MadMup.com

Hey, kids, want to make your cell phone look and sound like mine? Of course you do! Well, now you can! Download the following files and transfer them to your phone for the full experience!

Background:

Don’t tell Apple, but it’s a shrunken version of their “Aqua Blue” background for OSX. Shhhhh!

Next up, ringtone! It’s a MIDI version of “Mahna Mahna” from The Muppet Show, specifically the sketch entitled “Mahna Mahna and the Two Snowths.” If you’ve never seen the sketch, well, shame on you. If you click here you can watch it. The pink cow-like creatures are the “Snowths.” I’ll let you figure out who “Mahna Mahna” is.

Last but not least, the message tone. Any time I get a voice mail or a text message this is what I hear: the attack cry of a Murloc from World of Warcraft. It scares the cats and I get weird looks when it goes off in bookstores.

So there you go! Everything you need to make your cell phone look and sound like mine!

I am happy to finally be able to say that they’ve finally made a good Superman movie. String me up or ride me out of town on a rail if you like, but the previous Superman movies weren’t very good at all. People like to talk about how awful IV was, but I think III was the bigger insult. The second one had Zod, but wimped out in the “letting Lois keep information” department. The second one also gave Superman (and his ilk) weird telekinetic powers, which didn’t make any sense at all. The first movie’s best contribution to the Superman canon is the score. It’s not PC to say you didn’t like Christopher Reeve as Superman, but … I didn’t. I also didn’t like Margot Kidder’s Lois or Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. Too campy and silly for my tastes.

Superman Returns fixes a lot of the problems, in my opinion. The characters are treated as real people, which I think is the most important aspect when making a superhero/comic book movie. People react believeably to the events that unfold. Lex Luthor still has some humor around the edges, but Kevin Spacey gives him an under-the-surface anger that hints at future confrontations in the Lex-vs.-Superman story. Lois is understandably angry at Superman for leaving (he’s been gone for five years and the movie begins with him coming back). Superman himself, though alien, is very human, trying desperately to deal with his self-prescribed duty to help humanity and his desire for love.

Then there’s Lois’s boyfriend, Cyclops. There’s no way to envy this guy. He’s been dating Lois for five years, helping to raise her son, knowing full well the whole time that her first and biggest love is The Big Guy himself. Sure she’s hurt because he left, but Cyke knows she’ll always have him in her heart and mind.

So when Superman ret– comes back, it’s easy to tell he’s not so okay with this. Sure, he’s glad that airplanes are brought back to earth gently and not as many people are being killed by falling pieces of buildings and all, but when it comes right down to it, he’s jealous.

This is where I experience a little disconnect. I guess I can understand being jealous of someone who your girlfriend used to love, but being jealous of Superman is like bulimia: it might seem like a good idea, but it ultimately doesn’t make any sense. Jealousy is based in comparisons, most of the time: what does he have that I don’t? (superpowers), what makes him so great? (uh… superpowers), why does she like him more than she likes me? (….superpowers, maybe?) About the only thing he’s got over Superman, really, is that he didn’t go off into space for five years. I guess that’s something. Relationships have been built on less.

I guess it’s the natural (human) response to be jealous, but I think maybe Cyclops should call that nice Jean girl he used to know because I happen to know who Lois picks in the end (Hint: he can lift continents).

So, it was a good movie overall, and I recommend it, even though I guessed the “twist” pretty much when the movie was announced a year ago. I guess the “twist” wasn’t the point, though, and it should be interesting to see where that goes.

Now to go back to waiting for the next season of Smallville.

I can’t sleep. I thought I was tired earlier, but after lying in bed for 20 minutes staring at the ceiling, I figured I was lying in bed – lying to myself about being able to go to sleep. I don’t know what the deal is. I don’t drink any caffeinated beverages or anything else that would be doing this. I can’t remember the last time I had raspberry tea.

My new thing is water. I can’t really drink a lot of “regular” water, though. The taste of it bores me enough that sometimes I kind of feel like I’m gagging on it. I discovered, though, that Target has these wonderful flavored waters that I absolutely love. They have all sorts of really weird flavor combinations, and I’ve discovered I don’t like many of them (like “spearmint” – it sounds good, but it’s nasty), but I do like the lemon/raspberry and especially the blueberry/tangerine. So good! In fact, between that exclamation point and the beginning of this sentence I nipped downstairs and got myself one. I don’t understand how they can add flavor to the water without adding anything else, but all of the Nutrition Facts are at zero except for sodium, which clocks in at a paltry 5mg.

I’m actually thinking about going into work. If I knew I could work a regular shift, just shifted a few hours forward, I’d do it. I’d go in right now, work until 9:30, and then come home and sleep. You can’t call your boss at one in the morning and get that okayed, though, and I’m fairly certain I couldn’t go in now and work until 3 p.m. like I’m supposed to.

I started reading In Cold Blood the other day. I’d never heard about it before the Capote movie came out last year, but once I stated hearing about it, I got interested in it. The only other “true crime” book I’ve read was Helter Skelter, about the Manson murders, and the style of this one is completely different. Frankly, it’s really sad. I’m only a quarter of the way through it and it’s making me sad. I had to stop reading tonight because I couldn’t take it. Probably part of the reason I’m still awake is that by the time tears get to your ears, they’re cold and feel weird.

Earlier today I finished watching King Kong (it took me two sittings to get through it). It was about 2/3rds of the way through that I realized no matter how much I rooted for the CGI monkey, he wasn’t ever going to win.

I’ve had a real craving to buy a video camera lately and there’s no good reason for it. I imagine myself making little movies and editing them together on my computer and being all creative and stuff, but I know that’s not going to happen. And there’s only so many movies you can take of your cats (“Look! Now she’s sleeping!”) before someone calls the state to have you placed into custody.

The air conditioning in my apartment decided to break on Friday night. I slept on the couch downstairs and actually opened a couple of windows a bit to get some air into the place – that’s how bad it was. I never open windows. Frankly, I never open the blinds. I couldn’t take it, though – it was too stuffy. I called and left a message with my landlord on Saturday morning, but never heard back from them. I went over lunch to pay my rent and mentioned it again just to make sure they had it, and when I got hom from work, the guy was actually there, just finishing up. He said he’d been there about three hours, so he’d been sent before I made my second plea. Turns out the main AC unit, the thermostat, and the … thing outside all had shorted-out parts – he suspected there was lightning damage. So now I’ve got a spiffily working AC unit that’s even doing a decent job cooling the upstairs plus a new digital thermostat. And if you know me at all, you know that I am a firm believer in all things digital. Digital > analog by a long shot.

I was balancing my checkbook over the weekend and got to the entries from Canada. I only used my debit card a few times up there, but I had originally entered them in the Canada-given amounts. Well, of course, my bank made the conversions automatically, so my statement had the American equivalents instead. I had to change each of the entries and it turns out my Canada trip cost me approximately $7 less than I thought. Wooo!

Even though I own Guitar Hero it’s still fun to play it at the demo station at Best Buy for some reason. I was playing it there this weekend and a lady started asking me questions about it. I answered as best I could while Hendrixing out on “Spanish Castle Magic,” and she ended up buying it for her kid. That’s not the first time that’s happened to me, either. I think I should be getting some sort of cut on these sales. Or at least a free copy of Guitar Hero II in November.

I wish I had an answer for everything. I’ve got a couple of friends going through some really, really hard times right now, and I wish I knew the exact right thing to say to each of them. My brain knows that sometimes people just need to know other people are available for listening, but my heart wants to fix everything for them by saying that one perfect thing that will make them say, “Oh! That’s it exactly!” and go from there and be happy forever. Sure, it’s not a realistic wish, but I call realistic, attainable wishes something else entirely: “goals.”

The cats are weirded out by my being up this late. It’s like I’m upsetting their sleep schedule somehow.

Note For Future Scientific Study Purposes: First yawn was at 1:41 a.m.

And, actually, with that yawn, I’m starting to feel like maybe I could sleep a bit. I shall go try. The alarm doesn’t go off for another 4 hours, so I should be fine.