Photo by Mark Newport

I freely admit that I’ve been pretty hard on Aquaman on this blog. But apparently the dude’s got a bit more depth than I gave him credit for, as illustrated by this monologue (attributed to author Glen Weldon) on McSweeney’s. Here’s an excerpt:

Dude, I can get 6 million krill to gunk up the engine of a getaway ship by having them hurl themselves up the intake jets. Mass sea-monkey suicide. OK? Try that shit with operant conditioning, with some big-titted blondie waggling a smelt, see what you get. Think they’re meting out kick-ass sea justice over at Epcot? Shyeah.

Sorry, dude. That pilot was surprisingly good. Too bad it didn’t get picked up. The costume’s still pretty dorky though. No barbed pitchfork in existence is going to make an orange scaly shirt and green pants look cool.

Last night my company had a Halloween party, which gave me the excuse I’ve been waiting for to wear my Clark Kent costume. I say “costume”, but really, it’s just a clever use of existing clothing…I wore a suit with a Superman shirt underneath. Unbutton the dress shirt a bit, and poof, you’re Clark Kent. The only hard part was the hair, but thankfully Heather helped me out there (sadly, spouses weren’t allowed at this event, so Heather couldn’t be the Lois to my Clark).

I wish I could claim to have come up with this idea, in truth, I got the idea from someone I saw at Comic-Con (but then, that’s an easy place to get costume ideas). While nobody in their right mind would know it, I also based this costume on Alex Ross’ Superman forever painting (still among my favorite Superman images of all-time…why can’t I buy a signed print of that, anyway?).

Anyway, the party was fun. My costume might not have been as offensive as the pregnant nun, or as specific as the pregnant Britney Spears (or Angelina Jolie…both were there), but I think mine was pretty cool. Here’s the obligatory photo of me in costume (posed just like the painting, although I’m unfortunately not as barrel-chested as Alex Ross’ model):

Hair by Heather. Fashion by Alex Ross.

There’s a great piece up at Wired (from the latest issue, although there are entries that didn’t make it into print), where they asked various writers to submit stories consisting of no more than six words. Here are some of the better ones:

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Easy. Just touch the match to
- Ursula K. Le Guin

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

He read his obituary with confusion.
- Steven Meretzky

God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.
- Arthur C. Clarke (who refused to trim his, apparently)

I absolutely love stuff like this, so here are a few of my own:

Tommy is a cat. Jimmy was a mouse.

Hm…perhaps I’ll keep the antidote.

Looking for trouble. Found her mother.

Money bought me power and herpes.

Eureka! The artist needs more money.

Superman will save me. Oh crap -

So much fun. I could do this all day.

In case you missed it, earlier in the week, Apple announced updated MacBook Pros. The changes are all under the hood, but they’re pretty significant: 2.16 or 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo processors, dual layer SuperDrives on all models, a FireWire 800 port on the 15″ model, up to 200 GB of internal hard drive space, and a baseline of 1 GB on the low end, and 2 GB of RAM on the higher end 15″ models, with a max capacity of 3 GB.

Apple claims up to a 39% speed bump over the older models, but I doubt real-world tests will reflect that. But I don’t really care…all that matters to me is the beefier RAM, the generous hard drive space and the dual layer SuperDrive. I have to admit, there’s pretty much nothing else I could ask for…maybe a better video card, but the X1600 Mobility in there is no slouch (especially on the midrange and 17″ models, which have 256 MB of VRAM), and I won’t do much gaming on it anyway. I can honestly say that if either my desktop or laptop macs were to die tomorrow, I would be perfectly satisfied with the maxed out 15″ model.

But that doesn’t mean I’m going to run out and buy one or anything. I still can’t justify running out and buying one, since both my desktop and laptop are functioning. They’re not functioning well by any regard, but they’re still ticking. If they’re still alive when Leopard ships I will probably cave in and get one then. It just doesn’t make sense to upgrade machines that are limping along like these.

In a perfect world, Apple will simultaneously ship Leopard and full second generation MacBook Pros at the same time Adobe ships an Intel-native Photoshop (I absolutely will not upgrade Photoshop until I have to…I’m still running 7.0, and the reason I upgraded to that version was because it was OS X native). I doubt that will all happen, but you never know.

…but there’s no getting around it: this is an unfortunate headline.

Today marks seven years for me without a single cigarette. If you haven’t seen my annual posts here before, this is a big deal for me, as for many years I was an extremely heavy smoker. Seven years ago I quit cold turkey and haven’t had a single one (not even a puff off somebody else’s) since.

And now for the fun part…the amount of money I would have spent on cigarettes had I kept smoking for these seven years.

Using my average of 1.75 packs a day (most days were 1.5, but many were 2+, often reaching 2.5) over the last seven years (2,556 days…2000 was a leap year) I would have smoked 4,473 packs of cigarettes, or 89,460 individual smokes. Using the New York City rough average of $7 a pack, that means had I been smoking, I would have spent..

Drumroll please…

$31,311

Or roughly $4,500 per year. To put that in perspective, I could have used the money from one year (had I been smart enough to save it) to buy a PlayStation 3 ($600), an Xbox 360 ($400), a Wii ($250) and a fully-loaded 17″ MacBook Pro ($3099) and still had enough money left over to spend on games and comics and other fun stuff.

If you’re thinking of quitting, here’s Wikipedia’s entry on smoking, WhyQuit, QuitNet and the Surgeon General’s five day plan to quit smoking. This year’s Great American Smokeout is on November 16th, so there’s plenty of time to get ready to quit. The ACS site also has a Cigarette Cost Calculator so you can see how much you’d save if you quit today.

Wow, how’s this for a coincidence…almost immediately after Criterion releases one of my favorite movies of all-time (which had criminally never been released on DVD until now), Warner Bros. confirms plans to release that other movie I’ve been waiting for…

The movie in question is Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 adaptation of Hamlet, and it has indeed been confirmed by Warner Bros. for release in 2007. If you’ve never seen it (which is perfectly understandable, since it was only released on VHS and Laserdisc), this interpretation of Hamlet is lavish in the extreme. It’s the complete text of the play, was shot in breathtaking 70mm, and has an all-star cast featuring (among others), Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie and lots more (including cameos by everyone from Billy Crystal to Jack Lemmon). Watch the trailer if you’ve never seen it.

As exciting as this is, I’m curious to know if they’re going to be releasing it in HD. I have no intention of taking sides in the format wars (universal players FTW), but this is one movie that I’d much, much rather have in HD than standard def. And there aren’t many movies I can say that about.

But even if they don’t, I’ll take what I can get. I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters, but since I saw it at the Paris, that memory is a fond one indeed.

There’s a fascinating article over at The Escapist by Allen Varney, talking about a strange, non-violent shooter based on Hindu mythology. It was never actually made, but still made for an interesting game design challenge, so the article’s worth a read. I especially liked this concept:

Your aim was to achieve pure consciousness by cleansing your six chakras in ascending order. But your current karma (depicted as a gray pall over your character’s silhouette), if it covered any chakras, prevented you from cleansing them. So you had to remove karma by completing quests before you could purify yourself.

…

During the game, you may die repeatedly, but this doesn’t end your adventure. Through reincarnation you resume play in your next life; the storyline’s mythic war is assumed to continue unabated for generations. Your karma at the time of death determines your next incarnation. If you have purified yourself and spread enlightenment, you may return as a rich merchant or Brahmin priest; if you have defiled yourself with violent actions, you may instead become a lowly peasant or even a pig, dog or worm. The game is winnable in any human form, but your current incarnation governs how much people and other beings will tell you in conversation, the price you must pay for equipment and so on.

Kinda cool. It’s a little like Omikron: The Nomad Soul (a game that had great ideas, if flawed execution), but it takes it a bit further. I’m always interested in unique takes on gaming like this, so it’s a shame it was never really a viable project. Who knows…maybe someday someone will undertake it for real.

On Friday, just before going to that wedding and subsequently dropping an air conditioner out our second floor window, I got up and made my way over to my local GameStop, waited on line with a bunch of other local gamers, and successfully pre-ordered a Wii. I was #22 of #26 allocated to my store, which means I was pretty lucky. I heard some stores were only allocated 15. The rumor on the line is that for the PS3 there were only 5 slots, which makes you wonder how many those stores in more remote areas were given.

In any event, I pre-ordered the system, a second controller, a nunchuck to go with it, and two games: ExciteTruck (because dorky name aside, it’s fun incarnate), and against my better judgement…Zelda. I’ve never been quiet about my dislike of the Zelda franchise (listen to that podcast I was on to hear their amusing reaction to this revelation). I’ve only finished one Zelda game to date, and that was Majora’s Mask…and I did that despite the utterly dull gameplay (I did it to see just how close that asteroid would get…it got really close, which was pretty cool, I’ll admit that much).

I strongly disliked both Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time, I saw nothing appealing in Four Swords, I thought the original NES one was crude when compared to Phantasy Star (or Final Fantasy for that matter), and well, it just goes on from there.

The game I’m most looking forward to on Wii (onWii…hah) is Super Mario Galaxy, but until then, I don’t doubt that Zelda is going to be the big launch title that everyone’s going to be talking about. Every console has one, and if you’re getting a console at launch, you really need to get the big title. So I am, despite my better judgement. Who knows…maybe this one, with its unique controls will be the Zelda that finally convinces me of its brilliance (at least it looks cool, unlike the last one, which made my eyes bleed).

In any event, between the games I pre-ordered and Wii Sports, I’m all set for launch. This is the first time I’ve bought a second controller since the PS2 launch…I never bothered with my Xbox, GameCube or 360, since the only multiplayer I play is online. But with the Wii, I see that changing. This is a much more social system than any other one I’ve owned in recent memory, and I definitely look forward to trying out Wii Sports with friends and family.

As I mentioned in the previous post, we went to a wedding on Friday the 13th. It was, of course, an unusual choice for a couple, but Heather correctly pointed out that it’s not like every year is going to be Friday the 13th (although that would make for some very amusing anniversaries, I’d bet). But really, the wedding went off without a hitch and all who attended had a wonderful time, us included.

But that isn’t to say there weren’t any incredibly unlucky things that happened.
Just getting to the wedding, which was out in New Jersey, was an adventure in and of itself. I did (as I mentioned yesterday) rent a car, and that always leads to hilarity, as I can’t parallel park for the life of me (and my regular parking skills lead much to be desired). Anyway, our apartment is really quite close to where the wedding was being held, but we decided to give ourselves plenty of time, and leave with plenty of time. But we encountered incredible (and unusual) traffic at every step of the way, the best of which was a truck (a truck!) that managed to stall right in the middle of the street by the Holland Tunnel, causing an incredible backup of traffic. I mean, what are the odds of that?

And then once we got to Jersey, we found ourselves driving down a street with the right name and numbers, but oddly enough, not the one we wanted, which was a town over. New Jersey hates me. But that’s beside the point. We eventually got there and had a great time, and made our way home without (incredibly) incident.

Once we got upstairs, Heather mentioned that since it was cold, she was going to turn on the heat, and could I please take the air conditioner out of the window in the bedroom? “Sure,” I said, and walked over to the window. Heather was standing right behind me, and asked, “Do you need any help with that?”

Simultaneously, I said “Yes” and opened the window. Why these things happened at the exact same time are inexplicable even to me, but they happened. That’s not really important.

No, what is important is that just as I opened the window, the air conditioner tumbled out of it.

Instinctually, I reached out to grab the machine, and clutched at whatever I could get my hands on. Which naturally was the power cable.

If you’ve ever held an air conditioner, you know that they’re quite heavy, and no cable could possibly support that much weight. But I grabbed at it regardless, and caught hold of the cable. Which as you can probably guess gave way, and the unit tumbled to the ground. This left me holding on to it, not at all like a Looney Toons character holding the tattered remains of a stick of dynamite.

Now, we’re only on the second floor, but these things are really heavy. Had someone been standing down there, they would have been killed for sure. Thankfully nobody was down there. When I was able to finally get down there, there was incredibly no damage to the tiles. The air conditioner had landed almost vertically, and was clearly destroyed, but it didn’t shatter and send plastic bits all over the place (sturdy units, those air conditioners). Also (much to my relief), our neighbors found this to be as hilarious as we did.

The air conditioner wasn’t a big one, and I got it dirt cheap, so there’s no real harm done (it’s not like I was going to need it again this year anyway). I’ll file this one under stupid things I’ve done and move on with my life. But it was pretty funny. I’d show a picture of the damaged air conditioner, but New York’s finest waste management people picked it up the next morning.

The moral of this story? Be yourself. Think about it.