윤

I wonder what it must’ve been like to kill off the last 白鱀豚, knowing that you’ve outlived an entire species? I certainly hope it was worth completing that shipment of Nikes or whatever.

A week after Martin revealed himself to be a Street Fighter (the game, of course—though you never know, with that Rufus bod of his), not to mention a stick-making one, I received an e-mail from a guy in dispatch who saw the Squeenix token addressed to me and let me in on his uber FFXI LS. And yet don’t tell me there wasn’t a hint of embarrassment when the nine 75-jobber had to say “Aht Urhgan” aloud, right next to Amber’s. As fond as I am of the old stomping grounds, however, the what, five, six-year-old title is looking a little long in the tooth, compared even to the latest results from a team smaller than an EXP party. I criticize SFIV for doing little if anything for the franchise, apart from keeping it the same as it ever was, but MMORPG endgame isn’t faring much better, I think, without pitting the massively-multiple players against one another.

Look through my closet (seriously, that’s no metaphor; my DEVO radiation suit and Lupin III green jacket are still there) for ample proof that I’m less fashion faux pas than fashion fuck quoi. I was for a time determined to get a duffle coat like I had when I was a child, but couldn’t justify wearing it anytime after boarding the flight from Heathrow. It’s the hood, I think, and that it’s European only makes it respectable, right? Well, more on the wearable side comes the inexplicable twice-as-pricey goggle jacket, that is, if I stay in my car, and don’t mind looking like Dumb Donald from Fat Albert.

I read stories like this, and I wonder if we went to the same place. Granted I was prepared for it, but to be perfectly honest, I would’ve had to make an effort to spot the CCTV cameras. And the most inconvenience I experienced was not being able to find a trash can in the Underground. Which is also why I’ve always doubted the effectiveness of those “scared straight” programs; you can’t fully appreciate an inmate’s confines unless you’re there to stay.

Sean Penn earned his Oscar for the role, but how sad that twenty years later, the same old politics are still in place and manage to “succeed” where progress did before. One might argue that the right to marry is more inalienable than getting to be a teacher, but maybe becoming more mainstream kills your clout. Oh well, I wonder if there’s a special purgatory for souls of the deceased whose life work is reversed?

And I haven’t been keeping up, but it seems during my absence conservatives actually rallied around being called teabaggers. That means these morons aren’t even functioning on a Family Guy-level of culture. America deserves to be doomed.

I’m down now 30K calories vs. ounces, no matter how much I run (and next week’s release of pure-cane Mountain Dew won’t help), so I’m augmenting my regiment with the occasional ride. I think what I like so much about these waterways is how their network of thoroughfares remains for the most part unpolluted like the streets it quietly runs alongside. There’s a world of difference even from the short trip to the office. I’m not passed up by an Expedition burning a gallon of gas because I didn’t feel like flooring it off the light, don’t have to care about who’s parked where or have to drown out the voices in my head telling me to run myself off the road for driving to work everyday with only slightly less ridiculing ones on the radio. Then again, the risk remains that I’ll be hit by flack from a chase between time-traveling killing machines. Or worse.

Mom’s 목메달 joke is a reminder that mass stupidity is by no means limited to the mainland Chinese. It’s like that Happening movie, where instead of making people hang themselves or jump off buildings, Mother Nature just instills this for a generation or two and succeeds with her own brand of population control.

I’d like to think I won’t beat cancer one day, then realize life’s got no more feeling. If I do, then I can only hope to pick up where I left off in my most detailed and fulfilling dream world. I’ve actually managed that, on more than one occasion, but I could never create mysteries I hadn’t already solved myself. Setting the Ashes to Ashes sequel in the Eighties makes it sound right up my alley (as often as I listened to my Scary Monsters record), but I’ll wait, seeing as how critics were harsh and the Amazon UK price has yet to dip below £10.

Electricity went out, quite dramatically, while I was watching the final episode of Life on Mars last night and stayed off for longer than what folks in this comfortable neighborhood surely must be used to. Even if I could continue on a laptop, there was no getting the disc out of the player. So I took a walk to see how far the darkness went, but turned back when I didn’t see a single family outside, and thought maybe I might be gunned down by one of these fucking McCain supporters with their AK aimed at the door.

Edison’s website didn’t acknowledge the outage for at least an hour—

—and that was after I had called it in, and was informed that over 2,000 homes in the area were affected. I then checked with the local news affiliate:The Internet is useless.

When you think about it, Kuma—Kutner made the most sense, as one-dimensional they kept his character; lets House struggle with the unknowable mystery of another. The only person I personally knew who committed suicide was among my headbanger clique in high school (or was it stoner, I can’t quite remember the prevailing term, as much as the black T-shirt, tight jeans and Indian boots). I remember clearly the large Teutonic assistant principal making a veiled announcement of her passing over the PA in a broken voice. The Vietnamese girl who saw her parents murdered in front of her, she broke down often, but survived. Perspective reminds us that over 200 real people lost their lives in yesterday’s earthquake, and with every one of them also went a microcosm of experience and interpretation not even God’ll be able to sort out.