Goodnight, 15 Maple

A few remembrances, in honor of the apartment I’ve left behind.

Yippee Ki-Yay, Wentworth Douglas Hospital

My little buddy/roommate Josh Lipka (JL Cakes Machine) is in the hospital right now. It’s weird; I came home from work last night, and Ryan said:

“Oh, Ken?”
“What?”
“Josh is in the hospital.”
“WHAT?”
[louder]“Josh is in the hospital.”
“I heard you – why is he in the hospital?”
“Having his appendix taken out, I guess.”
“Oh. Well, let’s watch Lost.”

This is a minor deal as far as surgeries go, obviously, and he’s fine, but it’s still sobering for me to think of my friends as being anything but indestructible alcohol consumption factories. I’m a fragile little flower that bends in the slightest easterly breeze, but people like Josh and Ryan are like bulldozers strapped to missiles being shot into the sun to fuck it to death as far as I’m concerned, so it’s particularly arresting to me when they display some sign of weakness. Josh, I mean, was just fine on Tuesday; I sat on the floor in his room and watched the Celtics game and wondered aloud how long it would be before Tommy Heinsohn legitimately had a stroke during a live broadcast.

Then, apparently, sometime yesterday morning, Josh felt, in his words, “…like there was an alien trying to burst out of my stomach.” Now, let’s be straight here – in and of itself, that’s awesome.  Aliens are awesome, and things bursting out of people’s bodies are awesome, and, well, to combine those two things in a location fairly close to me is so awesome as to nearly render the very word meaningless.  If I came home, and Josh was splayed out on the floor of the living room, bloody and screaming in pain with an alien blooming out of his chest cavity?  Sure, there’d be a twinge of sadness there, about my friend being in not the best of states, but that twinge would be bookended by the most intense fanboy boner and orgasm the world has ever witnessed.

Then, Josh said to Ryan, “Welp – see you later,” and walked calmly out of our apartment, to his car, and drove to Wentworth Douglas Hospital and checked in.  A few hours later, some people with knives cut his body open and ripped his appendix out like the remains of an eagle wedged in an airplane engine.

A few hours after that, Ryan, Josh Austin, Meg, Amanda, and me loaded up a few High Lifes, a bone saw, and about thirty thousand gallons of pure, uncut bro-love and hauled it over to the hospital; we were going to either visit Josh and lift his spirits, bust him out of the joint, or kill everyone in the city trying.  I mean, one of those things, or we’d just stand around awkwardly, making jokes about poop while the nurses awkwardly tried to perform their jobs without punching us in the face.

There were awkward moments all around, really.  The thing about hospital visits – and this is true regardless of the severity of the patient’s condition – is that they’re always the most forced attempts at restoring normalcy that anyone can muster.  No matter how confident you are, or how strong a particular friendship or relationship may be, there’s no escaping the fact that all of your conversational efforts are aimed at ignoring the fact that, as of a few hours ago, some joker with a paper mask on was rooting around inside your buddy’s insides like a plumber unclogging a drain.  So we made lots of jokes, and the girls took turns rubbing Josh’s feet and scoring him extra helpings of hospital pudding, and Ryan pretended to poop in a bag (maybe not as close to pretend as we’d like – he didn’t make it out of the building, even, before he had to stop and commandeer a  bathroom for a solid twenty minutes).

He’s probably on his way out, now, as I write this, but also, the old man who Josh shared a room with is likely not going anywhere.  I saw him a little, just glimpsed him on the other side of the curtain in the center of the room, and his little old-guy-face looked fixed in surprise; the mouth hanging open, the eyes wide.  I don’t know what he had, exactly, but I’m going to go ahead and guess, sadly, that the health gap between my 22-year-old semi-professional cyclist and his elderly roommate was pretty fucking wide.  The nurse came in to check on Josh, just before we left for the night, and she asked him if he needed anything for the pain.

“No, that’s okay, thank you,” he said.  She turned around and walked out, but as she was, Josh’s elderly roommate-for-the-night muttered, “Meeeee…I do.”  We looked at each other and made yeesh faces, but on the way out, we didn’t talk about the old guy at all, and instead we made jokes about climbing on top of the elevator, like John McClane.

FUCK TWITTER

http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/

I DON’T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WITHOUT YOU BRETT FARVE

“BRETT? BRETT, IT’S ME, JOHN. JOHN MADDEN. JOHN MADDEN FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR YOUR FRIEND FOOTBALL? BRETT I HEARD ABOUT YOU LEAVING THE GAME OF FOOTBALL AND I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT I HAD TO SIT DOWN ON MY FOOTBALL-SHAPED SOFA AND CALL MY THERAPIST ON MY FOOTBALL PHONE JUST TO CALM MYSELF DOWN – HAD TO CALL A LITTLE TIMEOUT LIKE THE COACHES DO ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD WHEN THERE’S TWO MINUTES TO GO. BUT AFTER THE TV TIMEOUT AND ONE OR TWO BITES OF MY TURDUCKEN I GOT IT BACK TOGETHER, GOT A NEW PLAY IN FROM THE OLD SIDELINES LIKE BOOM AND I SAID TO MYSELF, SELF, I CANNOT LIVE IN A WORLD WITHOUT BRETTY BRETT. I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. IF I HAVE TO WAKE UP AND LOOK AT THE SUN SHINING AND KNOW THAT SOMEWHERE YOU AREN’T WEARING A FOOTBALL HELMET OR SHOULDER PADS I FEEL LIKE MY TEARS COULD KICK AN 85-YARD FIELD GOAL TO WIN THE SUPER BOWL SNOW PLOW GAME. TOM BRADY PEYTON MANNING CHEESEHEADS HORSE TRAILER BOOM THAT’S A MAN’S TACKLE, BRETT, AND I DON’T WANT TO IMAGINE A UNIVERSE WITHOUT YOU HUCKING THE BALL THREE HUNDRED YARDS THROUGH SOMEBODY’S THROAT, BRETT. BRETT? BRETT, PLEASE CALL. BRETT?”

“BRETT FARVE FOOTBALL. SADDEST CLOWN, FOOTBALL.”

NO. NONONONONONONONONONONONONO.

Friendly ‘Death Star’ Laser To Recreate Sun’s Power.

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There are so many reasons that this is a horrible idea.

1) Have you ever seen a major motion picture before? Have you ever heard the good guys talking about a friendly giant fucking sun-creating laser before? I’m pretty sure the good guys are the ones flying spaceships into the butt of the giant sun-creating laser to blow it up from the inside, ladies and gents. The bad guys are the ones who put out the chipper press release and later take the yahoo.com reporters hostage at knifepoint in a last-ditch effort to avoid capture.

2) Any article that legitimately contains the following quotes makes me nervous:

The National Ignition Facility has already test-fired all 192 giant lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California as part of this effort. The lasers will eventually focus their power on compressing and heating a single, pea-sized fuel capsule to more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit in order to trigger thermonuclear fusion.

and:

Just 150 micrograms of deuterium and tritium, or less than one-millionth of a pound, can serve as the fuel for the NIF experiment. But containing the high-temperature plasma from a fusion reaction represents a special challenge — temperatures of 180 million degrees F and up would melt any known substance…

This shit doesn’t even sound real. Can we dispatch someone to make sure that they’re not running Team Fake News over there? Would it surprise anyone to learn that somebody with a hard-on for sci-fi cooked up a story that actually contains the phrase “test-fired all 192 giant lasers”? DEATH STAR IS IN THE TITLE.

3) Can we maybe just install someone in a position of universal authority over all decisions that are made, everywhere? When there’s a decision made, he’ll get a little post-it note delivered to his office summarizing the relevant facts, and then he can either give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. We’ll call him the Director of Are You FUCKING SERIOUS?

Woah, Mr. President – that’s some fucking China shit!

I’m a big Obama guy. Have been for a while, now, and I’d like to continue giving him the benefit of the doubt in the infant days of his presidency. In fact, it still makes me slightly giddy to even say that there’s an Obama presidency in the first place, as opposed to any comment I’d make about a McCain presidency, which I’d likely have to make in a panicked screech while running from fireballs spewing from the battered ruins of a post-apocalyptic, hellish future America. My allegiance established, let me just say that the new Cybersecurity Act of 2009 is not a thing that I would be particularly enthused to see him sign into law. And by “not particularly enthused,” of course, I mean it might be time to grow my beard down to my chest and build a fallout shelter into the side of a mountain, because, goddammit, Mr. President – not cool!

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president.

The bill does not only add to the power of the president. It also grants the Secretary of Commerce “access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.” This means he or she can monitor or access any data on private or public networks without regard to privacy laws.

So, one man or woman gets to decide: a) what constitutes an emergency in regards to cyberspace-related critical infrastructure, AND they get to then shut down all internet traffic and search the personal data of whomever they want with no regard for any standing law on the books?

Is this a job that anyone can apply for? Does it require experience? And, most importantly – can I work from home?

The Friggin’ Act.

Cruise Vignette #1

So I’m back from a week on a vacation; Marissa and I went on a seven-day Caribbean cruise.  It was wonderful.  There’ll likely be more to come from me about how it went, but this is the first thing I want to mention before I forget.

I hate traveling.  Nothing about being on an airplane strikes me as being anywhere close to safe.  So no matter how much Marissa tells me that it’s fine, these people have done this before, they’re professionals, etc., etc.  – I see us constantly, seconds in the future, going down in flames and screaming at six hundred miles an hour into a mountainside.  Even places where there’s no mountains, I imagine the world shuddering violently when it senses my approach and shooting a fresh, newly formed rock formation directly in the flight path of the plane I’m on.  So, clearly, I’ve got an overactive imagination when it comes to these things.  I see potential danger in geology, in shifting continents, for Christ’s sake, so imagine how I deal with anything else.

This is why I nearly had a panic attack and had to turn to Marissa for a ten minute nervous conversation when the flight attendant, near the end of our plane ride back to New Hampshire, came over the intercom and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please place your seatbacks in their upright and locked positions and buckle your seatbelts – we’re about to begin our final descent.”

OUR FINAL DESCENT?

Seriously?  There’s no better way to put that?  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to begin our procedure for landing the airplane.”  Or: “Ladies and gentlemen, in just a moment we’ll safely touch the aircraft down on the runway.”  There doesn’t need to be anything final involved in this fucking announcement; I have no plans for this to be my final descent unless someone in the cockpit angles the whole deal wrong and we take a nosedive into the fucking control tower.

Please, please, PLEASE be real

I hereby nominate ‘Joaquin Phoenix leaps into crowd at hip-hip show’ as the coolest fucking headline I have ever read. Please, Joaquin, don’t be faking this meltdown – it’s too good. You are so much more interesting if you’re batshit crazy.

Please. This:

vs THIS:

As if there’s any contest.

Dude, hit the reset button.

I was excited to hear that Fox is looking to reboot The Fantastic 4, because it neatly reaffirms everything that I imagine I know about the film industry. And that boils down to this: when something works, fucking do it all the time!

I hate to blame people that have good ideas and execute them well, but this is Christopher Nolan’s fault. He knocked it out of the park on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight – because he had a good idea. Because he made sure that a solid, coherent script got written for each movie. Because he stocked his films with competent-to-fantastic actors. Because he orchestrated events around what served the story. Because he made good goddamn movies.

But, sadly, the industry doesn’t see that – they see that they took a franchise and rebooted it, made it more serious and quasi-realistic, and more importantly than anything else, made it “darker,” and “grittier.” And that’s all that they’ll do here. They’ll skip story, and character, and plot that anyone will actually give a shit about, and instead as a means to get at those aforementioned cool buzzwords they’ll just, I dunno, shorten the film’s title so that it somehow seems more badass. Instead of The Fantastic Four, it’ll just be THE FOUR. Because fuck Fantastic, that corny shit’s for retards! THEY DON’T NEED FANTASTIC, THEY’RE JUST THE FOUR.

And they’ll all wear leather jackets and have five o’clock shadows and maybe occasional substance abuse issues, and from time to time they’ll stare off into the middle distance and that will be the point that you’ll know, sitting in the theater, that these characters are tortured and gritty and real and fuck you, we rebooted it!

Wait, what? What did you just say?

There is MORE SNAKES ON THIS PLANE?  GODDAMN!