After reading this lengthy review of Leopard, the latest update of Mac OS X, it doesn’t look like something I’ll be saving my pennies for. The sad truth is I have so little time to use my own computer that it doesn’t make sense to spend much money on it. You know you’re in a sad place as a Mac user when you sit down at your Mac to log in and you’re looking for the control-alt-delete keys. I have sunk so very low!

Yesterday was a football day. First was the sad sad defeat of Michigan at the hands of Ohio State, followed by the triumph of the Montana Grizzlies over the Montana State Bobcats. I’m really no great fan of football, but I have these observations on the games:

First, the Michigan defense was incredible, but when your offense can’t get more than half a dozen first downs there’s no way you’re going to win a football game. It could be that the Buckeyes defense was also just at the top of its game, and it did play well, but my admittedly novice impression was that the Michigan offense just was not in the game. It was sad.

Second, watching Montana football broadcast by a local tv station after watching Big 10 football broadcast by a national network is kind of sad. No matter how well the Montana teams played, the game paled in comparison to the whiz-bang professionalism and superior technology of the national broadcast. Even the color of the images you saw on the screen showed that the Montana broadcast was but a very pale shadow (literally) of its national counterpart.

Finally: You know it must be NaNoWriMo if I’m turning to football. How many ways can I find to procrastinate writing this piece of crap “novel”? [tags]mac, football, nanowrimo[/tags]

Punctuation doesn’t count. Spelling doesn’t count. Hell, even a coherent plot doesn’t count. You simply have to hit the 50,000-word mark between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. That means averaging 1,666 words a day every day for 30 days. Try it. Seriously, try it. ⇒

The infamous Tennessee Pot Cave is for sale. It seems the creative mind behind the cave has been in a bit of trouble. Maybe he should have bought Barry Cooper’s Never Get Busted Again video and he’d still be happy in his cave.

In fact, perhaps public defender offices everywhere should join together and purchase bulk quantities of Cooper’s video to distribute throughout our communities as a public service. Such an effort would be a great compliment to the “Stopped for DUI? Don’t blow!” ad campaign to ensure citizens understand their rights when it comes to that substance, as well.

See also: More on Barry Cooper from NPR. [tags]drugs, 4th amendment[/tags]

Since I’m supposedly trying to write a Douglas Coupland-like novel for NaNoWriMo I’ve recently picked up Generation X. I first read this book back in the early 1990s, soon after its original publication. At the time, it was like windexing a heavy film off of my eyes and looking at the world with a clear view for the first time, but, of course, in a hip, ironic, and distanced way. Reading it now, 15 years later, is almost painful. Whereas before the insights into contemporary life were piercingly funny and cool, they now seem depressingly accurate and all too familiar.

Another way to put it: When I read the book at age 20 (approx.) it was funny because it described the lives of others. Reading the book now is not so funny because it describes my own life to a much more disturbing degree.

That’s not to say I’m as cool, hip, detached, ironic, glib, witty, cynical, or poverty jet setted as Dag, Claire, and Andrew. Far from it. It’s just that the world described seems less distant, more immediate, and therefore more scary and depressing.

One sign of how the book slays me: It describes my entire life in a single sentence defining a single word:

Overboarding: Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one’s previous life interests, i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs….

Shot through the heart, and I’m to blame…

“I believe monkeys are the future,” Jeremiah said. ⇒

Today’s a holiday for state employees, meaning for me. That’s a good thing. I worked all day yesterday and part of Saturday, so I’m studiously avoiding the office today. Basically that means I don’t really know what to do with myself. When all you do is work, the rest of your life tends to atrophy.

But I don’t only work. I’m supposed to be writing a NaNo novel this month, and I’m working on that, sort of. The joke already isn’t funny anymore, so I’m tweaking it in an effort to keep it going. I just have to keep forcing myself to look at my job sideways and then it can be funny, or at least interesting rather than depressing and frustrating and difficult and all the things it is when I look at it head-on.

Speaking of sideways, if you haven’t seen the 15-lateral pass last-minute football play from about two weeks ago, you should really watch it. I’ve never been a big football fan, but if more teams would try stuff like this more often, I wouldn’t be able to tear my eyes away. This was quite possibly the most amazing and exciting football play ever. (See it also from an endzone angle.) If there’s a better one, please share.

And on the subject of football, did anyone see the Wolverines lose to the Badgers and the Buckeyes lose to the Illini? I saw the 2nd half of the Michigan loss and it was kind of heartbreaker. Amazing how important a good quarterback can be to the overall effectiveness of the team, but how could you not feel awful for poor little freshman Mallett? How can you not be looking forward to the huge game this saturday in Ann Arbor: Michigan v. Ohio State for the Big 10 Conference Championship!?

(Ed. note: Yes, this is quite possibly the first ever football focused post on the imbroglio. What can I say? Life is just full of surprises! Next up: Bowling!)

So let me try this again: Never talk to cops or prosecutors. Ever. Under any circumstances. Just say “I don’t talk to cops or prosecutors. Only my lawyer does.” Got that? ⇒

Maybe I should stop drinking in the morning. ⇒

That makes the iPhone more than just a gadget. It’s a genuine handheld, walk-around computer, the first device that really deserves the name. ⇒

It’s November, which means it’s NaNoWriMo, which means I’m once again, for the sixth year straight, trying to write 50,000 words in 30 days. After just two days, I am not optimistic for this year. Foolishly I decided to attempt to write a satire about a public defender’s office. That was foolish because, frankly, this job isn’t very funny. Sure, I work with a bunch of funny people, most of them fascinating characters in their own right who amuse, anger, frustrate, and entertain me on a daily basis, but that doesn’t change the fact that what they do is deadly serious and really not very funny at all.

What was I thinking? [tags]nanowrimo[/tags]