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10:14 a.m. - 03-20-2003
Games, Movies and hand lotion?
"Oh, it's very rock 'n roll, Bob."
I'm competitive. I'm very fuckin' competitive. I'm competitive to a fault to be honest. I hate to lose. I hate losing to the point of temper tantrums and violence. Of course, no one likes to lose, but if you enjoy the game then winning or losing should be secondary, right? I said should be. It's almost an obsession with me.
I recently bought Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for the PS2. As you loyal readers (all 3 of you) will recall, I totally loved GTA III and I like GTA: VC even better. It's got all of the cool things from III with some added bonuses. The biggest of which can be summed up in one word. Helicopters. That's right, you can fly helicopters. I'm loving it. But, it's not all fun and games, unfortunately. For people who don't know, the GTA games (at least III and VC) center around "missions". You play a criminal who does various "jobs" for other criminals. They start off simple like, taking a Columbian drug lords daughter to a club, and then get more difficult, like riding the gun position in a helicopter with an M60 and taking on an entire gang on their turf. Well, this is where my competitiveness gets in the way. If you fail a mission, it's best to just reload the game (hopefully you saved it before you started the mission) and just start over. Sometimes, you'll have to do the mission 2, 3, 4 maybe even 5 times or more. As you can guess, this gets tedious, especially if you've gotten almost to the very end of the mission and then end up getting killed or making a mistake (like getting killed isn't a mistake?) and having to start over.
It was just this type of mission I was doing one day when, after like the 10th or 11th time trying to do it, I finally just yelled FUCK THIS FUCKIN' SHIT! and threw the controller across the room, yanking the cord out of the machine,luckily not pulling the PS2 off, scaring the shit out of the wife and kids in the process. I know it's just a game, but damn, I wanna win! You know what's really sad? After my outburst, I relaxed and took a break. Then later, the next day, I did the mission again (dreading it) and finished it first time. Isn't that a bitch? I get myself so worked up having to do it over and over again that I end up making myself fuck up. But, when I take time off, collect myself and relax and then try again, boom boom boom, success. I do love the game, though, and am having a hell of a time, robbing, stealing cars, shooting people and what not. You really should check it out. Do it for the little felon in all of us.
I've got a movie recommendation for all of you guys. If you're fans of Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, then you'll love this. It's produced by the same guy who produced both Guy Ritchie hits, Matthew Vaughn. It's called Mean Machine and it stars Vinnie Jones (Bullet-Tooth Tony - Snatch/Big Chris - LS&2SB), and also has Robbie Gee (Vinnie - Snatch) and various other characters that you'll recognize from Snatch and LS&2SB. The movie, is a remake of the old Burt Reynolds hit from the early 70's The Longest Yard in which a famous football player, Burt Reynolds, goes to prison for gambling or fixing a game or something like that. Anyway, the remake is set in England and Vinnie Jones plays Danny "Mean Machine" Meehan, a famous English footballer who was kicked out of the league for match fixing. A couple of coppers try to site him for drunk driving when he assaults them and gets sent to prison for 3 years. As it turns out, the Governor (warden in England) of Longmarsh prison pulls some strings to have Danny sent to his prison so that he can coach the prison's amatuer football team. But there's a snag.
The chief screw (guard) is the current coach of the team and he doesn't want Meehan coaching his team...and Meehan doesn't really want to coach. So, a compromise of sorts is reached. The Governor sets up a match between the Longmarsh Prison Cons and the Longmarsh Prison Guards. This is when it really gets funny. Danny has to pick his team from the crop of prisoners, only the best players work for a crime boss in the prison and won't play so he has to take the "less talented" players, one being "The Monk" a psycho, murderer goalie with a mind (or 2) of his own (played brilliantly by Jason Statham - Turkish from Snatch). Then, when the match is finally underway, it's color commentated by two of the funniest fuckin' people in the movie. If you liked The Longest Yard then you'll really like this movie. Hell, if you just love to laugh then you'll like this movie. Go get it...Da 'Bear says so!
The only thing is, be sure to get it on DVD if you can find it because you'll have to have the subtitles on for most of it. They talk so fast and some of them have such thick accents, especially the Scots, that it's near impossible to make out what some are saying without them. But, it's well worth it. Well worth it.
If it wasn't for the fact that I know it's Thursday, I'd think it was a fuckin' Monday.
I had to work last night and all hell broke loose. I'm being taken off producing the news and the editors will be producing their own stuff so I have to train them on how to do it. I was training one of them last night while I was doing my normal thing and it was going pretty smoothly. But I should have known. I get all the news into the system, a little behind schedule, but I can catch up, and start to create the e-mail mailing when all of sudden everything goes wiggy. I edit the mailing and try to save it and it won't save. Ok, maybe I did something wrong, I'll start over. After starting over 3 times, I realize, there's a fuckin' problem. I page the people who have the mailing system in Wisconsin and tell them something is fucked. Ok, they're working on it. Normally, I have the news for the mailing done and ready to go before 10:30. It's now after 11 and I haven't even gotten started. Finally after going back and forth with a tech support guy, who's nice enough, but was a big idiot last night, I go in to see if it's working. No one told me that anything was fixed or what the problem was, nothing. I just happened to go try the system again and it worked so I got started. I finally get done and go to bed at 3:30 AM. Who knows how late it would have been if I'd waited for them to tell me it was fixed. And that's not the worst of it.
I get to bed at 3:30 AM. At 8:15, I'm woken up by pounding on my bedroom door, from the inside. Icebear Jr. has gotten a bottle of hand lotion and is covered from head to toe in the stuff. He was beating on the door because he couldn't open it with his greasy hands. I could not believe he did that, wait, actually I can. So, I had to take a hot shower with him to wash all that shit off, but now he's all silky smooth. Heh...little shit.
Well, I'm going to go over to the mother-in-law's. She's offering to feed me and watch Icebear Jr. while I take a nap. That's cool. I'll catch you all later.
