NorthWest Miscellanea

.. because it can make you laugh your rear off  pretty much, and so you got that whole mind-body connection going…

.. you know, the research on how your immune system is boosted when you laugh.
My favorite types of clips to look up on YouTube, which I’d recommend to anyone:
Crank Yankers (it looks lame at first.. cuz all you see are puppets, however this show (cancelled a while back) was my favorite on the comedy channel.. it’s basically short clips of real crank calls, really crazy funny ones.

Conan O’Brien (since I’m not up when his show is on at night, it’s perfect to be able to see some of his show on youtube, he’s beyond hilarious)

Animals - There’s some good ones.. especially one that I saw, where this cat was defending his food and swiping at this dog which wasn’t much bigger.. funny as heck

SouthPark - I saw an 30 min episode on YouTube. (I’m sure by now, it was yanked off). It was where the southpark kids were playing a role playing avatar type game. It was absolutely hysterical. In this episode, this loser kind of slob of a grown up man was completely killing everyone with his avatar character. And the kids decided that they didn’t have the life points to have the kind of arsenal, to stop him.

So they all decided to stay away, for the time being, from this killer character, until they gathered enough points to have advanced shielding, weaponry, etc.. and to do that, they all stayed at their computers, through dinner and overnight, to do repetitive tasks that got them just one or two points, but had low-risk. (such as kill wolves with their weapons) .  Never thought I’d spend 30 min on South Park. I probably will never do that again, but I just couldn’t click Stop after 5 minutes of this particular episode.

Your favorite comedian, see if he’s on YouTube! I recommend: Mitch Hedburg, Kathleen Madigan, Craig Shoemaker, Brent Leek, Carlos Mencia(sp)
There’s more I can’t think up now, but you get the point.

(I’m glad Google bought them, because it gives me confidence that they will stick around, and won’t run out of disk space)

http://www.youtube.com

Coincidentally, this not so high profile actor showed up in two completely different movies that I saw this weekend, both very good. And the movies were exactly twenty years apart.

The first one I rented (in VHS) after reading about good 70’s movies somewhere on a website. It was Straight Time, a superb fact-based 1978 movie about a convict who just can’t seem to make life work after he finishes his 6-year prison term. Dustin Hoffman actually did extensive research studying the real convict this movie is based on and which he of course stars in.

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I’m going to miss Oy.
Oy is a “billy-bumbler”, a character in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. It’s an “other-worldly” type creature, very much like a dog, but also very capable of emotions and cries with real tears, and he laughs if you’re of its “ken”, but many times more vicious than even a pit bull if you’re not on his side.

This is not a spoiler by any means. But I am reading the few remaining Dark Tower books in the series, and so there’s no choice regardless, in saying adios to all the characters.

Note: It’s almost a curse that each time a D.T. book came out, I was also in the middle of learning something new, or otherwise already busy. When I bought both book 6 and 7 of Dark Tower I was knee-deep in Internet Marketing ebooks (95% of which is total crap - i just wanted to learn how to optimize my for-fun-only sites) and forums.

When book 5 was out, I think I was I trying to learn Python.

Book 4: I remember having to refresh my MFC (C++) knowledge for job interviews, but I chose to read Book 4 instead. I don’t remember what happened with the particular jobs. But Wizard and Glass was pretty good (that was book 4).

I will need to say “no” to fiction for a long time, now that I’m finishing this series.

If you work at home, an easy thing to let happen is massive clutterage surrounding the desk. And this includes music CD’s.

If you use your computer CD player to play music once in a while, you might avoid putting them back on their holder stand.

I use RealPlayer for my AUDIO CDS’s, because RealPlayer prompts you when you insert the CD if you’d like to save tracks. When you save the tracks, you never have to use your CD again (and save CD Player wear and tear).

Here’s a good sequence to go by to, little by little, to save your entire collection of CD’s onto your hard disk.

1. Go through the next couple of weeks, (or 6 months if you’re an audio freak, but you’d better have a huge HD), just playing your CD’s on your computer cd player as you naturally desire to do so.

2. Always click Yes for saving to tracks.
( I’m pretty sure that Windows knows whether or not you’ve already saved the tracks for this particular CD, by going over to this folder
C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\My Music
and checking if the name of the album isn’t in there already, but I might be mistaken )

3. When you think you have saved the tracks for all your CD’s, and all they’re on your hard drive, you need to create playlists in RealPlayer:

Under the “Tasks” area, click “New Playlist”

Click “Browse”:

4. From then on, any time you want to play a CD, just click on the RealPlayer icon on your tasktray or taskbar, whether that little icon is, click on “My Library” wherever you can can get to it, so that you have this displaying:

Click on Playlists of course

If you have not seen The Cooler, 2003, with William H. Macy, Maria Bello and Alec Baldwin, it is not a risky rental. Odds are you’ll like this, or like it a lot.