Spit-Shining the Crystal Ball

My brother’s been making a habit (three more years and it’ll be a tradition!) of posting a list of New Year’s Predictions. What the heck, I feel like taking a stab at it too. Granted, these are a lot more random and sarcastic than his, but hey, I don’t follow the news as much as he does.

1) Britney Spears, in an effort to follow in the footsteps of her own idol, will join a weird and obscure religion, rename herself Hepzibah, and give birth to a child named Po-Mo. At least two news agencies will consider this an important story.

2) The 2006 elections will be largely inconclusive, yet both sides will declare victory and a mandate, and will on the whole make the American public wish we could just vote the whole lot off the island.

3) A great many Richard Pryor fans will vote “None Of The Above”, both in honor of the late comedian and out of sincere desire to see the offices vacant.

4) Tom and Katie will break up at the last minute due to a growing suspicion on her part that Tom is a very disturbed individual. His attempts to get her back will confirm those suspicions.

5) The Reverend Jesse James –I mean Jackson will try to intervene in the aforementioned. If not, he will find some other burning issue that is completely none of his business to get involved in.

6) Michael Jackson will either be deported by whatever Arabian country he has gone to, or made a high government official.

7) UN peacekeeping forces will attempt to fight their way out of a wet paper bag and fail. Kofi Annan will blame this failure on George Bush.

8) Cindy Sheehan will finally admit that her son’s death was not George Bush’s fault and attempt to give up the life of a political icon/football. Neither the Democratic party or the liberal media will allow her to.

9) OJ Simpson will finally produce the real killer – Jessica Simpson. She will confess before realizing what anyone is talking about.

10) My niece Angela will return from her mission, get married, and be expecting her first child before the end of the year.

11) Thom will set a new personal record for the consumption of Fuji apples. He will even set up an Apple Meter on his weblog page…

12) I will start and finish at least one story.

13) SE Idaho will receive precipitation on a scale not seen since the Great Flood. Local news will still proclaim that the drought is not over yet.

14) New Orleans will be fully repaired and restored just in time for another hurricane to turn it back into The City Literally Beneath The Sea. The government will still insist on rebuilding.

15) Gas prices will spike when the members of a junior riding club in Texas all demand new ponies at the same time. SUV drivers will set fire to hybrids in protest.

16) I will still be getting marketing research calls about Union Jack’s eight to ten months from now.

17) Also, Pitney Bowes will still be trying to sell me a postage meter.

18) I will move to Boise and get a job at Albertsons, thus proving the Theory of Strattonic Gravitation. Absolutely no one will have any idea what my job is, least of all me.

19) Movie-goers across the nation will call for a boycott of the Walt Disney Corporation after being exposed to one abysmal remake too many. Mickey Mouse will be burned in effigy, and Michael Eisner will be forced to flee to Michael’s Jackson’s compound in the Middle East for his own safety.

20) The world will end, but most of America will be too busy discussing last week’s Apprentice to notice.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Krishna...

My family's always kind of low-key about Christmas. We don't have room for a real tree anymore, and Mom rarely has ambition for any kind of decoration. This year, our sum total of Christmas spirit extends to some different bells on the door, a little fiberoptic tree by the window, and red plaid curtains in the doorway to the kitchen. Well, that and watching Christmas movies, that much gets done quite a bit. We bought the Patrick Stewart version of A Christmas Carol this year... He's a dang good actor, but I don't care as much for how they did the story this time. It could be that I love the George C. Scott version because I grew up with it, though...

It's been melting all week, which means we could have a gray Christmas. I don't mind that, usually, but I also know better than to make assumptions. Idaho weather does whatever it darnwell feels like, and it's got a perverse sense of humor. We've been putting in a few hours here and there getting the shop cleaned up and things ready to sell, even though there's a shortage of buyers. Someone did come and take the freezer off our hands, but the offer we got for the tables and chairs hasn't come through yet. Trying not to worry too much about it, and the approaching holiday is managing to be slightly distracting.

Once again, my Christmas endeavors centered primarily around Westwood discount. I can never afford to give expensive gifts, but by now no one expects that anyway. At least they should find my presents amusing or entertaining, and if they don't then they can dispose of them without offending me.

All in all, I've been feeling kinda meh this week. Christmas is nice and all in theory, but it's hard to get excited when outside your house is rampaging commercialism and inside is vague lip-service. I remember always being excited about Christmas when I was a kid, where did that go? Probably the same place my excitement about life in general went. Well, I've got a lot of things weighing on me lately, that's a lot of it right there. It's really not so bad, I've got family members I consider friends, I'm not lacking anything essential materially, I've got creative things to do to keep me occupied, and things can always get better. I'm just the type who obsesses about things I don't have...

This wasn't going to be a depressed post when I started, but I guess that just happens when I start thinking about my life. Maybe tomorrow I'll go for a walk in the hazy sunlight or something... In the meantime, I wish everyone I care about a Merry Christmas (not a Happy Holidays or any other fragging PC euphemism, I may not be a Christian anymore but I still celebrate Christmas), and may you keep your enemies close and your loved ones closer...

It's The End of The World As We Know It (And It's About Time)

Well, it's final. My restaurant, Union Jack's, is closing tomorrow. The building is cold even at the best of times, and business has slowed to a very sluggish trickle. We've had an ad in the paper to sell it for a couple weeks now, but while there has been some interest in individual pieces there hasn't been any firm offers yet. Mom tossed out the idea of having a 'garage sale' the Saturday after Christmas to liquidate the stock and furniture we haven't sold by that point (as well as anything else the family wants to toss in), and while it just occurred to me that that's New Years Eve I do like the idea.

It's been nearly seven months since we bought the place. Dad keeps saying that it's been a good experience for me and that I've learned a lot. Maybe. Right now I feel like the only thing I've learned is that you have to be part of a corporation or already rich to succeed in modern America. Maybe in a few months I'll feel like it was a valuable experience, but right now that really isn't the case. My main concern is offloading as much as humanly possible so that I can pay back most of what I've borrowed from Mom. Once that's done, I intend to fall apart for a couple weeks in the hopes that I can get it all out of my system. After that, I don't know...

All I Want For Christmas is World Domination

I'm a hard person to buy for. I have very definite tastes, and most of the time I don't let them slip unless someone's already bought something. However this year, someone actually asked me what I want for Christmas. In case there might be more than one person who both (A) cares and (B) has money, I am enclosing my wish list in the comments for this post. Be apathetic. Be very apathetic.
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But not so apathetic you lie down and die... Sorry, sudden Firefly movie flashback.

Space Monkey Cowboy Mafia

One of the people in my gaming group did a crazy thing to me. Apparently, most of my players are fans of a sci-fi/western series called Firefly, and to appease the crowd I went and saw the movie that recently came out (Serenity). To my surprise, I liked it, and I even signed up for the "not happening just yet" online game that one of my people is wanting to run. Anyway, Tuesday I got a package in the mail from Amazon. I opened it up, and lo and behold they had sent me the complete run of Firefly on dvd. Grey, you're a twerp!

So, I've been watching it. All in all, I'd say it's a pretty good show. Not something to let the kids see, as it goes by FOX visual censorship standards, but it's well-written and well-executed. So of course, the series got cancelled after fourteen episodes...

The basic premise of the series is that after Earth finally becomes used up, there is a huge rush of colonization. People get stuck together on colony ships for long periods of time, so by the time they actually get to terraform and settle new worlds they're all a kind of cultural mishmash where everyone speaks English with occasional Chinese phrases. The older and 'more civilized' colonies band together into the Alliance, and the rough-and-tumble border worlds band together into an Independence faction. There is a war, of course, and the Independence (or 'browncoats') get their backsides handed to them.

Six years later, a former browncoat has become the captain of a (comparatively) little Firefly-class transport ship called Serenity with a crew consisting of a former comrade and her husband, a hardbitten and clueless mercenary, a perky little engineer, a high-class courtesan, an elderly priest, a mild-mannered medic, and his mentally-fragmented little sister who just happens to be a wanted fugitive. Since the Alliance has made it almost impossible to make an honest living (especially with the huge reward out on the medic and his sister), the crew of Serenity find themselves scraping from one questionable job to another just to keep in fuel and food. Of course, more often than not the jobs develop major hitches, but the writers manage to keep it pretty fun. The characters seem to be pretty consistent and well-acted, and even the annoying ones give you reasons to like them. The mercenary is a case in point, as he has no manners and even fewer scruples, but he's so unapologeticly himself that it's really hard to dislike him for it. He's ignorant, prejudiced, thinks most situations can be resolved with bullets, and wouldn't know an ideal if it bit him, but you always know where you stand with him.

Anyhoo, this is a long post for no particular reason. The cafe is up for sale now, and there hasn't been much interest yet. The temperatures here are below zero at night and not much above in the daytime, and we've discovered the hard way that our building's heat doesn't work very well. Today we closed early when I figured out that it wasn't getting above 48 degrees in the dining area, and tomorrow I'll probably keep it closed. Until this cold snap ends, there's not a lot of point. Not many people like eating frozen food...