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Cought an excellent movie on tonight, one I haven’t seen in quite awhile as point of fact: Auntie Mame with Rosalind Russell as Mame.

The film starts out in the 1920s with a man writing his will, that when he passes on. His sons future would be well taken care by his banker. But his son would end up in the care of his sister, something that he wouldn’t even wish on a dog! But of course keeping himself in good shape, he figures that there will be no need to worry for while. He dies at an ironic time during PT, making the papers with the shocker ^_^. Which send his young son Patrick and servant Norah Muldoon off to live with his living realitive.

Patrick’s “Auntie Mame” mistakes him and Norah for the new dishwasher when they walk in on a party. Setting the entire film in motion as they adjust to life together. The character of Auntie Mame is without a doubt, one of the best. She is arguably a first class screw up, party animal, and a lune but a very good person. Nuts as a mad hair but a good person lol. They have a near non stop stream of parties or as Norah puts it when groaning with the decorator. They’ve had 13 parties in two weeks, would have been 14 but the bootlegger couldn’t come that day, hahaha.

When the stock market crashes as the great depression looms, Mame and all of her friends are totally wiped out. Her best girl friend Vera (who is usually passed out drunk at Mames place) hooks her up with a two bit part in one of her plays. Mame is almost literally there with bells on and ruins the show when she gets her bracelet stuck on Vera’s dress. Although it is probably a great way to get fired on the first night, she actually cracked up the audience and livened up a really dull drama. In search of a new job, she ends up as a switchboard operator on a PBX and bungles it horribly.

While working as a sales girl at Macy’s, Mame walking around with the worlds most horrendous sales book in history (practically trailing behind her). She meets a fine southren gentlemen, whose out buying 24 pairs of roller skates for an orphanage. After Mame gets fired, he chases after the manager to explain things; she shouts a reminder to get the skates, and “get them at Gimbles!”. Fast forward a bit and “Beau” has brought her home to the plantation to meet his family. Where an jealous ol’filly suckers Mame into riding in a fox hunt, side saddle atop of a killer horse. The plantation sequence is bloody hilarious, even more so perhaps if your an American. Every one but Beau is expecting Mame to die in the process, even young Patrick who offers to trip her, “You’ll only break a leg Auntie Mame”. Not only those that zany woman manage to survive the fox hunt, while riding side saddle!!! She passes the hounds, she passes the fox! And ends up flying off the monstrous horse and into the bushes, holding a steering wheel as the only thing keeping her from flying back to blue belly hell >_>.

Beau purposes and she excepts but little Patrick just has one question, who the flib did she stay on that horse!? It seems that just like in the play, she got “stuck but at the other end” looool. Mame and Beau take a honey moon around the world, where Beau is always trying to get to the highest places to snap a picture of his bride, until he ends up falling off the Matterhorn in the alps. Mame eventually returns home to friends and family, only to find out that the growing Patrick is getting married. And even worse, to the most stuck up snob on two legs. Patrick manages to convince her to write her memoirs and play it “sane” long enough to pass in front of his snobbish fiancée. Before the wedding, Mame invites everyone to her place for an intimate family dinner…. Masterfully planned as only “Auntie Mame” could “accidentally” arrange ^_^.

She redecorates the place to beat the bands and what a perfect idea it is. She drives Patrick’s in-laws to be and fiancée crazy, invites every “riff raft” friend who helped raise him over. And totally sets off utter chaos — if anyone can get through this part of the movie without laughing at it, they must be a part Vulcan. Mame succeeds in destroying the evil engagement, driving the matchmaking banker insane, and making Patrick realize hat a doomed course he was set to, rather then actually living his life. Several years later, Mame is entertaining the son of Patrick and her (now former) secretary, and scheming a way to show the youngster India!

At first glance it might be a boring idea for a movie but in actual watching. Auntie Mame is a great movie, funny, entertaining, and the best rendition that I’ve seen. It’s been made into a movie at least 3 times, who knows how many times on stage as well. But the first film outing is the best IMHO, and most funny 🙂

Yes! Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!

Coming on at 0100Q is a movie that my family has enjoyed for ages, The Trouble with Angels. A really long time actually, my parents first saw it on a date in the ’60s. It was a drive in double feature of Cinderella and The Trouble with Angels, and the entire family has enjoyed the movie since lol.

It follows two girls at a Catholic boarding school run by a group of nuns. The two of them get in enough hilarious trouble, that the poor Mother Superior is lucky enough to survive the movie! From bubble bath in the nuns tea, the smoking affair, making a plaster mask of another students face, and oh… what pranks those two brats play! It’s like watching a little demon and her stooge at work lol. It’s also the film that introduced my family to the expression,

“I’ve got the most scathingly brilliant idea”

Which usually occurs before they get into more trouble ^_^. You’ve got to admire the nuns, for not beating the ever loving crap out of them for all of the torment they are subjected too…

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Finally a decent nights sleep, even if I’ve gotten absolutely nothing done. My dreams falling into a more positive realm and ending on a much nicer note then other dream streams of late.

Not that this morning has been especially nice though. And to make it worse, I have to start getting ready for work in about 5 minutes :-(. At least though it is a fairly light week, I didn’t have to work yesterday — so that’s a light week! Hum bug, already being off’ed to do something else before work. And quite conveniently, if I don’t get dressed for work before doing, I’ll be late lol.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be in a business where it wasn’t such a repressive pain in the ass, to actually have to do it? Wait a minute, Guy Fieri is the only guy on earth with a job like that…

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

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War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y’all

War, huh, good God
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

Ohhh, war, I despise
Because it means destruction
Of innocent lives

War means tears
To thousands of mothers eyes
When their sons go to fight
And lose their lives

I said, war, huh
Good God, y’all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again

War, whoa, Lord
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

War, it ain’t nothing
But a heartbreaker
War, friend only to the undertaker
Ooooh, war
It’s an enemy to all mankind
The point of war blows my mind
War has caused unrest
Within the younger generation
Induction then destruction
Who wants to die
Aaaaah, war-huh
Good God y’all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it, say it, say it
War, huh
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again y’all
War, huh, good God
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

War, it ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker
War, it’s got one friend
That’s the undertaker
Ooooh, war, has shattered
Many a young mans dreams
Made him disabled, bitter and mean
Life is much to short and precious
To spend fighting wars these days
War can’t give life
It can only take it away

Ooooh, war, huh
Good God y’all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again

War, whoa, Lord
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

War, it ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker
War, friend only to the undertaker
Peace, love and understanding
Tell me, is there no place for them today
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord knows there’s got to be a better way

Ooooooh, war, huh
Good God y’all
What is it good for
You tell me
Say it, say it, say it, say it

War, huh
Good God y’all
What is it good for
Stand up and shout it
Nothing

last couple days

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I think over the last few days, I’ve probably have had the most sleep I’ve had in months but still miserable rest if any. I keep having strange dreams that are, should I say a bit distorted? And each usually less pleasurable then the last… I’m always waking up, going back to sleep, or not able to keep sleeping w/o being bothered into getting up :

My most productive day in awhile actually. Got some work done on the website for Wiz, managed to drop into the Proving Grounds on the RvS side. Scope out some of the current regulars and check in on the NCOs. I also managed to duck in for a few rounds with Duke before dinner. It’s been a good while since I’ve played SWAT4, since I took the Drill Instructor position for a Raven Shield recruit. I have been focusing my own activities on RvS as well, after all — what good would I be as a DI if I wasn’t up to par myself?

It’s also quite nice to be able to play RvS at night again without lag. The only sad thing, I thin I miss my old “lag step”. I get an occasional spike of warpage in both game snow but that is probably because the aerial on my [new] wifi card is bent… As opposed to before, when I used to play RvS and lag-step to an extent that taking two steps forward felt like warping half of one backwards too. Now once the first-round lag is over, I wouldn’t even realize the server is in another country lol. Hooah for cable.

Tonight I was also on Element Leader duty in SWAT4 for the first time in a long time. I generally have a standing policy of “If no one else will, I will” when it comes to EL. I try to avoid it though, in favor of letting young Cpl/LCpls take command of the mission. That’s how my generation learned, practice !!! With how long it has been, I was actually presently surprised that I didn’t fumble any keys. Probably because I was concentrating more intently on a safe mission plan for my element, instead of what key to push. Planning about three quarters of it before hand also helped >_>. I still prefer taking EL of elements that are mostly compromised of [SAS] though, rather then a superposition of pubs and members. For one thing, it is much faster to plan things without having to go over details covered in our training regime.

I think I did fairly well for a rust bucket, I don’t consider a headache the size of Russia and much time spent coding instead to be a decent excuse for shotty work though. Not with how many hours of server time I’ve got lol. As long as I can keep my eyes on what I’m doing, I can generally handle room clearing in my sleep. But one thing that really threw me off though was our rear guard, a pub. Who had a great knack for taking up good spots for covering the rear. But almost no talent for actually securing the rear, often I’d end up crossing his/her Line of Fire (LoF) and that’s not good, but I suppose it was faster then having to teach the pub how to do a better job…

*sigh*

Tomorrow is my last day off and I’ve still got so much shit to get done :

Writer’s Block: Last Call

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You are on a plane that’s about to crash. You have time to make ONE phone call. Who do you call and what do you say?
Submitted By lovelylette_x3

Live Journals Writer’s Block

I’m not married, so fuck’em all 😛

Just kidding lol, I’d probably call home, leave my will and say good bye. Assuming lifes little different from now, probably something like: distribute the computer stuff between Justin and Stevo, [SAS] gets any cash left, E-Mail Wiz and send him a copy of all my [SAS] related files, E-Mail miles, then post on the forums I frequent most. The rest being taken care of by the usual flow of communication to people on/off the net who should know.

Considering my families general technical literacy and the strength of my system logins, I best stay healthy for a good long while lol.

Burned my 3rd coaster ever :

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Maybe I should just not be lazy and fire up my laptop so I can burn the disk with cdrecord. For one reason or another, burning CD-Rs with Nero Express 6 seems to get pissy if I don’t verify data properly. If this burn session fails, I’ll just have to open a new pack of CD-R and use my laptop.

I need to get a PC-BSD test machine set up for some work, so it helps to not have to have to wait on patches to install. My previous disk set was v1.5.0, the current PC-BSD release is v1.5.1 + auto updates. Since my test machine is also my regular desktop, she has dual monitors. I’ve spent some time reading through various X.Org manual pages and it looks like it should be fairly easy to get things set up the way I like it, pardoning any KDE issues I guess. Once I’ve got the monitors sorted out, I can get started hehe.

I can’t help but wonder though, how much fun it might be to take one PC, a couple monitors, graphics cards, mice, and keyboards. And experiment with concurrent users running X sessions. As far as I know, the only limitations involved are PC related. X seems to be fully capable of it, Unix like systems are more then capable of multiple users and the design of X follows suit. Why does all of this thinking make me wish I had more equipment to play with >_>

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Well, I made a posting on daemonforums about the smart phone / pda idea, personally I think I’m toast as far as finding something suitable, and they will probably think I’m an idiot lol.

But, I ain’t been able to find anything on my own so far and it’s basically this… Or continue to suffer :. One thing I dislike about my life, no one here understands the difference between a compiler and a weed wacker, let along how much annoyance they are. Is it to much to ask, to be able tow ork on stuff when I’m not at work? It’s really getting to the point where I may have to bring my own projects to work in order to get them done, without having to kill anyone in the process: speaking of course!

Why bother or just die trying?

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Fuck heads driving me fucking nuts….

It’s almost 0130 and I’ve still gotten nothing done !!!! Like, who the hell do I have to kill just to get some work done…. Damn blast and unfuck it all ! This is driving me out of my skull. I can barely write a post….

I had an interesting idea at work today, mobile device in the smart phone / PDA family. Ideally something between slightly bigger then a traditional cell phone and a little smaller then a Game Boy of yore, and with a QWERTY keyboard of course. Something that I could edit text files on and transfer data to and from a PC via USB or through a memory card.

The idea would be to use my “idle” time at work to work on writing code, there’s usually gaps of time where I can’t complete my remaining work until something else is done, so I’m stuck waiting (and usually pacing much to my mothers extreme annoyance and threat to crack my skull open, etc). So why not fiddle with a text editor instead?

As annoying as it would be to ‘thumb’ across a keypad, as painful as it would be to put up with no Vim, as expensive as the device would be…. I would probably be more productive then ever, like today. I had to wait about 20 minutes until I could finish, standing at ease, to avoid argument over pacing back and forth inpatiently — I hate having my time wasted.

So why not work on some code while I wait? At least at work, while I’m usually annoyed at least I’m not as *annoyed* as when I’m at home… Giving my family more chances to abuse my time. Maybe it is a crazy idea but at least, it is worth thinking about :. I do admit my friends are right, a phone for me is more of dead weight then a feature >_> Although people would actually be able to call me for a change, not that I like phone calls to start with lol.

“Why the hell did you call me when your sitting at the computer!” <<-- me. I hate phones with a passion but if it would fill the gap, I'd live with having a (more powerful) cell phone again. All I really care about is a decent text editor and a way to transfer files to/from the device with my FreeBSD laptop. Crap like mobile phone capability or internet access would just be a luxury. It would really be nice to be able to write programs for it without losing an arm or a leg financially just for a few custom apps (read creating a minimalist Vi editor or porting nvi) So far, I haven't be able to find anything suitable... but one can always dream of productivity, no? I haven't been able to find anything inside or outside of my price range that foots the bill yet though :-(. A few models of Zaurus PDA’s actually would be nice… but seem to be rather lacking in availability here lol.

Crud, if I had the right supplies I could build something my self… Probably electrocute myself in the process but hey, it would be interesting >_>. It would also be a way to pass the time. The thing that really pisses me off? I’ve had computers with less computing power then many of the smart phones in the American market, and they would fill my needs better if they weren’t so dang big.

Maybe I should just get some sleep… worry about it in the morning, I ain’t got a snow balls chance in hell of getting anything done tonight anyway. And to top it off, the dog has stolen the entire bed!!!

Writer’s Block: Phobias

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Do you have a remarkable phobia? Does your phobia have a large impact on your life?
Submitted By bitter_melodee

Live Journals Writer’s Block

Well, I do have a mild fear of heights: not strong enough imho to count as acrophobia but it is still there. My fear of heights usually has little effect on my life, I’m rarely more then a few meters off the deck. I’m very uncomfortable in high places and tend to avoid certain areas if at all possible. Such as houses where the upstairs is heavily separated from walking off the edge by railings instead of walls. The kind where it is wide open and if you wanted to go off the deep end, all you need to do is climb over the nearest edge and break a leg lol. I can’t stand being in such an area, makes me nuts.

Although oddly, the concept of flying does not bother me in the least! Maybe because it implies that one would actually have some control of the situation, rather then purely reliant on merciless gravity :.

I don’t really know why I have a fear of heights but I only have one guess. When I was little, my brother (10 years senior) would sometimes pick me up by the ankles and spin me around the room. Luckly I eventually got to big for him to get me off the ground so easy >_>. And I remember once when a friend of my mothers came to visit along with his wife and a few friends. I don’t remember what I said, maybe I told him to F off or something? I dunno but he picked me up by my feet and dangled me in the air until I apologized for whatever I had done to the poor guy lol.

I was generally a good kid and stayed out of trouble as a child, e.t.c. but some times I could be a brat if I tried lol. I was the peaceful couch potato in training, while my brother was the obsessive defiant hell raiser ^_^. Hmm, It’s kind of amazing how far back one can remember, my memory goes about as far as being 4 years old and encompasses most of the time between now and my very first memory.