Announcer: Hello, and welcome to America’s faaaaavorite gameshow – HOW! MUCH! MONEY! Ladies and gentleman, here’s your host Briiiiick Rockford!

<The studio erupts in applause. Brick comes bounding out, dressed in a creamsicle-orange tuxedo and carrying an old-timey stalk microphone>

Brick: Thank you! Thank you! Folks, we’ve got a fantastic set of contestants for you tonight…

<The applause surges and Brick pivots to wave to the entire audience>

Brick: Yes! Okay, thank you, thank you so much!

<applause continues unabated, Brick takes an overly formal bow like a robot>

Brick: Ladies and gentleman, please! That’s too much, you’re too kind

<he mimes shooting the crowd with a machine gun, chuckles, then throws away the imaginary gun with an “oh you” gesture, causing the audience to go even wilder>

Brick: Please….. Okay, wow

Brick: Seriously now, really? You’re really still applauding? We’ve got a show to do here, people!

Brick: What’s going on here. Tom, can you hear me in the booth? Tom? What is wrong with this fuck….ing… audience…. My god. These people….

<The Camera pulls back to reveal the audience with gruesome metal contraptions fused to their backs. Cables slither over oily gears, jerking their palms together in a hideous cacophony>

Brick: Sweet mother of christ.

Tom: Brick! Brick, can you hear me? We just got a report of a suspect matching Puzzle Piece’s description leaving the studio lot two hours ago. Any sight of him?

Brick: Puzzle Piece was here all right. If only I’d gotten here sooner…

Tom: We’re too late then?

Brick: Yeah, we’re too late. Looks like we’ve got four hundred new contestants… for Million Dollar Dead-amid.

Next time, on Brick Rockford: Undercover Gameshow Detective!:

Chief: God DAMMIT Rockford. A hundred thousand dollars worth of damage, two stages destroyed and you still haven’t caught Puzzle Piece! You’re off the case!

Brick: But we’ve almost got him, chief! He’s left one clue at each crime scene so far, and tonight was the last piece of Puzzle Piece’s puzzle… piece. Just give me twenty-four hours and we’ll be back in the game!

Chief: You may get back in the game, but Puzzle Piece changed all the rules!

DUN-DUN-DUNNNNNN!

An angry young man yells
At a silver car, belching skidmarks

Later on the stoop outside work he will talk up the cute girl
who smokes outside, observing.
“Next time, I’ll pull a motherfucker out the car and beat his ass”

Next time, a Korean car named after a city in Arizona will squish his stupid little hat

Little old lady on the sidewalk
when you are gone
who will rinse pollen off our sidewalks?

So, I’m on a bit of a tidy, organize, reduce kick at the moment. As such, I’m making an attempt to cut down on the number of DVDs I’ve got sitting around. This is no mean task – I have over the years accumulated a massive collection of DVDs, several of which are extraordinarily terrible. I blame this entirely on poor impulse control and an overly generous tendency to cut filmmakers slack. Slack which they do not deserve!

I thought it might be entertaining to go explain why I’m getting rid of some of these pieces of shit, and see exactly how much I can remember about them without watching anything or looking anything up. I am seriously not wasting any more of my life watching these movies.

Anyway, today I’m getting rid of Wildthings, which is this movie right here:
It was released in the late nineties, and stars Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards and Kevin Bacon. I actually totally forgot about Kevin Bacon in this movie until I looked at the cover art, which is not surprising since you full-on see his entire junk as he gets out of the shower. That’s the kind of thing you tend to want to forget, despite Mr. Bacon’s best efforts to show you Mini-Bacon in several of his movies (Hollowman, I’m looking at you).

The movie is perhaps most famous for the scene where Neve Campbell and Denise Richards make out. I don’t know if I actually bought this movie because of that, but I would like to direct your attention to this graph I made:

This graph is the “Desire To Own A Copy Of Wildthings” vs. “Availability of Internet Pornography.”

Now that I think about it, I remember buying this DVD because it was $15 and at the time Blockbuster was running a promotion where you could get 1 DVD free after buying three. This was back when DVDs just came out, were usually $40, and nobody knew if they were going to be the next Laserdisc or not. On a side note: this is a problem I decided to maximize by buying a DVD player that also included a Laserdisc player, meaning at best I would end up with a machine guaranteed to be at 50% obsolete. Like I said before – poor impulse control.

I’ve literally watched the movie once since owning it, and apart from the surprise shot of Kevin Bacon’s balls and wenis, the only other thing I remember is all of the characters being irredeemable back-stabbing pieces of shit, which really doesn’t make me want to watch it again. So, into the trash/sell pile you go!

Hello! As it’s the summer, I’ve been spending most of my free time gardening. Or, more correctly “yard maintenance.” It is a situation that is too depressing to go into. It’s like a part-time job that doesn’t pay you.

I’m also playing a lot of inFamous for the PS3, which is a really great game. I believe I’m coming up on the end, judging on how much of the map is left, and how badly I’m getting the shit kicked out of me by hordes of well-trained snipers. I’ll have to try the game again on the evil side, worrying about civilians and my Karma accounts for a fair number of my deaths.

Hey, check out what M got for Christmas! The Lego Ultimate Collector’s Millenium Falcon. It’s the biggest kit Lego has ever made, at over 5000 pieces. Last year, she got me the Death Star II, which was 3400 pieces, and that took about 15 hours to build. So I’m expecting this to be an all-weekend project. It’s becoming something of a tradition to build some massive Star Wars Lego object. Last year was the Death Star, the year before that an AT-ST, and I think I assembled the Tie Fighter and X-Wing a few years before. The Ultimate Collector’s and Creator series are really the closest to my earliest experiences with lego. Very few fancy parts to overly simplify the building process, which means you get massive amounts of reusable pieces for making your own creations.

This is it after removing the shipping container.And here’s what it looks like after about 2-3 hours of sorting and preparation. I’m timing this based on watching David Spade’s “Take the Hit” and Eddie Murphy’s “Raw” back to back. I think I watched an episode of Naruto in there as well. Apparently, if you’re in the States, you can watch the entire show of “Raw” for free on Hulu.com, so that’s pretty cool. Anyway, back to the building.

I somehow managed to survive Blizzcon ’08 without my feet exploding from standing in lines for 3 days straight. I’ll say this for Blizzard – they put on one hell of a convention for their fans! The tickets were $100 each, but I think they we got half that back in the goody bag alone. A starter pack of the WoW collectible card game, an account authenticator, three different keychains, and a 4-foot-long inflatable sword among other things. Oh, and a minature bottle of hand-sanitizer. Precious, precious hand-sanitizer.

I’d normally think using hand-sanitizer when you’re not a health-care professional would be a little extreme. I didn’t think that after I sat down at one of the communal Diablo 3 PCs. This is not a joke, or an exaggeration: One of the people who sat at or near that terminal before me smelt like a backed-up toilet. When buying a few shirts from the store, I stood behind a man who smelled like stale urine.

Probably the highlight of the show was the closing ceremony. Patton Oswalt did infact appear to do a show, and I hope some of it appears in his CD coming out next year. The in-house Blizzard band, Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftan played 4 or 5 songs. For those of you not familiar with them, L70etc is a heavy-metal band made up of Blizzard employees, including the Art Director on vocals and the president of the company on Bass. Closing out the night was Videogames Live playing selections from various Blizzard games.

Unfortunately, I missed most of the section on Friday night hosted by Jay Mohr. I’d really liked to have seen the costume contest. Check out the winner. That turtle is not a dude in a costume.

I did get to see the Dance contest, though. Here’s the winner of that:

I’m off to Blizzard’s Blizzcon tomorrow. Tomorrow…. very… very early. So early, I might not even legally be allowed to call it early. Early showed up and me leaving for Blizzcon was like “What took you so long? I’ve been here for ages.” Yeah. In fact, I have to get up in 6 hours. And I’m not writing this in bed, or while asleep, so it’s going to be pretty rough.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibits and going to some of the panels. Maybe I’ll see some of my old World of Warcraft guildmates around. Comedian Patton Oswalt is going to be there… apparently? I don’t see any mention of it on his website. Hope I don’t buy too much stupid shit while I’m there!

Last weekend, a bunch of friends and I drove up to Montreal for a Bachelor party. It was my first time there, and I could see why my friend’s would want to drive 5 hours to go there.

The celebrations themselves were very tame, which was good. The last Bachelor party I went to, we all went to play a variation of bumpercar lacrosse. This time, it was just straight up go karting at Kart-O-Mania. That was a lot of fun, even if every single one of us walked out with a massive welt along the ribs from slamming sideways into the walls.

Anyway, I’m just bringing the trip up as an excuse to talk about how awesome Sirius’s satellite radio is. The variety and quality of channels is pretty great. Also, the feature where you can set up your tuner to alert you whenever an artist you like is playing is amazing. What it needs is the opposite of that, so that if an artist you hate comes up, the radio will automatically switch.

The first thing I would use it for is to make sure I never heard Kid Rock’s All Summer Long ever again. Let me get this straight. You wrote a song about listening to another song? Well, “wrote” is a strong word when you use that as an excuse to sample that song. Writing music is hard, guys!

So hey, the game went gold. Please look forward to it on August 19th!

And if you have Xbox Live, you can get the demo right now. Holy crap!