And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when allof God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

– Martin Luther King, Jr. from The Great March on Washington

It’s almost 50 years later, and this rings truer than ever. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever get here.

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Easily my most favorite Sesame Street celeb video clip. It speaks to the geek in me, obviously.

The thing with it, though, is that when it comes to playing games, you have to be invested. Let me explain. Nadine bought me Gran Tourismo 5 for Christmas. It’s good stuff. I like racing games, and the GT series has always been known for its realism and fun. So great. Tonight I decide that I want to try out the game. So I turn on the PS3, pop the disc in, and fire it up to find… a screen that says “Not so fast, you can’t use it until you update it.” sigh Plus, this update is huge. So it starts to download. An error comes up. Turns out my internet connection went down. Click OK on the error (or, in reality, hit the X key on the controller). Game comes up and says “oh hey, this would work a lot better if you install a bunch of data onto your system first”. Allow that, it takes almost 30 minutes. Grow old and feeble. Data install finishes. Game starts to launch and then says “oh hey, you know that update you started? We need to finish that.” Data starts downloading again. Looks like it’s almost done. Rejoice. Going to enjoy driving a virtual car on a virtual track. Update data installs. Get excited. hair starts blowing back in anticipation. Have world crushed when a 1GB plus update starts to download after. Lose desire to play game.

This isn’t the first game this has happened to for me, as I’m sure it’s not for others. The thing is that it’s frustrating. I admit that as big of a geek as I claim to be, I’m little more than a casual gamer. I got other things to do. I don’t even know if there’s a way for Sony to make this better in PlayStation 4 or what have you. Until then, I guess I’ll just stare at this download screen and go on with my real life.

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I always enjoy marching band takes on popular stuff like this.

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I get the idea of buying a shirt or something if your team wins the World Series, or equivalent big game. That’s worth celebrating and shelling out some cash for. But honestly, why in the world would I pay for this:

Oooh, MLB Playoffs

You see correctly. This is a hat to commemorate the fact that my team simply made the playoffs. Really? REALLY? REALLY? I need a goddamn hat to celebrate my team making the playoffs? And that shit costs $28. TWENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS. For a hat that would be outdated in less than a month. Jesus Marie, they take us for imbeciles who will buy anything. Well, I guess we are imbeciles who will buy anything because if we didn’t buy it, they wouldn’t sell it.

The sports apparel industry is a huge deal these days. Everyone wears shit with their team logo on it. Hell, half of the clothes I own have the Yankees logo on them in some way, so it’s not like I haven’t bought into this, but even I have limits. There’s supporting your team, and there’s saying you’re an idiot who spent $28 on a hat that says “MLB Playoffs”. Even I won’t be that guy.

Technorati Tags: hat, mlb, playoffs, ridiculous

One of the selling points of this place is that they do brick oven pizza. Who doesn’t love that shit, right? So, I ordered a Margherita pizza. I love Margherita pizza. It’s simple, uncomplicated, delicious Italian food. Now, for anyone who doesn’t know, a Margherita pizza should look like this:

Mmmm, Pizza.

We’re all on board with this concept, right? Right. So after waiting forever for it, the pizza comes out, and what do I get? A motherfucking plain cheese pizza. For half a minute, I thought about telling the waitress that I got the wrong order before it dawned on me that this most Americanized slab in front of me was their take on a Margherita. Cheap sauce, cheap cheese. No fresh mozzarella. No full basil leaves. To top it off, one side of the crust was scorched because it was either too close to the fire or in the oven too long. I’m betting both.

This is many things, but a Margherita it isn't.

I’m not even sure where I’m going with this, but I hate when restaurants misrepresent like that. This is motherfucking New Jersey. We know pizza. We can tell the difference between thin-crust and thick-crust; New York and Chicago; Neopolitan and Sicilian. Don’t try to sell me some lousy cheese pizza as some fancy shit when it clearly isn’t.

In any event, that’s the last time I eat there. They can take their cheese pizza and shove it.

Photo #1 credit xymox on Flickr. Photo #2 credit The Pizza Review on Flickr. Both photos licensed under a Creative Commons license. Also, you get a nice big cookie if you get the reference in the title of this post.

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Seriously, these are "fashion"?

Today’s topic is those ridiculously oversized spectacles that girls seem to be in to these days. You know the type, where each damn lens covers about half of their face. The ones that were the ones you got stuck with from the bargain eyeglass rack at the eye doctor as a kid because your parents couldn’t afford the nicer frames. How is that shit fashion? I mean, I get that idiotic hipsters would wear them because they find it somehow “ironic”, but what about more fashion oriented people? They look fucking terrible! It’s like another worst part of the 80s came back. This is somewhere in between the return of Gordon Geccko-esque greed and big shoulder pads in the ranks of “shit we should have left in the 80′s but didn’t”. Plus, somehow, this has become part of the “nerd” look. How is that so? Nerd glasses used to be the slightly thicker oval or cat eyed shaped black frames. Now they have that, but each lens is bigger than their head. Even my grandmother didn’t wear glasses that big.

In the end, I know it’s just me. I’ve never been in touch with the forefront of fashion, and I never will. I just can’t believe the things people wear that they think make them look good. It’s sad and funny all at the same time. Oh, humanity.

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Still, watching the VMA’s makes me feel ancient. I look at what the kids like and listen to these days and it boggles me. Everything sounds the goddamn same. The same, boring, Auto Tuned crap. I remember getting excited about the VMA’s and when they were part of setting trends in the music world. These days? Meh.

I know, I sound old. I get it. I’m older than I think sometimes. Now get off my lawn and turn down that radio, you damn kids!

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It’s sad to see that Amy Winehouse has died. It’s even sadder that all of her issues with drugs and alcohol over the past few years have done a lot to cloud what a talented singer she was. Seriously, go back and listen to Back to Black. It’s four years old and sounds just as good now as it did then. As you listen to it, realize that a lot of female singers (especially Adele) would not have any foothold on success without this album catching fire the way it did.

Rest in peace, Amy. You’re better than you think.

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