last night, chris, david, jocelyn and i went to see watchmen on the imax screen. if you've never seen anything on the imax screen, stop what you're doing and go. now. even to the one at the museum where they play all those documentaries about fish and penguins and such.

i don't get as excited as i used to about most movies but i was pretty stoked on this one. i had been wanting to see it for a few months now. it looked amazing, visually speaking. the story looked pretty good. it was getting great buzz on the internet. and so... i went.

bummer central. and that's with me having a full day to ruminate stew.

okay... the highlights:
- dr. manhattan is the shit. if i could be the smartest thing ever and invincible, i probably would.
- malin ackerman is hot. i mean, really hot.
basically would be it.

now... the lowlights:
- rorschach looks and sounds exactly like the sherminator from american pie... post puberty. in the film he's about intimidating as my mother's copy of Enya's shepherd moon record.
- dr. manhattan's electric blue smurf penis. seriously. it's on screen every ten minutes. and it's gigantic. this makes me feel inadequate as a man.
- creepy hair. through and through.
- not enough nudity involving malin ackerman. what? she should have been naked the whole movie.
- an unnecessary trip to the arctic. i was pretty stoked when this came up as a plot point of the film. well, it's a DC production and i figured that there would be some sort of crossover between this and superman. what? i thought that they were going to the fortress of solitude and then shit would have been off the chain.
- is he God? is He God? is he not god? is He not god? is he kinda god? is there a god? i get it. i'm not 12.

oh! it was like seeing fantastic four 2 but with a blue dude instead of a silver guy on a surfboard. but with many more f-bombs.

i was bummed. not quite as bummed as when the tigers lost the 2006 world series but pretty close.

save your $10.

i should be a professional movie reviewer. i really should. i wonder if that's a job listed on indeed.com. hmmm...

i walked downtown last night for michelle's birthday. i won't say (26) how old she is now. it was a long walk by the way (5 miles) but it was a very nice evening so i rather enjoyed it.

as i was enjoying my night of one beer - a pint of flat coors light for $3.50? how can i lose?! -and a waitress who thought that $6.50 would have been a perfectly acceptable tip, my friend samira showed up at the broadway brewhouse. it's always good to have friends around but to have even more friends around is even better. that sounded like the end of a very poorly written monologue at the tail end of an episode of Acapulco H.E.A.T.... preferably spoken by a blonde with a boobs out to here and the IQ of a fish sandwich. for dramatic effect. of course.

anyway... the first thing that samira said to me (after bemoaning the fact that i am fur and large hair free making it exceedingly difficult to locate me in a crowded bar) was "my friend is absolutely in love with you!"

JACKPOT! screw the 'having good friends' crap from above or whatever i was talking about. bring on the good stuff!

"yeah," samira continued. "she was at my birthday party last month. short girl, dark hair, had a flower behind her ear."
"oh, yeah!" i said excitedly. now, i must interject that while i don't have a one-track mind, it's running on maybe a track and a half on a very good day.
"yeah... she was texting me from across the room that night and was asking me all about you."
"yeah!?" my eyes must have been as big as saucers by this point in time. again, i have to interject that unless a woman is topless, holding a beer, and is saying (word for word) "let's go makeout" i am not going to pick up on any signals. she could be standing outside my house directing me with airplane runway flasher things and i'd end up calling the cops saying that there's some weird fuckin' lady on my back porch with lights trying to get a plane to land on my house and kill me. that's about how well i pick up on stuff. intuition? right out the window, kiddos!
"yeah... she said it's a good thing you didn't give your number to her husband an--"
"wait... what?!"
"yeah. your friend mike."
"damnit, samira!!! don't send me up the mountain and then down the backside of a double black diamond like that!" that's a skiing term, by the way. i was told once that sailing is like sex to rich people so i'm assuming that skiing is for the slightly above middle class.
"yeah," samira began to conclude, "she said it was definitely a good thing that mike doesn't have your phone number."
i guess that last part made me feel better. i guess. oh, well... thwarted again.

if only i were into breaking up marriages.
is that so bad?

Dear eBay,

I have been a loyal patron of yours for the past several years. I have purchased more belt buckles from you than I can count or than I really need. I have sold stuff via you that I thought that no one in their right mind would buy. EVER. Nothing like the year's worth of friendship that my friend Tim sold a while back but still...

With times being as tough as they are and me not needing a whole bunch of my musical gear that I have floating around my house, I decided to get rid of a whole heap of it. Among the things I listed were an old 4x12 Crate bass cabinet that I have not used in years and my beloved 1972 Fender Bassman cabinet 2x12. I don't really play in bands anymore so I decided that I didn't need either of 'em.

What a waste of time trying to sell this shit on your site.

Issue #1) Your shipping calculator sucks. I estimated the shipping charges for the 4x12 bass cabinet. I determined that it weighed between 60 & 70 pounds (actually, as it comes to be, it weighed 55) and according to your awesome shipping estimation calculator, I was informed that it would cost about $70.00 to ship via UPS ground. When I went to UPS to send it out, I was informed by the well-spoken, highly edjumacated individual behind the counter that it would be "mad expensive" to ship. I told him that I knew that. He then came at me with a price of $187.00. All I could think of was Tom Hanks' reaction in "Big" when he gets his first paycheck at the toy company. I contacted the winning bidder and told him (in response to one of our earlier communiques) of the actual shipping charge and he was okay with me not sending it and just refunding his money. Still... get a calculator that works.

Issue #2) Your bidder that won my '72 cabinet. This guy waited for weeks to pay me after I had already shipped it. After I finally received confirmation that the item had been received, I asked him to release the hold on his item so that I could withdraw the funds from paypal. I received an email from him this morning (the Mail program on my mac wen "ka-bing" and woke me up at 5something on a Saturday morning... leading to me being too pissed to go back to sleep. His email read that the item was "significantly not as described" and that he refused to pay me. What I want to know is how an item that is clearly listed and accompanied by multiple pictures not be as it was described. He bitched and complained to eBay and I sent my response. Within 15 minutes, I received notification that Nancy NoPay the crybaby had won the dispute and that he would be sending the item back to me and that I was to issue him a full refund. Great... just what I want. Something that I was looking to sell that is pushing 40 years old being shipped all the way across the country again. That last sentence made me sound like I was the owner of a transcontinental harem.

Seriously. What the hell?

So eBay, I am DONE with you. I wonder if I can sell my account on you... Seriously, the goodwill that I have built up on that thing has gotta be worth a ton of money. A ton. I'm sticking to craigslist. That shit is the mad note!

Sincerely,

Stephen P Bohn

Cursive either releases songs that are pure genius or pure crap. actually, i think that's the fault of tim kasher who may be the most uneven songwriter alive today. he makes your precious boy wonder ryan adams look like a model of stability.

anyway, the new cursive record "mama, i'm swollen" is out... kinda. you can download it for as little as $3 on their website or you can just wait until it comes out next tuesday and pay full price at a record store. it's up to you either way.

this record is really quite good. it's not as good as "the ugly organ" (frankly, they'll never get there again) but it's the most unrestrained thing that i think they may have ever released. i don't mean unrestrained as in "sloppy" (let's face it, no one is ever gonna call this band "tight") but it finally looks like their figuring out how to play as a band. it only took 'em a dozen years, too.

i really thought that i was going to like twitter when i first found out about it... umm... a year or so ago. i still can't figure out the appeal.

that's not to say that it doesn't stop me from using it. i liken it to spices in a kitchen. sure, i guess it's full of all sorts of neat things... throw them in a salad or a... uhh... what do people cook these days? a chicken? and you've got something that was good and you subsequently have made it better.

spice on a salad? why not! this is america, damnit, and if i want paprika on my salad then that's what i am going to have! daddy gets what daddy wants!

that was not a very good analogy. it's monday. leave me alone.

so i've been twittering for a while (i think kibbe drugged me into it. "drugged me into it"? sure.) and i just don't get it. i basically just use it to write profanities and be cryptic. i'm like an ancient egyptian pyramid carver... with a vengeance!

that was a good analogy. it's monday night. let's party.

with all that being said, you can follow me on twitter if you want to. basically, i just want to know who is stalking me and how they are doing it. it makes me better prepared to deal with any potential attackers. for example... if you a-twitter the following:

OMG! @omarmctrigger is soooo hot. i want to cut off all of his hair and keep it in a ziploc bag!

i will now know about it.

too bad the joke is on you for the following reasons:
1.) i'm twitter aware. twitter hyper aware.
2.) i have a loyal harem of trained, deadly, sexy assassin type protector ladies who want nothing more than to pleasure me (we're talking grape feeding here, perverts) and/or protect me.
3.) i have very little hair so you'd have to be pretty good with a pair of scissors.

so go ahead... stalk me away. stalk me away? it sounds like i'm hoarding corn for the upcoming drought or something: "stalk me away some o' that sweet corn, ezekiel! don't let jed near it! sonovabitch done near ate it all last time." you see what i'm getting at: don't trust jed.

i finally got around to sending out the stuff that i sold on eBay last week. three of my bidders requested that i ship them their items via UPS. that's the last time that I make that an option for shipping...

i strutted into the UPS store on 21st avenue in hillsboro village on friday afternoon. i knew the things that i were going to ship were going to be expensive. i didn't really care about that because the purchasers were the ones who paid for the shipping charges. i boxed up one of my items and was having it sent ground delivery to some rinky dink town in my home state of michigan. i checked over the invoice and got down the very last line item on my bill... it was "delivery area surcharge" of $4.55.

"excuse me," i began to the clerk, "but what the hell is a 'delivery area surcharge'?"
"well," he responded "it's because the address that you're shipping this to is out in the middle of nowhere."
"isn't that what you guys get paid to do?" i asked with a scowl. "i'm paying you guys to ship something to a place that i can't get to... why am i, essentially, getting charged twice for it?"
the dude didn't have a good answer. he was the assistant manager at a UPS store and i didn't really expect him to anyway.

i'm not using UPS again anytime soon for anything. that place sucks. the post office will get it there just as fast and won't charge as much. eff U... PS.




also, there seems to be a tea leoni-a-thon on TNT this morning. first deep impact and now jurassic park 3. i hope spanglish is on next.

all of my friends are getting married while i'm just getting drunk. i wish there were more to it than that. however... it's pretty cut and dry. like a lemon in a martini.

that was pretty good.

but since i CAN'T just leave it at that, as i seemingly never can, i will continue to write. last night trevor and hillary got engaged. this came to me both as shocking and not shocking at all. it also makes it the third time in my life when i have received a text message that read "she said yes!" i wish that that particular text left a bit more to the imagination... i wish it meant "she said yes to letting me re-animate the corpse of ricardo montalbon so that i could finally get star trek 2, 2: now you've really pissed off kahn off the ground." to my knowledge the "she said yes!" text has never meant that to my knowledge.

last night at las palmas, i mentioned to jocelyn that on april fool's day this year, i plan on sending out a "she said yes!" text. i probably won't because i'll forget but that would be a pretty neat idea. rest assured, it would be the kind of "she said yes!" text that meant the thing about ricardo montalbon as indicated above. i just thought that that would have been a great idea for valentine's day, too. much more romantic, in a creepy-dude-made-out-of-leather sort of way.

so, with all this feigned self-loathing in mind, i have decided to come up with this:

"SO YOU WANNA GO OUT SOMETIME?" SURVEY

each answer is worth one point except for the short answer at the bottom which will be worth something more. also, nude pictures will get you far. the highest score gives you the privilege of taking me out for a night on the town on your dime. i figure that since i'm a pretty hot commodity and your stock can only go up by being seen with me that it works out. a simple bit of copying and pasting on your part will suffice. ladies only. i mean, i guess if guys want to fill it out, too, they can but none of them are getting a date with me.

here it goes...
[] i like cheeseburgers.
[]i have no problem lounging about for extended periods of time in my underpants.
[] i like saved by the bell.
[] i don't like saved by the bell: the college years. mark-paul gosselaar was about 43 when he was on it and in real life would have been the middle-aged jackass fucking up the curve in all of the 100 level classes.
[] i like that "fucking" doesn't have a little red squiggly underline thing underneath it indicating it as a misspelled word.
[] i am independently wealthy.
[] i have seen all three lord of the rings films.
[] i have seen all three lord of the rings extended edition films.
[] i have seen all three lord of the rings extended edition films in one day.
[] i know who arthur guinness is. no cheating.
[] i voted for ron paul at some point in the 2008 presidential election. "supporting" and then voting for barry or johnny later doesn't count.
[] i like the idea of the snuggie-crawl. blankets in the bar?! you bet!
[] i sing along to my own ring tone.
[] i sing along to other people's ring tones.
[] i am a hipster and have applied to work at emma email marketing at some point in time.
[] i was rejected during the emma email marketing application process by being told that my writing was not good enough via an email that contained at least one grammatical and one punctuation mistake.
[] i have climbed a mountain.
[] i shave my legs. this one's kind of a deal breaker.
[] i laugh when people fart.
[] i volunteer in some way.
[] i have been in a fistfight.
[] i think that your (my) picture makes me look like vincent van gogh without the weird hat.
[] i like the nintendo wii.
[] i like ireland.
[] i really like ireland.
[] i prefer macs over pcs.
[] i once ate an entire pizza in one sitting.
[] futurama. no "i like" necessary.
[] i don't ask "sports night? what's that?"
[] i think rap was way better before tupac came along and started fucking it all up.
[] i like the zoo.
[] i like looking at animals at the zoo.
[] the best part of the zoo is the shaved lemonade ice concoction that sells for four bucks and into which vodka can be poured.
[] the really best part of the zoo would be seeing an elephant attacking a herd for 8 year olds that mistakenly wandered into its pen.
[] i like taylor swift's "love story" song.
[] i won't make fun of you for liking taylor swift's "love story" song.
[] i don't think that christian bale's rant was all that impressive.
[] my mom shopped at eddie bauer (or other comparable urban-outdoorsy store) for me when i was in high school.
[] i think that fuel economy is sexy.
[] the fast and the furious wasn't that bad of a movie.
[] m. night shamamamamlllalalalaln has turned into a hack.
[] i think that all senior citizens should have Life Alert.
[] once a person reaches the age of 60, they should be required to take a driver's test every three years.
[] dude.
[] duder.
[] dyyyyyude!
[] i remember when chris carabba only sang in further seems forever.
[] tori spelling huffed some mad dong to get kinda famous in hollywood.
[] i own a shoe organizer.
[] i do not own multiple shoe organizers.
[] post rock makes you feel important.
[] they're not called "tats".
[] i will not ask to see your tats unless i offer to show you my boobs in return.
[] i have not been on tour.
[] i went to belmont.
[] i did not go to belmont.
[] i think you went to belmont.
[] why didn't i ever see you in any of my classes at belmont?
[] i have driven across the country.
[] i have driven across the country by myself.

and now... the short answer.

makey outy at the end of our date?





okay, ladies, there it is. good luck! you're gonna need it...

on friday, amazon is releasing their highly(?) anticpated kindle 2.

when i was a kid, i used to go to the library for the rare occasions that i would read books. what more than likely happened, though, would be me somewhat fired up to do a prject for school, going up to said library, checking out the books and seeing them collect a fine layer of dust over the course of the next four weeks all while watching re-runs of "road rules" on mtv and wondering why the report on frankenhooker or whatever i was supposed to be studying in english class never got done. it was a mystery to this day that i still haven't solved.

hang on... i'm gonna go get a beer.
and i'm back.

now... where was i? oh, yes... the amazon kindle.

for those of you not in the know -- probably about the same number of you who are actually interested in the kindle 2 and leaving the other 99.9% of us in the world not to care -- the kindle 2 is essentially an electronic book reader.

seriously. an electronic book reader. ultimately, i am okay with anything that gets people to read. to those of you who can't read i have this to say to you:

you suck more balls than season two of LOST.

now, who did i just offend? i'm eager to meet them. besides, folks who can't read don't even know they were just insulted.

*eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr
that was the legendary "brakes stopping quickly" noise, by the way.

what really tugs my beard though is the kindle 2 will be available with an option that READS THE BOOKS ALOUD TO YOU. geeks are, um, geeking out about this shit all over the blogosphere. or at least they are for argument's sake in my head.

personally, i'm not impressed. oh, man... something that can read aloud to you. i had one of those when i was 3. called it "mom". and then when i was 7, i had a speak & spell. that was 21 years ago. amazon doesn't seem so bad ass now, does it? i'm so far ahead of the curve. so far. i'm like the only amish dude with a power drill. you might as well call me elijah the electric.

the street price? $359. do you understand how many x box 360's i can buy for that? one. okay. that's not a very good comparison. but i bet i'd have a helluva lot more fun. who wants to get way more smarter when they coulds be playing the videos games? not me.

in the past month or so, i have noticed an increase in the amount of spam that i am receiving. no, not the disgusting type of spam that makes me vomit; the kind that i get in my email inbox. as sophisticated as gmail is (it's got the smarts of ten men, i tells ya), the occasional spam message still slips through into my inbox from time to time.

for the past... hmmm... forever... someone from nammimimmbmiama (it's in central africa, i think... maybe western africa) has been trying to wire me $150 million. do you know what i could do with that kind of money?! in addition to solving all of my financial problems and allowing me to fulfill my goal of owning every friday the 13th movie ever made, including the new one where it seems the only requirements for casting were two things:
1.) can wear t-shirt
2.) can have t-shirt removed for campy (hehehe) make out/sex scene
i would be able to purchase the home that i always wanted. not just any home, mind you. a home with one of those lazy rivers like they have at the waterparks on the inside. basically, it would just be a large wearhouse. with a basketball court. and some stipper poles. with strippers. hot ones. with names like "daisy" and "bunny" and "that one chick that you had a crush on sophomore year of college but you don't remember her name now but you remember that she was really hot and critiqued your english paper once". something really classy.

anyway, as i was checking my email this evening, i received one such piece of junk snuck it's way past gmail's chastity belt of email protection. the subject line indicated to me that my grandfather had left me a tidy sum of money. the english was much more broken than that (like i said... it was from somewhere in the eastern hemisphere) but i was able to decipher what it said.

"holy shit!" i thought. "my ship, she has arrived!" and i'm a big thinker. i mean a BIG thinker. screw the $150 million dollars that my grandfather had left me... i'm gonna run the paranormal world. i have figured out how to communicate with the dead via email! dude... think of all the good things i could do with that ability:

• i could write ghost 2: the REAL secret of curly's gold. it would be a cross-over smash bringing the universes of whoopi goldberg's talent and jack palance's deadness together. fuck you, citizen kane. this shit's gonna be the best film ever.


• i would have my own tv show. for real.


• no more wondering who really killed JFK. i could ask him myself and write a book about it. i would call it tuesdays with jack. mitch albom would sue me and probably win.

and that's just off the top of my not drunk head.

all i had to do to get this money was send all of my bank account information to gramps who was hanging out and just waiting for it. what he was doing near a computer on the other side of the world instead of using his leisure time in heaven to either bowl or fish is beyond me. turns out i don't know where my bank account and routing numbers are... and he HAD to have the information by the end of the day.

oh, the room scouring that i did! i searched high and low. near and far. corner to corner.
and then i got tired, bored, and turned on my television to, believe it or not, watch the first friday the 13th movie. kevin bacon getting an arrow through the neck is still awesome.

oh, well...
i'm sure my grandfather will send me the information again. he was pretty good like that.

did i sit at home on a friday night and watch basketball? you bet i did. i did it because it is cheap although my funds will change a bit as of tomorrow with the close of several of my eBay auctions. during my night in chris, tony bakker (the second "k" is silent), and i came across a commercial for the upcoming espn bassmaster classic. i think that's what it's called. chris and i got into a heated debate about what was is considered to be a sport and what is not. chris then slurggested (slur + suggested = slurggested) that i write a blog about "the 25 most sporty sports". that would require far too much effort, i believe, and i don't want to develop a formula for measuring things like sweat, amount of gatorade consumed, and whether or not the team captain of the losing squad was or is beheaded at the end of the match. they were called incas. look into it.

also, never being one to do things quite the way that they are expected to be done (for better or for worse), i have decided to turn chris' suggestion on its ear a bit and give you a list anyway. ladies and gentlemen, i present to you, in descending order (for dramatic effect and in homage to flint, michigan's own casey kasem:

THE TOP FIVE NON-SPORTS

sure, people will watch them, but they're talents not athletic endeavors. think of them like magic shows.

5.) Shooting. i am going to try to be as general as possible with this one. this includes archery, guns, slingshots, man out of a cannon (only barely, though) and basically anything that involves a firing mechanism. besides, if expert marksman luke skywalker can "bulls eye womprats back home" (which, by the way, aren't much bigger than two meters) i don't think it should be considered a sport. luke was always kind of a turd. plus that fucker used magic... called it The Force.

does this dude look like an athlete to you? naw... didn't think so.

4.) Rhythmic Gymnastics. this would probably be much higher on the list if it weren't for the two following things:
-- will ferrel with his incredibly funny turn as frank the tank in old school:

jonah just yelled out "you're my boy, blue!"
-- i know better than to mess with the IOC. let us remember what they tried to do to john candy and those four americans with really bad accents jamaicans in cool runnings:

"i'm the best puuuushcart driver in allllll jamaica!"

3.) Equine Events. no, this is not exclusively due to my intense dislike of horses. yes, that is a large part of it. i guess jockeys get a wee bit [hehehe] of credit for being athlete-like. i mean, they're like 8th graders on a basketball team. sure, i guess you could watch it but you're time would probably be better spent making out with somebody under the bleachers. dudes and chicks and dressage get no credit whatsoever. any event that require you to wear a jacket and a tie should also include require one or more of the following: a wedding, a funeral, a fancy dinner, and the chance that you aren't going home alone at the end of the night. of course, if you go to a funeral and take the corpse home with you with plans of turning it into a lamp or something, i suggest that you stop reading right now... simply because you creep me out. oh, and rodeos (by and large) were negated by all of the horses / shepherding / other activities that happen in brokeback mountain. i'm not a homophobe but i don't want to see gay guys get it on; probably about as much as gay guys want to see straight people bonin'. the only reason why rodeo is somewhat redeemed is because some professional rodeo guy is married to jewel and she has an awesome rack:

i kid you not... i did a google image search of jewel and this is the 3rd image that appeared.

2.) Auto Racing. this includes stock car, f1 formula, demolition derby (as cool as it is), and anything that resembles the fast and the furious. it's a contest and a one that involves dudes drinking beer, very few chicks, sitting on couches and yelling. by those metrics, what i did last night is a sport. if you were to see tony stewart walking down the street, you might lean over to your wife and whisper into her ear "honey, look! it's that fat, mentally challenged fellow that NASCAR lets participate!"

no amount of beard is gonna help you, tony. cut out the carbs.

1.) Poker. no matter what the oft-confused dan rydel may say in the episode "shoe money tonight" from sports night, poker is not the sport of kings. it's a good time to hang out and try to trick your friends into giving you money based on the pieces of paper held in your hand. you know who else does that shit? insurance salesmen and no one has ever considered them to be athletes. need further proof? i present you with 2004 world series of poker champion greg "fossilman" raymer:

interestingly enough, greg (pictured on your left) has an ass made out of leather while john elway has a face made out of leather.

... and there you have it. infallible. unarguable. perfect. as always.