Dear Lame Saint,

I have Laryngitis.

Imagine that, a zombie who can’t speak. That’s a silly thought, now isn’t it. I mean, how are people going to know I’m a zombie if I can’t say stuff like ‘Braaaiiiinnss’ and shit??

Lucky me, though. I have my trusty fembot (in a wet t-shirt) at the bottom of every entry just waiting around to speak what I write. Now if I only had something interesting to say today, we’d be all set here.

O.k. got it, we could get all updated on week one of the J23Ix2, shall we? Ja!

My eating this week was quite good. No binges, no purges, no brains (well, I am a Vegan zombie). Everything I consumed was colorful, purposeful, guilt-free, and tasty good!

In the mind-food department, I made with the reading. In fact, I read a heck of a lot… of, um… O.K., O.K.!! I read about a hundred comic books. Well, it may not be exactly what I had in mind when I promised myself I’d read more, but at least I’m all caught up on D.C.’s 52 and Marvel’s Civil War. I’m having a hard time deciding which series I’m enjoying more, but I can easily say that I am enjoying reading them both.

Marvel has a distinct advantage, with there being countless tie-in’s to nibble on while piecing together the entire picture. And I’ve particularly enjoying the X-Factor, Wolverine and Luke Cage arc’s, but I’m thinking that the Elongated Man story-line in 52 might be the most engrossing for me.

As the world of fitness turns: Starting on Monday, I alternately ran and biked four miles each day, and rested on Saturday. So far I’m feeling pretty good about it. By Friday I started to feel my runner’s breathing return, so I was able to push it to six miles. I paid for it the next morning, but it was worth knowing that I could still do it. I’ll take it down a notch this week and let myself progress naturally.

Saturday, I got together with my family and we celebrated my oldest sister’s birthday. I brought my X-box and the Karaoke Revolution Party games that are to me and Eve what Crack is to Whitney Houston, and we all had a great time singing and laughing. Eve and I sang our heads off, but since I lost my voice completely, I’m gonna put forth that I may have overdid it. We won the Diamond Duet Trophy though, so I’m gonna call it a fair trade.

My nephew’s X-box was broken, so like any good Uncle would do, I ran out to Best Buy and bought an X-box 360…. for myself, and I let him keep my hella old, creepy, X-box regular. But when I got home the next day and hooked that bad boy up, I found out that none of my old games work on it. And I ask you,

What The Fuck???

None of them???

What the hell kind of backward compatibility do you call that???

On Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance (GBA), every single freaking regular old GameBoy game works on it. Now that is what I call backward compatible. The 360, on the other hand, makes you go through this whole shit-ass routine of telling you that the game is not compatible with the new system, but if you get online with it, you may be able to download an update that will make it work. So I got through the painfully slow process of signing up for an X-box live account, it begins to download all these ‘necessary’ updates, which, even though I’m sporting a 30mbps broadband connection, took fucking forever to finish its business.

And when all is said, done, and updated, nothing worked. And I became very sad. I don’t know what I am gonna do about it, but as Evie so eloquently said yesterday,

“That thing really is a 360, cause it’s gonna be circling right back to the store.”

As it turns out, there is a backward compatibility team at Microsoft that is sloooowwwwly creating a separate emulator for each and every X-box game (what a shitty solution, b.t.w.), starting with their ‘most popular’ and working their way down the line. I don’t know where Karaoke Revolution Party stands on that list, but I’m guessing pretty fucking far down. So, I emailed the Microsoft X-box Backward Compatibility team and asked them if they could give me a time-frame for when my particular games would be updated. If they don’t answer me by the end of the week, back to the store it goes.

And Finally, we finished off the weekend by seeing Lady in the Water and Clerks 2. I’m not going to go in-depth here, but if you want my quick opinion, Lady in the Water was a slow, moody film, that I grew to enjoy, with Paul Giamatti once again proving to me that he is one hell of an actor. But unfortunately, I can never, never, ever recommend this film to anyone, ever! It was just far to inconsistent and idiosyncratic for me to lay my reputation on the line and give it the nod. Sorry, M. Night, but you’ve been on Notice ever since that crapfest with the fake monsters in the fake amish village, buddy! That’s it your gone from my life for cereal. You can go hang out with that other dude whose movies I will never watch again– Oliver Stone!

P.S. Oliver Stone, go fuck yourself!

On the other hand, Clerks 2 was Pure! Freaking! Genius! There is so much to love about this movie. It was funny, intellectual, gross, intriguing, boundary-pushing, and as Joel Siegel will never know, heart-warming. As a sequel, it completely did the right thing. The script stayed true to the realism of the two working-class New Jersey dudes we saw in the original movie. Kevin Smith added a necessary complexity to the main character’s relationship— a complexity that was only hinted at in the first movie. And this ultimately made the film very endearing and believable.

Sorry, Joel Siegal, but you are an unprofessional douche. And Kevin Smith is my new B.F.F.L.!

Shit, I guess I did go a little in-depth there.

Anyway, so far as I can tell, the only thing I failed to fit into my self-imposed J23Ix2 schedule was a bit of guitar practice.

Sorry, Guitar! You know I love you. We’ll get together a bit this week, I promise.

-Draconian Devil

Brethren,

I posted a comment to a story on one of those social bookmarking/link sharing sites, about the upcoming Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino flick, GRINDHOUSE, and in it, I referred to them as R-Rod and Q-Tar, respectively.

Just a quick little thing I didn’t even think much of as I submitted the comment, but upon reading it a few minutes later, I was struck squarely on the retarded bone.

I’ve never heard or read anyone using the ‘J-Lo’ in reference to Quentin before, and R-Rod too similar to A-Rod, which is old hat. So unless someone can supply notarized proof to the contrary, I henceforth claim invention and ownership of the title Q-Tarâ„¢ in reference to Quentin Tarantino (much in the same way that I invented the Governator in reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger), and will be copyrighting it ASAP!

-Obvious

/caution, may only be humorus to brain-damaged undead
//whatever

Three years ago, Zombie put the saw to the bone.

I attempted to embark on a journey of self-improvement- what I dubbed the ‘June 23rd Initiative (J23I). I had just been through a rough two-year stretch of ups-an-downs, and I felt I had let time get the better of me.

So the J23I was an attempt to get a firm grip on my reins and get back into the habit of doing what I felt was ‘my daily thing (MDT).’ MDT usually consisted of some form of reading, writing, drawing, learning, exercising, practicing, meditating, and producing.

Deliberate actions of improvement have always been important to me. But unfortunately, unless I go regimental on my ass, I will usually allow myself all manner of excuses to become distracted from my goals.

One fall off the bike, and I’d slip-up.

So anyway, in honor of brainchange trail-blazer and genius, R.A.W., I am proud to announce that on July 23, 2006, ObZomb Inc. (that’s me) enacted the rollout of J23Ix2.

I’m certain to elaborate more when time permits.

-Obvious

In a follow-up to one of Geeks of Doom’s most commented news story, Empress Eve reveals the CW’s complete starting line-up for the fall television season.

As we all know, the CW will be replacing both the existing UPN and The WB networks this fall. Well, their fall schedule has been finalized, and here are all the names and dates of the full premiere line-up. Check it out and see if any of your favorite shows survived the merge.

read more

Future victims,

On Saturday, Eve and I went over Jenn & James’s house for an evening of dinner, followed by fun and games. We usually get together for a few rounds of Trivial Pursuit or Cranium, wherein Jenny and I are usually crushed under the steel-toed boots of Eve and James’s superior trivia knowledge.

Well, thanks in part to the modern miracle of video gaming technology, this particular instance of ‘fun and games’ happened to mean belting out Brick House, Play That Funky Music, and Dust in the Wind into a Playstation2 microphone, for points, laughs, and props.

Finally, a level playing field!

Since they’ve had the game for a while, Jenn can sing up a karaoke hurricane, and James can definitely Take Care of Business. Eve and I totally had a blast. We sang until we could hardly talk anymore, whether it was from the singing or the laughing is debatable, but nonetheless, fuckin’ awesome fun was had!

Now, here goes something I thought I’d never be caught dead writing:

Eve and I are karaoke singing fools!

Well after the evening was over and we were home, as I was lying in bed waiting to succumb to the nightmares, I couldn’t get those games out of my head. I woke up with one, single-minded purpose.

Get! That! Game!

Thankfully, they make the same games and stuff for the Xbox, except that instead of Microphones, they have the Xbox live Communicator headsets. So instead of looking like Sonny Bono & Cher singing into vocoder mics from a ’60s Playtone set, we look more like Madonna from the Like a Prayer tour.

So, in one-hundred degree weather, we got on our bikes and peddled to the local Best Buy. The rest of the weekend went like this.

Location: Den, Couch Proper… headsets on.
Song: Endless Love
Fools: Singing

Thanks Jenny, Thanks James- Addiction Achieved.

–Obvious

Food,

Thanks to slashfilm, I was made aware of two things.

One very cool, one not so much.

First the not so much.

The Hollywood rumor mill has churned out yet another stinking wad of green, glowing, throat-gunk. According to an article on the afore mentioned slashfilm website, Denzel Washington had been spoken in the same sentence as ‘rumored to play Master Chief in the upcoming HALO movie.’ Let me cap this off with a disclaimer- Zombie Love Denzel, but having hard time envisioning him as Zombie’s beloved M.C.

Please, let this remain a rumor.

And second, if you look at the bottom of each of my entries, you’ll notice the addition of a cool iPodish icon that says Listen to this podcast… well, go ahead, listen. I followed a link on Slashfilm to their audio broadcast of the Denzel rumor entry and wound-up at Talkr.com. They have a free service that translates text entries to speech for podcasting and/or the visually impaired.

I signed up and installed a WP plug-in, and seconds later all of my entries were made available as mp3 files.

Quite cool, ja?

So begins an era of my thoughts being read aloud by a computerized woman.

-Obvious, and my feminine, binary-type accompaniment

I’ve had a seventies jazz instrumental floating around inside my noggin for the past three days, and I can’t for the life of me remember it’s name, or even who performed it.

I can hum or sing nearly every note of it from the beginning to end, though.

This is quite frustrating.

I don’t suppose typing out …duuuuuuuuuh naaaah naahh, net nah nuh naa. net nah nuh nuhhh, da na nu naaa new naaah nuh nah ney nuh… Is going to do me any good.

…

Think french horns.

I am having an away message skirmish with, Porl.

First, his away message read ‘Working hard,’ to which I responded with my away message of ‘Working smart.’ He then changed his away message to ‘Working stupidly.’

I felt my victory was at hand.

An unexpected change of his status to ‘blueberries’ was quickly answered with my status of ‘raspberries.’

Take that, Porl!