Whoa.

Picture of the solar storms that supposedly will fuck up your cellphone and all sorts of other electronic shit.

Note the picture of earth provided for comparison purposes.

Rock And Roll

You know a concert rocked when you leave thinking, "Man, that was so good, I need a cigarette."

And you have never smoked a day in your life.

Everyone should go see Melissa Ferrick live. Especially if you like to fuck women, because she sings and discusses quite a bit about that particular subject. But even if you're not so much into that aspect, she still flat-out rocks.

Fun Thing

When someone offers you a cough drop, and you decline because you haven't coughed in weeks.

Then, twenty minutes later, you proceed to have a coughing fit of epic proportions and have to return to the profferrer of cough drops to beg for one.

Uhhhhhhhhh....

Wow, Thursdays are gonna be lonnnnng days. We tape two shows, and that means twice the work, twice the chaos, and twice the vocabulary-draining exhaustion at the end of the day.

And I need to get a VCR I can actually tape things with on a timer, unlike the one I currently have, where I can't set the timer because it refuses to respond to any remote in the known universe.

What I really need is TiVo, but I don't have the cash for it, seeing as how I barely have cash for lunch.

Okay, I'm gonna stop with the tangents and go find my sweet, sweet bed.

Further Blame For Kim

Since I had been planning on doing some maintenence to this site anyway, I took CheshireKim's suggestion of adding the ability for you fine folks to comment whilst doing some, uh, fall cleaning.

The ensuing chaos will be entirely her fault.

And I will do something new with the actual design of this site at some point. Just not anytime soon.

Damnation

Elliot Smith died, apparently at his own hand, last night.

Northwestern students who saw him open for Wilco a couple of years ago remember well his bizarre behavior, which seemed to indcate he was having some serious drug issues.

However, the word through the grapevine was that he had been doing a lot better recently, and that he seemed to be cleaning himself up and pulling himself out of depression.

Sadly, it appears that word was wrong. What a fucking waste, because his best work was clearly ahead of him.

Check out his music, if you don't already know it.

Badge Of Honor

I am now the proud owner of my first security badge. I had to get one for work, and I think it's quite funny.

It amuses me because growing up in D.C., people wore their security badges all the time, especially if they worked on Capitol Hill. I strongly suspect some of these people wore the badges when they slept and showered.

I noticed this mostly when I worked at Starbucks after my senior year of high school. I worked at a store with ridiculous morning traffic, and almost everyone who came in had some badge or another chained, clipped, taped, glued, or otherwise attached to themselves.

Some of these people seemed to think that a pass stating they were a Senate page made them look really important, and thus entitled them to faster coffee service, or possibly a blowjob. Or at least extra foam.

The thing about security badges in D.C. was that the badge didn't just simply state your name and where you worked, but exactly what you did.

It was a weird, less paper-intensive variation of the Japanese business tradition where everyone exchanges business cards to see who ranks the highest. Or to put it in a slightly more vulgar way, it was a public dick-measuring contest.

Like most things out here, the competition is at least a little more laid-back.

My badge (and the few I've seen out here) has my name, my photo, and the NBC logo (since they tape the show the show at NBC Studios since NBC is a joint owner of the production company), and that's it.

Everyone on the lot has the same nondescript badge, from the executive producers at each show to the cashiers in the commissary. Thus, there's far less point in constantly wearing it when you're not actually at work.

Here, a badge is something to get through doors and gates, as opposed to something to show off. And frankly, I think it works a lot better that way.

I just gotta figure out how to attach it to myself surgically so I don't lose it....

Next Joe Millionare Observation

To call this guy as dumb as a box of rocks would be an insult to boxes of rocks everywhere.

Damn You, Kim!

CheshireKim is to blame for my addiction to this.

You're welcome to blame me for yours.

New Job!

First day of the new job went well.

I will forewarn you all that I did have to sign a confidentiality agreement, so alas, I can't tell you who showed up drunk, stoned, or both (although this is normally patently obvious to the aware TV viewer), or who's secretly gay (that information, I'm retaining for my own purposes).

So no celebrity gossip, kiddies. Probably won't learn much anyway, since I basically work in the office, far far away from the famous people.

The people I'm gonna be working with all seem very nice and quite cool, which will definitely help. The work's pretty much gonna be scut for a while, but that was expected.

Anyway, I'm kind of out of it right now, but I'll post a few fun stories from my first week at some point. Until then I'll see what oddities I can come up with in my normal life.

Question

Can't we do this with the real W.?