Yeah, I'm still alive, just haven't had much to say. I made the mistake of buying World of Warcraft, a brand new MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role playing game - hundreds of thousands of people all playing online in the same world) and, well, it's addictive. Like crack. Can't stop. Need a fix. Argh. You get the point. Anyway - did you hear about the first act by our new Secretary of Education once she was confirmed? She attacked PBS over a cartoon featuring a lesbian couple. No, seriously. The Globe has good article on the fallout - the show in question, "Postcards from Buster", is a WGBH production, and the episode in question features a lesbian couple from Vermont and their daughter. Not surprisingly, they're kind of pissed:

''It makes me sick," said [Karen] Pike, a 42-year-old photographer in Hinesburg, Vt., who united with [Gillian] Pieper in a civil union in 2001. ''I'm actually aghast at the hatred stemming from such an important person in our government. . . . Her first official act was to denounce my family, and to denounce PBS for putting on a program that shows my family as loving, moral, and committed."

I'm with her. If you'll pardon my French - fuck you, Margaret Spellings, you homophobe. The episode isn't even about lesbianism or anything like that - it's about maple syrup and dairy cows and the like. This bigoted Bush appointee is complaining because the show casually includes a same-sex family and doesn't make a big deal of it. That's just ridiculous.

I love the Bay Area.

...it's rot, according to the maintenance guy. Which means that I just need to air the garage out more or something. I dunno - the smell's still there, but at least I'm not going to get sick.

Just watched an episode from mid-way through the 4th season of Angel...turns out it was the only episode from after the first season of Angel that I actually saw on TV. It made no sense at all at the time - Angel has a teenage son? Cordy's melodramatic and pregnant and evil? Guh? Well, now it makes sense. It's pretty impressive how little the later seasons of Angel have to do with the first season. Except for common characters (and considering the progression of Cordy, Wesley, and Gunn, it's barely the same characters) and the general aesthetic, it's an entirely different show. Compare that to, say, Law & Order, where you might have completely different characters one season to another but otherwise the show is exactly the same. I like the later seasons of Angel better - as I've said, I have a thing for grand arching storylines in my TV, especially when watching 'em on DVD. Anyway - back to the TV - I've only got 6 more episodes to go!

The latest nifty thing someone's found in Google is that you can find web surveillance cams, some of them in real-time, and supposedly some of them even allow you to control the camera angle, but I haven't found any of those yet. Try this search, this search, or this search. My favorite so far is this camera, which lets you watch the control room of WMUC 88.1fm, the University of Maryland radio station. Dorky, yes, kind of creepy, yes, but hey - it's fun to watch people do stuff. =)

I'm just about to finish up season 4 of Angel on DVD through Netflix, and now I need something else to put in my queue until the Wire season 2, Deadwood, the Shield season 3, and Angel season 5 all come out next month. I've watched the shows above, Alias, Babylon 5, Oz, the Sopranos, and Buffy already...so what should I go for next? As you can probably tell, I tend towards genre shows, but I think that's mainly because genre shows use the full-season-story approach more often, and that's what I look for in a TV show on DVD first and foremost. I love Netflix - my TV show watching thing had started costing me a LOT of money, until I realized that if I could accept the delays inherent in Netflix (which always annoy me most on weekends - for some reason, I often end up on a schedule where I put one DVD in the mail on Friday, watch a second on Friday and get it in the mail on Saturday, and watch the third on Saturday, leaving me with nothing to watch on Sunday - but this is far from the end of the world), I could save gobs of money while still watching all the TV shows that I wanted to anyway. But I need to feed my addiction - so give me show suggestions!

Less of a need to panic than I think I gave in that last post - there's a guy coming to look at the mold situation on Monday. I've been airing the apartment out for the last 48 hours or so, and with the aid of my upstairs neighbor, I've covered the baseboard in my lower cabinets (which is where we think the mold is) with some plastic stuff he had lying around. Oh, and my room is sealed off at all times and doesn't actually touch the mold area. So it's getting better here for the short-term, and the long-term. I promise!

I think I've mentioned this before - my apartment stinks. The apartment above my garage (which is right next to my bathroom and kitchen walls) was flooded back this summer (the night before I moved in, in fact), and based on the stains on the garage wall, I'm pretty sure there was some serious water damage in my walls. And there's a smell. A hideous, unpleasant smell that's only getting worse. I assume it's mold - it's worst when I open the cabinet doors under my sink (which is why I'm going to try to clean the garbage disposal, but the smell doesn't come up from the drain, just under the sink), but it's there pretty much anywhere along the wall that borders the garage. I've talked to my landlord about it, and he said he'd do...ok, I'm not entirely sure what he said he'd do, but he knows about it, at least. But what do I do now, so that I can breathe without getting mildly nauseated? I open the windows, doors, etc to air out the apartment, I've tried those scent candles, and none of that makes any lasting impact. Any suggestions? I've got to get this place stank-free and clean by mid-February when Arwen comes to visit, which means actually getting the mold eliminated, but I'd sure like to do something to make my life a little more liveable in the short-term.

I spent my birthday sitting around the apartment, cleaning and doing laundry. I did pick up my new iPod, true, but that was all the excitement I got. New Year's Eve wasn't much better - I went out for dinner on my own, but that was the sum total of my interesting activity. Today, so far, has consisted of some more cleaning and laundry along with importing CDs onto my iPod. I am a boring, boring person.

But at least I did something on Thursday - I drove up to San Rafael and spent the day with my Aunt Marge, my Uncle Ralph, his mother Libby, and my two cousins Ruth and Nora. I had a great time - I'm finally at the age where spending time with family that I haven't seen for a while (or ever talked to, really, in the case of my cousins, who were always too young to really talk with the few other times I've seen them) so it was really quite satisfying. And I *did* go for a nice long walk yesterday - so maybe I'm just turning into a middle-aged person. If I start watching my cholestoral intake, get very, very worried.