Well, I've had two lovely ladies reminding me that I've been neglecting this corner of Bloglandia, so here I am updating. Let's fire up the Internet machine and see what's going on in the life of David...



(BTW, that picture is real but the caption is fake. More's the pity.)

Turns out not a whole lot's going on. I'm not even sure where the last couple weeks went. How is it almost the end of February already? Sheesh.

Aside from being proud of and supporting Des's academic pursuits, I've been updating a lot on my gaming blog lately, because that's mostly what's been going on with me. Which is both good and bad. It's good because, hell, them's good times. On the other hand, it's bad because it means I don't have much else, like things that pay me cash money, to take up my time.

It's going on three months since my last writing job wrapped up and I'm getting a skoche anxious about finding more. Looks like I'll be writing papers for high school and college students to plargiarize off of before long.

Actually, I've been working on my transcribing skills. After seeing Des get screwed over by her transcribers, I was inspired to get into transcribing to put skunks like the guys she hired out of business. Helps that the pay is good. I've done a couple practice transcriptions and this week I'll be doing my first paid assignment.

Ah, but enough of all this seriousness. I've got an adventure to work on for tomorrow night, and a novel to pound into a workable second draft. In the meantime, let's breakdance our cares away. Take it, Grandmaster Flash!



That actually just reminded me--I have this really vivid memory of my Mom tucking me in the night before I was set to start second grade and of me crying. Because I thought of second graders as "upper classmen" and assumed they all knew how to breakdance. And I didn't. ::sigh:: I never did learn to breakdance. Turned out it didn't really matter--no one else knew how either.

But hey! It's never to late to start, right? Teach me how to move and groove J.B.!



Ah, forget it...

A hard-hitting video on the realities of inner-city gang warfare in the 80s:



I can't believe this video only has 40,000 views! I'm getting the word out--c'mon folks, let's get this thing's view count up into the millions.

You got Talking Heads in my Muppets!

Des, Ashanta and I had a bit of a movie marathon last night, and we capped it off with a movie I hadn't watched in years: Better Off Dead. Neither of the ladies had seen (or even heard of) the movie, so I knew they were in for a treat, but even I had forgotten how insanely awesome that movie is.

First, it's full of good-looking 80s people, John Cusack first among them. Then we've got this scene, which has now become infamous in my mind, both for the fact that Ricky's dance left Des in stitches and that atomic_star has a huge crush on the singer of the band, who you may recognize as Dottie from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. She's credited as "Herself" in this movie, so I guess she was a bit of a songstress in real life.



The subject of the movie had come up over dinner earlier that evening when I made a joke about "Where's my two dollars?" that fell flat, and I had to explain its origin.



God I love this movie.

So as some of you noted in this post, my family was a bit on the intense side in the 70s. Basically, they lived in a wood and adobe house on the banks of the Rio Grande River (literally--it flooded up to the house walls every summer!) in a little speed bump of a town called Embudo. They kept ducks and goats. Hardcore stuff. Here's a bit of a chronicle of those outlaw days.

( Read more... )

From about the same age as the last drawing...Des loved this one.

( Read more... )

During my time in Santa Fe I dragged out a box full of my childhood art. And now I'm going to share it with you, whether you like it or not. Yeah, I was rockin' the Star Wars fan art at an early age...

( About 4 years old )

So I am also "anti-striking" against the whiny whiners who called for a "posting black-out" to protest the end of ad-free Basic accounts. I think it's folks like that, rather than any sort of corporate policies, that are driving people away from LJ. I can think of...at least three people off the top of my head who have either left or are seriously contemplating leaving LJ this year.

The people who call for strikes or bans or whatever remind me of the kids I went to high school with who would call for a "march on the principal's office" or a "walk out" to protest "unfair" administration decisions, like sticking our AP English class with an unpopular teacher or taking corn dogs off the menu or what have you.

Anyway, enough of all that. Tomorrow delicata77 and I will be flying out to Phoenix to visit my brother and niece, then driving on to Santa Fe the next day to spend a week with my parents.

I was born in Santa Fe and lived there for about half my pre-adult life. We relocated permanently back in '91, and I haven't been back for a visit since '99. Last fall my parents finally got out of L.A. (barely) and have been living it up back in New Mexico. So I'm very excited to get a chance to go back again and see the sights and taste the many flavors of the land of my birth. And I get to be a tour guide for Des, who has never been out that way--or that far from a major body of water, come to that.

It should be a lot of fun. The weather this time of year is a bit of a wildcard, but the immediate forecast is for decent temperatures and clear skies. But a few last flurries of snow are not unheard of around Easter. We'll see.

Since I won't be around to do my Monday Night Video Wrap Up, I'll post a few now. Basically, I'm selling off a bunch of CDs (check out my wares at Half.com!) and I got a question about whether a Teen Idols CD I had up for sale had any skips in it. So I dusted it off and gave it a listen last night. Well, hello 1999! Sheesh. Brought back a few memories, that's for sure. So then I went browsing on YouTube for other pop punk favorites from days of yore. And now I will share the bounty.

It was a lot of fun to revisit these old bands, especially in light of the commercialized joke that pop punk became after acts like New Found Glory, Good Charlotte, etc. broke big in the early 2000s. I forgot that pop punk was once much more about the "punk" with only a little flavoring of the "pop", instead of the other way around.

( I got a feeling you been damaged/Whoa-oh-oh-oh! )

So I just found out that HBO is doing a Grey Gardens movie.

It's set during the time that Little Edie was in NYC. Drew Barrymore is playing her. Jessica Lange is playing Big Edie.

( All I need is to find this Libra man! )

I don't know. Could be interesting.