messiestobjects

A Dream Of Germany And All Points Nostalgia. Ugh.

I had a dream the other night which, when I woke up, left me with that bittersweet feeling of joy and loss that only dreams can evoke. Not to sound gay or anything. But it was a pretty simple dream; I was in a hallway, and people started arriving. They were people I'd known from Germany. More and more showed up until we formed a very crowded circle in the hall there, and everybody was chattering away, laughing, telling old stories and old jokes from our time at Chiemsee. Nothing can be as nice and comforting as an old joke retold between friends you haven't seen in years. Like the time Bailey caused Deutsche Bahn to cancel the 11:10pm train route from Munich to Bernau because he got a bit too toasty and kicked out a train window, uh, accidentally. Disco night at the Windjammer.

Or when a rogue storm came up on the lake during a sailing class that Danielle and I were in together, capsizing our sailboat, losing my glasses to the bottom of the Chiemsee while trying to right it. Or Nimmer catching the train by his teeth as it was pulling out of the station during an unscheduled church points stop at 2am. Or Scott... well, he wouldn't want me to tell that story. But it's a funny story. Seth playing Frogger on the autobahn. Dirk tying a kite to his rear bumper, lighting it on fire and going for a ride on the hotel strasse, then waking up the next morning cuddled contentedly next to Josh in the Summerhaus kitchen. Dirk, Josh, Lauren, Dave & I seeing Foetus in Salzburg and getting locked out of the car, then driving up to Dirk's Dad's historical German hunting lodge for a weekend of too much rich food and cappuccinos, causing unspeakable trouble in my bowels. Dumpster diving. Charlie's. The Bernauer Stuben. Krampus fest. Al Harms! Bus Olympics. Absinthe parties after Absinthe runs to Czesky Krumlov. What was Matt's roomate's name who Scott made up all those stories about? Windjammer Halloween parties. "Stealing" the maypole from the Badehaus. Radlers on the German beach. That last summer on the dive shop dock. Volleyball Tuesday. Singing The Yellow Submarine in German. Rosenheim. Munich. The Bernau Bahnhof.

Anyway, I could go on and on, each one of those memories spawning a hundred more. Forgive me; wistfully reminiscing about Chiemsee is a pathological pastime for those of us who were there, annoying and boring on a regular basis our friends who were not. Suffice it to say it was a bittersweet dream, laughing with old friends whom I'll never see all together in one room again. I spent three years in Chiemsee, but I also spent three years in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a ski town near the Austrian border in the Alps. Garmisch tends to take back seat in my memories of Germany, as it was so much longer ago and the dynamic at Chiemsee during the final year of its operation was rather show-stealing. But coinciding with my dream, a good friend of mine, Marc, from the Garmisch days recently got back from a vacation with his wife whom he'd met there to revisit our old stomping grounds. He posted some pictures on his Facebook page from the trip and I of course found myself looking through them with a renewed sense of old days gone. He has loads of great pictures of our favorite German food and beer. Nostalgia, that's the word. Yuck. I had had a really great time there as well, and I think that it is perhaps one of the most beautiful spots in the world.

Marc reminded me of a historic night on the town. On the week prior to the night in question, we had been at the Santa Fe, otherwise known as the local American Bar. When the Santa Fe closes, there's only one other bar that stays open later (Well, except for the Evergreen, but that's another story) named Peaches. It's a horrid place. Fruity girl drinks and obnoxious party beat music. But at 3am, all pretense of discernment tends to fade. So we walked over, and the doorman wouldn't let me in. It was rather unbelievable for a bar that catered to the 3am crowd. He said my pants were too baggy; he thought I looked like a snowboarder. And I was a snowboarder in fact, but so what? He said, in middling English, that they'd had trouble with my kind. "They, they come in here and cause trouble and drink too much and, and they snowboard," as though it were an unspeakable crime. Weird, right? So I glumly turned around and went home, while Marc & Lenny got inside. The next week, for whatever reason, they let me in. I was dressed the same, I had actually gone snowboarding that day. It was ironically funny, but I was bitter. Last week had been inglorious. I felt wronged. Marc was retelling the story to Lenny, Sabino, and Rio. They laughed, the flavor of wormwood remained with me. I had never caused trouble, I was not one of "those" snowboarders. I had never come to this bar and... snowboarded... I cheered up. I wasn't thinking clearly, but I was thinking.

If I'm going to be accused of sinning, I might as well sin, right? I happened to have my snowboard strapped to the roof of my car right outside, having in fact, as I said, gone snowboarding that day. I ran outside to my car. The same doorman who had not let me in previously, but had inconsistently decided that I was okay on this night was working. I told him I'd be right back. No problem. I grabbed my snowboard and ran in. He didn't try to stop me from bringing my snowboard in, I think he was too confused. Perhaps the hand of God restrained him. In the back of the bar where we were seated, we were on a raised platform table with two or three stairs leading down to the main floor. Here, Marc took a picture of the very spot on his recent trip:

I strapped on my snowboard, gave a drunken rebel yell, and snowboarded down the stairs. Now Mr. Bouncer, you won't be lying next time when you say that snowboarders; "They, they come in here and cause trouble and drink too much and, and they snowboard."

Of course, the joke was really on me because I scraped the crap out of my nice new snowboard on those granite stairs and I had to pay a sweet 50 Deutsche Marks to get it re-waxed. But you know, in the annals of Drunken revelry, score one for me and the snowboarders.

And Along Came A Transrealist

I picked up this book relatively randomly a few weeks ago. Stuff of this nature always piques my curiosity because I like both science fiction and popular science. (Also, I saw it sitting next to a new book of transcripts from some lectures that Carl Sagan gave in Scotland in 1985 which has recently been published by his wife, which is what originally caught my eye.) It's a book of essays by various pundits about what humanity could possibly look like if we were still around in, well, Year Million.

It's not overall a great book; I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's a bit stale in many ways. Naturally, it's difficult for anyone to guess what even the very near future is going to look like. For instance, go into a Starbucks on lunch hour in any major city, listen to a conversation that the nerdy computer types are having about the drudgery of their IT jobs, and try to imagine what that conversation would have sounded like to you back in say, 1985. I'm sure even Carl Sagan would have been like, "What the crap are you maniacs talking about?" Words that mean one thing back then have taken on whole new meanings in light of technological advances, so to a 1985er, the words might even sound familiar, but the ways in which they were being put together might remind him of a conversation in a particularly dire lunatic asylum. For instance: "I was trying to download some music files onto my cellphone, but Apple's damn proprietary iTunes system keeps messing me up. I've got to figure out a way to hack that shit." Think about what that sentence could possibly mean in a pre-home computing world. It's English, but it's nonsense.

Stanislaw Lem actually wrote a really excellent book on that subject called "Return From The Stars", which in a nutshell is about a Spaceman who returns to Earth after a 100 year mission only to find that he doesn't understand anything that is going on. Looking at the problem in reverse, I just re-watched that fabulous David Mamet movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, which is about the cutthroat business of real estate sales in, I assume, the late 80's early 90's. These salesmen kept having to make telephone calls to potential sales leads via pay phone, and in one Scene Jack Lemmon is calling his family and telling them he won't be able to be reached later and I kept thinking, what? Why are they bothering with pay phones? Can't he be reached by his cell? Major plot hole. It's amazing to me how anachronistic those pay phones seemed, and that it took me a beat or two to catch on to the time frame. I think it was the combination of familiarity and a decade of perspective... I've seen that movie before and all the actors in it are pertinent to my adolescent movie experience, yet give it ten years and whammo, weirdness.

So you can see, the idea of trying to look a million years into the future seems at first glance a bit useless. One major technological advance and wham, everything changes. But in a weird sort of way, looking a million years into the future might actually be easier than looking a decade into the future. You have to ask larger, less precise questions such as, Will we have colonized other planets, or entire galaxies by then? Will our energy source be entire suns, entire star clusters, or dark energy itself? Will we be human, something more evolved, or will our personalities be downloaded into huge programs in which our thought processes will be in effect immortal, and capable of computations greater than our current meat-brains can presently conceive? Well, all of these possibilities are addressed, of course. Some of the essays are more successful at getting the points across than others. But here's the reason I really loved this book:

There are about 14 essays in this book, and the first 10 are all asking questions along these lines. Futures are spun out for us that to a Borg seem like heaven. We have deconstructed entire planetary systems and turned them into so-called Dyson Spheres: technological monstrosities made of "computronium" which would make the Death Star run away with its tiny little tail between its legs. We turn ourselves into gigantic computer minds, more capable of exploring the infinite Universe than in our present, limited meat bodies of mortality. All of which are not necessarily impossible ideas, they just seem to us now as that airplane seemed to those people from the last of the uncontacted tribes in South America. Or perhaps they are impossible; it's a book of speculation, after all. But then, along comes chapter 11. And who is it written by? Why, none other than the greatest speculative mind of our time, Rudy Rucker. I haven't said it enough lately; I love that guy. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Not that that matters; his own body of work is genius. He's a well respected mathematician and philosopher in his own right. But I've written enough about him in the past, so I'll spare you.

Except that, his essay in this book is why I love the book and why I think he's the greatest, in a nutshell. All these impressive, impossible to fully comprehend, yet fundamentally bleak views of the future of humanity, and along comes a transrealist. His essay is about how all of that mechanical technology is a real downer and totally beak. It's a great book because it shows the real value of genius, standing him up next to the more mainstream and dull views of the status quo. I'm going to quote him now:

 "Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth [or any other structure] is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that's a perfect match for the old Earth. Call the new one Vearth. It's worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature, because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires using a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts."
Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that's smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/ Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels."

So basically what he's saying is, the physical matter of the Universe is already the most complicated calculation there is, and that any desire on our part to harness it for our own small needs is rather ugly and in the long run diminishing. Not that he doesn't predict amazing possibilities for our future. Due to the high calculation potential of every bit of matter, he predicts something he calls Hylozoism, from the Greek, hyle, matter, and zoe, life. He believes that, given a million years, we'll find a way to wake matter up. As in, making it conscious. So that we can communicate with it. You'll actually be able to talk to walls, and it will be more productive than talking to politicians. He even has a plan for it, involving bending certain spatial topologies utilizing the extra dimensions of space. The benefits of waking matter up are enormous, and too much to go into, but they involve the possibility of teleportation, matter duplication, etc. This is a book report, not the Cliff's Notes. Suffice it to say, Rudy paints a much more incredible, surreal, no, transreal, view of the future, and on top of it, shows how it's just as conceivably possible as the deader versions of the typical futurist. If I could buy stock in Rudy Rucker, I'd grab every share I could, because I have a feeling that his ideas are going to be around for a long long time.

"Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation."

"It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end."

"It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable."

"If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!"

"Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way."

"Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons."

  -Rudy Rucker

The Stars At Night, Are Occasionally Big And Bright...

"Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think."
-Ambrose Bierce

Ahhhhh... The smell of Texas hick in the morning. I'm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for work this week. There is nothing cool about this trip. No pictures, no wry observations. Except for the smelly Texan hick I got stuck in the elevator with this morning, and there ain't nothin' wry about that. The smell is quite similar to Pennsylvanian hick, actually. You'd think, you know, different States, different hicks, different smells. But hick pretty much smells the same all over I guess. The one exciting thing I did was take a drive down to Waco, Texas. There really wasn't much there though. I got a coffee. Turned around came back.

So I spent the little free time I've had this week at the movie theater just a few blocks up from where I'm staying. I saw The Dark Knight. Twice. I think it's the best superhero movie yet. In fact, it might be a work of film art. Heath Ledger of course was amazing, but even more amazingly, he didn't entirely steal the show. (Though his performance should make Jack Nicholson feel ashamed of his inadequacy as an actor) Everything in the movie was absolutely perfect. The worst that can be said about it is that some of the action was so busy and parts of the plot so byzantine, that if you weren't paying attention, you may have to watch it a second time. But what I really love about it is that it is an ensemble piece... Batman didn't get any more screen time than anyone else, and the most pivotal role in the movie didn't really even belong to him, and it was still exciting as hell. (I'd say the most pivotal role was Aaron Eckhart's, whom I was glad to see in such a good role. Been a fan of his since In The Company Of Men.) Christopher Nolan gave all of his characters an important piece of the story, and allowed all of them a chance to play themselves out. It's the first superhero movie I've seen that can correctly have the adjective "epic" be applied to it.

Anyway, sorry. I know that nobody comes here to read pop film reviews. I'm just indulging myself in a gush. And, you know, I've got nothing else to talk about, yet my habits dictate that after being away on a work trip, I must post about it. So, movies I saw in Arlington, Texas is my theme. Hancock. Stupid. REALLY stupid. It started off fairly intriguing. But it was like the screenwriter or director or whoever had had a neat idea for a superhero movie, got partway through the script, but then realized that he didn't have an actual creative bone in his body nor had he ever actually read a comic book, and pulled something stupid out of his butt and plopped it in the theater. X-Files. Yeah. Not actually a bad movie... if Mulder and Scully were supposed to be characters in a mature adult romantic detective novel. It was more Moonlighting, the later years, than X-Files. And really, after waiting like 10 years after the end of the series to make a movie, you'd think that X-Files fans would deserve some answers, or at least more plot development on the Alien theme. But, nope. Chris Carter doesn't think so. Wanker.

MILD SPOILER ALERTS THIS PARAGRAPH:
But the most disturbing thing about all three of these movies was the children. None of these movies were appropriate for very young children. There were 4 year olds, infants even, that parents had brought to the theater. Severed arms, Hancock shoves a guy's head up another man's butt, horrifically scarred man holds a young boy hostage... all kinds of potentially scarring moments on a young person's psyche. Plus, young kids are noisy and it's just rude to the other moviegoers. I mean, what are parents thinking? This kind of stuff can scare the crap out of kids in their dreams for years. I speak from experience... I inadvertently saw a Monty Python sketch one time on TV when I was very young which gave me the screaming willies for years. Monty Python. Imagine what seeing a psychopathic clown put someone's eye out with a pencil would've done. There was a preview for a horror movie... there were some pretty horrific images loud and proud on the screen. Blood, disfigurement, bizarre imagery... you know the kind of thing pop horror fans are into these days. There was a very young boy nearby, staring in horrified awe, and his father was laughing his ass off. Laughing at mutilation. What the F*** is wrong with people?

Ok ok... sometimes scaring the crap out of children is funny, but still. Not always.

Getting It Backwards

For some inexplicable reason the other day, the words "You got served" came out of my mouth. It's really about the most horrifying thing I can imagine, linguistically speaking. I don't remember what happened that elicited that appalling phrase from my head, but even at the time that I said it I had no idea where on Earth my brain got the idea that it was an acceptable response to anything. And then I realized I had recently seen a TV show where, and not to be overly descriptive but there's a point to this, some portly black woman had used that phrase. It had stuck in my mind because she had at first been an extremely annoying character, and she'd been "talking smack" about someone who'd "been served", which made me want to plug my ears. But during the course of the show, she became a much more interesting character and I found myself liking her, despite myself. She was smart, witty, and other than the occasional unpalatable urban street slang thrown in the mix, extremely engaging.

So I then realized that I'd probably used said horrific phrase because I'd found this TV show character funny, and that offhand phrase of hers which I'd found repugnant must have retroactively stuck in my addled brain, and that's when I realized that even though I have been watching zero to even less TV, I was still watching too much if my speech patterns were being interfered with in such a manner. It's amazing how little it takes to affect human behavior, isn't it?

But then something even more shocking happened. I'd had a picture of this character in my head, and her saying about someone or other getting served, but I couldn't remember what the hell TV show I'd been watching that she was on, or what the show was about, or maybe it was a movie she was in? It was one of those niggling little things that drives you crazy because you can't stop thinking about it until you figure out the answer, and I was extremely irritated that I was wasting even this fraction of brainpower on something Hell-evision related. When I eventually figured it out, I had a lot of soul-searching to do: Turns out she wasn't a character on a TV show. She was an actual real person who had been hired from my company's Human Resources department to come to our work retreat and give all the employees a two-hour lecture on Harassment, sexual and otherwise, in the workplace and why one should avoid it.

I'd garbled a two-day old memory from a real live person into a TV show. I'm mistaking real life for TV. It's the opposite of the usual problem people have (mistaking TV for reality), but still, it's worrying. I feel a bit panicky about it, if the truth may be told.

By the way, the reason her character... dang it! I mean, she, the actual human being, was so engaging and funny as a Sexual Harassment lecturer was because she was one of those people who pretty much broke every sexual harassment law in the book during class in order to show us what we shouldn't be doing. Very effective technique.

In other exciting events, Wall-E is a great movie. Don't let those Right-Wing Republican nutjobs tell you otherwise. (If you haven't seen it, that link provides not only hilarious fat complaining Republicans, but some major plot spoilers.) I think my favorite line from that article is: "Stolyarov cites the fact that fast-food restaurants are serving “health foods,” “landfills are remarkably effective at storing garbage,” and that traditional farming is, like, hard and stuff, as flaws in the film’s logic."

Taking Stock Of My Stupidity

I've got yet another new, very dangerous hobby which I've chosen to become addicted to this week. The stock market. And you know, it's a good example of how extremely poor my sense of timing is, because there really ain't much out there that's doing any good. Especially not the stocks I chose to buy into... grr argh.

I'd picked up Jim Cramer's book, Stay Mad For Life a few weeks ago, and there was a lot of good advice in it about retirement planning and saving and all that boring grown-up stuff. And of course a few good stock tips. So I followed some of his advice, which as it turns out was of course written a bit before the current financial crisis which America is unlikely to ever fully recover from. In fact, much of what I read online from various stock pundits involves buying companies that provide raw materials to China, as they are the real economic up and comer these days, and investing in purely American ventures is widely considered to be, well, stupid.

But of course, at this particular point not even that advice is panning out because nobody really has any confidence in the market to begin with, so everything is tanking, more or less. Nobody is really saying it, but it looks like the US has peaked; we've reached the highest point of wealth and world economic power that we were ever going to reach, raised our hands up at the pinnacle of the ride and gone "woooo-hoooo!", and now we're on the full-tilt ride down.

Enter me and my money: The two of us go in, but only one is coming out. It's a fight to the death.

Anybody got any hot insider tips?

Commercials Make You Think Drivel Is The New Funny

I haven't had my own personal access to Television in maybe two decades. I despise TV, and have had nothing but disdain for it since... well I don't know exactly when, but at some point I decided that it was the devil. I'm not against a good show, mind you. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest TV show of all time. Actually, Firefly is quite good too. And Angel. And those are great shows because Joss Whedon created them, who is a genius. So I'm not a total TV snob. I believe that film can be art, even on TV. But art on TV tends to get canceled quickly, unless you're lucky. But my philosophy has been, for the past few years, that anything that is actually good, I'll hear about it and can watch it on DVD someday. That's how I discovered Buffy; I never would have chosen to watch that show, thinking that it sounded like the dumbest idea for a show on Earth. Especially because the movie was so bad. But I knew some people who really liked it, so I borrowed a friend's DVDs and gave it a shot. I was able to watch all 7 seasons of it without a single commercial break... which is the point I've laboriously been coming to.

Commercials are the devil. I hate hate Hate HATE them. In fact, I've been known to scream at them in disgust. I don't feel that TV programming is what is responsible for dumbing down America, although there are certainly plenty of shows out there that I wouldn't wipe my bottom with. Hell, if I was a personal Nurse for a quadriplegic Stalin I wouldn't wipe his bottom with them. Well ok, to be fair, I'd never be a personal Nurse for any quadriplegic, Stalin or otherwise. Gross. I'm just not that selfless a person. But still, you take my meaning. Next to commercials, aimless channel surfing is the next in line for most mind-numbing thing ever. Anyway. I feel that commercials, and most popular TV shows, are a way of making people think that raving lunatic morons are funny, or even normal. Like those Wendy's commercials where the black guy wearing a Wendy's wig is trying to convince people that they have a constitutional right to a better burger. I know, I know, it's supposed to be funny. Ha ha we're just kidding buy our burgers. But something about it makes me want to commit suicide inside.

So having said all of this, I finally caved and got cable. I did this because, earlier this year I was happily enjoying my HDDVD player when BAM! Blu-Ray won the High Definition battle, making my HD collection obsolete. No more new movies in that beautiful, pristine format I had so recently become accustomed to. Believe me, you have not seen Unforgiven, The Shining, or 2001: A Space Odyssey until you've seen them in HD. I could have made the switch to Blu-Ray, except that the cheapest player is still around $400, the discs cost like $30 to $40 a pop, and a few other reasons that you probably don't care about, but I do. HDDVD players were around $200, and the discs were usually around $20. Sigh. But so I got cable, because they offer some channels in HD, and I was really wanting to watch some stuff in HD again.

I haven't had it on much since I got it, since I don't actually spend all that much time watching TV anyway. I tend to watch a movie with dinner, and that's about it. But I've enjoyed a few things... I got to watch The Lost Boys in HD, and the other night I tried out the HD pay-per-view channel and saw The Golden Compass. Very nice! But last night, something happened which made me decide that cable in my house is a short lived phenomenon. Spiderman was on TNT HD, and I was all excited because I'd been curious what that looked like in HD. When TNT plays movies, they have commercial breaks. A commercial for a Stouffer's TV dinner came on. I was already irritated by the spate of obnoxious pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator commercials I'd been forced to sit through between segments of Spiderman, and the worst part is that they tend to play the same 10 commercials on every break, just in case you'd forgotten about their stupid product that nobody needs from ten minutes ago. Oh, I also have to say that the worst commercials to sit through (Well, they're all horrible. It's so hard to chose the worst, actually, that anytime I complain about any commercial it's going to be the worst.) are the chain restaurant ones where they show you large pictures of gross greasy things that come in food-like shapes and are supposed to be appetizing, but are in fact unbelievably nauseating, and are the worst reason to have HD channels.

(Keep in mind that these pictures, as disgusting looking as they are, are not even what the food you order will actually look like in reality. The actual food always looks limp in comparison to the ads. Gross and grosser. Blechh.)

So this Stouffer's TV dinner commercial came on. And it combined just about everything I could possibly hate in a commercial. It starts off with a shot inside of a moving car; Mom and Dad are in the front and three noisy brats in the back, eating some sort of take out and all looking generally miserable. Then the voice over comes on and says, "When did this become our idea of a sit-down dinner?" Several big gross photos of greasy Stouffer's TV dinners later, and a satisfied family sitting down at home to eat them, and I was screaming, frothing at the mouth, unleashing a stream of obscenities at the TV as though I had just been told I had to wipe Stalin's immobile ass. I mean, seriously, Stouffer's TV Dinners have the audacity to lament the disappearance of a sit down family dinner, and try to convince you that they offer a product which solves said dilemma!!? This is what is going to end us, I swear. The problem is is that people just pretend like it's no big deal to have to witness such towering banality, that it's just a commercial and of course it's dumb but it doesn't really affect me. But it's not true. People, you have no idea how much it affects you. Seriously, try not watching TV at all for a time; try turning off your cable for say 6 months. Then go back and watch some... you'll be appalled at the drivel you're made to swallow.

You might think that you can control it. You know, flip to another show while commercials are on, or mute it or whatever. But I'm telling you, having cable in the house is no different than keeping heroin in the cabinet for medicinal uses when William Burroughs is your best friend and drops by all the time. I don't have any TV addict friends who drop by to get a TV fix, and TV is an addiction I gave up long enough ago that it tastes like ashes to me now, so I'll keep it around for the moment, until I can find a better HD solution, but please. If you ever realize that I've relapsed into couch potatoism, please come over and punch me in the head really hard. I'm begging you, intervene. I think I'll be fine, you know. I gave up smoking and fast food. I'm sure I can keep away from idly turning on the TV for no good reason. I have plenty of methadone, I mean DVDs to get me through the more difficult moments. I'm just saying, you know, TV commercials are worse for you than smoking, fast food, or heroin, so I'm a little more nervous about it.