Recently I learned some things, one of them being that sitting in front of a computer typing mundane opinions about shitty movies is not all that rewarding. The second is that I live on the water. How and when did that fucking happen? I mean you would think it would be obvious to me that a mere 50 feet from my front door is a beach, I guess that really must give you an idea of how powerful the drugs I have taken are.

In reference to this whole living on the water thing, I have come to the realization that if I go outside for prolonged amounts of time you begin to notice things that the other ‘water people’ do, like the many different floating objects you can lay upon and drift aimlessly until you either run out of beer or your weed high starts to fade. Perhaps that chic in that movie where she isn’t being humped by vampires would like to join me while I float on stuff, I think this could happen because she always looks super high and I usually have weed and lets face it women with nice boobies don’t like to pay for weed.

That reminds me about the 3rd time I ever scored weed. I had interrupted my dealer and his woman getting it on (in the parlance of our times), so she ended up answering the door using her arm to shield her boobies, which was awesome. The story continues with the dealer being pretty preoccupied with his womans state of undress so he just kept scooping more and more weed into the baggie. So not only did I see some awesome boobies I also got the ever elusive buy one gram and get three for free deal, which actually doesn’t exist so don’t ask cause you’ll just get that look from Saul, you know Saul right, he sells weed.

Sidenote: About a year later that very same topless drug dealer girlfriend called me crying about how her man called her a coke whore due to her having sex with a guy who offered (which she accepted) her some cocaine. I let her do all the talking and weeping cause I was like 15 and had no idea what to say. So a week later she had me drop by her place to tell me how supportive I had been and that her breakup was for the best. A few minutes later she asked my opinion on some new clothes she had just bought ending the show with some panties which she insisted on modeling for me, they had little strawberries on them. For some reason they looked better on the floor. She was my first natural blonde. Without weed this never could have happened, hooray for weed.

So the moral of the story kids is that while computers are cool for masturbation and stealing songs they have yet to make a topless drug dealer chic appear out of nowhere and bone you big time for doing nothing but listening to her whine about stuff you forgot as soon as she hung up the phone. So get out there and do stuff, cause doing stuff is much better than writing about how Vegan vampires make no fucking sense.

PS: Do 20 yr old topless blonde girls that want to model underwear for me still exist? I sure hope so, cause I love strawberries…

I’m from Seattle, now go fuck yourself.

Why is that the people that have no interest in looking at all sides of an issue always seem to be the most passionate? They can be angry, mean and usually have unwavering commitment to their beliefs. They don’t want to hear from the opposition and will do anything to distort what the other side has to say. They will lie, cheat and even condone acts of hatred as long as those people are on their side.

This is why I am always leery of someone that is too passionate about Religion and Politics. Its great to have an opinion but if someone believes something you don’t, it doesn’t mean that it takes anything away from your beliefs. No one is saying you are wrong, they simply are saying they don’t agree with you that a man rose from the dead and turned water into wine or that a man that has $30 million and a dozen houses knows how a blue collar family struggles to live on $35k a year.

Many are inexperienced at things until they start doing them. There is no training for being President, no apprenticeship. It’s the people that one surrounds themselves with that will help determine their success. Hiring only friends and people that unflinchingly agree with you will never be the best path. Hiring and appointing people that disagree with you creates a need for debate and in the end gives everyone a larger perspective and the opportunity for fresh ideas to burgeon and grow. Changing your mind is both healthy and empowering as it means you have seen a different perspective that can and will influence future decisions. The greatest and most successful leaders in our country have used this template to ensure that they are given all sides to a particular issue. Lets hope this is where we are headed in the relatively near future.

On another note their seems to be an odd vibe in this country right now, its as if we are waiting for widespread economic disaster that could happen at any time. The nearly $4.00 a gallon gas isn’t inspiring any confidence in anything but OPEC and the big three. I’m basically ready for the next depression, so bring it on, as I have been living a pretty frugal lifestyle for some time now. Not having a couple hundred in cash at all times was a hard adjustment to make for me, but I got through it. To be honest I would like the housing market to crash where I live as its at least 60% inflated. Might sound harsh but isn’t that what living in a small town is all about?

Barrack still did really really good and the states he won he dominated and yet some people just aren’t paying attention, I’m looking at you Cali. He will do really well in the next month as the momentum is still building and I am sure he will have a landslide in Washington, mostly because we just get it here.

I hope that women in general aren’t thinking if they don’t vote for Mrs Clinton that they are letting down their sex, it still boils down to who is the best person to lead and lets be honest she has been taking money from some very nasty people and a whole lot of it. Plus she made Bill defend her as rightfully he should but it just made him look so un-presidential.

And then all of a sudden a chill ran down my spine…no politician that I ever wanted to win ever ends up winning. Even locally, not even in high school. I guess there is always a first…hopefully.

And yet I sent a random text message to a friend and asked if he was psyched about Super Tuesday. He responded with a succinct ‘Fuck Politics’, in the end he might be right. Election night in 2004 was one of the worst nights in my life so maybe I would be better off without it. I guess it makes me feel apart of a bigger thing.

Check back with me in 9 months and we shall we if I have that same point of view…

As you might be able to tell I have been watching a lot of The Wire lately and its made me consider putting a package onto the street so that I dont have to sell my kidney on the black market.

As soon as he sold it he realized he no longer had any thing to do, so he decided to start taking classes in an area of interest and then put the skills he learned into action. But he did this a little differently than most of us would or could. Example: He went to wooden boat school for a year and then built his own 50 foot sailboat. He learned about cabinet making and bought 200k worth of equipment for his personal shop, to date he has only made cabinets for his own house some 6 years later.

And this all leads to his new venture, he went to school to learn about greenskeeping. You might have already figured this out by now but he has now just finished his 9 hole golf course on his property. The first nine of a planned 18. The course has sand traps, a full state of the art drainage irrigation system, and even tee boxes. The odd thing is, well he hates golf. Hates people that like to golf. Thinks its a waste of real estate. So why did he build it? Because he needs something to occupy his time and a way to spend his money. He is not the type of guy that will ever buy a Rolls or even a beach house in Hawaii, he drives a VW van that has about 400k miles on it.

And I am sure he is not alone in this lifestyle, there are people all across this land that have no idea how to spend their bank vaults full of money. They feel guilty spending it without having a practical reason and something to show for it.

So I have decided to start an new endeavor, Unemployed Ben’s money spending school. I will teach these lucky bastards how to spend money guilt free, ya know just like Republicans do.

So what to do. I would shit myself if I saw me walking down the street wielding this bad boy, so maybe I could start a protection service in my beach community. ‘Pay me 10% of all your money or I don’t leave the axe home tomorrow’, would be our motto. Yep I see big things because of this.

So everyone seems to have Rock Band and its cool to play but I just never envisioned my older family members being so interested in a video game. Let alone the music being a lot of what I grew up on, this made for a few odd glances at the family gathering.

Went a different route with the food this year, hand served and that meant no casserole dishes packing the table (thank Jebus) . No, this was Cognac Creme’ Roasted Reds, Prime Rib with a port reduction, and dessert by TBone himself. This is the tradition I want to see repeated over and over again. Fuck that turkey and ham bullshit.

Prediction for 2008: Much of the same and will find no real answer for the future of wifi, a huge part of their wireless strategy, and one that is perilous at best when demands for free wifi access are at an all time high.

Microsoft: Vista was slow, bogged down with trial software, and damn expensive to be able to run its most entertaining features. Not to mention the fact that the lack of drivers for peripherals made it impossible to not have a dual boot system unless you wanted to brick both high and low end products that a lot of people have built up over time. To simply have the view that people should buy new products or be very very patient is a sad state of affairs for a company that can do so many things so well and yet other times look like a startup, and a poor one at that.

User account control. Who stood up at a meeting with this idea? And who in the world then agreed with it? Pop Ups will save the day? This just might be the biggest misjudgment of the decade, note to Microsoft we do not like things ruining our experience. Once click should keep us safe and be enough to know we want our computers safe from prying eyes and from malicious code that destroys our data and privacy. And how about doing all this when the computer is in sleep mode and not when we are home and awake on a weeknight.

Entire computer industry - Why so slow to innovation? Video game consoles are dominating you in the fun factor and you have had little response. I want to play every game that is on a console on my computer, why would anyone leave this massive revenue stream so barren?
And why cant I yet literally walk into my computer with full touch controls for a hugely immersive experience. Monitors should bend around us and let us become a part of the game.

When people saw the Minority Report computer interface their collective jaws dropped and then wanted it for their own. Its now five years later and we are still pointing and clicking. We are past the time where our computer at our jobs and the ones we have in our homes should even remotely be the same. And sticking a webcam into a monitor is not a great leap forward, thats where we all hang them correct?

Good to see and hang with some old friends though, things feel very different and yet the same all at once. These are good guys living good lives and they deserve it, a tad too focused on work though maybe. As we worked in the same company and building for a few years one of them hasn’t missed a day of work in like a decade and the other went a sketchy part of our country to help out the company, well at least it wasn’t Tampa Bay.

This can also go for people you haven’t met, take Judd Apatow for instance, he just seems to get it. His writing is dead on with the way a lot of people talk and act, even if it offends. This couldn’t be any more apparent than in his newest movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and in particular the following scene.

How obvious is that scene and yet it appears for the first time in 2007. Something so natural and yet so dang funny, as if you were just talking to a friend. Looking forward to this one as all the Ray’s, Doors, and Walk the Line needed a little mocking.

The words of a guy that just gets it:

I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That’s what kind of man I am. You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It’s science.

Well if you were a man, I’d punch you. Punch you right in the mouth.

I don’t know how to put this but I’m kind of a big deal. People know me. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.

I’m gonna punch you in the ovary, that’s what I’m gonna do. A straight shot. Right to the babymaker.

We are laughing and we are very good friends. Good buddies sharing a special moment…laughing and enjoying our friendship, and someday we’ll look back on this with much fondness.

In watching some recent sports highlights I am amazed at how much influence the referee still has on games, they make about 100k a year and can change the direction of the entire multi-billion dollar league. Seems to me even more mistakes still occur, sure the 10 camera angles help us see the miscues a whole lot easier but shouldn’t the goal of any league be to just get the call right. This is part of the reason I paled back my interest in sports and thats brings up an interesting question, where does interest become fanaticism?

More than a few times I questioned why I needed to know who the backup tight-end of the Jets was and why I felt the need to ponder if he had to play, how that might effect the teams weak side pass protection. Now consider that I don’t like the Jets and that this knowledge is only useful if I am a scout for the NFL or a obsessed fantasy football geek.

Very few of the people I hang around with would see this as a problem, actually it would be considered as an asset. However, there is a line you cross when it goes from wants to needs and obsession begins to creep into the picture, then that line is awful fuzzy. Its the highs and lows that make it so damn interesting, a roller coaster of emotions and if you come out on the winning side it can make you feel invincible. I won, so in the end if felt good at the end of the day or year but that doesn’t exclude some door slamming, desk kicking and even a few shattered CD’s. It became less fun and more like a chore, I essentially treated it like a job and the actually games were irrelevant even with my hometown Seahawks, sure I rooted for them but not if it could cost me a fantasy game.

So took a step back and it feels good, I don’t watch a game unless I want to. I don’t have to read the sports page or even worry about things like injury reports, which coach is on the hotseat or why Terrell Owens is such a gigantic tool. I let others take up where I left off and to them it might be a more enjoyable experience, I was holding on too tight and for something as silly as rooting for some millionaires to beat other millionaires in a half a billion dollar stadium I helped build and maintain with my taxes and $7 beers. Not a real complaint it just seems I am more distant from the modern athlete than at anytime in my life.