I don't think it's possible to love a computer forever. I've come close with Maui, my much beloved Sony laptop, but even it is slowing down as it nears the 18 month old mark and it is sorely in need of a nuke-n-load of XP anew. I kind of dread it though, since Sony didn't give me an actual XP disk, but instead made me make some restore disks that will probably erase my data on the D: drive as well...

But that's not what I want to complain about. No, last year I cheaped out and bought a new desktop system from an online vendor who builds them for you. You pick the specs and they put it together and send it off. Easier than building another one myself, I decided.

All was good for about a month... just long enough to get past their 30 day refund policy. Then things got wonky. Hinky, even.

Long story short (as if that's possible), I replaced RAM and a VGA card thinking that solved the problems I was having with flashing screens and spontaneous reboots. It did. For about a month. It didn't last, as spontaneous reboots gave way to not booting at all. In the last couple of months it's been a struggle to get through a day without worry that some strange thing would cause the system to shut down and try to launch (and more often than not, hang in the process, or load but without access to things like the Network or sound or anything else integrated on the motherboard). I blamed the hard drive, I blamed the anti-virus software, I blamed anything that came to mind, but finally, I have to believe, it's the mobo. It has to be. So I called the company today and finally gave in and told them to send me a new one.

(Though I suppose it could be a bad CPU as well... oy.)

So, in a week, I'll be performing major surgery to replace what is essentially the nervous system of my computer.

I just don't know how regular people with no computer knowledge even make it through this kind of crap without crying.

Let us speak now of the past weekend, which I spent making the yearly pilgrimage to the city of New York and the Great White Way. Here are the highlights:

Saturday: Arrival in New Jersey at Lauren and Elaine's house went without incident (and the Prius managed to do 45 miles to the gallon on the four hour drive, so woo and hoo). Lauren greeted me with a gift of "The Batman Handbook" which is kind of like the "Worst Case Scenario Handbook" except specific to remaking yourself into a non-powered superhero.

We went to see Spike Lee's new joint (what the rest of us call a movie) Inside Man and it was, in a word, great -- nice to see a flick where you don't know what's going to happen. It was my first trip to an actual stadium seating theater in a long while... that and the THX sound really made it rock. Nice. Hopefully our piss-poor local theater will get rebuilt soon, like they have been promising since I moved here.

Sunday: The big day of the show at 7:30pm. First, however, after we drove in, we went over to the Javits Center to the GLBT Expo where Elaine was part of a booth of musicians trying to drum up business.

As tradeshows go, I have to say, it was pretty boring -- I'm too spoiled to gigantic booths from the likes of Microsoft or EA at shows like Comdex or E3 to be impressed by anything less. Really, the show was more about various businesses -- resorts, cities, banks, condos, credit cards, even the city of Hershey, PA, with free candy -- showing that they are gay friendly and trying to drum up business. However, it was certainly more colorful, in just about every sense of the word, from the rainbow curtains to some of the folks there -- you don't see many transvestites and transsexuals at the computer tradeshows. Another big difference is that a GLBT show has booth himbos rather than booth bimbos. Which didn't do much for me nor my lesbian friends, though the wife was kinda psyched to see a guy with his chest painted in latex. (I once got to spend an afternoon at a porno industry trade show once in Vegas at the same time as an E3, and there was a lot more skin and silicon there.) However the GLBT did have more booze giveaways than I'd ever seen.

Like any tradeshow, it was too hot, and carpets over cement floors aren't fun to stand on or walk on EVER.

A few years ago, after I did a guest shot on a show on TechTV, I got an e-mail when I got back to my office from a gay man who wanted to tell me just how attractive I was. No lie. He said I was a "bear." Thus I had to get this picture. (Afterward, the guy manning the booth invited me to a bear party for that very evening. Nice to know I still got it going on with at least one demographic.)

Eventually, Lauren and the wife and I split and took a cab down to Battery Park City to visit our friend and former co-worker Michelle, AKA Mick, who recently became a mom and is in the throes of moving out of her apartment a block away from Ground Zero (she got it cheap after the towers went down, as you can imagine). She's got a helluva a view, but she's giving it up to move to the hill towns of Western Massachusetts because, really, who can afford NYC with a kid? As she puts it, New York is a city for the young or the rich. (I wished I'd had time to see a few other people in NYC... but I never have time.)

From Mick's we cabbed uptown and had dinner at a Mexican place called Mi Nidito on Eighth. It looks like a dumpy pizza place outside, but inside it was quite nice and we stuffed our pie-holes with chips, salsa, guac, all before the entrees came. Big margaritas too. So much for Weight Watchers.

We had an hour to kill before the show so wandered about in Times Square, wishing the damn area had a Barnes & Noble or something. Instead, we ended up in the same store we visited last year -- the Hershey Store. That's a lot of Hershey in one day. But I managed to power through the visit without buying anything to eat. Luckily, I had a chimichanga sitting like lead in my stomach to help me.

We met up with Elaine at the Circle in the Square theater around the corner and took our seats for the show: The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. We got first row seats on the side, close enough that I could use the stage as foot rest if I'd wanted. The wife said to take a shot of it and I thought, I can't do that, but someone else's camera flashed, so I took this quick shot -- and immediately got yelled at by a mean old usher lady. (I got yelled after the show by a janitor for putting my foot on the stage, as well.... this after someone actually poors a coke on the stage floor during the course of the performance as part of the plot.)

The show was fantastic, maybe the funniest we've watched in four years straight of trips to Broadway, and that's saying a lot since the last two shows were Avenue Q and Spamalot. But this musical -- about neurotic little kids (played by adults) competing in a local spelling bee -- did not let up with the comedy from the first second. Even better was that one of the characters fixed on my wife as if she were a girl named Marigold that he had a crush on. Squanto would blow kisses back at him when he stared at her and she became an integral part of the plot when the pre-teen erection he got from fantasizing about her caused him to blow his word at the microphone. His next song was appropriately titleed, "My Unfortunate Erection" (click on M.U.E.). (Click here for a video preview of many of the numbers.)

Really cool: the production stage manager on the show is a girl I went to high school with. Not that she'd probably remember me (she was an upperclassman), but I remember her -- she was a total babe and had a smile that would light up the Jumbotron, which she used even in her job at the cash register at Wegmans. I knew she was working on Broadway, but I didn't think I'd ever be at one of her productions. (Even cooler: a Wall St. Journal article about her and the show -- which manages to get the show's name wrong.)

Afterward, we drove out of NYC. I might be back for a tradeshow in September, otherwise maybe not until next year... I dunno. I wander the city and wish I'd taken the time to actually live IN the city when I had the chance... when I was young. Now I'm just rich, but I have dogs. And dogs deserve better than concrete.

Monday: Eight hours of driving (had to go pick up the dogs). Neck hurt. Want to sleep at the wheel. Listen to four episodes of This American Life. Finally watch 24. Got to bed. Dread the return to regular life. And here I am.

My mom asked me for the salsa recipe Bonny and I use, and since I typed it up into an e-mail, I might as well cut and paste it for all to enjoy. And yes, this is the BEST DAMN SALSA EVER.

Mammie Georgia's Zero Calorie Fire Breath Salsa



INGREDIENTS:

1 can (28 oz)  whole or diced tomatos (drain off excess liquid)

1 or 2 jalapeno peppers (more to make it really HAWT)

1/2 cup fresh cilantro (a good fistful)

1/4 to 1/2 cup worth of onion

2-8 cloves of garlic (depending on how much you like garlic)

2 tblsp white vinegar

2 tblsp lime juice

1/2 tsp salt



DIRECTIONS:

1. In a food processor combine the jalapenos, onion, cilantro, and garlic: mince to a fine consistency.

2. Add vinegar and lime juice.

3. Add tomatos and salt - - pulse the food processor until desired consistency.

4. Chill for at least one hour (preferably overnight).

5. Buy a bag of Tostitos Gold Tortilla chips.

6. Scoop a copious amount of salsa onto chip.

7. Stuff your face.

Correction: I worked for the country music station in high school, not college. In college, I worked for food service. Which was still a step up from playing country music...

Gabcast! Squished Frog Audio #1 - First Gabcast

Talking about the tool, the upcoming nephew b-day, and the trip to NYC.

Hey, it's 2006! And if it's an even numbered year, then it's time for me to go on a diet.

As my brother so distinctly put it to me (in that method he has of speaking with such utter conviction in his own beliefs as to make me think even he knows he's full of shit), you can't lose weight with just exercise, you've got to diet. That's certainly true in my case, but I didn't really care. Yet, for some reason, Friday night, while in the throes of a 5 hour orgy of watching mostly British entertainment (if V for Vendetta counts as British; Doctor Who certainly does, and for the record, I liked V, but the Doctor was better), I decided I had to go back on Weight Watchers.

Maybe it was because I realized I couldn't save the world from fascism or  animated plastic mannikins in my current state.

But this time, there will bbe no god-damn feel-good pat-on-the-back meetings with middle-aged women (and the occasional  young coed uber-hottie with the words "JUICY" written across the ass of her sweat pants who belongs in WW about as much as Mr. Rogers  belongs in a brothel). If you've followed my previous dieting exploits you know that the meetings were the aspect of it I despised the most.  I told myself I needed it for the public humiliation aspect. I'm hoping that's not true, as I'm now instead embracing the softer side of WW. Specifically, the software side. As in, I'm doing it all online.

 The WW site lets you sign up (at a monthly rate, not the weekly rat the meetings require) and lets you track everything you eat in a tool there, so you can graph your Points (the number coversion used to quantify the calories, fiber and fat of every sweet morsel you inhale) and weight loss. I should have done it before, but was too cheap to spring for meetings and online tracking. But I can't put a price on my health! (Actually, I can... I'd eat hair-infested pudding off the floor for the right money, people.)

Get this: I've been back on WW for less than 36 hours... and I've lost a pound.

(Okay, my scale actually sometimes thinks I lost 6 lbs. Maybe it's not to be trusted. But even jumping up and down on it I can't get back the other pound it said I had yesterday. So I'll take it.)

Right now, I'm snacking on carrots and celery with a glass of water, when usually I'd have pretzels and Sierra Mist. Breakfast this morning was four 4-inch pancakes with carefully measured syrup, instead of the 5 10 inchers with a vat of Vermont's finest soaked in. I'm taking multivitamins to turn my urine neon yellow; I suppose they do something else, too.

So far, my attitude is good and my hunger is relatively in control. Since I have no one to lie to but myself (and the wife), there's little point in cheating. Tho we'll see how I do when she's not in the house this week... maybe I should make her take all the tempting stuff in the house to work.

But even rice-based packing peanuts are starting to sound good about now...

My favorite prematurely cancelled show ever (well, one of my favs that suffered such a fate) was Wonderfalls. And now you can watch the original unaired pilot to it (which is pretty much the same as the aired pilot with a couple of different actors).

Last night I got an email from a woman named Angela. I've never met her, but she found the Squished Frog site by googling the term "Irish Twins." That's the term for siblings born within less than a year of each other, which was the case with my brother and me. She wanted to ask me how to handle the fact that two of her kids are also 10.5 months apart in age -- they could start Kindergarten together if she wanted.

Here's most of what I said to her:

Angela:

I'm probably not much of an expert. In fact, I probably know more about quantum physics. But that's never stopped me...

The way it worked for my brother and me (10.5 months apart, I'm older), was that mom always said she could have put us in the same grade, but was afraid it would mean undo competition between us. That probably would not have been true, because I was brilliant and he was a numbskull (those conditions have since reversed for both of us in many ways)...

Just resign yourself to your children hating each other's guts until they're in their very late teens or early 20s. No matter what grades they are in. After that, they'll either be bestest friends forever (like I am with my Bro) or never talk  except at holidays. By that time it's out of your hands. Just hope they'll agree long enough to pick out a fantastic nursing home for you when the time comes.

Hope this helps. Tho I'm sure it does not.

Eric G.

My Mom sent me this picture of my nephews with the message, "this is how we feed our grandkids when they come over."

Because so many people -- at least three! -- thought my picture from my senior year book was so hot, here's another chance to see me in my skinny-ass  pre-20's glory. Go to Armed Infant's video for the opening credits of their short-lived cable access show TVIL (because "TV is evIL") and watch the whole offensive montage (NSFW, unless your work is okay with full frontal).

I'm in there (with clothes on tho). The few seconds of me was taken from one of the all time classic Squished Frog bits. I won't tell you who I am tho, you have to guess.

Okay, here's a hint.... I die.

The history of the name Squished Frog Productions is completely intertwined with a character my friends and I created called, cleverly enough, Ratguy. Our filming of a full length parody film of Tim Burton's Batman never quit got finished (though there is a kick-ass trailer out there somewhere), but never ones to let a joke die, we also ventured with him into the world of radio, the industry in which just about every Squished Frog original member had their first job, including me (Sunday mornings, 5:30 am to 1pm, under the Big Top at WLEA, Hornell's "News Authority" and preferred listening to the elderly.)

The result was the Ratguy Mystery Minute, a series of one minute (mostly) show where Ratguy is, basically, a retard in a cape trying to fight crime. They ran in the mid-90's on Bilbat Radio (now, apparently called "Freedom 105"), the competition to WLEA in Hornell, where my friends worked at the time. Their morning show was infinitely cooler than my Sunday shift running reel-to-reel after reel-to-reel pre-recordings of "The Marion Hour" and "Where Catholics Meet" for old folks who couldn't get out of bed for church.

Mostly, Ratguy Mystery Minute gave us an excuse to use sound effects albums that had probably been around since the '50s and make puns and riff on Bullwinkle.

I didn't participate in many of the Ratguy recordings, as we only made a few before I had to leave town, probably off to NYC to start my so-called career. But there were a bunch of them, and now, for your listening pleasure, you can get them as MP3s from Armed Infant, the site of my friend and fellow Squished Frog founder, Brett.

Download them all for your iPods. You'll want to play them over and over for the kids.

Despite the fact that I didn't do many of them, I'm pretty sure that's me playing the knock-off Catwoman character in episode 4b....

On Friday, my brother called, as he is wont to do, since his only conversations for hours on end may be with two and three year olds.

"I read your blog," the other day he said, as if he was doing me a favor. (It's only a favor if he clicks on an ad and makes me money).

"Yeah?" I said.

"So you actually exercising, or just bitching about it?"

I said, "Yes."

He went on to express incredulity that I mentioned running a mile in only under 16 minutes back during my high school days. That's how I remembered it, but he couldn't believe it. "I'm not exactly in great shape, but I'm pretty sure I could run a mile in a lot less than 16 minutes," he said.

And he's right. He is out of shape. With his shaved head -- facilitated by the cool-ass head-shaver I bought him for Xmas -- and paunch, he looks like my late grandfather when viewed from the back. (Grandpa was about five foot tall and not skinny.)  I wouldn't have noticed, but my cousin's pointed it out to me during the holidays, and who am I to argue?

Still, his statement got me thinking... did I remember it wrong? Had I actually done a mile in less than 16 minutes? Was it 14? 12? Not even in my wildest dreams do I think I ran four times around the track at Hornell High School in ten minutes in the ninth grade. If that happened, I would have called myself Flash for the next four years.

So, during my last visit to the gym -- which I prefer to pronounce like Homer J., as in "GUY-em" -- I got on the treadmill and set it to my usual walking pace of 3.7 miles per hour and kept my eye on the clock and the miles walked as I listened to "Odd Thomas" (which is, in essence, a story about what would have happened to the kid in The Sixth Sense if he had never met Bruce Willis and grown up with crazy parents).

Math dictates that 3.7 miles per hour means that I'm not going to get up to 1 miles in 15 minutes. For that I need to walk 4 mph. Duh. After a couple of minutes I reazlied this and reset the machine, moving it to 4.2 mph to make up what I lost at first.

This put me at a very brisk jog, which I was able to handle for about 5 minutes. The shins were screaming bloody goddamned murder by then, so I set it back down. I let my usual fast walk go until I was at the 14 minute mark, and realized I was .10 of a mile from a full mile. So I cranked it back up and managed to hit the 1 mile mark at 16:10.

I had just repeated -- without much thought or preparation or giving a crusty crap --  something I considered one of my bigger physical accomplishments in high school.

This was all pre-skinny days, I remind you. Ah, for the days when I could eat McDonald's fries for lunch every day and my adolescent body burned them up like ice thrown on hot blacktop. That was a fine, fine three years...

It was kind of like finishing my novel. It felt great and all... but it didn't seem like, in retrospect, it was that hard. Why hadn't I done it for years?

It's a terrible way to feel about something as hard as writing a novel in 3.5 months. Or at all. Tho that hasn't stop me from already getting back into writing the novel I was working on last summer.

No, it's obviously just me trying to get out of doing any more jogging on the treadmill. And I won't do that. I won't quit.

If I can get the stamina to make 2 miles in 32 minutes, then maybe I'll give up...

Oh, that's right, I always forget... the whole point is to keep doing it. My brother said in his wise-man voice (which is what he uses to say almost everything he knows I'm going to react negatively too) that it take s a body three months to get to the point where it enjoys the exercise and all the endorphins released and all that nonsense I've heard about but never experienced, cause I usually give up before I get there.

I think I get plenty of endorphins from yelling at my TV screen during exciting stuff on The Shield.

These aren't actual red states... well some may be... this is a map of all the states of the union I've visited in my life (not sure Colorado counts, since I've only ever been to the Denver airport). Add Ontario and Nova Scotia and Great Britain and you've pretty much got me covered for the globe.

Create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Even at my most svelte, during my high school years (and there's pictures for proof! Check out the 1988 Hornell High Yearbook senior photos, which some poor sap posted online. I'm on Page 7. Whew, no mullet...), I was never a fan of burning calories. My gym class was run by a teacher named Bostwick who had a broken nose that was never set right. In my head I always called him Tublat, after the broken-nosed bad-guy ape in the Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan books I was reading at the time. Oh, the cleverness of a teen geek.

Even as a skinny teen I never had the upper body strength to climb a rope, the skills to make a basket, nor the stamina to run a 16 minute mile. (Well, I did do that once, in 9th grade, and my legs still hurt.) I was mostly cut out for the unit on square dancing -- yes, we actually had physical education classes in the 1980's that forced students to "do-si-do" and "promenade". But I hated square dancing even more than doing squat thrusts.

Oh, and I do so loathe any squatting that involves a thrust. At least with clothes on.

I remained exercise free until my third year of college. By then it was woefully apparent that I'd packed on the Freshman 15, followed by the Sophomore 20, and was shooting for the Junior 10. Such is the price one pays for a collegiate career in food service. My housemate Dan and I would occasionally go up to a gym in Ithaca that he, as a townie, had probably know about for years. It had racquet ball and weights and all that. I don't remember much about it outside of feeling like a schlub. Not so much because of my own schlubliness, but simply in contrast to Dan, who was pretty much an Adonsis to the ladies (and some dudes) back then. Standing next to Dan made most men look like Elvis toward the end.

Senior year I tried again to get in shape through actual educational programs at Ithaca Collegethat were, at the time, called GIPPEs (pronounced GIP-PEEs). I just looked it up and it stood for General Instructional Program in Physical Education; today the program is called PALS for physical activity, leisure, and safety. That is more in keeping with a program that once included ballet classes. There were several GIPPE's to choose from back then, all half-semester elective classes that only gave you half a credit. They were generally used to fill out a schedule missing just one or two credits needed to graduate. The editor of the school paper and I, Christa, were friends and took one that involved stretching in the gym and then running around the school track a lot. I remember it mostly for trying to breath and talk at the same time. I took another on archery, borrowing my brother's compound bow from his youthful archery craze, so I had all my own equipment for shooting the Styrofoam deer the school kept in the woods behind Boothroyd Hall.

I remained free of the tyrannical yoke of physical exertion until 1993. My friend Joe and I joined the gym around the corner from our place of work at One Park Avenue in New York. Joe joined to maintain his physique (he had equipment at home in Staten Island, plus an actual metabolism), I went to try and find one, much like a sculpture with a block of marble finds a statue inside by cutting away all the useless material. All I lost was money. At least I got the company discount.

Fast forward to 1997-1998. I'm now a married homeowner with a dog living in Western Massachusetts. I'm still sitting on my ass all day in my chosen field, but it's time to do something about it. Lo and behold, I have my first actually successful weight loss, combining the horror of Weight Watchers with the actual fun of going to a gym. It was only fun because I went there with my friend Laura. We'd walk a few blocks from work to go to a brand new facility, bitching and moaning the whole way there and back, because we both hated it. Her probably less than me, as she has an athletic streak. But it is tempered by various injuries over the years. Her latest injury is some kind of head trauma that made her go to medical school. But bless her, because I'll counting on her to prescribe me some miracle weight lose cures in a few years. And/or do surgery on my brain.

During my time living and working near Boston, I managed to avoid any kind of organized physical activity. Owning a house should be enough. But it isn't. I walked the dogs with the wife a lot, but it never amounted to much for me outside of learning my brother was right: cotton is "death cloth" and socks (sorry, near Boston they're "sox") made of cotton should not be worn by sweaty feet. SmartWool for me.

Finally, back to the city of Ithaca. I won't bore you with the specifics, as you can go read just how much I love WW and the gym. As I try for the fourth or fifth time, I just wonder what the hell it takes for me to want to do something healthy. Do I need to have a god damn heart attack? Seriously, I know one is not supposed to tempt fate and all, but I really could use some fucking scary ass chest pain right now. I'm feeling far too immortal for my own good, apparently.

And now, I'm hungry. GOD DAMMIT.