Shamelessly horked from Fuzzytopia, because it was just too good not to.

/snark

Take today, for example. I kept hearing this shrill beeping. It just went on, and on, with no particular rhythm or pattern. Just the same hair-raising honking note, over and over. I was irritated that anyone would just sit downtown and make annoying noises. Ah, but it was only after I discovered the source of the sound that I became well and truly irked.

You see, it was a panhandler. Or a street performer. It’s hard for me to tell. I have trouble understanding how wearing a stupid hat, glasses, nose, gloves, and shoes makes you a performer. Especially when the entire extent of your performance consists of honking a small bicycle horn. In my opinion, this was begging, pure and simple. You can put makeup on a pig, but it’s still not going to be a prom date.

But you don’t have to take my word for it! Thanks to my new camera, I have captured the moment so all of you can enjoy it too.

And I bet at least some of you thought I made all this crap up.

Hollywood actually made a motion picture about a patent lawsuit, and it’s got quite a high-powered cast, including Greg Kinnear, Alan Alda, and Dermot Mulroney. The movie is about the infamous intermittant windshield wiper lawsuit, fairly well-known in IP circles.

It’s clear from the trailer below that this is going to be cast as the classic ‘David and Goliath’ story. It’s the honest underdog family man against the evil faceless corporation. It’s trite, it’s cliche, but in this case it’s pretty close to the truth. It will be interesting to see how closely they follow the actual events of the long and complicated series of lawsuits.

In any event, if someone can make a movie about patents entertaining to laypeople, then they deserve some kind of award.

Scary Hatchet fish, courtesy of Dark Roasted Blend

Unbelievable.

Watch it here.

Tags: watchmen, trailer

It’s every bit as good as the hype would lead you to believe. It plays a lot like the previous BioWare hit, Knights of the Old Republic, except it has a better storyline, better dialog, better graphics, and better gameplay.

When I am playing games, the Wife is typically on the computer. She either surfs the web, or watches a DVD, or obsessively-compulsively plays Legend of Aladdin (oh, how I rue the day I bought that game for her - but I digress).

Last night she actually sat down on the couch and watched me play for a little while, a rarity indeed. If she was going to watch me play anything, Mass Effect would be a good choice because it really does play out like a cinematic experience. She watched me work through a couple of areas populated with bad guys, taking them out and occasionally healing myself or my squad members.

At one point in the evening, if you had been a fly on the wall, you would have seen the following.

Onscreen, my character moves slowly back into an empty room, flanked by his squadmates. His gun is drawn, and he is moving deliberately.

The Wife: “There’s nothing on your radar. Why do you have your gun out?”

In the game, a shrill keening sounds behind my character. I spin him around to find a giant spider-thing has erupted out of the floor. My character and his two squad members immediately open fire/trigger biotics and speedily dispatch the creepy-crawly beast.

Me: “THAT’S why.”

Sometimes I am forcibly reminded that the Wife has not squandered as many hours as I have playing video games.

It has been genuinely amusing to watch different ads appear in the Project Wonderful adspace to the right. I never ceased to be amazed at the folks trying to make a go of it on the Internet, and the ways they find to do so. Please, if you see an interesting ad, go ahead and click on it. This repays them for their investment in my adspace. Plus, they seem like nice folks.

Speaking of being amused, I watched a schmuck park his oversized SUV in the parking garage this morning. He carefully edged forward, cranked the wheel, edged back, cranked the wheel, edged forward, all trying to pivot his behemoth into alignment with his chosen parking space. When he finally got it inserted into place, you could see the word “COMPACT” stenciled on the floor of the space. Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

I packed my nifty bento lunch box today with miso soup, phad thai, carrots and grapes, and tapioca pudding. That Zojirushi lunch jar is the best investment I’ve made in a dozen years. Plus, I have once again got a meal cooking in the slow cooker today. This time it’s carnitas, which I plan on having wrapped in soft tortillas with onions, salsa, and avacado this evening.

With respect to how life with a CPAP is going, even though I’m sick as a dog the last two mornings I’ve awoken before my alarm clock went off, and been basically wide awake. Usually I’m so sleepy in the mornings that it takes two alarm clocks to get me out of bed, and if I reclined on the bed to read the comics after my shower, I would promptly go back to sleep. So, big improvement.

Now, if I can just lose this searing sore throat….

It hurts to swallow, it hurts to cough, it even hurts to talk.

It’s an absolutely beautiful weekend, and I’m too sick to enjoy it.

Bah.