Here. For all the people who didn't believe when when I said they were planning on making a Kung-fu remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I told you so!

Okay, we, as a species, need to come to a consensus on some sort of code-word or signal that we can use to gracefully end a conversation that one or more parties is not interested in, and which serves no practical purpose.

We all have our own signals that we try to use, which most people will pick up on. There is, however, a group of people who are missing some sort of gland or hormone or something which enables the common person to determine when someone really has absolutely zero interest in the topic they are are going on and on and on and on about. Personally, if you are speaking to me, and I don't look you in the eye, turn to face my computer, start typing, and reply in only monosylabbic, phatic words of indifferent agreement, such as, "Yup", "Sure", "Mm" or "Yeah", congratulations, you have managed to bore a guy who gets excited about little plastic cars that turn into little plastic robots. If you start to leave my cubicle, and then return while providing me with more statistics about how many units Tiger Woods' Golf 2002 for the PC shipped, and I clearly sigh heavily and wearily pick up a nearby GameBoy Advance, then I'm sorry, but you are a bore. I try to be a nice guy. I don't want to say out loud, "What can I do to communicate more effectively to you that this is a subject about which I clearly could not give less of a shit?", but one day I swear I'm going to snap and do just that.

Now, I know that I can be boring. I can start talking about things to people, things which they don't care about. However, I realize that the things about which I can get excited are not necessarily, and in fact are very rarely the same things that excite others. Thus I have worked on perfecting my Boredom Early Detection System, or B.E.D.S. which allows me to terminate these conversations before the person subjected to my babble is forced to take violent action to shut me up. Call it a self-defense mechanism, if you like.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of working in the game industry is that it appears to be populated with a higher percentage of folks who suffer from this peculiar glandular defiency. They seem to latch onto me, lamprey-like (See, now I asked my cube-mate what the little fish that latched onto sharks were, and halfway through describing them, I remembered the name. A few exchanges after that, I could tell she was not interested in the intricacies of shark/lamprey relations, thus I said conclusive and went back to writing this. I could haev gone on forever, but I didn't.) because I don't respond in the manner in which they are used to (a direct punch to the face seems like it would be a reasonable response from an average person to some of the drivel I've endured), they assume that I care, no matter how obvious I try to make it that I don't. You know what I'm talking about, you've met these people, maybe you've punched a few of them.

I just can't bring myself to tell them that I really don't care about the things they want to talk about. I know that it would break their little hearts. I don't want to seem like I think I'm too cool to talk to them or anything, but I really, truly, honestly just don't care. I don'tt want to hurt their feelings, since I think this need to talk about subject which have no meaning to me stem from a desire to talk to someone about anything, which can often lead to them trying to talk about nothing. A conversation is a beautiful thing, it should not be created without an express purpose. The purpose itself does not matter, but it must be there. Be it a discussion over whether that are relative to various cultures and or are absolute, or simply an attempt to obtain a Chicken Malibu with fries, it needs to have a purpose going in.

A conversation also needs to have at least two participants. Once one participant is no longer interested, or listening, it becomes a monologue. And there are few things sadder than someone trying to have a monologue with someone else who really doesn't care.

I think maybe I need a fare-counting machine like they have in taxicabs. I'll just turn it on at the point at which I disengage from the conversation and leave it running until they disengage from the conversation, and then collect the charge they run up. If I'm giving them some sort of psychological comfort by not telling them to shut the fuck up because I don't care, then I damn well should be paid for it. I am not free therapy to help them deal with the fact that they are 41 and still living with their mom.

And if I ever try to continue a conversation with you that you are not interested in having, please, I ask you for both our sakes to just politely say, "Please Ken, shut the fuck up." You won't hurt my feelings.

Whew! It's a good thing Rusty didn't ask Wil Wheaton to endorse him during the Big Blogger All-Star game. Because apparently Wil's a fan of K5. Wil also wins cool points for referencing not one, but two Dead Milkmen songs in yesterday's post.

Well, Rockstar Games has announced one of the most important details about their upcoming prequel/sequel to Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, namely: the radio stations.

I'm a little disappointed in that regard, sure, it will feature over 90 licensed songs from the 80's (Judas Priest, Rawwwwwkkk!!!) and cover about 9 hours worth of audio, but there was something so very perfect about weaving a sports car in and out of crowded city traffic at 90 mph to bumpin' trance beats, or corkscrew-spinning a car off of a broken bridge in slow-motion as opera plays in the background. I suppose I could always just take the effort to put a CD on. The key word there being "effort".

So now it comes time, before I forget them entirely, for my forbidden thoughts about the terrorist attacks of last year.

For those who were born on September 11th, their birthdays have been effectively ruined for the next few years, at least. However, people will forget.

Okay, I shouldnt' say that people will forget, I don't think I will ever forget and I have, as I have stated in the past, the recollective capacity of a goldfish. Rather, the nation will forget. My girlfriend's birthday is on Pearl Harbor day, and her birthday is no longer ruined. Now, the attacks on Pearl Harbor were, I suppose, of a slightly less horrific nature than those that occurred on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, considering that they were executed against a military facility with strategic intent and not on innocent civilians with the intent of merely inspiring fear, but I believe the nation was no less upset about them. Most people alive today, though, do not remember the events of 61 years ago, and I believe you would be hard-pressed to find a candlelight vigil come December 7th.

People are being born every day who were not alive on September 11th of last year, in 15 years time, these people will be sullenly tapping their pencils on faux-pine desktops and staring at wall clocks as their history teacher attempts to explain to them the significance of the terrible events that occurred on that day. It's depressing, but you know it's true. Brows will be furrowed as students stare at multiple choice questions on finals. Were the responsible parties A)The Al-Queda terrorist network B) The CIA and FBI for not communicating properly C) Iraq or D) All of the above?

I'm sure Jerry Bruckheimer already has a script for "Patriot Day" tucked away in a safe-deposit box for his grandchildren to inherit and mold into a blockbuster 2.5 hour film featuring a story of star-crossed romance, which girlfriends will drag their boyfriends to go see. The boyfriends will tolerate the mushy love story and wait impatiently for the exciting, heroic fight sequence aboard Flight 93 intercut with action-packed scenes of firefighters desperately racing through a flaming, unstable World Trade Center, searching for survivors, whcih will make the boys feel it was worth the $50 they paid to see it.

It sounds like blasphemy, I feel uncomfortable typing it, but I would bet money that it will happen. The funny thing is, it's not all bad. Sure I don't like the idea of commercializing tragedy. I certainly don't approve of the amount of commercialization that's surrounded our most recent national tragedy, but if you wait long enough, the nation forgets. If you bring it back into the nation's collective consciousness, then we remember. How much thought did you give to the sinking of the Titanic before "Titanic"? How often did you pause to consider the attack on Pearl Harbor before "Pearl Harbor"? I'm willing to bet that it probably wasn't that much. And yes, they're somewhat tasteless, and yes, they're of questionable accuracy, and yes, they're simplified for the consumption of the average viewer, but is it better to remember things as a blockbuster film or not at all?

"Patriot Day", coming to a theater near you, in 60 years.

So yeah, our president has declared September 11th officially Patriot Day. Now, that's fine and all, but that isn't going to help those poor high school students I mentioned remember what happened on that day. "Pearl Harbor Day" is obvious enough, but "World Trade Center and Pentagon Day" is a little wordy. I'd take issue with it, but I really cannot think of anything better.

(If one looks through the Proclamation Archives at the Whitehouse web site, there are some pretty odd things in there. Did you know that Bush declared Mother's Day? Does the president have to do that every year? And Black music month? Well, that's cool, but the proclamation's statements about black music kind of end with Stevie Wonder. I guess I can't really envision Dubya rockin' out to P-funk, Bob Marley or Run DMC.)

Okay, time to flush out my brain-pan.

Asinine observations: Did anyone else notice the similar career paths of Gov. Jesse Ventura and Mayor Haggar from Final Fight? (Yes, yes they did.)

BASIC: I learned how to program pretty well in BASIC in high school... Thanks, American public education system! If I'd really gone for it, I could've learned some Pascal, too! I wonder if kids these days are learning HTML in their computer classes. Any high-schoolers in teh audience?

Cars: What the hell is a Skylark? Is there such a thing as a Groundlark or Sealark? And you know, once upon a time, someone thought it would actually be a good idea to name a car "Le Car".

Death: Wouldn't even heaven get boring after a few billion years or so?

Embarassing admissions: I forgot to go to my SAT2's. Oddly enough, this is not an automatic failure.

Fantasies: If I had all the money in the world, I would buy an El Camino. Then I would drive it on El Camino.

Goals: If I don't beat StuntMan by the time Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Tony Hawk 4 are released, I will suffer a cerebral hemmorhage, mark my words.

Hey, look down there! No, next to that, yeah, where it says, "comments" You know what that means? It means comments! I have officially taken 1moredork Online from a one-sided rant into a one-sided rant on which you can comment!

I'm trying out enetation. If it works well for me, then I'll stick with it, donate some cizzash (out of the BBAS prize money) and get e-mail notification and stuff. So, I don't actually have e-mail notification yet, thus I probably won't notice if you comment on something that's like, a year old. I'm sure I'll develop a brand new manifestation of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and hit refresh 700,000 times a day on my page so that I can comment on your comments, and you'll comment on my comments on your comments on my articles and together we'll break the internet for great justice!

Well, not to run on a theme today, but I must link to one more article. It's not a news piece this time, I promise.

Modern medicine has never given much credence to the idea that the body can heal itself. After all, there's no real scientific proof, right?

These are the words of someone who clearly has the benefit of health insurance. Me, I'm not so lucky. I believe very strongly in my body's power to heal itself. My body cannot afford to pay anyone else to heal it. If I were to get hit by a bus and have my spine shattered, I would probably just try drinking more orange juice and take off from work early.

Research shows that laughter bolsters immunity.

On second thought, I bet I could take that bus. A friend just lent me the entire first season of the Simpsons on DVD. The first season, back when Homer used to strangle Bart at least twice per episode. Now that was funny.

Okay, now the AP has spelled "foriegn" incorrectly. I wonder, if this the same writer? I mean, I know they probably have to write these articles very quickly, but even a simple spell-check would have caught that.

Oh plus everyone knows that Bush wants to invade Iraq no matter what they concede to, Hussein may very well just photocopy his butt and fax it to Bush for all the good allowign weapons inspectors back into Iraq will do him. I mean, Hussein's a dickhead and doesn't deserve to be in charge of so much as a sandbox, but Bush couldn't make it more obvious he wants to invade no matter what if he urinated all over the Iraqi flag in front of the U.N. assembly. It's been said before: Like father, like son.

I'm working on getting comments enabled, but then I just know I'm going to get a flood of "Hey, Ken. If you're so smart, how come you always type the "g" before the "n" on "-ing" words?" To which I wouldreply, "Well, I'm not getting my stories published in Salon, am I?" So just back off, alright!?!! That last thing I need is a bunch of folks countering my feeble arguments with a bunch of "facts" and "logic".

This article pisses me off. Okay, I can handle the fact that Walters doesn't cite any statistics or studies to show that more teens enter into rehabilition programs for treating marijuana addiction than alcohol addiction or all illegal drugs combined (perhaps, it is so mildy addictive that teens have an easier time seeking help if they have a problem?). I can deal with the fac tthat he fails to mention cigarettes and how blatantly those are marketed to teens. I can tolerate that they're going to be using millions of tax dollars to effect a national advertising campaign against marijuana usage. I can even deal with the surgeon general's misleading statement that an amount of marijuana contains 3 to five times the tar and carbon monoxide as a similar amount of tobacco (I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say the average cigarette enthusiast smokes waaaaaaay more tobacco than the average weed enthusiast does marijuana, plus there are roughly 17 million carcinogenic chemicals found in cigarettes that he didn't mention.)

What I cannot stand for is that the writer of this article used "effect" as a verb (not meant as the bringing into existence of something, in whcih case "effect" can be a verb, but I digress). It's "affect" when it's a verb!!! Learn the difference, people! Even my brain-dead self knows that, and I don't write for the Associated Press.

Then again, I think I cuss too much, and am too biased to write for the associated press. Oh, plus I make typographical errors constantly.

"WASHINGTON (AP)The nation's dumbfuck drug policy director tried desperately to justify the fact that he has a job Tuesday by warning parents against telling their kids that marijuana won't make them into deranged, idiotic criminals, making up some story that more teens are addicted to pot than alcohol and all illegal drugs combined, conveniently failing to mention cigarettes, but probably because teens barely use those at all, not. What a complete tweed!"

Yes, that's right. I seriously won. That was one of the most satisying and I managed to do it without blog-whoring. I mean, I don't think it would have helped that much, since most of the peopel who read this site now probably came here from Big Blogger. So you can bet I played up the non-blogwhore angle! Fortunately, some of my fans were kind enough to blog-whore for me. I guess that makes me a blog-pimp, aw yeah.

Welcome to 1morepimp Online. I bring it, I sing it, and I bling-bling it.

I can't believe I won! Really! And it's all thanks to my fans. Thanks, guys! I think I did some of my best work over on that game, and to boot, more people are now reading this site. Hello everyone! All you... lots of people... So now... um... I guess I'd better be really funny... err... got to maintain readership... uh.... Okay, here we go, check this out!

*pratfall*

Tah-dah!

I won. I can't believe it. However, I still ahve to work until late tonight. More later.

"What the heck? Are you driving a truck? NASCAR has trucks now?"
"Yeah, of course it does, where have you been?"
"I don't watch NASCAR, I went to college!"

Okay, I like Harry Potter. I think the book series is very well-written, clever and engaging. I'll probably continue to read the series as long as Rowling keeps writing them. I thought the movie was actually pretty decent. The game sucks balls, but I may be biased because I had to take a hundre quadrillion phone calls while working at EA from mothers who the game crashed after the troll chased Harry. (The answer is that the game detected a crappy onboard Intel 810 partial-3D video card as a full 3D card and overloaded the damn thing with too much information. Not that you'd know this from the solution given by EA. (I didn't type that one. Thank goodness.) I'd heard the game was only in development for four months, but I'm sure that was just a rumor.)

But, regardless of how well-thought out the rest of the Potter mythos is, Quidditch is an incredible stupid and pointless game. I'm sure it's very exciting to watch, and lord knows I would certainly enjoy flying a broomstick around even if there were no Quaffles or Snitches involved, but if you look at the rules, the game is clearly designed to just make one person on the whole team (the Seeker) the most important player. Quidditch Chasers must have such low self esteem, seeing as how their positions are essentially meaningless. I think it would be extremely difficult to throw a ball through a hoop while whizzing through the air on a stick of wood, especially when contending with a Keeper, but when they make a goal, it's only worth a measly ten points. The Seeker grabs one little snitch out of the air, the game is over, and whichever team caught it wins pretty much by default, considering the other team would have to have a 160 point (or 16 goal) lead to offset the 150 points the snitch is worth. At that rate, you might as well just remove the goals, Keepers, Quaffles and Chasers and it would essentially be the same game.

Clearly Quidditch is meant to be simply a literary device contrived to showcase the skills of one particular player over the rest of the entire team and thus escalate Harry Potter to instant MVP status, but it may as well be a practical and sensible game as well. I propose that the act of catching the snitch is worth absolutely no points, but merely brings about the end of the game, and whichever team's made the most goals wins. This would make the game a lot more exciting, as the Seeker would have to be aware of the score and try not only to catch the snitch, but to catch it at a time when their team is winning. The Seeker is still the most important position, so Harry Potter gets all his messiah credit. It would also lower the suicide rate of Chasers, who really don't need the additional stress of being easily forgotten team members when they're dealing with all the crap that goes with pubescence anyhow. Seriously, name two other members of Griffindor's quidditch team, just two! (And it doesn't count if you can also name all the other members of all the other house's teams, becuase then you are officially a creepy Harry Potter fanboy/girl.)

Does anyone have the address of the International Quidditch Association rules and regulations division?

I saw the original Drunken Master again last night, as part of my campaign to expose my extremely patient girlfriend to the wonders of Chan. There are no fewer than 12 kung-fu battles in that film, all of which last for a good period of time. That's not even including the training scenes, Jackie Chan's practicing the styles of the 8 drunken gods, or the master's demonstration of his secret style. Now that is getting one's money worth. (One of my friends observed that kung-fu flicks are very analagous to porn flicks, in that the plot is really there as filler between the scenes which are the real reason you rented the movie. Sometimes this is true. Lots of people don't seem to realize how much the fighting styles of the characters are really extensions of their personalities. Every battle tells a story, or maybe I just read too much into the film.)

These days you only get about a half-dozen kung-fu battles per movie. However, the older fight sequences were pretty much just two guys going at it, generally in a pretty stilted and rhythmic manner. Nowadays you've got the mad props, environments with which our fighters can interact, and a car chase or two for good measure. Less traditional kung-fu, more stunt-based action. Also, the fights seem much more improvised these days, and the actors look as if they might actually really hurt themselves. But even in the older flicks, it appears Jackie maintains his record of doing at least one thing per fight that is absolutely impossible.

It is dangerous for me to watch Jackie Chan flicks, especially if I have to clean up anything afterwards, because I get this uncontrollable urge to flip Toilet Duck bottles around, spin the mop around my waist, shut closet doors with spinning roundhouse kicks and so forth. Because I am not actually Jackie Chan, this can sometimes have disastrous results. These days I have learned to only flip around plastic bottles. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can flip a bottle as well as the next guy, but my flip/drop ratio isn't nealry high enough that I would consider a kung-fu movie career, shall we say.

Chairman Mao was a doodiehead.

(trying to get my site blocked by China)

(Thanks Ernie, for the link.)