The article in question actually comes from CNN so that adds to this entire thing.  Apparently Avril Lavigne is far too sexy for their really stupid religious standards.  So women can’t perform unless they’re in a burka?  Oh wait, that’s not the rules in that country.  Here they are.

Malaysia requires all performers to wear clothes without obscene or drug-related images and be covered from chest to knees. They must also refrain from jumping, shouting, hugging and kissing on stage

This leaves so much up for interpretation.  A full latex body suit for example meets those requirements.  I’m certain there happens to be more needed there, but that’s all I have to go by.  I’m certain judging by the pictures of her that I’ve seen over the years.

Yet again, it’s modern society being brought down by the man of some stupid mythical figure out there in the clouds.  Come on people.  Grow the fuck up, don’t live your lives being scared you’re going to be spanked when you die.  You don’t know what happens, and neither do I.

In the final part for that.  That picture came up on a google image search for malaysian muslims.

The coolest part about all of this was watching them set up.  After it was all done you could hear some dude yelling "Fire in the hole! FIRE IN THE HOLE!" then a rather large explosion that shook the walls ever so slightly. 

After the explosion me and the rest of the office tried walking out to see what’s up, but the cops pushed us back in.  We’re trapped like rats I swear.

Photos are in my flickrstream. Only had my iPhone on me so not the best quality.

Update: After they exploded what ever, the cops and bomb squad bugged out pretty fast. I’m going to assume that it was just a homeless person’s suitcase or what ever it was full of clothes. If it was anything serious they probably wouldn’t have left in such a hurry. 7th and Parker are open again.

Of course that wouldn’t make a great great story unless one gets free instead of burning up once the sun rises.  Now here we go, it’s going to be World War Z (sorry Max Brooks).  I have to say I had never even heard of this until today, and I’m glad I read it.  It was an awesome read, and points out a few flaws in the way our government goes into war with the middle east and how we actually operate it against UN regulations.

For more information head over to super hero hype or Red5 Comics.  This one’s definitely in my bag for it’s 6 issue run.

It wasn’t very difficult.  Just read this a couple of times and take the practice tests in the pdf and you’re pretty much golden.  If that wasn’t enough the test is only thirty questions, of which you have to get eight wrong in order to fail.  Something crazy stupid like that.

I’m a firm believer that everyone should exercise their right to bear arms, or arm bears if you please.  I do have a hunting rifle, but I plan on using that barrel for spare parts and replacing it with an M38 sometime this fall.  Along with that I plan on getting a Glock 17 (rented one at the range last week and loved it) as well as a Ruger 10/22.  I’ve mentioned the latter in previous posts.

Now to obtain my hunting license and figure out some spots to shoot a pig.

I’m writing about something something I just just read over at the New York Times that really perked my interest.  Invincible by Robert Kirkman is getting the small screen treatment.  It’s definitely a fun comic and happens to be written by one of my favorite writers for the past year and half or so.  It’s really the technology that has me stoked.

But it’s not quite animation in the traditional sense. “I like to think of it as cinematic comics — digital cinematic comics,” said David Gale, executive vice president of MTV New Media, which is producing the episodes in partnership with Gain Enterprises.

I’ll be honest here I didn’t see the animation that was recently done of Astonishing X-Men #1, but it definitely sounds cool.  I may have to pop over to Marvel.com and check it out so I know what’s what with this style of animation.  The fact that they’re going to have up to issue #36 by september makes it awesome.  Perhaps when they catch up to #50 they will release new "episodes" as the issues are released monthly.  How cool would that be?

For those that don’t know, the image I use in my header is from a Fall of Cthulhu comic from them.  I forget which number off the top of my head, but it seemed fitting with the theme I found for wordpress.  Too bad they’re not releasing that one for free, but they are releasing Cthulhu Tales.  I always figured anything with Cthulhu should be given out for free since it’s based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

In other comic news the full trailer for The Spirit has been leaked.  I know I’ll probably see this but it does look over the top.  Then again a lot of trailers seem to look that way and the film can be very good.  Then again will this end up like the latter two Matrix films?  Or is it going to be as awesome as Sin City?  Only time will tell.

I haven’t been able to do an update for a little over a week due to the fact the machine I host on was in transit from Ireland to the Bay area.  Needless to say, that meant no web site, at least I host my email elsewhere.  It has been an interesting couple of weeks since I came down to San Diego.

I really don’t enjoy how hot and humid it is down here.  It’s a little too much for me, mostly because I’m not used to such weather after spending a little over three yeras in San Francisco.  At least in the east bay it’s not humid when it’s hot.  I’m sure I could get used to it after an extended period of time, but fuck it’s hot down here.  I sweat just doing nothing, sweat buckets.  If I walk then I’m pouring sweat.  Not fun if you plan on going out.

I did clown a couple of Thursdays ago.  Nothing major just some dirty puppet dancing at the House of Blues down town with Bruce and Willie Bologna.  When you’re doing something that crazy it gives you free reign to do what ever you want.  Hot girls would come up to me and make me grab them in all sorts of places and freak dance.  Sometimes I love weird shit just for that reaction.  At least there were no hippies about.

So the reason for the bug on this post is because when hanging out with Willie Bologna a constant topic of conversation is SHTF.  Basically what to do when the shit really hits the fan.  How do you survive, do you have  plan?  That sort of thing.  Since he’s crazy about surviving and making sure that he’ll live to witness the chaos he’s a great source of information.  Was going to pick one of those up anyway since they’re good times for plinking, small game and getting traget practice in cheap.

Probably going to do a camping and hiking trip up on Angel Island sometime in October.  Should still be fairly warm and not raining at that time.  Can see if I remember shit from when I was a boy scout.  Of course it might end up being rather rough for a first attempt.  Fun none the less!

I suppose that’s it for now.  More to come sooner or later.

I’ve learned how to make my own MREs to lighten the load of food and eat better than what you can get in a store.  I’ve figured out a lot of the things that I really should get.  Most expensive being the Ruger 10/22 semi automatic rifle.

I have to say Amtrak is the worst way to travel in this country.  I’m sure Greyhound is worse, but I haven’t taken one of those so I can’t really bitch too much about that.  I got thrown on the wrong train.  My tickets were written by hand so getting anywhere on that damn system was a complete cluster fuck.  I did get to meet some cool people (you can see my pictures on FaceBook).  It was just a huge pain in the ass.  Cussing gets you kicked off apparently, fuck that noise.

So now I’m down in San Diego.  It’s hot as hell here, and I can see a lot of boredom coming my way during the days.  It’s so quiet in this neighborhood, ironically, that sleep is probably going to be difficult.  At least I sleep in an UFO.  Yes that’s right a mother fucking UFO.  I can now say I have lived in some of the strangest places that anyone will ever deal with.

First off I’m in a lot of pain mentally and in my heart. Of course this is going to happen when the person you truly, or though so, loved leaves to go on their own adventures without you. Of course after this comes acceptance. Which is probably one of the hardest things to get to. Finally getting to the next stage and maybe being friends again, maybe not in some of my cases.

A lot of my questions keep coming and going. When they pop up I start to look inside to see what’s happening. At times it scares me, others it makes perfect sense. Though this isn’t the entire purpose for writing right now.

I’d like to say that the things I’m doing now I would have if my Texas Rose hadn’t left. Hadn’t moved to Utah. I’d like to say that but I’d be lying. I’d still be in the same spot I was because in all honesty I was too comfortable with what I had. I enjoyed the security we had in the little life we had carved out for ourselves. I loved that I wasn’t moving every few months. I loved holding her every night when we were together. That’s not enough when it comes down to everything.

Since she left I have changed my diet. I’m trying to lose a little bit of weight from drinking so heavily over the past few years. It has gotten a little out of hand. I’ve started exercising more because I want to get in shape. I’m only taking baby steps right now because you really need to crawl before you can run full throttle. I’m out of shape. I drink and smoke too much. At least the drugs aren’t very prevalent anymore.

So I’m doing good for myself physically. I’m eating better. I’m drinking more water. I’ve started to run, use a weighted jump rope, sit ups and push ups. It’s really all that I can do while being of no fixed address again in my life. Still these are baby steps and hopefully I will be in better shape by the time I get back to San Francisco in August.

I’ve even begun drinking less. I’ve only had four beers when going out at night anywhere. Alternating with water or a redbull if I’m tired like I am a good deal of the time due to lack of sleep. I’m really not ready to abstain for a month or more just yet, but I am getting there and get there I shall in a few week’s time. That I feel will bring along a lot of boredom for me since I really have nothing much to do other than think and work on improving my body and my mind.

That’s not really what I’m writing about, even though it sucks, but rather mass transit.  Not public transportation which is generally decent in cities, but traveling and places that don’t have it. In news of the obvious air line fees are sky rocketting.  Yeah saw that coming with the price of jet fuel increasing and so many of them ending up in the red, plus charging extra just to travel with luggage.  I mean come on, you go on vacation, you gotta take luggage right?  Why doesn’t America have a valid alternative with high speed rail?  Yeah I can get around the west coast decently, but it’s still slow but cheaper and uses less fossil fuels.

If we’d only get off our asses and go the European route on this.  We would save energy, we would save fossil fuels and all in all it would be cheaper in the long run.  Of course our energy policy has been so fucked up for so long that it’d be a miracle to even get something like this done today.

Now we come to another story that is absolutely assnine.  People would rather cut other costs out of their lives than give up their 10 mile per gallon H2?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Vehicles like this are a major part of the god damn problem people.  Auggie Mathis you are a fucking idiot for saying what you did in that article.  You own how many of them?  You spend how much on gas polluting our world?  Then again this is in Texas.  Makes perfect fucking sense.

In all honesty a third run of Marvel Zombies could be good.  It could also be absolutely god awful.  I don’t think this is going to be a sequel really.  After all, the heroes mentioned, it sounds like it’s going to take place during the same time period as Marvel Zombies 2 when the "Galactus" are out in space in search for more food.

I’ll probably pick this up since I’ve already read everything dealing with Marvel Zombies.  I don’t know how keen I am to have it in the main 616 universe though.

By way of Gizmodo the best canned food ever has been found.  Yes that’s right canned bacon.  Can you imagine being the only person in your neighborhood having "fresh" bacon every morning while your neighbors have just pork and beans and cold condensed soups?  They’d be jealous of you.  The smell of bacon wafting through the hallways on your little camping stove in the kitchen?

I must get a case of this.  It’ll be great for camping trips.  Pack a can and have bacon for me and the others every day!  Mmmmm, bacon.

I honestly can’t tell you how happy I am about this.  Obama is definitely the clear winner for your vote.  His policies on everything just make more sense.  Not a stop gap solution to the issues plaguing America.

Odds are she’ll be on the bill for vice president just to keep her happy and to make her campaign just as hard for the presidential race between Obama and McCain.  Don’t waste your votes people.  Vote Obama in November.

My baby has decided that she needs to move to Utah.  Continue on with her life journey and figure some shit out.  It’s a heart wretching thing for me, but I’ll have to survive and move on.  This means that the woman I’ve loved for the last two years is no longer going to be an every day presence in my life.  It also means that I’m of the single variety of the dating species again.  Just my fucking luck.

Because she’s moving to Utah I can’t really afford the apartment we currently live in.  The room mate also moved out.  $2,500 for one person and a large apartment is too much for me to handle.  Originally I started looking for apartments but found out that my credit is a little too shitty for that.  Time to make some changes!

With some help from Spartan I’ve begun cleaning up my credit.  Everything is paid off of it except some stupid Best Buy bull shit and the car repo I had during the first dot com crash.  I’ll start a payment plan with Best Buy on my next cheque to help clean that little smudge off of the record.  I won’t touch the car payment because it should be off my credit report within a year.  Along with the secured credit card I got from Bank of America I should have decently over a 600 credit score upon my return to the bay area.  Thus allowing me to find an apartment easier.  Oh, and I’ll have 5 to six cheques saved completely.

What am I going to be doing in San Diego?  Well for starts I am joining up with the circus again.  Will be working on some plays and doing music hopefully.  Regardless it will be good times while I’m down there.  It will be nice to hang out with Willie Balogna again.  I miss that mother fucker.

I’m also going to work on cutting down my drinking severely.  I’m going to quit smoking.  I’m going to start exercising again.  If I want a drink or a cigarette durring the day I’m just gonna go run around the block.  Keeep this up and I might hit 50 miles in the first week heh.  Good times will be had by all.  I am also going to watch what I’m eating and try to maintain a certain amount of calories a day while I’m trying to get back in shape.

I’m going to be taking a train down there.  The shit mobile is being parked at the ware house in SOMA the entire time I’m gone.  This way nobody steals it, or it gets towed.  I’ll more than likely be getting rid of it after I get an apartment.  Well depending on where I get my apartment that is. I’ve never taken a train ride anywhere except from DC to Baltimore a few times.  So this should be interesting.

Well that’s it for now.  Expect me to write in this category pretty often over the next few months.  After all I need to keep writing for some of my goals.  Blogging definitely helps me out with that regard and might actually force me to complete some of the other goals I’ve set for myself over the next 12 months.  Who needs New Year’s resolutions?  I’ll have mid year ones thank you very much.

So I go back to you and notice that you have a jabber IM to send updates to.  Sweet, I’m always logged into GTalk so I can start updating again!  Then I find a plugin for wordpress to send updates to you.  Even add a little application on Facebook to put my twitter updates on it.  Why not get back into micro blogging again?

Of course you lose your IM again.  It’s been weeks and I haven’t gotten any updates because I don’t open you up in my web browser.  I’m busy enough with work and the few sites that I do need up in there to have another tab wasting away space and time.  Why not just work through the weekend and fix your instant messaging?  We fix bugs at our office constantly, major ones at that.  We’re a tiny company compared to you.  Though I do understand that you’re a start up just like us.

So please get your instant messaging working again.  Or you’ll just have to wait until I get a better phone to start getting any real updates from me.

So I’m cleaning up my credit report.  Something I probably should have done last year.  I notice that there’s three "dings" on there.  Two from the same collections agency and a third from Wells Fargo.  Find out that it’s about thte fraud that I went through.  Since Wells Fargo sold off the account there’s not a fucking thing I could do about it.  Fuck me in the goat ass.  Three years later and I’m still getting anally raped by these assholes.

I needed it off fast.  So I just said fuck it and paid.  Still didn’t want to toss those fuck wads any loot.  I just paid it off because I need the credit score of zeroing out those three things.  This should defintely help when I get back from San Diego and in the search of a new apartment in San Francisco. 

I really want to shoot that company.  I really fucking hate banks.  At least Bank of America hasn’t fucked me in the two years I’ve been banking with them.

Didn’t really find much help.  So I reinstalled iTunes and suddenly for the first time in three weeks my iPod synced.  Guess one of the iTunes updates borked something.

It’s times like this that I remember what air conditioning is like.  Then I realize I grew up without it in the muggy northern Virginia and can deal with this dryer heat with no problems.  Come to think of it I haven’t lived anywhere in SF that had air conditioning.  My office has it, but Berkeley does get a lot warmer than home.

Enjoy the weekend people!  Oyster Festival tomorrow and Bay to Breakers on Sunday!  I’ll be picking it up somewhere in the Panhandle since it’s so close to where I live.

I have played dominos recently.  Sometimes I won, most times I got my ass kicked.  Who woulda thought that it would be so much trouble to beat Janelle in that game?  Certainly not me.

I might pick up some board games when I get my new place (more on that later) in August.  Have game nights!

Yum?  I mean come on.  It’s some of the worst fucking package management I have ever had the displeasure of using.  Let’s do a default install.  Oh what the fucking shit?  There’s no god damn mother fucking GCC or kernel headers?  Holy hell that blows my fucking mind.  How can you have linux and not have these basics?  Want us to use RPMs for our kernels?  Fuck you I’m not loading in shit I don’t need.

Let’s not even get to the crappy way libraries are handled.  I have to have two different versions of openssl installed just to keep these two machines happy.  One for everything else in the world (because I can’t do an emerge -b world to rebuild packages) when I update openssl, the other is because your god damn distribution is fucking stupid.

I’m glad I kept with slackware for all those years.  Your way of doing things is the mongoloid of linux distributions.  I’m glad I went to gentoo after slack, because well portage is the shit.

</rant>

It’s strange that I’m into video games now.  I took years off of playing them only to get sucked in by the Wii and now the PS3.  Hell the last GTA I played was the original 2D one for the PC.  Yeah, it was crappy graphically but damn it certainly was fun mowing down those monks in cars and shooting your friends in multiplayer.

Now that there’s multiplayer in it again I’m happy.  It’s nice to play through a game, but after you beat it what do you do?  Well with GTA and CoD4 you can play random people online or your friends.  Infinite hours of good times to be had.  I need more friends with a playstation though

It’s even getting great reviews.  IGN gave their first 10.0 rating in like a decade.  That has to say something.  Though what really cracks me up are the people bitching about the game already because of what you do in it.  Come on people.  With the amount of media the first ones got you’d figure by now that anything in this series of video games is going to be violent, involve some sort of misogyny towards any and all women in it, and of course drugs.  It’s a game about jackin’ cars and shooting drug dealers for fuck sake!

Well, I’m looking forward to coming home from the office tomorrow and shooting some cops and pimpin’ some hos.  I’m sure I’m not the only person out there that feels this way about hte game.

Basic premise is that the pigeons are trying to be all urban, hip, ghetto, while they’re actually from somewhere out in BFE.  Of course they’re going to run into a racket of street savvy squirrels that know the ins and outs of city life.

I don’t know why this sounds funny to me but it could be quite the laugh riot.  My first dealings with pigeons was on the farm I grew up on.  They were the dumbest birds I’ve ever seen.  So when I moved into the city and saw them acting like morons there I figured they were all pretty silly and stupid. 

Squirrels on the other hand seem to be shifty and always stealing shit from cart vendors.  Or just getting into all sorts of trouble.

There’s my first ideas.  I’m sure they’ll change greatly if I continue with this.  Just thought I’d share an idea with everyone.

I read this article over at the NY Sun.  Seems they’re predicting up to ten dollars a gallon in a couple of years or so.  Yegad people!  If that happens it’ll be cheaper for me to take the transbay buses instead of the 20 minute drive I have now.  Of course, it’ll also give me two hours a day in commuting which would suck quite a bit.

Stop driving SUVs and gas guzzling vehicles!  We really need to start using less gas.

Now I actually don’t know anybody with a PS3.  Everyone I know has an Xbox 360.  It does have a lot more games than the PS3, but it seems like that trend is going to change.  Regardless, the games I want to play are out on both platforms.  It’s really just a moot point for me.

When I bought the PS3, I really should have picked up Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.  Instead I picked up Viking: The Battle for Asgard.  It’s a fun game and all, very much like God of War.  It’s fun.  I stopped by Best Buy on my way home and did pick up CoD4 along with a dual shock controller.

Wow, what fun!  Shooting guns, killing bad guys!  Damn it’s crazy.  Running around the entire world doing crazy ass missions.  Now I see the reason why this series has done so well.  The attention to detail is absolutely stunning.  Then add in the HD goodness, wow.  When I have to buy a television I’m definitely getting something like this *g*

It follows four of the many street "performers" and pan handlers on Hollywood Blvd in Hollywood of course.  You have Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk.  Why they chose three DC characters at first is beyond me ;)  Maybe there’s really not that many Marvel characters out there.  I also doubt there’s many independent characters as well.

Each person has a very similar story.  They all want to be stars.  They all come from a strange background, or from a poor one.  The exception is Superman who claims to be the orphan son of Sandy Dennis, though her family claims differently.  Odds are, despite being a nice guy, he’s a bit of a nut case.

I do hope that the Hulk makes it.  He’s honestly trying hard and doing his own thing.  Was homeless for four years while pursuing his dream.  That takes a lot of constitution.  By the end of the documentary he did win a role in a pretty shitty remake of Bruce Lee’s last film.  Though you have to start somewhere.

Batman is just a fucking looney bin.  Has some serious anger issues, and alluded to killing someone in the 80s.  If that’s true, he’ll probably end up in jail.  Not get scott free as he claims because of the way evidence was able to be obliterated back then.  If anything now a days the cops are able to find more evidence from cold cases than they were back then.

I honestly really didn’t care much for Wonder Woman as a person.  She seemed like the spoiled little princess from a small town to me.  She seemed like a crazy and good sort though.  Willing to do things, like marrying someone four days after meeting them, that most people wouldn’t do.  She might make it, but the way she talked it seemed like she isn’t really going to push extra hard.

Superman is definitely obsessed with what he does.  15 years doing the same thing?  Yeah that’s a little nutty, I would have gone on to do something else with my time.  His apartment is also completely covered wall to wall, floor to ceiling with anything Superman.  Yegad.  Though it was nice that he married his lady at the Superman convention in Metropolis Illinois dressed like Superman.  I may be a geek and a nerd, but there’s no way in hell I’d go that far.

The story is based in the future of Alice.  This time her daughter, Carroll, has to go through Wonderland.  Throughout the story she learns what drover her mother insane and why she acts the way she does.  Very interesting concept, though not terribly original in some aspects.

The artwork is gorgeous and the story is thrilling through all six issues.  Definitely something you want to pick up at your local comic shop or at the next convention in your area.

Along came Garth Ennis and changed all of that.  Maybe it’s the fact that this is on the MAX imprint so they don’t really have to follow the comics code.  Can get away with using the word cunt, or showing nudity and sex.  The level of violence is also something that’s above and beyond the call of duty for any comic book.  Though this isn’t really the reason I wanted to write about this.

Comic books have pretty much been a mechanism of counter culture for as long as they’ve been around.  The medium has constantly changed and morphed as times come and pass.  Writers, like many, of comic books will add in some slight political agenda into their stories to help bring awareness of what’s going on around them.  You never really get these insights in books aimed squarely at the younger reader but sometimes you do.  They’ll write stories about the war in Iraq, or they’ll talk about how white supremecy groups are still a problem in today’s society.  What really got me about Ennis’ run on Punisher is the slavery story.

Issues #25 through #30 of Punisher volume 5 is called "The Slavers."  Initially when I saw this I figured it would be your classic selling people to do work.  Well work they did, on their backs.  It was basically about the Punisher finding a girl in distress and suddenly uncovering an entire multicontinent ring dealing in the sale of teen age girls to be prostitutes.  They weren’t willing participants in this, but rather raped into submission then sold and resold around the wold.  Pretty grim out look on life.

Go read those issues, enjoy them.  They’re absolutely fantastic.  Of course if you don’t like blood and guts you probably might want to stay clear of them. 

This is just one way that comics help bring real life, and serious, issues to light for a good many people that live in their own little fantasy bubbles.  I’m certain a good many people don’t know about the trafficking of children and women for sex purposes around the world.  It’s a very common, and very profitable, thing for many illegal operations.  It’s also sad that many of these children will never have normal lives, or even get to know true happiness in the world around them.

The image up to says it all.  It’s also how the story ends.

Well after a bit of clicking around I finally figured it out.  Not that it was hard, but I figured someone could use the help.  When you’re in your monitor settings under arrangement.  Just click the white "title" bar and drag it over to the screen you want to use as your primary.  Man, that made me rather happy.

The real treat for me though was the band right before Clutch.  They’re from Indiana and go by the name Murder by Death.  I thought they would be the same type of annoying metal that was being played before and didn’t really give them much thought prior to them appearing on stage.  Though the sight of an electric chello did shock me.

Once I heard the music, seems like a combination of post punk and rock-a-billy, and the voice of the lead singer, very Johnny Cash, I was hooked instantly.  For the first time in my life I actually purchased a CD of a band at a concert.  I have no idea why I haven’t done this before though. 

The album is called Red of Tooth and Claw.  It’s in the iTunes store already.  Go pick it up if you can.  Support an indy musician!  If you’re in the SF bay area also check out their next show at Bottom of the Hill nn May 16th.

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