Friends

After a more than exciting week leading up to Christmas (one ER visit and a pneumonia in the family) when I had intended to post this installment of the set, I'm happy to bring you further highlights from the Mustang set. In this case, Lolly.



( My Muse )

Time to shill for a Christmas gift the wife found for me: "Yummy Earth" brand "Organic Hot Chili Pops." I'm one who is wont to toss some "Dave's Insanity Sauce" in the ol' chili pot (or, at least, in my own bowl so nobody else eating with us has to go to the emergency room), and these suckers come nowhere near that level of heat. I'd put them at highest around Taco Bell "fire" sauce, but the burn is variable from lolly to lolly. Anyway, you can find them here, though you kind of have to hunt for them (they're the third row of photos down, under "lollipop pouches" in the drop-down menu). At the moment, they're only available in 15-unit bags, and you get a mix of "Chili Lime Lambada" and "Chili Mango Mambo." One participant in our holiday gatherings enjoyed how the lime one tasted with his beer, and I liked having them in the car as a little pick-me-up for the duller parts of the drive (the ones without snowbound cars). Anyway, I really dug this stocking stuffer and hope I don't get sick of them anytime soon. They're also only 22 calories apiece, so I hopefully won't expand my waistline too much over the coming months...

With little going on in movies or TV, here are a few items: Kevin Bacon is going to be a superhero in an upcoming film, "Super." His character, "The Crimson Bolt" is the alter-ego of a former drug dealer named "Jacques." Why does this sound like something thought up by Ben Edlund, father of "The Tick?" The other item that piqued my interest was Peter Jackson's announcement that he's working on a post-apocalyptic film where cities fly and do battle against each other. I predict at least one slow-mo jump from one floating city to another, with about 50/50 odds that it will be a parkour-style jump or via a car.

Odd "D&D" news (or at least, "D&D-like") from what I believe to be a Chinese website promoting a new online game. From the Google translation, I see a lot of D&D-esque words like "Illithid" and mention of what I'm guessing is either a realm name or the fact that part of the game takes place in a British suburb called "Chelsea Heights" (it's on page 2). The second page's picture of a kid with a flintlock shooting what appears to be a sea troll over the head of what appears to be a pretty powerful cleric makes me wonder what other oddities were in store on page 3... and I was greeted with mention of "Canadian pets." I know odds are high that meaning is being mangled, here, but I kind of hope not. :)

And on an "around the office" note, I'm hopefully going to be test-driving a new office chair soon. Some might remember my raving about the AK-Octane, which appears to be out of production. My current AK's cushions are losing their "cush," and one of the arm rests has begun to disintegrate from the bottom up. Rather than buying another new chair, I'm trying something different. I've found a cheap (yet antique) set of legs and manual swivel chair mechanism on eBay, and I'm going to graft the seat and back from a wooden "school board" chair liberated from a now-defunct educational building. Tossing a few "skateboard" castors on it, I'm hoping to have a pretty sweet "new" old chair. The screw mechanism going into the leg assembly does wobble a bit, but some research tells me that its vintage (possibly from the late 1800's) is pretty much doomed to wobble, being old and made of cast iron. If it ever fails, I'd have to replace it with steel, but I could keep the legs. Sadly, no parts are made to fit the old hardware for the purposes of stabilizing the thing (the screw is larger than the current 1-inch or "acme" swivel chair standard), but I read that as long as I don't abuse it, it'll probably work for a few more decades before becoming unusable. I'll post some pics if it comes together as planned!

The rest isn't about chairs, but you might like it nevertheless:

- DJ Earworm has released his 2009 'United State of Pop' mashup, compiled from Billboard's top hits for the year.
- Though I'm sure it's been done before, here's a very good Star Wars/A-Team mashup.
- Puzzles and magnetic fields are the basis of Magnetic Moment. Arrange magnets and objects to propel and guide a ball to its bucket.
- This is either genius or madness: Tuper-Tario-Tros is a combination Tetris/Super Mario game. Press your spacebar to switch between making a plumber jump and fitting together falling blocks.
- An interesting gallery of Nautilus designs. Captain Nemo has quite the array to choose from.
- The singing could use some work, but there are a few clever couplets in the Battlestar Rhapsody (if you haven't seen the new "Battlestar Galactica," spoilers ahoy).
- This next one gets a "violence 'n' bloody stuff" warning. There's a new trailer out for the upcoming Aliens vs. Predator game (note no "vs. Space Marines," as if they weren't a threat... a pink, squishy, screaming threat). The movie series might be a disappointment, but this looks pretty good. And Lance Henrikson does the voiceover.
- And lastly, some eye candy gaming with Perpetual Blaze, a game where your ship is your weapon, making whoever you smash into explode into gatherable particle effects.

(c) Gassan Kerimov

I remember when I could spend days and days just browsing things on the web and reading for hours.

Now I'm lucky to find anything to hold my interest for more than an hour.

I just did a photoshoot to create album art for Psyche Corporation's upcoming music album. Here are two pics from the shoot.

You can find out more about Psyche Corporation here:
http://www.psychecorporation.com
http://myspace.com/psychecorp




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