need directions?

I stumbled across Google Earth via a news website i frequent daily and have discovered just how fucking cool this application is. It requires a download of the app to your local drive, but it streams live once you open it, so it's constantly being updated with new information. and the app opens with a 3D view of the earth zooming in where it stops at just under 4 thousand miles above North America. this is a search engine for maps whose results display in 3D and show the exact location, literally, on a map on your desktop. you want to see your house, real time in all it's glory? do a search on your address and poof!, you can see exactly what your house looks like sitting in its neighborhood. Like to locate the nearest bar, movie theater, bank, retail shop, school, stadium, etc? it'll mark the exact location of everything within X miles of where you are. the possiblities are endless. and to make it even better, you can chose the location you've searched on and it'll give you directions on how to get there and print out a map for you. Fuckin A!

Wanna see a 3D view of the Grand Canyon? check! Wanna see the Statue of Liberty? check! wanna see what New Orleans looks like in the aftermath of Katrina? check! this is truly an awesome and limitless tool.

how far is ridiculous?

i have, as i'm sure that thousands of others, watched with awe as hurricane my ex-girlfriend pounds on Louisiana and Mississtoomanyesses and turns bourbon street into bourbon canal. it amazes me that mother nature can create something so incredible and so deadly with water. something we seem to have very little of at this time of the year. i sit here drinking my water that's been dredged thru the bottoms of texas lakes and they drown in it. and might i say, this water is delicious if you were a big fan of mud pies when you were a kid. but what amazes me even more are those idiots in the 'news' industry who are on location reporting the devastation with live footage. this morbid need that humans have to see destruction and see it as it happens is equally awe inspiring as mother nature herself. as i stand in the break room getting my cup of mud, i see live footage on the tv of reporters in the eye of the storm as it rains buildings and cars and cows down on top of them. Fox News, the channel it happened to be on, had the obligatorily perky and happy blonde with big tits relaying information from her cohost who was in the middle of the storm.

tits: ok george, am i to understand that it's raining glass?
georgetheidiot: uh, yes tits, it's literally raining glass down on us in steady and unrelenting sheet after sheet.
tits: wow, that is just fascinating george, is there anything else that we should be made aware of?
georgethemoron: why don't you get yer pretty ass out here yourself bitch and tell me if raining glass isn't enough.
tits: ok, that was just georgewillnevergetachancetosleepwithme reporting live from new orleans in the eye of hurricane lbgs-ex.

of course, this is FOX who also brought us 'Fast Animals Slow Children', so we can't expect better quality than this. but who am i to complain.

this is pretty cool though.

anyone who can incoporate 'hey man, nice shot' has my vote. plus, it just looks good and creepy.

My mom always taught me that moderation was the key to leading a balanced life.

- Don't eat to much candy when you get back from trick-or-treating, or you'll end up with a tummy ache.
- You need to eat your vegetables along with your salsbury steak to get a balanced and good meal.
- Don't purchase more than one hooker a week. You can't afford more and no 15 year old boy should be having that much sex at his age.

Well, i took her suggestions to heart and i've lived a pretty balanced, un-obsessive, mundane life. this has also allowed me to fine tune my rage and anger, much to the disappointment of past girlfriends.

her: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? WHY DON'T YOU EVER GET UPSET AT ANYTHING? I JUST SLAPPED YOUR FACE AND YOU DON'T EVEN RESPOND TO THAT!!!!!
me: (snoring)...

so this story brings me back to the good old days of the BG household and my upbringing when i read that China is putting a ban on the amount of time that its inhabitants can spend playing games online. this doesn't come as a suprise to me after reading about past occasions where listening to mrs. BG would have paid off and a country of 1.3 trillion people wouldn't be suffering for the actions of a few bad eggrolls. the chinese government agency that oversees online gaming (how can i get a job with a group like this?) has imposed a 3 hour limitation for those who play games online. this isn't just for MMOs, but all online gaming.

so once little billy bob chin reaches his three hour limit, his World of Warcraft, level 58, Horde Warlock, [Brack Cats] |_33t b1t<|-| begins to lose his impact in the Burning Steppes and gets his ass handed to him more often, because that government agency has reduced the characters abilities to half of what it really can play. After five hours, 'leet bitch' loses all his abilites and drops the character back down to a level 1.

ass on a platter. now who's leet, n00b?

so what's the cause of this government intervention? situations like this, this and even this is why Blizzard and other online gaming distributors are going to start making easy money from it's millions of addicts. now i don't necessarily agree with this intervention, but something should be done about people who have problems like this. i'm not offering up suggestions. i'm only here to bitch.

this certainly firms my decision to have the bill of rights tattoo'd to my back. fuck with number X and feel the rath of lbg.

back to my roots

Phurion pointed this out to me and since i am a LBG, i figure it'd be good to learn the language of my peeps. give it a look.

lazy days gone by

weeks are long and hard and the last thing i really want is a long and painful weekend. the long part is ok, but nothing worse than waking up on a saturday morning only to discover that you have a laundry list of shit to do all weekend long. so i created lazy day on saturday morning, tossed my list out and spent the weekend being a vegetable. my wife failed miserably on saturday, so we had to try lazy day again yesterday and she did much better, but i think her motherly instincts to accomplish something kicked in and kept lazy day from being all it could be on saturday.

there's not been much to discuss around here lately. summers tend to put you into a rut of reruns. not just on tv, but in your life. kids are out swimming and riding bikes and the harsh reality of adulthood is a good beatdown to put your life into perspective. i'm still loving my new life. that's changed my life forever, in a positive way, but i never realized how mundane summers really are. nothing good on tv to watch, with the exception of food tv. even discovery is in reruns. summer movies (as i discover in my adulthood) is a hit and miss. in younger years, no one cared whether the films sucked or were geniunely good, it was a movie. sitting in a big theater with your friends munching on popcorn and tall cold drinks was all that was needed. nowadays, i pretty much go for the popcorn first and the movie second. and aside from batman, the pickin's have been slim. the epics of each summer season all look alike from year to year. maybe michael bay should release a winter epic instead, next year. and then to hear news like this makes me want to cry.

but lazy day weekend was a complete success with me, even if my other half didn't abide by the rules. we've been struggling ever since we got married to find a game for her that didn't make her want to ralph. and i'm not talking Kramden, i'm talking leftover beanie weenies. she can't play a game that has any kind of camera movement, so that rules out just about everything that i play. our goal here was to find a game we could play together. she's a gamer just like i am and i'm thrilled, but we're keeping Gamestop in business with duplicate purchases trying to find something that she can play and keep her cookies down. we were successful with Diablo II and loved it, but you can only play so much of that game until you've had enough pixelated goodness and then you need a break. she's a big fighting game fan (Tekken, Mortal Kombat) because the camera never moves from the side by side display and you still get to whoop some guys ass. so after a half dozen attempts at games, we finally found Warcraft III. i'd previously played this game, but had forgotten about it when something else came along and it got pushed by the wayside. i'd also forgotten how insanely addictive the single player campaign is. so we picked up the Treasure Chest (the first game and expansion pack) last week and played some 1v1 and 2v2 on our lan. then i made the mistake of firing up the campaign on saturday morning. i'm now into the 3rd chapter and there are only four chapters in the single player campaign. i made the most of lazy day. both times. i've also started back with World of Warcraft after finally completing HalfLife 2 and Chronicles of Riddick (i can't say enough good things about both of these games) and have a lvl 22 hunter named Elysian and a lvl 12 rogue named Persephone. it's a good thing that summer tv sucks so much.

and speaking of world of warcraft, we had an interesting and exciting experience this weekend. WoW is the first MMO that i've ever really enjoyed. i've played plenty of others and after about a month into it, i just couldn't do it any longer. boredom set in, the grind was to much and i just had a bad taste in my mouth about MMOs in general. so WoW comes along and changes my perception about the genre and i actually really enjoy it. i've joined a guild and see lots of friends online playing most of the time. when you join a guild, you accept others, whom you don't know at all, into a family of sorts. you aid each other, you help out, you chat and become a family. that's fine and dandy when it's online, because you aren't really meeting them. you know their alias, especially with a role playing game. and there are some fanatics out there (see: anyone who ever played Everquest). that's cool with me, but i'm just not a fanatic. i love playing games, but i'm not sure i'm considered a fanatic. so this weekend, my wife and i meet my guild leader and his wife out for drinks. this is strange for me (even though i've been chatting with these two people for months, in-game and out), because i have that stereotypical perception of what "online friends" are. maybe i've watched to many movies or to many news articles or whatever, but i had a belief that internet friends should stay that way. but i broke my rule and i couldn't be happier. maybe luck was on my side, but Phurion (his alias) and his wife are wonderful people. and they're normal. this is what i was most concerned about and i consider this a healthy concern. and it wasn't over P and his wife themselves, but the kind of people i had in my mind that they could have been. the weirdos online, encumbered in a game who took themselves and their characters way to seriously. but they aren't and my wife and i are thrilled. it's exciting to find another couple our age who are like us. similar interests, similar likes and dislikes... So P, thanks for not showing up with a mohawk and studs thru the bridge of your nose. :)

oh, and Indy ate an entire tub of butter on saturday morning. we're waiting for the backlash...