And the 2018 Academy Award for Artistic Acheivement in Bedhead Goes To...

Guy from The Office using the word "homeskillet"? Check. Retro track suit complete with short-shorts and headband? Czech. Not to ironically beat a dead horse to the tune of an Air Supply song or anything, but you don't need us to tell you what this year's Token Quirky Movie is. You know, that quirky, dialogue-driven dramedy full of scene-stealing, unique, and yes -- quirky characters? You've just gotta pull for that little 'independent' movie as it somehow builds auidience and critical Joementum until it quirkily takes in $100 million at the box office.

Well, sorry dear readers, but in this corner of the Blogosphere, we do not pull for these movies. In fact, we have been boycotting them for a few years. Our decision to label a movie 'quirky' involves taking a Potter Stewart approach to the trailer. Were "I Heart Huckabees" and "Thumbsucker" actually quirky? God-willing, we'll never know from personal experience. Bloggy Blog is annoyed by the targeted, intelligence-aspiring advertising; watching this fluff hasn't made us smarter or more sophisticated. We don't want to "spread the buzz" for this "underdog flick"; these movies generally feature slick and experienced directing and acting. (Really, we just watch The Wire to feel exclusively intellectual) We will always prefer bad movies viewed ironically to clichéd ones with scripted irony obvious enough for anybody to 'get'. After all, how then, are we supposed to feel smug?

And The Funds, Good Sir, Will Henceforth Be Transferred To Your Account When The King's Estate Is Distributed To The Heirs

We here at the Bloggy Blog have long since abandoned the sniping and random S+H of eBay for the more legit pastures of Amazon Marketplace, but that hasn't stopped scammers from contacting us with time-sensitive offers to buy items we have lost bids on:

	from		"lingularii @ gmail. com"		hide details	Jan 16 (15 hours ago)
	reply-to			lingularii@gmail.com
	to			djanes1@gmail.com
	date			Jan 16, 2008 8:16 PM
	subject			Question from eBay member about Item number (310014222091)
	mailed-by			jetta.cgnhost.net

Dear djanes1,

I have for sale: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=310014222091 My price is negociable. If you are interested just give me a fast reply on this email address and you will find all the info that you want. Please contact me as soon as possible for more details directly at lingularii@gmail.com !

Thanks for your time !!

And that is how the script goes. Essentially, the scammer looks at lists of auction losers, and assumes their email follows the script of ebaySN@gmail.com, ebaySN@yahoo.com, etc, and sends something like this. Of course, responding with a 'no' just makes more of these things show up. An attempt to negotiate the price down to 52 cents led to a request for our name and address. This scam would be more believable if our Gmail account name was the same as our eBay account, so if yours is, be aware.

UPDATE: They will stop emailing you if you play with them a bit.

Hard Drive Enclosures Exist, And Are Awesome

So, to go back to an earlier post, lets just say that we're rocking out like only robots on the Autobahn can. The transfer of hard drives from my bricked mp3 player into the used one was fairly seamless. We couldn't get the back case of the newly acquired one and had to rip it off and replace it with the same part from the bricked one, thats all. Now we have two batteries and two power supplies!
This scheme was inspired by an overarching theme of life here at diezer Bloggy Blog, that of Hard Drive Enclosures. Those of you out there in the blogosphere probably have dealt at some point with your laptop breaking. Laptops generally like to break in a way that requires about $400 worth of repair, usually through a break in the cheaply made motherboard. "Fuck it", you say, it's worth it just to get a new one. But before you do, don't get conned in to shelling out another $100 or so to have the data on your old hard drive 'transferred' to the hard drive on your new laptop. If you can take out the old hard drive yourself, you can get a hard drive enclosure for ~$20 and have access to all of your files in the form of a portable, usb-powered, external hard drive. We got this one from Tiger Direct for $17 shipped. It's plug and play compatible with Macs and PCs, and can fit quite a bit of pirated material. Unfortunately it takes up two usb ports when plugged in, but hey, its an external hard drive for $17! Come to think of it, it might even be worth it to have one of these lying around for that inevitable moment when you need your files and they are telling you to ship your laptop to the Dell/Geek Squad repair hub in You Might Never Get It Back, KY.

Geaux Buckeyes!

Oh Yeah! College Football fans, we're here at the Allstate FanFest in New Orleans, your home to celebrate both the Sugar Bowl, featuring the Georgia Bulldogs taking on the Hawaii Warriors, and the BCS National Championship, in which The Ohio State Buckeyes try to stay #1 against the hometown favorites, the Louisiana State Tigers! Over at the receiver challenge booth, you will have the chance to test YOUR football skills against some inflatable plastic targets. Or, if paperwork is more your style, head on over to that table to the left to sign off on some worthless hurricane insurance! Be sure to be on time for your team's Pep Rally where you can show the world who has the best fans! Yes, we here at the Allstate FanFest know your home was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, but we are unable to award your claim since the damage has been determined to be caused by a storm surge rather than direct wind! Speaking of wind, test your leg against the elements and try to make a field goal on our replica post! We are aware that the only thing worse than stealing years of insurance payments with no intentions of paying the claims is guiltlessly sponsoring high-profile sporting events in the affected region! Our technicalities are as obscene as our shame is absent!

Like the weight of debt and home loss constantly on your shoulders, see if your children can run to the end of this inflaty-thingy with a rope tied to their torso! If only all these settlement appeals were this easy to rein in! Shit, here at Allstate we would much rather spend like 20 million on this naming rights crap than rebuilding homes. One gets us like a hundred million in marketing value, whereas the other only gives us an image of integrity. Don't get us wrong, here at Allstate we love having an image of integrity, but we just pay Dennis Haysbert and his calm, baritone oratory for that. If you are feeling frustrated right now, why don't you just toss the pigskin around and see if your hands are as good as ours. Sure, we could have just waited a year and sponsored some bowl games in other cities, but we really just wanted to show off in front of the communities we've profited so much from! That's Allstate's Stand!

Even in high-heeled boots, you still must use a lot of low-angle shots to make Javier Bardem look really tall.

We here at Bloggy Blog got around to seeing a movie we already referenced, and let it be known -- the reference still stands! We enjoyed the Coen Brother's remake of 1986's Blue Velvet. In them, a small-towny young man is aimlessly walking around a field where he finds an ear/2 million dollars. This unforgettable find leads him to a tangled web of intrigue, violence, and a pure-evil psychopath type that carries around a creepy gas tank. Both films have a decidedly 'retro' ambiance, and annoying old ladies that don't quite steal the scenes they were intended to. However, the Greater-Houston area audience in the theater we saw it in sure liked her quip about Mexicans in suits! [Borat Voice]High five, Lou Dobbs![/Borat Voice]

I Want My, I Want My, I Want My MP3s

So, our two-year old mp3 playa broke in a silly way this week, with the power cable connection housing fracturing and breaking from the circuit board. It was a good run. We originally bought the 40gb Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra because it was a high capicity, no-nonsense player with a user replaceable battery and a DRM-free software interface. It's downsides of size and battery life didn't really matter to us; we just wanted to put all of our music on one player and let it play through some speakers at wërkenzie.

Well, a brief tour through the World Wide Web for a new mp3 player showed that Creative had conceded the high-capacity mp3 player market. Dismayed, we anguished between the expensive, fanboy cliché iPod, and the probably shitty Microsoft Zune.

Then inspiration struck us down like a thunderbolt from Baby Jesus herself: buy one of the used 30gb versions floating around Amazon Marketplace (fer $130) and switch out the hard drives! Will this harebrained scheme bring back the sultry sounds of Kraftwerk et. al. to the lab? Will there be some kind of lame 'firmware' problem? We will update you, and we know you will be refreshing this page every 30 seconds until the answer comes!

The Fox News Commode Stall Wall that is the NOLA.com Comment Board

The website of the New Orleans Times Picayune is NOLA.com, and has an unmoderated comments column at the end of every article ... and thus has turned into the call in segment of a Rush Limbaugh radio show circa 1996. Lets lead off with the nuanced position of 'cjdla', who writes in responding to a story about a string of Cuckoo Nest-style escapes from a juvenile facility involving 15-17 year olds:

"I say when they catch them put a bullet in thier head., i guarantee one of these thugs will kill someone before they die"

At heart, cjdla is simply a proponent of "No Country For Old Men" style conflict resolution. Of course every Hannity needs a Colmes, or in this case a 'SPATZMAN', who advocates an alternative housing plan for the soon-to-be displaced homeless encampment near city hall:

"Ok enough is enough. Let Stacy Head take all those homeless people to her house. We need to move forward and not worry about a bunch of bums who have spent years milking the system. If Stacy can"t take them home this evening let the Fire Department give them a bath every morning . They will move.Spatzer"

Indeed, spoken elequently from years of personal experience by the Spatz-dawg. Gotta dig that Spatz-miester! This next poster, 'cardsup2', is a student from the prestigious School of Hard Knocks who only wishes his life was as awesome as displaced public housing residents:

"I'm a student making an income equal to the small percentage of previous public housing residents with jobs(which i believe was only under 30% of residents), and all I can say is this; i only wish I could send my rent bill, my power bill, my water bill to the city to pay. But I can't, i have to budget, I have to save, I have to practice smart spending (no $12,000 bling rims for my ride), and if I come up short, do I march on city hall demanding that the government foot my bill? Heck no, if I come up short on my rent, I get kicked out, if I come up short on my power, the lights go off... if you saw my white face marching on city hall, I would be laughed at and called "privelidged" even though I am far from it."

Shit, no bling rims? Budgets? Bills? When oh when will this war on the middle class end?