My vision is fine, but my eyes hurt a lot.

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My mother seemed excited to have tentatively “won” $200 by betting money on a super bowl calendar, but I wonder how much money she has paid in total to rent those squares in previous years. Probably not more than $20 a year, and I don’t think she has done this more than five times, which would mean a one-hundred dollar profit. Even so, I don’t think I would watch a four hour advertisement with occasional football breaks just because you MIGHT give me $100. I want a guarantee and a contract. I reckon clicking on one of those “congratulations, you’ve won a free i-phone*” internet ads is a more solid deal.

I did not say that to my mother.

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I was recently complimented on the quality of my recent entries in comparison to some other ones I did, I guess. This is something I will not stand for.

B CUZ.

Searching my note file for “Ringo,” I find this:

I never knew John Lennon (though I apparently just missed him at a few These Green Eyes shows), but I appreciated that I didn’t hear much about George Harrison when Paul and Ringo were out doing embarrassing things. Ringo’s new song is the music equivalent of Down East magazine. What’s he know about writing songs, anyhow? I realize he’s had forty years to figure it out but… I don’t think he has. I remember he had another album some years ago and the song was something like “All you’ve got to say is la dee da, la dee da,” and it was kind of stupid, and not even in a “to do it, to do it, to do it, to do it right” kind of way. Either way our vocabulary suffers so we may as well enjoy it.

Don’t bother. We’ll find you.

Ringo seen here with backup Ringo. He needs the other Ringo to be near the front when he tends to a drum emergency because beatnik Triple-H was attacked from behind with a steel stool (I swear that makes sense).
Searching my hard drive for “ringo” turned up the pertinent accompaniment, “ringo and backup ringo.jpg,” dated January of 2008, which the calendars tell me was two years ago and not of pertinence to the ad for his more recent schtick I started this with. I have no recollection of what the song being performed here actually sounds like, which is just swell with me.

Speaking of people that aren’t Ringo, I read that Paul McCartney got dead in the 1960s, and rather than tell people, three Beatles and a guy who looked and sounded exactly like Paul that I guess they just knew and got along with as well but that nobody else knew about, somehow, recorded an album with really idiotic, tenuous clues about Paul being dead. It’s too hard to call the police and release a statement. Let’s just spend a couple months making a double album with thirty songs alongside a clone that we raised in seclusion for just this purpose.

When I heard Beetuls fans were mad (angry) about a new advertisement, I assumed it was the one in which Paul McCartney hops through a cartoon avenue playing a banjo. Now that I have thought of this issue a year or two or three later I have forgotten which ad people were actually mad at, but I still remember the banjo hop.

Hopping in general is a bad sign.

Though I assume for Mr. McCartney it was also a dollar sign.

As for why I passed my opportunity to talk pre-emptive trash about A Downeast Smile-In, I was distracted by

1800s Oval-Frame Portrait: The Movie

More old beat-notes:
Guitar Hero 5! “9.5 out of 10 [success points]. This is the Guitar Hero to own,” says some source I didn’t bother wasting brain space with learning the identity of or the reasons why i should not trust its opinion on anything. Less than three weeks ago (three months ago) I was getting the same business about “Beatles Rock Band.” That’s the sort of statement that only starts getting lobbed around when the series is so over-saturated with redundant, indistinguishable entries in so short a period of time that no sane person could afford to own them all. I remember when Nintendo Power Magazine, the Fox News of my day, said something similar about Super Street Fighter 2, and then, it couldn’t have been more than a year later, the Power was running an article about Street Fighter Alpha, featuring all the same characters and all the same moves plus a few new ones. The goals and [lack of] story progression are exactly the same. Beat X number of guys one at a time in absurd yet predictable two dimensional combat. Nintendo Power didn’t MAKE the street fighting happen, but it also didn’t take the opportunity to say “don’t you see? Buying this only encourages them.” It’s disgusting and it never ends. It still hasn’t. Dumb twits will buy slight improvements for the price of a new product for eternity and then post whiny journals about how they’re out of money and I should pay them to draw for me, like they’re doing me a favor because they’re maniacal, decadent scoundrels. Even in a recession this is apparently the situation. True enough, Electronic Arts, who should have gone out of business back when they released Rolo to the Rescue, has sold approximately 1,037 times as many Sims 2 add-ons, but I don’t have tv ads, dorks on the internet and otherwise non-video game playing adults trying to seem hippy by gorking all up in my longitude every single fudgey time one of these gets made (these are the same adults who wouldn’t shut up about Avatar last month). There was even a Sims 3 produced and sold without me finding out. That is how it should be. I’d rather not be aware and I’m busy, besides. I only got around to finishing Star Tropics a week ago.

I shouldn’t have rushed! Yeah, ha ha, you guys. I remembered what the number on the letter was for nearly twenty years, too! All for you!

Like I could hide this in my pocket and walk out with it…?
I remember, growing around, how much my father liked them Beatles, and how I would always think “gosh I wish somebody would invent a way for me to pretend to sing and play along with these guys, preferably in the form of big cumbersome expensive pieces of plastic. I will not acknowledge that this group ever existed until that happens.”

As always, the ongoing popularity of the dot-field simulator is a mystery to me (as I like it best. I don’t have time to like it!). It’s like those awful old laserdisc games like Mad Dog McCree and Cliff Hanger that only require you to press a button at some point and the entire outcome depends on that, except instead of at some point getting to see the entire movie about guys with guns hiding behind stuff standing up and falling back behind stuff, you’re just rewarded with more dots, and not even the dippin’ kind. Or maybe it’s more like Legend of Dragoon, the depressing Final Fantasy ripoff whose sole gimmick was that your attacks wouldn’t work properly and you’d always lose unless you pressed an action key at certain intervals as your gang attacked foes. Toward the end your attacks would have up to eight steps in them, and I got pretty good at it, but I still remember the game as dull and mopey and without a whole lot to do beyond pressing a button while my guys were fighting. Making me tap along to the game’s mopey music rather than what was actually happening would not have made me like either any better. I’d sooner tap out to the challenge.

See, I’m so weak that I’m reusing old pictures of scoundrels whom I despise. Let that be a lesson to you!