Or maybe "Office-mus Prime."

Spotted at an intersection. Fortunately I had the camera with zoom and time to dig it out before the light changed.

Well, it does take me a while to fall asleep, but really, what I'd diagnose myself with isn't insomnia as much as doesn't-have-the-sense-to-go-to-bed-at-a-reasonable-hour-itis.

This isn't technically a roommate from hell story. It's a story about the ex-roommate who (I'm 99% certain) stole my credit card, then convinced his friends that I'd been going after him.

( A tale of theft, compulsive lying, police, and not covering one's tracks. )

Bad idea of the day: “I’ll be back before the rain starts again. No need to bring my umbrella.”

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

I actually would have made it if I hadn’t decided to finish re-reading The Briar King. Three pages from the end — WHOOSH! Instant cloudburst!

So I finished the book, zipped the full-sized hardcover into my jacket, and proceeded to run from Coffee Bean to the parking structure, pausing under overhangs when I found them. There’s a surprising lack of shelter at the Irvine Spectrum, not counting the stores themselves. It wasn’t until I got to the structure that I realized I’d been running with a coffee cup in my hand.

Amazingly enough, even though I got soaked, I managed to keep the book dry! (One must have priorities, after all.)

Let's see...worst movie I've ever seen in a theater. Top three candidates:

Dungeons And Dragons. This was so bad that the group of friends I was with started heckling the movie, and the rest of the audience joined in! Of course, that means we found something fun about it, so it probably doesn't count. (Similarly, I rather enjoyed Van Helsing as a comedy, even though it doesn't seem to have been intended as one.)

The House of the Spirits. This should have been a great movie. Epic story, all-star cast...but it was intensely boring. 16 years later, I barely remember a thing about it other than being bored out of my skull, but the boredom itself left that much of an impression.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I think I should just copy what I wrote immediately after seeing it:

On the plus side, it had giant robots blowing stuff up, and they put more thought into the story than I expected them to. And there were certainly good moments spread throughout the film. On the minus side, the visuals were so complex that they were hard to follow. That’s a problem I had with the Transformers’ designs in the first film, too — they look insanely cool in still shots, but start them moving and you end up with two clouds of shrapnel fighting each other. Plus Michael Bay has a very different sense of humor than I do, which didn’t help. And amazingly enough, the movie was tedious. I don’t know how you can possibly take a movie about giant robots and explosions and make it dull enough that I checked my watch at least five times during the film.

Yeah, that one probably deserves the title.

I don't recall ever walking out of a movie before it was finished, unless the movie itself stopped due to technical problems (which has happened a couple of times). I've been seriously tempted to switch off some movies I've watched at home, though.

Spent Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, who were helping host a huge Thanksgiving dinner for people at their church. So instead of the 8-12 people I'm used to for holiday dinners, it was 24. Hectic, but I discovered that I'm actually good at playing Jenga. (I swear, I haven't played the game since college, and I don't remember being any good at it at the time.)

With the warm weather, I'd been joking that we should have a Thanksgiving barbecue. The first thing I saw when we got there: a barbecue. Okay, it was being used to cook a turkey, but still...

There was also the highest pie-to-person ratio I have seen in a long time. I think there must have been at least 10 pies, if not a dozen. Probably enough for everyone there to eat half a pie!

We stayed in on Friday, avoiding the insanity of Black Friday sales (though I did look through the 15 or so emails from various online stores whose lists I'm on), then drove up to Westwood in the evening to see Equivocation (Shakespeare gets caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot).

Brush Fire Smoke, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Smoke from a brush fire near San Juan Capistrano, seen from the parking structure at the Irvine Spectrum. I wouldn't have caught this if I hadn't checked Twitter when I sat down to lunch and seen an update from @LATimesfires. (As it is, I still had to make do with the camera on my phone.)

The picture was taken around 1:30. It's about 3:30 now, and I don't see a plume anymore (though it could be behind a building) -- just a smear of haze to the south and west.

According to the LA Times, the fire started when a tractor crashed into a power pole this morning.

(reposted from K-Squared Ramblings)

I spent a good chunk of the weekend catching up on things I've been meaning to do for a while. This included:

A run to storage (also to look for alenxa's pumpkin saw) to swap some books I've read recently for some books I've been meaning to reread. And also to pick up some comics that someone had expressed an interest in buying.

Email cleanup. I'm almost down to 150 messages! About 1/3 of what's left are either to-do posts I've sent myself or newsletters that I still want to read.

Going through the leftover bits from my last computer upgrade, and sorting out what to keep, what to sell, and what to hand over to e-waste collection. This also meant opening up my computer so I could wipe the old hard drives. While I had it open, I reconnected my ZIP drive, so we can go through our collections of ZIP disks and see if there's anything worth saving.

I also tried to wipe the old laptop's hard drive, but it froze about halfway through the process.

And then there was the pile of ~4 months' worth of junk mail that I went through looking for Tech Tool Pro 5 so that I could test the extra RAM in that laptop. It turned out the CD was somewhere else (sandwiched between two boxes), but at least I got a head start on that process. By the time I found it, it was too late to get started, so that's something to try tonight.

Also: watched two movies: Liar, Liar, which Katie had seen before but I hadn't, and Conan the Destroyer, which I only barely remembered seeing. Shortly before starting the film, I looked at the envelope and wondered aloud, "How the heck did they manage to squeeze a PG rating out of Conan?" Simple: cut out the sex, and minimize the blood. And amp up the cheese. Biggest surprise, though? Olivia D'Abo as the princess.

The Station Fire burning through the Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles is expected to reach the summit of Mt. Wilson sometime tonight. In all likelihood it will damage or destroy the communications towers and the observatory complex. The Mount Wilson Observatory is an active observatory, and is also of historical importance because of discoveries made there over its 105-year history. In particular: Edwin Hubble's* observations with the 100-inch Hooker telescope (shown at right) indicated that universe is much larger than was previously thought, and that it was expanding -- observations that revolutionized astronomy and led to the current Big Bang theory.

I've been to the observatory once, on a tour my family took on August 8, 1992. We'd just come back from a trip to Florida where we visited Disney World and Cape Canaveral during the summer I was 16. I really wish I could remember more about the trip...but I took pictures and labeled them (though not in much detail). With the observatory threatened, I thought I'd dig them out and scan them**. You can see all eight on my Mt. Wilson Observatory Tour 1992 photoset on Flickr.

The Observatory's website is apparently hosted on the grounds, so the fact that its fire status page is still responding indicates it's still there and has power. The latest update says that they're setting up a backup info page at http://joy.chara.gsu.edu/CHARA/fire.php, but that's showing a 404 error right now.

*As in the Hubble Space Telescope.

**Scanning them was not a problem. Digging them out? That was a problem. I knew exactly which photo album they were in, and thought I knew where the album was. As it turned out, it wasn't there. It was in an unopened box shoved at the very back of the long,narrow hall closet, such that I had to move 3 other boxes, several bags, and an unused CD rack just to see that it was labeled "photo albums" on top. Edit: And, oh yeah, the trail of ants along the wall, going after the long-forgotten bag of Halloween candy. The wall I kept brushing up against. How did I forget that part?

That's the missing piece that makes the classic phrase more than a simple tautology. It's not just that it's in the last place you look. It's that it's in the last place you want to look.

Cross-posted at K-Squared Ramblings and Facebook.

Y'know, after a couple months of no Twitter posts getting transferred to LJ, and then rethinking the Twitter/blog tie on the whole, I think I'm just going to turn off LoudTwitter and just make an effort to post directly to LJ once in a while.

It just seems like the short-form Twitter and long-form LiveJournal are a poor fit for each other. Facebook is a much better match. Plus I've already got a set of digests over at K-Squared Ramblings, where I'm tidying them up (titles, tags, etc.) as I have time.

It might be worth decluttering this journal and deleting any old "Line Items..." posts that don't have comments. Definitely the ones that are just "New blog post: (link)," and probably most of the rest, too.

In 1984, Kenner launched a line of DC super-hero action figures under the name Super Powers. The toys were tied to the Super Friends cartoon, and each had an action: If you squeezed Superman's legs, he would throw a punch. If you squeezed the Flash's arms, he would run. Each figure also came with a 16-page minicomic starring the character and others from the toy line.

Today, Crisis on Earth-Blog unites fourteen sites in celebrating this landmark toy line.

• Aquaman Shrine dives with the King of the Seas.
• Bat-Blog covers Batman and his villains.
• Being Carter Hall handles Hawkman.
• Speed Force runs along with the Flash.
• Crimson Lightning is going all-out with a Flash extravaganza.
• Dispatches from the Arrow Cave aims at Green Arrow
• Love Dat Joker brings in the laughs with the Clown Prince of Crime
• Justice League Detroit follows a set of knock-off figures from the era.
• The Idol-Head of Diabolu has only begun to cover Martian Manhunter
• ...nurgh... reviews the entire series of mini-comics
• Doom Patrol Blog takes a spin with Red Tornado
• Fortress of Baileytude - Superman
• Firestorm Fan follows the Nuclear Man.
• Once Upon A Geek covers Dr. Fate and the unproduced Blue Devil & Shockwave figures

Enjoy!

Loudtwitter is back from ~2 months downtime and, according to the FAQ, is catching up on *all* the tweets from the mean time.

It's not clear whether it'll *post* them all, but just in case, I'll see if I can change settings to automatically put everything behind an LJ-cut. If I can't, or if it doesn't work, I'd like to apologize in advance to anyone who reads their friends' page between the time it posts and the time I manually fix it. Update: Loudtweeter swears it'll only actually *post* today's items, it just receives 200 messages at a time from Twitter. So you should be safe! (I did manage to wrap the template in an LJ-cut, assuming I didn't mess up the formatting. Not sure if I'll leave it or not. Something to deal with later.)

OK, back to reading specs.

We went to the Orange County Fair on Saturday afternoon. Most years we end up going to at least one of the Pacific Amphitheater's summer concert series, which includes fair admission, so we just combine it into one trip. This year it was Melissa Etheridge, and we also had another goal: Al's Brain.

We started by grabbing some water and (in my case) a chocolate milkshake (because I wanted some ice cream, dangit! and drinkable made it easier), then wandered through the arts and crafts displays, where they showed prize-winning jewelry, crochet, display models, dresses, origami, etc.

Al's Brain

Then we made our way to the back of the fair, where they had set up a portable theater for Al's Brain (in 3-D!). There was a huge sand sculpture out front of "Weird Al" Yankovic holding out a brain in his hand. An animated question mark and exclamation point would occasionally pop out the top of his head, and smoke would pour from his ears.

"Weird Al" has actually had a long association with the Orange County Fair, often doing free concerts on multiple nights during the run. We've seen him there at least twice, possibly three times. One year there was a "Weird Al" museum of sorts. This year, he got involved in a short 3-D educational film (comedic, of course) about the brain.

( More about Al's Brain; Zucchini Weenies and Chocolate-Covered Bacon; Acrobats; Concert; The Fair at Night )

Cross-posted at K-Squared Ramblings and at Facebook.

Two chihuahuas clinging to the sides of a bell and its support beam.

Honestly, I'm not typing this from a Taco Bell.

Spent the weekend mostly cleaning and following up on things from Comic-Con last week. Photos are all up at Flickr, and alenxa and I are posting write-ups at K-Squared Ramblings.

Some highlights so far:

• Lost was *the* panel to attend this year.
• Flash Forward looks awesome.
• Mad Science: The Science Behind Science-Fiction was fun, with reps from Eureka!, Fringe and Caprica/BSG.

Oh, and there's the matter of the costumes...

The annual trip commences...

alenxa and I took our annual trip down to Laguna Beach to watch the fireworks display launched off the bluffs. This time we made reservations for dinner at a restaurant we'd walked by a bunch of times, Ocean Avenue Restaurant and Brewery. Would definitely go there again.

Around 7:30 we staked out a spot on the beach, which was already crowded. At the time we got there, the daytime beach-goers were just leaving, while the fireworks crowd was just arriving. I kicked off my shoes and waded out into the surf a bit, taking pictures of seagulls and scenery. Then it became clear the tide was coming in, and we moved up the beach to an area that didn't have any seaweed. Sure, it was 10 feet from a volleyball court and next to a group with a couple of umbrellas (which they never did take down only one of which they took down), but at least we could rely on not getting flooded during the show.

It cooled off pretty quickly, and I went across the street to get us both some coffee at one of the two Starbucks. Yes, two. (One used to be a Diedrich.) The line was about 15 feet out the door when I got there, and it took be about 25 minutes to get through it, by which time I just ordered plain coffee so I could get out of there quickly. It had stretched to at least 40 feet out the door!

The sky grew darker, the moon grew brighter, and stars started peeking out, and finally around 10 minutes to 9, a lone firework went off. I'm fairly certain they do a test fire, because there always seems to be one firework that goes off about 10 minutes before the show gets going. Soon we could hear low booming sounds in the distance, and flashes of light started appearing over the bluffs from the next display up the coast (Corona del Mar, maybe?)

Meanwhile, the volleyball game was still going, even without any light except the moon and streetlights.

A little after 9, the fireworks started, launched out over the ocean from somewhere behind the bluffs at the northwest end of the beach. The volleyball game stopped, people rearranged themselves to be able to see, and we ended up standing and drinking coffee. I experimented with the night and fireworks settings on my camera, and tried out the video on my phone, but mostly just watched. I actually got a few decent shots.

The wind was good, blowing the smoke parallel to the beach and keeping the view of the fireworks clear. (A few years ago, it lingered, so after a few minutes we got to see smoke lit up in pretty colors.) Every once in a while, I'd look behind to see the moon and the fireworks from the next display along the coast the other way (Dana Point?), barely visible in the distance.

After the big finale, just about everyone started leaving the beach, heading for one of the few places where you can cross PCH. We stopped at a gelato place on our way back to the car, tried some flavors, and shared a two-scoop cup with one scoop of ginger and one of pineapple chocolate chip. They went surprisingly well together.

By the time we made it back to the car (parked up near the Laguna Playhouse), the traffic had died down a bit and we had a smooth drive up the canyon. After a while, we started seeing bright flashes of light over the hills, and realized even after 10:00 there must still be another fireworks show going. As near as either of us could tell it was near the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.

Finally got home, avoiding the two raccoons that ran in front of the car, washed the sand off of our shoes and feet, and I started going through the photos looking to see how many actually turned out well.

(Cross-posted to K2R and Facebook. More photos at Flickr.)

In order:

1. Wanted to finish reading a bunch of comics, particularly The Unwriten, The Unknown and Unthinkable.
2. Wanted to write a quick review of those comics.
3. Someone was wrong on the Internet.
4. Wanted to finish that review. (got it)
5. As I was about to brush my teeth and go the hell to bed I came up with an idea and had to jot down some notes so I wouldn't forget it later.
6. Decided I had to post this. WTF?

(Yes, it's a real LJ post from me. Crazy, huh?)

And the game is total crack. alenxa has been playing it all week, and it's that perfect combination of WTF and fascinating.