Number 6 allegedly dead at age of 80.

After drunkenphlower posted that the third episode of Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog was back up, of course I went and watched it.
I think in some ways this hurt worse than the episode where Buffy's mother died.

Didn't realize that Doctor Horrible was only going to be available for a limited time, and so missed Part III by not watching it yesterday. Meh. I'll be buying the DVD when it comes out anyway, and in the meantime I can cultivate patience.

Went out to Fairfax last night and met up with P for dinner at Moby's, which I won't be doing again soon since two hours later my blood sugar was still over three hundred. Holy crap. I blame the rice. Six units of insulin and eleven hours of sleep later, blood sugar is down to tolerable levels (i.e. not requiring a fresh hole in my torso) but still not great.

So: make a deposit at Suntrust, pick up drugs at Kaiser, drop off books at library, throw out more garbage. And watch part III of Dr. Horrible after everything else, because it is SO COOL. Except for Wonder Woman, is there anything Joss Whedon does that isn't awesome?

Is it still TV if it's only on the internets?

Spent most of the day watching vintage (TOS) Star Trek on G4, which was a good time except for the ads, which were pretty annoying - especially the ones for their upcoming Ninjafest and Horrorfest. Not watching either of those, thanks.

Got laundry done, got showered, and placed calls to the local Accountemps offices. Hopefully one of them will have something for me tomorrow, something with 40 hours a week and decent hourly pay. We'll see what happens.

Reviews of House episodes by actual by-God doctors.

I was doing a survey today for one of the companies that uses MyPoints and it occurred to me that despite having a fully functional TV in my room every night since leaving Minnesota, the only TV I've watched was this past weekend when there happened to be a couple of interesting things on the History Channel and Spike TV. Most of my down time on the road was spent sleeping, browsing the internets, or (occasionally) watching the Ai Yori Aoshi box set I picked up before leaving the Gopher State. Whether that was actually a more productive use of my time is an exercise left to the reader.

Tomorrow's pre-work to-do list includes getting a post office box out here in Chantilly and retrieving my boxes from UPS in Alexandria, assuming they haven't thrown them out already. I'm also going to pack lunch - Strayer isn't charging me for chow time, and eating lunch on the road before I get there can get messy and expensive.

I'm also changing my browsing habits...while I've been reading Megan McArdle since 2001, when she was blogging at Live from the WTC (later renamed Asymmetrical Information) I don't think I'll be keeping her blog at the Atlantic on my A-list of blogs I follow daily. For one thing, the Atlantic is paying her to blog about economics, and that's all she's doing. Which is boring*. For another, the commenters at the Atlantic are the worst sort of fever-swamp Democratic Underground moonbats, and I'm just not willing to voluntarily put up with that. Ms. McArdle will be cut to the quick, no doubt. [/sarcasm] Ironic that this should happen after I finally show up in Washington and have a non-zero chance of actually meeting the young lady.

Finally, if you've read Quartered Safe Out Here, any of the Flashman novels, or the monumentally awesome The Pyrates, you MUST read McAuslan Entire, which is the sequel to the first book and tells the tales of Dand McNeill after he gets his commission at the end of World War II and goes from Borderers in the jungles of Burma to the Highlanders in the Libyan desert. Originally published as three separate books (The General Danced at Dawn, McAuslan in the Rough and The Sheikh and the Dustbin) the book is full of win and hilarity. Unlike QSOH, it isn't a novel so much as a collection of stories, most of which revolve around the oddities of life in a Highland regiment and a fair number of which involve the "filthiest soldier in the Regiment," Private McAuslan, who more often than not saves the day in a manner nobody could have possibly seen coming. Really, you need to read this, and don't skip ahead to "The Constipation of O'Brien" or I'll banjo ye, I will.

*If you find economics more exciting than I do, by all means pop on over there, and take a gander at King Bananian's joint while you're at it.

jamestrainor and I got together for our usual Sunday swim, but this week we used the indoor pool at the Thunderbird instead of the outdoor pool at Fremont Court for what I hope are obvious reasons. It was noisy and crowded so we didn't stay in long.

We caught some TV while he tried to arrange a lift home. History Channel's Living Weapon was okay, but Adult Swim's Frisky Dingo was a weak attempt to duplicate the humor of Venture Brothers, and it was epic fail. I suppose it might have made more sense if I'd seen any of the previous episodes...nah. I didn't even want to give Moral Orel a shot - the technical quality was good, but the story seemed deliberately intended to piss off anyone even slightly religious. No thanks.

And so to bed...

It's Dame Diana Rigg's birthday.(Llama Butchers)
One of my plans for future summer vacations is to acquire the requisite box sets of The Avengers so I can see all the 1965-68 episodes I missed when I was a kid. She was also fabulous as one of the Bond girls in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and as a nun (!) in In This House of Brede, or so my mother says.

Space: Above and Beyond is one of the more obscure fringes of media fandom; the series didn't spring from an already-popular comic series, movie, or book, had no stars, and ran for only thirteen episodes on Fox before being killed by the network, whose execs apparently resented the fact that the show had become much more than Space: 90210. Still, for several years the S:AAB fans of the Space Ready Reserve were extremely active, playing an unusually proactive role in improving the series and heaping praise on the Sci-Fi Channel when SFC picked up the show a year or so after Fox cancelled it. In addition to show-related stuff, the SRR also conducted a number of charity "operations" in support of the troops in Bosnia and Iraq.
( credit where credit is due )

I don't think I was at my best this Saturday during the AD meeting. I felt horribly disorganized, disconnected and scattered, but I did manage to put out the news about the hotel, remind the department heads to get their procedures and budgets together by the end of September, remind people about the Board election to fill Josh's seat, and get out of there by 3:30 or so.redmartel took notes, which I have to transcribe and post, and depending on how awful I feel tonight I'll take care of that little detail then. In the meantime, I got the boxes tokenfanboy scored for me and gave jamestrainor his copy of The Venus Wars, which he'd loaned me a few months ago.

So then it was off to the Arkham Asylum, where cajones and chebutykin were hosting an Ultraviolet marathon. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, does that series ever kick ass! It's a fabulous combination of Hellsing and The X-Files at their best, and I am genuinely sorry that there's only six episodes. They're damn good episodes, though. So was the episode of Doctor
Who, "Dalek", shown afterward, which was also directed by Joe Ahearne. By the time that wrapped up it was after 11 and I was feeling the effects of a very long day, so I headed home...only to realize around the Highway 55 exit that I'd forgotten my cell phone, sunglasses, Palm Pilot, and my laptop. So I decided to get off on 55 and go back up to the Asylum. Traffic was light enough at that hour that I slid over from the center lane - and found out at the bottom of the ramp that it's not a plain "H" intersection. So, after checking the traffic, I turned onto the northbound ramp back onto 100 without bothering to get all the way over into the eastbound lanes of 55, and that's when the police officer behind me hit the lights. Thanks to my clean driving record, though, he let me off with a written warning and a pointed lecture about fat guys driving SUVs like sports cars. Since I grew up down South, I shut up and nodded and took my warning. It was better than arguing my way into a ticket.

Got back to the Asylum, where cajones and chebutykin were (thank God) still up watching Twilight Zone, got my gear, and got on home to bed. And that was Saturday.

Cobb's not happy with Robots and seems to think that Robin Williams is the main problem. Me, I haven't thought Robin Williams was funny since before the Clinton Administration, so I have no trouble believing that at all.

Hey, Hollywood: This is why so many people are turning to anime. The art is better, and so are the stories. Disney fired most of its animators a while back and kept the rest busy with stupid stories that nobody over the age of six wanted to see, while WB is busy pissing away the Looney Tunes franchise by needlessly turning the funniest rabbit in history and his friends into ridiculous "superheroes". No wonder the best American cartoon shows on TV are the mockeries Cartoon Network airs on Adult Swim.

Given that the Cephalexin is doing a great imitation of Dracula and sucking out all my energy, my goal yesterday afternoon was to get home from work without killing myself and spend a long evening in bed, preferably asleep.

So of course I wound up over at Josh's place watching Versus, having been lured there by the promise of Drawn Together (horrible, just horrible, I'm going to have to buy the DVD) and Aqua Teen Hunger Force along with some professional wrestling. Well, one out of three was okay, though I could have done without Squidbillies. Versus is a pretty cool movie, very much a Joe Bob Briggs kind of flick with much sword-fu, gun-fu, kung-fu, gallons of blood and a small army of zombies. Worth seeing, definitely.

Anyhow, that kept me up way past my bedtime, but I managed to drag myself out of bed and get to the courthouse to take care of the overdue registration on the truck. No more activity for me, though; going to curl up with a warm laptop and watch anime between bouts of drowsing.

Yesterday I turned 45. I didn't do all the things I'd tentatively planned on doing, but that's okay; got the AD meeting taken care of, hung out with stuckintraffik and the Reverend, after which we went to do the Chinese buffet thing (without stuckintraffik) before seeing Team America: World Police over at the AMC Southdale with tjstriker.

Was the movie good? Fuck, yeah. ^_^ I'm sure a number of the people on my friends list will find it crude, politically incorrect, clumsy satire and excessively violent (well, maybe not the last one), and they'll be right, but hey - it's a puppet movie by the guys who brought you South Park, so you know what you're in for. Vomiting, death, dumb jokes about sex, and goofy puppet stuff.

We needed to hydrate after that, so the Reverend and I bade adieu to tjstriker, got some coffee & Coke and went over to his place to hang out. I was exposed to Aqua Teen Hunger Force and The Venture Boys, which are both funny - more so than the incredibly lame Sealab 2021 - and then caught up on the last fifteen years of pro wrestling, which I think qualifies as a guilty pleasure. Festivities ended about 5 AM, and now I need to go back to Josh's and retrieve my vest...which has my sunglasses in it. Owww.