissy.  I'm sure I also get annoyed at tangible, undeniable evidence of just how poor I really am, but us doesn't like to think about that.

After that I just wanted to relax with half an hour of D2 while I let my food settle (I can't do hard exercise right after eating without feeling loggy and like I'm about to puke.) So of course when I turn on the computer and start up Diablo II, there's a long gray screen with a white bar on the bottom, and then it boots me to the now-familiar "dumping physical memory since one of your components was locked in an infinite loop" screen, that was it.  I cursed ripely, threw the keyboard tray in, and stomped off to put on running shoes.

I couldn't even focus my anger and frustration into physical exertion, since my breakfast wasn't settled yet, my legs weren't very strong, and I kept getting side cramps, something I hadn't had trouble with for several weeks. Too pissed to breath properly, I guess. (The key to avoiding side cramps is long, steady, full exhales.)  Thus I passed an hour on the 6+ mile, super hilly trek, walking a lot more than I usually have to, out of sheer exhaustion and side cramping, and drove back home, in an even blacker mood than I'd left it.  My only consolation was that I'd thought about my novel a lot while jogging/walking, and was considering burying myself in fiction for the rest of the day. Putting on the headphones, ignoring the kitties, and just banging away for about 10 hours, with breaks to eat and spend some time with Malaya.  Not too much, since in my mood I would only bring her down and we'd wind up in some stupid argument that I started by being angry at everything.

However, once I was back home and had a shower I started to mellow out a bit, and Malaya was there with hugs and comfort, and after a big salad/pasta dinner I felt a lot better. We even relaxed on the couch and with my love with her arm over my slumped shoulders and a warm Dusty turning upside down and purring on my lap, it was pretty hard to stay upset. Later we spent some more quality time and I fiddled more with the goddamned computer and got some work done, so on the whole it was an okay day.  Just one with a shitty beginning. 

I even got a haircut in the evening, one that was about how I actually wanted it (the first time that's happened in my memory, given the way stylists always insist upon not understanding what I want my head to look like, and how they must always put their own unwanted touches into the final design) courtesy of Malaya, and the new hair trimmer I picked up at CostCo last week, for $25.

Unfortunately she did it too much how I said, and as a result it's too short in the back; shaved up to the crown of my head, which leaves a sort of dent on the top/back which the hair on top can only partially cover. I also managed to put a gouge into the right temple (partially visible in the middle shot below) by shaving up from my sideburns with too low an attachment (1/8 inch), which I covered up by shearing the sides down in a mangy-sort of pattern around there, and putting a semi-matching dent into the left side to balance things out.

This is a series of shots, of sorts.  Jinx was on the bed, being cute and seductive, so I got a shot of her. Well, actually four shots, but this was the only one that came out more or less in focus and that the bedspread wasn't a brilliant, glowing white from the camera flash.  I then scooped up the little cutie and snapped one of us together. She's not real impressed at being held partially upside down, as you can see.  Then I finished off the series with this self portrait in the bathroom mirror.  As you could probably have guessed, this is the only one of three shots I took there that are at all in focus.

Why I spent time taking self portraits to show off (a debatable term) my new haircut when I had Malaya sitting in the living room, and she would have been more than happy to click away a dozen shots of my head, is not a question I have an answer to.

As for the 3d card, it's really quite a bitch. It's the lowest quality GeForce 4 on the market, the PNY MX440, and I only got it since it was a ridiculously cheap $49 at Fry's, with a $20 mail in rebate.  But since I hardly game anymore, and I'm much more concerned with maximizing my bank account than my FPS, it should have been plenty. (Of course Fry's now has the same model with 128MB for $59, when it was $89 opening day when I got mine.  Grrrr.)

The problem seems to be the drivers, rather than the hardware, since Malaya spent some time hunting up technical info and help sites last night and found hundreds and hundreds of forum posts from people with the same card who are having terrible problems getting it to work. You'd think that before PNY put a new type of card on the market they'd make sure there were some drivers out that actually made it functional, but hey, why let that sort of thing get in the way of turning a profit?

I've tried the newest drivers from Nvidia, I've tried it with the older ones that came on the CD-Rom, and I've tried it with the November 2003 ones Windows update recommended.  And yes, I uninstalled the previous drivers each time, restarted, etc. All three of them work, more or less for 2D, though I had lots of random, odd crashes (like when trying to load quicktime movies) with the CD-ROM drivers. However none of them will work with 3D.  All lock up and dump to a bluescreen, or require me to turn the computer off if I try to do D2 in 3D, and I get the same result if I try to launch the 3D-required World of Warcraft.  I've not tried any other games, having no other games to try, but even if it did miraculously work with some other title, I don't want to play any other titles.

Funny how I feel my 3d card purchase, cheap though it was, is a waste given that the card won't actually work with any 3d games. I'm out of things to try at this point, and I'm just giving up.  There's nothing 3D I really care about playing now, I hardly game at all and feel guilty for the wasted time when I do, and I get very annoyed and frustrated when I try to fix something that I shouldn't have to spend 30 seconds worrying about.  It's a consumer product that costs a lot of money.  It should work when I plug it in, especially after I take the extra step to go online and get the latest drivers that the card manufacturer's website points me to. 

; the latest Nvidia drivers seem to be stable and functional, so long as I don't do anything that actually requires 3D processing power, so I'm basically right where I was a week ago, less the $50 and several hours I've spent buying and installing and fucking with drivers. I'm just going to wait and hope for a new batch of drivers that are actually functional with this card, unless I get an unexpected burst of energy and do the trial and error method of installing old drivers at random, simply hoping one set will work while the other newer ones didn't. Aren't computers fun?

¤ Eric Alterman was recently on the Dennis Miller show (who know he even had a show on some distant cable network?) and you can see tape of his appearance here. It's rather a surreal discussion; Alterman scores point after point about how the Bush administration has lied and mislead and misrepresented, and Miller, who is a Conservative, has nothing to say.  It's downright eerie.  Miller just sits there, slumped way back in his chair with his chin in his hand, as Alterman lectures him on recent events.  It's like even Miller doesn't care about his show at this point.

Where's the funny, clever, obscure-referencing guy from SNL and MNF?  Where's the quick witted comedian? He looks as bored with the whole thing as Bush as an economics summit.  I suppose we should give him credit for letting the liberal talk, rather than just shouting over him and turning off his mic the way Bill O'Reilly does, but it's not exactly the liveliest interview you'll ever hear.  Various drunken-sounding people in the audience make more noise and seem more into things than the host, FFS.

I've never seen the Dennis Miller show (obviously, since I didn't even know there was such a thing at this time) so I have no idea how he handles his show, but this was possibly the worst interview I've ever seen on a media program.  I don't know if Miller thought he was being cool and catty and aloof and skeptical or what, but he looked to me like he was just totally out of his depth.  Faced with Alterman, who really knew what he was talking about and had an agenda, Miller was helpless to ask intelligent questions, much less match ideology or try to rebuke points he disagreed with.  It was painful.

I have not gotten that much mail in recent weeks, but what I've gotten has frequently been very good.  The February mailbag will bear witness to that when it goes online later this week, and I'm hoping to get the March one posted not long after March ends, since I've meant to get back to a bunch of people, either directly or via the blog, and haven't been doing so.  That being said, here are a couple of recent mails, starting off with one from C in which he comments at length on the news story I posted yesterday, about the silly English lesbian who auctioned off her virginity.

The double indented portion is him quoting my blog from yesterday.

Hello

It's also funny that her parents are very well off, making over £60,000 a year, yet they won't help her at all with her school loans, even though they said things about how they feared she was selling her soul. Something makes me think they aren't on real good terms with their daughter, and that perhaps her lesbianism has something to do with it.

Ah well. I bet you are right. But come on, can you REALLY blame them? If you had a daughter who was stupid enough to do things like this, what would you do? Do you seriously believe that you can help a person who is willing to "open up" to the public the way she did? I mean, just consider the factoids:

* she's ugly (like most britons)
* she's inexperienced (daa, virgin)
* she's not interested (lesbian)
* she could be aware of all the freak action going on around this whole 'sex' business

I mean, anyone with their right mind would assume that some total freak would pay the most, for whom virginity and causing pain, or at least causing discomfort is valuable. Yet she went along with this whole mess, and got terribly lucky. I'm trying to fight down the urge to wish that she got at least a bit mutilated. Ok, forceful anal or something like that. And I will try to fight down this urge throughout the day and if I manage I'll let you know.

Btw, after all this, some would even question her "being a lesbian". Someone who is so clearly out of touch with reality and this whole sexuality deal might just overemphasize some past bad experience, or whatnot. Then again, I pity the parents since they HAVE to deal with this shit, this idiot being their daughter and such. I wish I'll never end up with a sibling like that.

I hadn't really given this much thought, other than as a way to segue into a general discussion of prostitution. Unlike C, I actually sort of admire the girl.  I wouldn't do it myself, even if I had bidders or a vagina, but hey, if men are stupid enough to pay 1000x what it would cost with a whore, just because a woman has never had sex before, why not take their money? I'm sure she didn't exactly enjoy it, but hey, it was basically a small lottery win in exchange for some awkwardness in a bedroom.  Most women suffer far worse sexual experiences for free.  Repeatedly.

I don't know what the relationship with her parents is, I just saw one article mention that they were well off, but weren't paying any of her school expenses at all.  I don't think she resorted to this virginity auction right away; she probably asked her parents for money for years, found herself sinking deeper and deeper into debt, and hatched this scheme out of desperation, perhaps even hoping it was one last way that was sure to get mommy and daddy to send her a check or two. There must be some serious bad blood in that family; maybe they hate her for being a lesbian, maybe they've never gotten along well, maybe whatever. But she clearly cracked under far less financial pressure than many/most college students face, and her parents are clearly very against supporting her, if they'd let her go through with the whole thing rather than help her out financially.

And yeah, she's lucky she didn't wind up with some crazy guy, or get murdered, or get HIV, etc. But I still don't feel the hostility towards her that some people seem to. *cough*

To Leo, re: your mail from the weekend... Happy Birthday.  Not so happy that I was going to do a special Sunday blog just for you, but happy nevertheless. I didn't think you were that young, based on your quality of writing.   Nor did I know you read my blog, but that's another issue.

Here's a long mail from a reader I don't believe I'd heard from before.  He's obviously been reading for a while and taking excellent notes, though.

Your recent blogs about Claim Jumper sparked my memory a bit, and made me hungry for some motherlode cake :)

I remember my brother talking about Claim Jumper a couple years ago, as he had just been there with some friends and brought back what looked like his entire meal. I was curious as to why he hadn't eaten his most of his sandwich or any of his dessert (motherlode cake). He explained that it was basically impossible to eat everything that came with the meal in one sitting, mostly because their sandwiches were the size of dinner plates. After looking at the sandwich and cake for a while, I saw his point. It took us a couple days to eat the cake.

A couple months later I went out to dinner with my friend, his parents, and another friend of ours. Low and behold, we went to CJ. There was a big line, at least an hour or two, as I recall. So we walked around and visited the stores for a while, and got some cool stuff at Trader Joe's.

When we finally were seated, we decided to get some appetizers. Appetizers and drinks followed. My milkshake was two-three times the size of the average milkshake you get at other restaurants or fast-food places. The appetizer plate, was more like four plates. At least one-two of each appetizer on the menu. For the main course I ordered a club sandwich, one of my friend's got a steak, and the other had a burger. The sandwich and burger were both the size of large dinner plates. None of us even got close to finishing our meals, but we got dessert to go. His parents got three motherlode cakes, one for each of us.

Random questions:

1. What's the best restaurant that you've been to since you moved to Northern California?

2. How goes the novel?

3. A couple months ago you mentioned that you and Malaya were interested in martial arts classes...are you still interested? Did you ever decide on a particular art that you'd like to learn?

4. Have you ever posted a list of your favorite books or authors?

Good luck with the novel and (very belated) congrats on finding Malaya

I'll hit his Q's, in order. 

1) Nothing leaps to mind. I've eaten at a lot of good places up here, but mostly chain type stuff, since that's what my budget is at this time. Malaya and I ate at Zuni Cafe, a rather expensive place in downtown SF with dad, but it wasn't really that good.  I'm also not interested in really expensive, ornate food; I prefer simpler stuff that I actually get enough of to feel satisfied by (something we didn't get at Zuni).  Good Italian or Chinese or even just a chicken or fish sandwich is always much more likely to please me than gourmet food at 5x the price. So I guess I'd have to say the deep fried sesame walnut prawns at Chef Chow's in Moraga, (not too far from where we live) is my favorite dish, although I only have it once or twice a month and it's just a nicely seasoned, crispy, Chinese shrimp dish.

2) Lagging, lately. I tend to blog more about it when I'm thinking more about it and getting a lot of work done.  Lately I've had lots of good ideas, but not done that much actual writing.  Mostly I've been rewriting and editing, which gets boring in a hurry when I only save an hour or two to work on the novel, 3 days in a row, and it takes me 30 or 45 minutes each day to get through what I edited and modified the day before.  I really need to just put in some 4 or 6 hour blocks of time, every day, and move through all of the lagging, needs-editing ending to chapter 2 and 3, and get to the stuff I've got well-outlined and planned in chapter 4-8 or 9.  And yes, I've been saying that for weeks and weeks as chapters 1-3 have gotten longer and more involved and been edited and edited again.

3) We're still somewhat interested, but our (my) general dislike/distaste for actually leaving the house, going somewhere, and spending money once we arrive is holding us back. Also Malaya works, goes to the gym every day, and tries to find time to work on her book and work projects, and I'm trying to write a novel, so it always seems like there are better more productive ways to spend our time.  And yes, we'll probably always regret it.

4) I've posted shot reviews of numerous authors I like, and some others I don't, and at least a dozen book reviews over time, though since I'm a year behind on sorting old blogs into articles and reviews most of that requires you to have read the blog daily since 2002, or else to have the patience to sift through the old daily archives pages to find what you're looking for.  Or you can just search the site via google (book review site:blackchampagne.com) and find much of that stuff.

However none of that is a definitive favorite books/authors list, and I should certainly do such a thing to head up my reviews section.  I have plans to reorganize and improve that part of the site, but then again I've got plans to do that to every page of the site, and it seldom actually happens. I'm putting off doing that for reviews since so many of them are in the daily updates over the past year, and I really need to go through and add another 15 or 20 pages there, mostly of movie reviews, before I do more organization.  I'll then break up the fantasy author and horror author pages into separate pages for each author, elaborate on them greatly, and have some sort of mail fiction review page with more general comments on authors. And my best/worst lists and recommendations.

Just briefly, I'd say that while Clive Barker is the best "writer" I've ever read, in terms of prose and style, he's far from the best story-teller, and that lots of very mediocre "writers" can actually turn out extremely fun and enjoyable books.  There's seldom a great deal of overlap between who I think the best writer(s) are, and which authors have turned out books that are a great deal of fun to read.

I'd say that the ongoing George R R Martin Song of Fire and Ice series is the best fantasy I've ever read, that Clive Barker's early short stories (The Books of Blood) are the best short works I've ever read, that Barker's vast novel Imajica is the best (but far from the most enjoyable to read) novel I've ever read, and that any number of the early Stephen King novels are probably the most fun reads I've ever had.  The Stand, Salem's Lot, It, etc.  I also enjoy a lot of pulpier stuff, works I'd never defend on writing quality, but that I enjoyed reading a great deal.  The first 5 or 6 books in numerous fantasy series would fall into that description, including McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, Piers Anthony's Xanth (Which was fresh up through book 6 or 7, while he's written an appalling 29 of them by now) and the first 3 books of his Apprentice Adept series.  However I'm also tainted by my memories and adolescence; since I hold far warmer memories for any number of novels I read then than I would likely hold if I read them cold today.  That's true for most types of entertainment though; it certainly explains the continuing interest in Star Wars that most 25-45 y/o adults harbor, for instance.

Anyway, I'll elaborate and organize my thoughts on this topic in far greater detail once I'm doing an actual reviews section feature on it.  I'm already imagining what I'd say about least favorite novels, worst writers, favorite films, least favorite films, and so on. Pity I can't see me doing that actual page and section any time soon.

<-- Previous  --  Next -->
Archives Index Page