Nipping at my heels

Well, consider my former college roommate properly goaded. Chickenboy has recently begun blogging at Chicken Blog. His first order of business was to dispense with a pinkish template in favor of a template featuring beautiful curly script. His second order of business was to misspell "nemesis" in full view of the world.

Nice start, Chickenboy.

But seriously, faithful reader (in case anyone but Chickenboy reads here), he's got a good head on his shoulders, knows some Spanish, and can really get to blustering when the mood hits him. He also does some woodworking on the side. And some carpentry.

Catalog of Annoyances

I'm watching Riding The Bullet on USA. So I've got all the video there, that's good. But all the cussing's silenced. Ugh! I guess, okay, probably a good idea to not have the swears, but do you have to silence the audio when somebody serves up the F-bomb? It's jarring.

And, much like Kingdom Hospital, this movie is a lot like a Stephen King story. For good reason, I suppose. Some things just don't translate well to screenplay, and I'd say some of King's frequent devices don't. How faithfully do we really have to adapt these things?

Avoiding Literature

I've got a whole stack of Christmas-present books to read. Unfortunately, I've got to slog through The Brothers Karamazov before then. When I read it, yes, it's very good. When I stop reading it, however, I just can't get fired up to sit and read it.

Sigh. I'm a philistine. The last book I stopped reading due to annoyance and/or boredom was The Illuminatus Trilogy and I felt so guilty for the longest time. That was a couple of weeks after my wussy former college roommate's wedding a year or two ago. That stupid crappy book still stares at me from one of my bookshelves. I'm afraid I couldn't take Dostoyevsky's stuff shaming me, incompletely read, from the bookshelf.

From the Poultry Gallery

From e-mail:

You, sir are the worst blogger ever. Your job is to entertain me, and you (with your light posting, and experiment with a different domain, and other such high-jinks) are a miserable failure.

I demand that you begin posting humorous, salacious, or other-wise entertaining commentary and inter-net hyper-links at regular intervals each day, lest I set the local blog-constabulary upon you.

Additionally, you fail to give proper regard to the king of the punctuation-marks, the Noble Hyphen. I demand that you begin hyphenating all compound-words within your so-called "web-log" post-haste.

That is all.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of support I get from my former college roommate. Actually number 3 out of 4, counting roommates I lived with for at least one semester. But the one I refer to as "my roommate" when I talk about college in general. I invited this thundering jackass to get a Blogger account and post his own crap, either on his own blog or on this one, but I strongly suspect he shall pansy out or be lazy. And if he does, he'll complain about Blogger's admittedly less-than-perfect formatting functions.

Consider the gauntlet thrown.

Why can't more former roommates be like those good chaps over at Boots & Sabers? Hey former roommate: They're Fightin' Texas Aggie Class of '96. You remember that class--those are the guys that yelled at us a lot when we were freshmen. Oh wait... you lived in the Honors dorm and you only got to meet the sparkly clean pissheads that the Honors Department deemed suitable for intellectual freshman consumption. And that royal badass McKenna, but he was a senior or something then. He sure could hit the high notes.

Hey former roommate: You gonna let some CT's from a not-noteworthy Class show us up?

Sadly for my class and the many other Waltonites out there not reading this, I suspect my former roommate will not respond in the affirmative. In fact, at this point he may be getting angry. Or maybe he'll have some demand like "If you want me on your blog, change the name from 'Being Rupe' and maybe I'll think about it" or other nonsense.

So here's my compromise, offered ahead of time: If my former roommate deigns to accept my challenge, and blog alongside me like some super-geeky Wonder Twin, I will in fact go in on a new, Rupe-luster-decreasing group circlejerk blog. And allow access to my Old Age Notes blog so he can indulge his hyphen enthusiasm.