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I can’t believe I found the one Bloom County strip from the book Ron Giveon brought to our dorm room that will forever illustrate my feelings toward gift-giving:

Saved me sixty bucks, YouTube and the Internet did. (Maybe even more, had I opted—like I most definitely would have, fifteen years ago—for the uncensored European version.) Meaning every decade or so I receive a Discover Card-like 1% rebate.

I spent an hour or so yesterday (not including my drive-time back and forth) giving back to the Wal-Mart community—you know, the one that is so hell-bent on destroying everyone else’s in America—by supporting the Redbox there, stuck on the return screen, despite their service line’s efforts to reset it remotely. As cheap as their rentals are, and as “simple” as they’re making them out to be, let’s not fall victim to the inevitable weakness in their business model, i.e., failing hardware, and call (866)733-2693, option 1 to check the transaction histories on locations before reserving to them. But the one recourse that’s sure to follow any innovation in vending machine use is our inclination, perhaps since evolved into the human genome, to commit violence upon them, as I myself considered, had I not turned over my account info on the phone.

Update [24 hours later]: They must’ve gotten someone to come in and do what I wanted to, and yanked the power cord. Occurred to me that the mom & pop’s like the place across from my new 親戚’s with $1.50 specials on Tuesdays might trade in sabotage how-to information, but the downtime’s hard to beat. So I suppose with the freebie codes they’re generous about handing out to callers I came out on top. Picked up スキヤキ・ウエスタン ジャンゴ, of all movies. One more thing, online reservations come with sales tax, whereas walk-ups strangely don’t.

Update [24 more hours later]: What I suspected proves true, that the “9pm tomorrow” you have until to pick up an online reservation counts as your first night. So much for simple—in reverse order, then: rent and return; reserve; call to confirm machine working; check to see if desired title there; check to see if location allows reservation; and now, check to see if schedule permits pickup by, say, eight the next day at the latest, with some slack for DVD Shrink.

Border guard much friendlier than the one welcoming greeting letting you back in, that’s for sure. Clean place, but it must help not having a highway anywhere near downtown. Or at all, at least not on a scale I’m familiar with. “Van City”‘s still quite the eco-conscious, keeping a main thoroughfare through Stanley Park—a misnomer, perhaps, for forest—as every taxi’s a Prius and Smart cars outnumber Yellow XTerras. And since we’re limiting this post (before I can get the pics up, much less my little Yuneymoon-inspired movie together) to the traffic there, I’m surprised I managed to return the rental without more than the fucking parking ticket, as I just now learned that the flashing green lights I ran everytime meant right-of-way for left turns. Oh, and note to self: always test GPS after updating, lest the same thing happen again and we find ourselves stuck with only the map to Guam left on the unit because US & Canada’s were deleted.

It’s been, what, a marriage since the last issue, so I might be forgiven for picking up the wrong new Final Crisis release: both are from Morrison, the artists were supposed to be changing, anyway, and how was I supposed to know “Submit” wasn’t a fancy tagline? It didn’t even occur to me after finishing the one-off story—featuring, incidentally, Black Vulcan v0.9; yes, it’s all about me—that this wasn’t in keeping with his oft-used tactic of micro-managing macro-cosmic events, until I re-confirmed the Darkseid cover and found myself cursing at the traffic lights preventing me from getting back in the ten minutes before closing time. Lucky for me, stores like theirs always have stragglers who’d rather keep talking Barry Allen or whatever than return to their anti-lives at home. But really, look at that panel of him kissing (and curing) Iris. It’s magical.

We renewed our membership at Marukai this weekend, one of the incentives for which, if not the only, was the 10%-off coupon, so I thought I’d use it towards an otherwise pricey carton of カレーうどん since the economy apparently hasn’t spared the imported cup noodle market, either, almost doubling the regular 98¢ 赤いきつね sale price. But the Nissin was nowhere on the shelves; what struck me as odder, no curry-flavored varieties were to be found, even among the “instant” packages. It dawned upon me that I had noticed the same scarcity, regardless of make and country of origin, in the counterpart section twice its size at wildly popular Korean Zion Market (whose name, along with Canaan Chinese restaurant, isn’t kidding). So you know me, it was conspiracy time: I imagined a coalition of the sauce makers (S&B, House, etc.) pricing out the stuff in other more accessible forms such as these, or perhaps it goes even deeper, the powers that be slowly doing away with foods with potential health benefits which threaten their status quo. I’m reminded, as I often am, of that exchange in The Hitchhiker’s Guide which I always found the most mysterious—and a little frightening—

ARTHUR: You know all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange, unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world… and no one would tell me what it was.
SLARTIBARTFAST: No, that’s just perfectly normal paranoia, everyone in the universe has that.
ARTHUR: Well perhaps it means that somewhere, outside –

The administration: “[$700 billion]’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

I saw this a couple of weeks ago, but it didn’t register then that it signaled the doom of the collaboration shown off at Morrison’s Comic-Con panel. I guess spirituality and crappy CG don’t mix well. This looks like a job for Bollywood…?