Totally Awesome Videogame!

I feel compelled to post this for the world and I need to add that if it wasn't for Rob Schrab, I would not have this and neither would you. Thank you, Rob, for your selfless, thankless efforts to make the world a better place. You cannot fathom this amazement. Your mind may be destroyed! BEWARE! http://www.macmame.net/joymusic/joystick.mp3

Get Rich Quick Scheme .397: The Bicycle Solution

I lived alone, off campus, the last two years of college. For most of that time I didn't have a car and the only way to get to school was a janky old bike that I amorously named "Rickets," because it was old and rickety and because it seemed like it had a bad case of rickets.

You don't know what rickets is? You should get an encyclopedia and learn something today. Rickets is really quite fascinating.

I rode Rickets to school for about a year, and when I wasn't going to school, I would ride to my on-campus job, the grocery store, or San Diego. While I was riding Rickets, I did not own a helmet, and I unfortunately learned a lot of lessons about biking that I would have rather learned while wearing a helmet. It was after a few of these lessons, Rickets decided to make some changes. Specifically, his wheel was bent into an inconvenient oval shape; there were only two gears that fucntioned properly; and the frame (already rusted) bent in two places.

I still needed to get to school and I hated walking, so I continued to ride Rickets, janky, oval wheel and all, to and from school.

It should also be noted that I was constantly trying to save money to buy a new bike. I knew that it was way past time to get a new set of wheels. I had looked into many many solutions to my transportation problems.

I went to the tiny bike shop and asked them to fix Rickets.
"They don't make that kind of bike anymore. We don't have the parts."

I went to the giant, bicycle mega-store.
"There's no use riding that bike. Buy a new one- our 2005 models just came in!"

I went to the medium sized bike store (oddly, NEXT DOOR to the giant place).
Them: "I won't touch that bike."
Me: "What? Why not?"
Them: "I'm liable for any injury you sustain while riding that bike if I touch it."
Me: "But can you fix it? I promise I won't sue you for my own stupidity."
Them: "You need to leave, right now."

Needless to say, Rickets wasn't going to be getting fixed up anytime soon. My only other option was to get a new bike. But a new road bike would cost me upwards of $1000 and I didn't have that kind of money. I could barely buy groceries.

So I devised a foolproof scheme to both my bicycle problems and my money problems: I would get hit by a car.

Genius, isn't it? I would get hit by a car and then, after recovering, I would calmly walk over to the driver, who, of course, would be sitting in his seat, stunned, and ask the person to write me a check for $5000 and I wouldn't press charges.

I was going to college when I thought of this. It might even have been grounds to legally commit me to the psychiatric wing in the hospital. I needed severe supervision.

What kind of person solves things by planning on getting hit by a car?! What's more, I only wanted $5000?! Who was I kidding? What the fuck was wrong with me that I thought it would be a good idea to be hit by a car? A college student.

Jesus Christ- I would be lucky to be ALIVE after being hit by a car. People do some pretty fucked up stuff in college- jump off bridges, get alcohol poisoning, study Political Science, but NOBODY wants to be hit by a car.

I only wish that I had thought about my get rich quick scheme enough to realize that one day, I would sit at my computer, dumbfounded by my own stupidity. If there is ONE thing that I take away from college—one thing that I attribute my degree to—it's that I am a complete retard.

If I Ever Become a Super-Villian...

One day, when the system has gotten the best of me for the last time, and I slam my fist down on a giant, plastic resin desk, and scream into the heavens, "NEVER AGAIN!" I will know that the world will crumble under my iron fist of a superior rule. There will be the necessary steps taken to create a latex suit with a utility belt; a secret volcano lair(does it get any MORE secret?); and a grand scheme of schizophrenic, meglomaniacal proportions.

Without any magical gem, or alien superpowers, I will need some sort of super-villian power that will make the populace sink to their knees and cry like babies. It's very obvious that without eye beams, or super strength, or psychokinesis, or razor sharp fingernails, I must turn to something that is SUPREMELY powerful: The SAT analogy.

Think about it- there is nothing more min-numbingly, emotionaly, crippling than those stupid analogies. EVERYBODY hates them. Granted, there are people that have excellent vocabulary skills and scored 1600s on their SATs, but they will fall easily to my well-trained StormTroopers.

On top of that, they have just removed analogies from every SAT from here on out, meaning there won't be anyone training with the skills needed to defeat me. I'll be unstoppable.

This does lead me to the question, "Are you allowed to take the SAT if you're not in high school anymore?" Of course, I'm sure this leads all you people to the question, "WHY?!"

Well, remember all those times that you were studying for the SAT and your parents were absolutely no help to you whatsoever? "I don't remember this stuff..." "It's been so long since i did long division." "When you take over the family cement pouring business, you won't need 'reading comprehension,' kid!" Maybe we need a leader to start making people keep up their "skills," as Napolean Dynamite would say. And it doesn't matter who you are or what you do. Shouldn't everyone need at least a little basic knowledge?

They've taken analogies off the SAT's, replaced them with more "comprehensive" questions, and added an essay. The highest score you can get is 2400. Does that mean if I ever want to go back to college, does my lame 1220 (75turn into a totally bummer 50€I guess that's incentive not to go back to college.

Personally, when I flip out and take over the world, I'm going to be making some changes of my own to the SAT. First, it'll be 2 multi-part questions. You will have to write an essay about a pre-determined topic, using all of a list of vocabulary words provided in a word bank. The second part will be a really really long, complicated math problem, pertaining to concepts that adolescent kids care about. For instance:

Jillian has 1,644 mp3s in her iPod which holds 60 gigabytes. Each song is exactly 40KB of memory. She recieves a Napster gift card for $15 to buy more songs. Songs cost $1 each on Napster. If she buys 14 new songs and deletes 38 from her iPod, how many Megabytes are left for her on her iPod?

You get the idea. Something relevant. Maybe even fun. I don't know how it will work, but I will definitely be threatening some people to make it more exciting.

Feel free to leave comments in praise of my beautiful, utopian society of intelligensia, and you will not be the first ones against the wall.

Pedophile Island

I went to bed early last night so that I could get up and take a walk. My morning constitutional, if you will. Right before I went to sleep I was listening to LoveLine on the radio and Adam Carolla was talking about his "idea" for a Lost type of TV show called "Pedophile Island." The basic premise was that in the future(2020) all the world's pedophiles were forced to live on an island in the middle of nowhere. Then one day, a plane full of Boy Scouts, on their way to the Fun Time Jamboree, goes down on pedophile island. Pretty funny.

Speaking of pedophiles, I had a conflicting moral dilemma today. I took a walk this morning and stopped in Rite Aid to pick up two items. The first item I bought was on of those cheap molded plastic toy boats that you give to kids to play in the pool. I bought it because I wanted to build onto it to make a realistic looking miniature. I was only planning on getting the boat, but then I realized that I didn't have any condoms, so back to the pharmacy area and bought a package of condoms. Done. Time to check out.

On my way back home, I walked past an elementary school. Kids were starting to arrive and walk into school, waving goodbye to their parents, running around on the blacktop. Almost past the elementary school, I see a young girl, no older than 8 or 9 years, LIMPING down the sidewalk, having obvious trouble walking to school. I start to think that maybe she was beat up by her deadbeat dad. Or maybe a bully beat her up and took her money. Or maybe she was bit by a wolverine. Who knows? I wanted to do the right thing and ask if she was OK, but then, I realized that I was carrying a plastic bag with a child's toy and a package of condoms. There is no other recipe that I know of that spells "child molester" than a childs toy and a contraceptive.

Principal: "Thank you for helping little Lupe!"
Me: "No problem. I just like to help my community."
(as I say goodbye, I drop my plastic bag)
Principal: "Oh Mr Crocker, you dropped your- what in God's name?!"
Me: "oh! ha ha! Um...you see.."
Principal: "Guards! Seize him!"
Me: "guards? what?"
(two Stormtroopers appear and grab me by the arms)
Principal: "This man is obviously a child molester. Take him away! TO PEDOPHILE ISLAND!"
Me: "Wait! I'm not a pedophile! NOOOOOOO!!!!!"

So I let this little, poor, gimpy girl, limp past me and into school where she probably got detention because she can't get to class fast enough. Then when her parents find out she got detention, her dad will beat her legs even more.

I am a horrible person.

An Open Letter to Daylight Savings Time

Dear Daylight Savings Time, I'm just a big fan writing to say Hi! How are you? You have been really busy apparently, "screwing people up," making them late for work, having alarms go off an hour early or late, and even making people change their clocks(or not). To be completely honest with you, Daylight Savings Time, I don't care what you do, and I find it mostly appalling that a large number of people blame you for their inability to get to work on time when they don't get to work on time anyway. I wanted to let you know that I don't blame you for anything. You do your job when you're supposed to and that's it. I respect that. I mean, you even do your job on the weekend so you aren't really getting in the way. Has anyone thanked you for your tireless efforts? You SAVE our Daylight through the fall and winter, eventually giving it back by showering us with beautiful sunsets at 6:30 instead of 5:30. When I was a child, I remember looking up to you as a signal that Spring and Summer were blooming and soon my nights and evenings would be full of backyard BBQs and playing hide and go seek across the neighborhood with my friends. Then when I was older, in high school, I knew that you were going to let me take girls to the beach and watch the sunset right around dinner time, so after we stopped talking about important things, we could go to a diner and keep talking. Thanks DST, because of you I've created a lot of memories that would have been kept in the dark if you hadn't done your thang. Now, as a young adult, I look to you to bring me out of my crippling, mind-numbing, winter, depression state and lift me into the months of happiness and motivated work. It's been three days and already I've done more than I ever thought I would do this year! Fuckin' A! Like I said, I'm just a fan writing a letter to you to let you know how much I appreciate the work that you are doing for all of us. Some people may badger you and use you as a scapegoat, but those people aren't aware of your true talents or the way you keep Pacific Standard Time fun and exciting and full of late evenings and refreshing mornings. Thank you, Daylight Savings Time. Thank you very much! Sincerely, J. Alan Crocker

High Score!

I love video games. The fun of playing video games for me, comes from the frenetic activity of mashing buttons and collecting apples and coins and mushrooms and birds and breaking bricks with your head or shooting a mafia crimelord or pretending you're a panda. Seriously, in the world of video games, there is nothing to far-fetched. Today, I got the highest score on Pacman that I have ever acheived and I am smiling from ear to ear about it. It's a very modest score, but I played really well and my strategy paid off. My high score stands at 46,200 on Level 7. I was reading a book about the history of arcade games and it said that Pacman is the most successful video game of all time. That's pretty hardcore. The book also went on to state that on level 49 or 456 or something, half the screen is a display of gibberish, so you can't literally beat the game. So the highest score possible is something like 3,300,000 points if you eat everything possible, and since there are so many Pacman masters in the world, they stopped measuring who was the best player in the world by the number of points since there is a finite number, and now they measure it by how fast you beat the game. Pacman is my game of choice at work because it doesn't take too much concentration or time to play and it's not too frustrating to start and stop over again. There are a few different online Pacman games out there, but here is the one that I play. Also, for the office gamers out there, the most original videogame website on the entire planet is: Orisinal.com There is a game where you are an egg adn you jump into baskets. There is another game where you are a bunch of gerbil/muskratty things that collecting red circles and avoid bees. And there is a game where you are a panda. Fucking sweet. A co-worker recommended to me EveryVideoGame.com to me yesterday when he saw me playing Pacman. He said there were tons of old Atari games on there, and with a name like every video game- well! I hustled over there right away! And I'm sad to report, they certainly don't have every video game- but there selection is quite large, consisting of Atari, 8-bit NES, and Sega games. All digitally transcribed from the cartridge system to online Java versions. Pretty cool. Another recommendation I found yesterday while searching for other old Atari games was PLAY.vg a site filled with links to old all sorts of old games, as well as, updated or remodeled versions of a lot of the older games. For the Frogger addicts out there, check out Sheepish!. Actually, Sheepish is from another website that has tons of online games called MINIclip. Miniclip actually as TOO MANY games for their own good. What they offer that no one else has are interesting versions of hangman(Hang a Roo) and Battleship(BattleShips) I would love, maybe as a present from someone, one of those new Plug and Play joysticks that they sell. There is an Acclaim joystick with like, Warheads, GrandPrix, Pitfall, etc. and a Pacman one with Pacman, Ms Pacman and Centipede. Some of them come with like 30 games and you just plug them into the front of your television and flip a switch, and it's like having a console system in the palm of your hand! $15 bucks! Huzzah! So- go waste some time, try and beat my Pacman high score, be a panda and rock out! And if your boss catches you- we don't know each other.

Haute Dog! Here I come!

I receive an e-newsletter from the Cal State Long Beach English Department every couple of days. Most of the time it has to do with on campus events or classes being offered. Sometimes it deals with readings and other off campus events, like the one i got today. I don't know if it's kosher to reproduce any of it, but i had to post this section:

Saturday, April 2: Haute Dog Poetry. As everyone in the area must know by now, Haute Dog means Justin Rudd, the impresario who promotes beach clean-ups, dog Easter parades and other community events. You are invited to read your favorite dog-themed works. Rudd will present prizes for the best entries.

Haute Dog Poetry begins at 1 p.m. on Ocean Boulevard, east of the Belmont Pier between Roycroft and Argonne Avenues, close to the water.

Directions: go to http://www.dogzone.com

For those that don't live here in Long Beach, Haute Dog is a canine boutique on 2nd St., in Belmont Shores, a very trendy part of town.

Three things immediately popped into my mind when I read this: 1.) I don't really like dogs. 2.) i don't really like poetry, nor do i ever write it and 3.) i really really really want to go do this.

Basically, to all you girls wearing dark eye make up and all you guys wearing dark eye make up, i am looking for some good poetry pointers to get my poetry up to snuff to compete in the Haute Dog! poetry competition! I know that there are PLENTY of people on MySpace with poetry experience so let's hear it! I've got a week and a half to get ready!

Does anyone else have any ideas on what I should write about?