1986

I just spent that last few minutes looking over my 1986 playlist.  I know that after listening through the 1985 playlist and being pleasantly surprised by how good it was, I was really excited to get to 1986.  And while 1986 looks like it was pretty damn good for music, I really didn't buy much of anything that year.  I don't know where my head was, but it really wasn't on music.  Most of what's on that playlist I picked up well after 1986 was over.  There may be other releases, but after a quick review, it looks like the two albums I bought that year were Tina Turner's BREAK EVERY RULE and Basia's TIME AND TIDE.  But upon further study, I find that I have TIME AND TIDE in the wrong playlist, as Wikipedia states the album came out in 1987.  I need to fix that right now.  It seems to me like it was awfully early for that album.  I have definite late 80's memories of it.  1986 seems too early.

I have no idea what the hell else I was doing in 1986.  I know I was addicted to Dynasty, so maybe my head was stuck in the nighttime soaps.  I wasn't hanging out with the group of friends I was about to make yet, so most of 1986 was solo time.

What a suck ass blog entry.  I'm sorry, 1986, but you aren't inspiring to me at all.

Random Update

Still sick, but today I'm finally starting to feel better.  As of last night, I was planning on staying home from work today, but when the alarm went off, I didn't feel like death, so I showered, got dressed and re-evaluated.  I decided to go in.  I'm not upset I did.  I probably could have used another day to lay around doing nothing, but I feel more accomplished and better than I have in almost a week.  Still not good enough to get back to the gym, but I'm getting there.

This weekend I had my first set of social plans for the year.  Saturday night was supposed to be dinner with my friend Carol.  I haven't seen much of her lately.  But Ken called and cancelled because I was sick, which was the right thing to do.  Sunday we had plans to meet up with friends Kevin and Brian for brunch.  Those plans should have been cancelled, too, but I thought I'd be well enough to make the trip.  And I kind of was, but I crashed hard in the afternoon.  I'm glad I went, though I should have postponed.

I started watching the Grammys last night, buy only got about half way through before I went to bed.  Overall, I was greatly disappointed with what I saw.  The last few years there have been a handful of performances that blew me away.  I dvr'd the rest of the show and I'll watch the rest tonight.  I hope there's something to make it worth my while.  In the first half, about the only thing I liked was Pink, though I probably would have been more impressed if she didn't do the aerial acrobatics again.  It just felt played out since she did it last time, too.  People have been oozing over Beyonce and Jay-Z, but I was kind of put off by it.  I just don't get the whole Beyonce thing.

Catching up on my t-shirt thing, here are the latest offerings.

January 19

Day off

January 20

I think I mentioned the Black Lanterns in my previous post when the picture of my Green Lantern shirt looked less green and more black.  By coincidence, I grabbed this one randomly out of the closet.  Where the Green Lanterns are all about willpower, the Black Lanterns are all about death.  In fact, the Black Lanterns are all dead, re-animated corpses hellbent on killing.  Ahhhh, such happy people.

 January 21

A companion piece to yesterday's Black Lantern shirt, this is the Yellow Lantern shirt, or more specifically, the Sinestro Corps shirt.  Sinestro harnesses the color of fear.  This isn't the shirt I thought I was grabbing that morning, but I love it just the same.

 January 22

 A New York Comic Con find.  I'm sure it's probably been on one of the shirt of the day sites, but I didn't see this until I was at the convention this year.  Bender vs. the Supreme Dalek.  Robot on Robot action.  I love mash up shirts like this.

And as a bonus, I wore my Dalek socks that day!

January 23

Day off

 January 24

Yet another shirt of the day shirt.  Hello Kitty as a zombie.  What else can I say?

January 25

Day off

 January 26

This is my Zan (of Zan & Jayna aka The Wonder Twins) shirt.  The day I saw it solicited, I knew I had to have it.  I contemplated getting the Jayna shirt, too, but I figured this was enough.  Ken has mentioned me getting him the Jayna shirt, but then he'd want to wear them the same day and be all matchy matchy and I'm not about that.

January 27

I got this shirt at the New York Comic Convention in October.  My friend Jed actually bought it and when I saw it, I made him show me where he got it because I had to have it.  It's fucking awesome.  Cher as Che!

I think that's all I've got.  As crappy as I'm still feeling, I'm shocked at what a decent mood I managed to maintain today.  That's not like me at all.  Anyone who reads this blog (and why you do is anyone's guess) knows what a miserable fuck I am.  LOL.

Sick

I've been sick for four days. I'm so over this bullshit. Today is the first day that I think I may be over the worst of it. Until I'm better, though, I'm going to continue being a miserable crotch. 

More Shirts

January 15

 Forgive the lighting, but this almost looks like a Black Lantern t-shirt.  Trust me, it's green all the way.  Green Lantern.  This is my second Green Lantern shirt of 2014 already.  Very similar to the one I wore earlier this month.

January 16

This is one of my favorite Disney shirts ever.  I got it a few years ago at EPCOT.  It's Mickey Mouse, obviously, but all Germaned up.  It roughly translates into "Hello! and have fun!"  It always makes me smile when I wear it. 

January 17

T-Shirt skip day

January 18

I think this is my first band shirt of the year.  I got it last year when I went to go see Stephen Kellogg.  It was a small and intimate show and was spectacular.  He was doing a small pre-album release tour for his newest solo album and I saw him three or four days before the release.  I was hoping he had some copies of the new record for sale with him, but that was not to be.  So instead I picked up some back catalog releases and this shirt.  I knew very little of him before the show.  He offered up a free sample on NoiseTrade.com, a site I visit daily.  I've found so much new stuff there that I can't believe it.  I've backed a couple of the artists from there on Kickstarter because I thought their music was spectacular.  Anyway, I downloaded his sampler and really liked it.  I didn't really search out much more of his music after that, though I don't know why now.  But I saw he was performing here, solo acoustic.  The tickets were cheap and I decided it was worth it.  I've been hooked ever since.  Just read he's playing about 45 minutes from here in March.  It's a Thursday night, so I'm debating going and taking Friday off (because I can!)  It's at a venue I've never been to, but they seem to get all sorts of great acts. 

Comics

I'm a comic book nerd.  I've been reading them since I was 9 or 10 years old.  It's a life-long passion of mine.  None of that is news.  None of that I haven't mentioned in the past.

I used to make weekly visits to my local comic book store.  That changed a long time ago.  Probably more than ten years ago by now.  My favorite shop went out of business.  There were a few others in town to choose from, but none of them really did it for me.  So I switched the way I bought comics.  I started ordering online and had the books delivered to me twice a month.  That adjustment was rather difficult at first.  I knew I'd sometimes have to wait two or three weeks for something I knew was sitting on a rack across town.  Over time, I grew to care less about that.  I look forward to my bi-weekly shipments of crack.

My first shipment of the year got here late.  The storms all across the country screw up the delivery of comics.  I usually get a delivery every other Friday, with a few skip weeks thrown in throughout the course of the year.  Twenty-four shipments over fifty-two weeks will do that.

I'm going to try an post a running blog of what I'm reading as each shipment arrives.  Here are photos of the contents of that first shipment of 2014.

Photo number one are the single issues I got this time around.
Aquaman #26
Batwoman #26
Earth 2 #19
Forever Evil: A.R.G.U.S. #3
Forever Evil: Arkham War #4
Justice League Dark #26

Photo number two are the trade paperbacks.
All-New X-Men
Batman: The Dark Knight
Batman: The TV Stories
Deadman
Demon
Doctor Who
Green Lantern: Sector 2814
John Constantine: Hellblazer

And finally, the everthing else portion of my shipment.  I'm obsessed with the Funko Pop Vinyl toys.  This is the latest addition to my collection.  Superboy.

2013

Every year I vow I'm going to keep better track of what I did and what I liked and all that shit so that I can look back at the end of the year and make a nice "Best Of The Year" list.  This year I vow to do that so that I don't have to post some utter nonsense like this.

My best of 2013 is a purely off the top of my head list of some of the shit I liked this year.

Best Concert: Frank Turner at Northern Lights (or whatever they're calling it these days.)  That show may have been the best show I've ever been to.  I was old enough to be half the audience's dad, but that didn't dissuade me from having a fucking blast.  He's great on record, but 1000 times more magnetic and charming in person.

Best Album: John Grant PALE GREEN GHOSTS  There were a lot of great albums this year and Josh Ritter's was a very close second, but John Grant writes the type of songs that I wish I could write if I wrote songs.  They seem very conversational and extremely personal and something that you can connect to.

Best Party:  Hands down it was the wedding reception party in Austin, TX in December.  It was a whirlwind weekend, I didn't have time to spend as much time seeing everyone I wanted to, I was shitfaced and I made out with as many people as I could.  And I made a lot of great new friends.

Best Thing I Read:  Not new in 2013, but it was new to me.  Sweet Tooth by Jeff Lemire sucked me in and wouldn't let me go until I finished the run.  Fabulous storytelling.

Best TV:  My favorite series was Survivor: Blood vs. Water.  I've been a fan since the first episode and this season was exceptional.  It was an experiment that could have blown up in their faces or could have been a total win.  Luckily it was a win.  Runner up was the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special.  

Favorite Comic:  I think it had to be Batman, believe it or not.  Scott Snyder is doing such great things with the book and I'm addicted to it like I've never been addicted to a Batman comic before.

See, that list was kind of lame.  I'll try better for 2014.

And to keep the geek chic stuff going:

January 12

Long sleeve Batman shirt.  Gift from my friend George.  Kind of goes along with what I just wrote about regarding Batman being my favorite comic last year.

January 13

It's Morrissey as Superman.  There was an article that went around Facebook last year about an artist who transformed Punk & New Wave artists into super-heroes.  I loved it.  And then one of the t-shirt of the day sites made this available.  I had to have it.  I have one other, but that will come in time.  I don't know if any of the others were offered and I missed them or if they're yet to come, but I'll be watching.

January 14

This photo didn't come out all that well.  Whatever.  It's yet another shirt of the day shirts.  And it's another Doctor Who shirt.  I liked the design a lot, so I bought it.  It gets harder and harder to find fun Doctor Who shirts because they all seem to be very similar.  This one wasn't.

Geek Chic Update

I'm very happy with myself that I've managed to keep up with the pictures so far.  I know it's less than two weeks into the New Year, but still.  My attention span seems to be at an all time low right now.  But here we go with batch two of my geeky shirts.

January 4

This is one of my Aquaman shirts.  I love that Aquaman has finally become "cool."  He's been the biggest joke in comics for the longest time.  It's one of the few success stories (for me, at least) to come out of DC Comics New 52 revamp.  Most of the rest of the line, not so much, but the Aquaman book is incredible.  Hopefully that will continue with Geoff Johns leaving and Jeff Parker coming in to write the book.

January 5

Batgirl.  My favorite super-heroine.  I was just about to jump in the shower and asked Ken to go in and pick out any shirt he wanted and to lay it face down on the bed.  This is the one he chose.  I don't know if he looked through the closet and found this or if it was a random grab, but he done good.

January 6

This one was a random grab.  It was Monday morning, I wasn't feeling it and I just walked into the closet and grabbed the first shirt I could.  This was it.  It's one of my absolute favorite shirts EVER.  It was the first shirt I bought when I finally reached my goal weight and knew I could fit back into human sized clothes again.  I bought this and a Supergirl shirt, which will be worn sooner or later.  It's an homage to the cover of the first appearance of Batgirl, recreated here by Brian Bolland. 

January 7

Almost all of my Doctor Who shirts are from the various shirt-of-the-day sites.  This is no exception.  It's a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots homage featuring a Cyberman and a Dalek, two of the Doctor's longest running enemies.  For some reason, I got a lot of comments at work on this one.  It's not a new shirt, so I'm not sure why people kept asking about it.

January 9

I took a day off of geek shirts and only wore a purple ringer tee on the 8th.  But on the 9th I wore one of my Arrested Development shirts.  This is my only mass market AD shirt.  The rest are from the shirt-of-the-day sites.  Arrested Development was one of my all-time favorite tv shows.  I still have high hopes that it'll be back again.

January 10

Another shirt-of-the-day site picks.  This time it's the Batman TV show logo done up Doctor Who style.  I love that I was at my friend Chris' t-shirt site and he's got a very similar new shirt.  It made me chuckle.  I have one other shirt that's similar to this and you'll just have to wait to see it.

January 11

Yesterday's selection was the Metal Men.  The shirt rocks and that's all I need to say about it.  Other than the fact that there are symbol shirts for each member of the Metal Men and I do not have them.  Yet.

1985

It's been October since I did one of these.  My bad.  I'm currently listening to my playlist for the year 2000, so time really did get away from me.  Let's see if I remember what I was doing...

I was out of high school and didn't pursue higher education.  My folks couldn't afford it and they tried to get me some financial aid, but it wasn't to be.  And I wasn't working much.  I believe I was only working at the comic book shop at the time and I had a seasonal job in the mall for Christmas.  I wasn't the most motivated of people when it came for looking for a job.  I earned just enough money to buy comics and an occasional record and at the time, that was good enough. I look back at the me of 1985 and just want to kick the shit out of him.  But the past is the past.

I wasn't looking forward to the post-1984 playlists.  The music of high school was pretty terrific, especially in retrospect.  And that sound had been slowing morphing through the early 80s.  My initial thoughts as I got to this playlist was it was going to be a lot of really cheesy canned synths and cheap production.  And while there may have been some of that, there were some pretty great things.

That's the year Be Yourself Tonight by Eurythmics came out.  That album was a complete game changer for me.  I loved the stuff Eurythmics had put out prior to this, but there was something about this record that absolutely hooked me.  I really liked them before, I became a fanatic at this point.

It was also the year that Control by Janet Jackson came out.  I loved that album.  So much.

I loved Howard Jones' first album, but it was his second album, Dream Into Action, that, like Be Yourself Tonight, totally sold me.  Took away any doubts about which direction my adoration for Howard was going to go.

Falco 3 also made a huge impression on me.  I was still all about anything German and his German/English lyrics tickled me so.  He was a great big giant cheeseball, but he didn't give a fuck and made fun records.

It was right around this time, I believe, that I discovered the radio station out of Woodstock WDST.  They played all the coolest music.  None of that pop shit that I loved, but alternative stuff no one else was playing.  I found out about Midge Ure's solo record The Gift by listening to that station.  "If I Was" remains one of my go to songs to this day.  It was a thrill to finally see him live in concert last year and to hear this live.

Hounds Of Love is another album that pulled me in and hasn't let me go to this day.  I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never heard of Kate Bush until I heard "Running Up That Hill" on the (pop) radio station.  It was everything a pop single could be without being a pop single.  My friend Tom had all her albums and lent them to me to copy.

I was (and still am) obsessed with Tina Turner.  I flipped when I found out there was a new, unreleased song on the USA For Africa album.  I was there the day it went on sale to get it.  I don't know why I have such a strong memory of it, but I bought it at Cam-Bo-Rec in uptown Kingston. 

Another album I have a very distinct memory of purchasing was Youthquake by Dead Or Alive.  I only knew "You Spin Me Round" but it was enough.  It was snowing, I got off work at my mall job and I was waiting for my Dad to come pick me up.  I don't recall why I didn't have my Mom's car that day, but I had some time to kill, so I was poking around the record store.  And I saw the album and had to have it.

It was really fucking cool going through this playlist.  There was a lot of great music that I just didn't realize came out in 1985.  It really surprised me in a good way at how good it was.

Here's what I bought in 1985 as new releases.

New Year, New Project

Something I've been meaning to do for the last couple of months is to weed out my closet.  I think I'm to the point where I have too many clothes.  But the thought of going through and getting rid of stuff is kind of overwhelming to me.  So I decided to make it a game.  A game, partially inspired by my friend Chris and his blog 365 T-Shirts: a sense of doubt blog. On his blog, he's going through his t-shirt collection and doing up full blog posts for each.  I'm hoping to do something similar.  I plan on wearing each of my t-shirts just once until I've gone through my entire collection.  I figure that by the time I'm through them all, I'll have a good sense on what I'm keeping and what I'm not.  Do not expect the awesomeness of Chris' blog on these posts.  I won't be doing one for each shirt and there won't be very much interesting commentary on the posts either.  But I plan on posting pictures of them all and maybe a few words to go with them.

Today is the 3rd of January and I've worn one every day so far.  There are days when I won't be wearing a t-shirt, though they should be pretty infrequent as I live in t-shirts.  I'm excluding from this challenge my gym shirts as they are dirty and gross and I wear them over and over.  But everything else is fair game.

January 1

This is one of my absolute favorite t-shirts.  I only wear it this time of the year because of the (implied) Christmas theme.  It's a Doctor Who/Doctor Seuss mash up with all the Doctors done up in a Grinch style.  This shirt just makes me smile ear to ear.  At least, it did until a few weeks ago.  An updated version of this shirt was offered on one of the t-shirt of the day sites I love.  The updated version includes the War Doctor on it.  He's the Doctor who we recently found out comes between the Paul McGann version and the Christopher Eccleston version.  But I didn't order it, as tempted as I was.

January 2

A generic Green Lantern symbol shirt.  I have another one similar to this, so I'm not sure what compelled me to buy this one other than loving Green Lantern.  I think I may have had a little store credit somewhere and didn't want to keep carrying it around with me, so I got this.  I think.

January 3

This is my newest shirt.  I mentioned on the January 1st shirt that I look at the different t-shirt of the day sites and shop them frequently. Actually, I go to teemagnet.com and they show the offerings from a half dozen or so sites each day.  I got this one from RIPT Apparel, I believe.  It's a Doctor Who/Power Puff Girls mash up.  I think it's so fucking cute.  I've got a thing for Doctor Who shirts, as you'll soon discover.

I do love my t-shirts.  For the longest time I was too fat to buy any since they don't make anything interesting in circus tent sizes.  Once I lost all that weight, I was going to buy myself anything that made me happy.  And my shirts make me happy as shit.  On the off chance I don't wear one to work, people always comment.  I wore a button up shirt one day last week and half the office made comments about it.  It was a little weird.

But there we are.  Three days in and three shirts worn.  I'll probably just end up doing a few shirts per post since it's been hard enough for me to post more than two or three times a month lately. 

Fake Jan Day

By the way, today is Fake Jan Day, the day we honor Geri Reischl.  She played Jan Brady on the short lived but amazingly awesome Brady Bunch Variety Hour.  It's today, January 2nd (or Jan 2 -- get it?  She was the second Jan...)  The official food of Fake Jan Day is the cheese ball, naturally.  I hope you all have a fantastic Fake Jan Day!

January 2014 Pot Luck

I'm not quite sure what my aversion to writing in this thing has been lately.  I have things to write about, but when it comes time to do it, I find a thousand other things to do instead, 99% of which are huge wastes of time.  Tonight I'm channeling some of the excess energy I have that I'm not using to put down something.  Anything.

I've got the extra energy because I'm blowing off the gym tonight.  I was hoping to go, but the weather sucks balls.  It's been snowing since late last night/early this morning.  We don't have much accumulation yet, but the roads are really messy.  That, and it's two degrees outside.  After weighing my options, I decided to blow it off tonight and go tomorrow instead.  I'll still be keeping on track as I usually don't go Fridays, but I do go Thursdays.

And speaking of which, even though it's Thursday, it really, really, really, really feels like Monday today.  This whole week has been messed up.  Having a holiday right in the middle of the week screws around with everything.  Yesterday felt like Sunday all day.  We went out to breakfast like a normal Sunday, I did chores like a normal Sunday, I cooked dinner like a normal Sunday.  But it wasn't.  Tomorrow is going to mess with my head even more because I put a slip in a work to take tomorrow off.  By the time I'm all shoveled out, I'm not going to want to have anything to do with work.  But it should be easier than usual.  On Tuesday our new snow blower was delivered.  There's no way I can do another winter with just a shovel.  I'm too old for this shit.  Ken cleared off the driveway just before I got home from work.  He said it was a little tougher to maneuver than he thought it would be.  I'll be the judge of that tomorrow when it's my turn.

I usually don't make New Year's Resolutions, mostly because they're stupid.  If I want to make a change, I usually don't wait for a special occasion to do it.  I just do it.  But since it's the new year, I thought I would put it out there in the universe that I'm done with stupid people and stupid people games.  I'm really sick and tired of people purposely being vague or evasive.  I'm really tired of the lack of common courtesy.  I know I space it from time to time, but that's not what I'm talking about.  I'm over people who never, ever seem to have it or use it.  I'm done with them.  The older I get, the shorter my attention span for bullshit gets.  

I'm not a huge fan of sideburns.  On some guys they look great, but on most, not so much.  That being said, I've decided to see if I can grow my own.  My facial hair is a fucking train wreck and I've got some big patchy areas, but the sideburns portion of my face seems to not have this problem.  So I'm working on them right now.  They don't look so great yet, but I'm hoping that in a week or two more they'll look like real sideburns and not the joke they look like now.  We'll see.

Like every day of my life, I'm still struggling with my weight.  I know most of the struggle is only visible to me, but it's very real.  I still compulsively record my weight every single day.  I still weigh myself twice a day, though the times have changed.  I used to weigh myself first thing in the morning and last thing at night.  I don't do it at bedtime anymore, instead doing it just before going to the gym so I'll have an accurate number to enter into whatever machine I'm doing that particular day.  The struggle has been tougher the last month or so, but it's that time of year.  There's food everywhere from the middle of November until now.  Add to that the cruise I was on two weeks before Thanksgiving and it's been a bumpy road full of temptations.  I know I failed more times than I would have liked to, but for the most part, I haven't let my weight get too far out of control.  Ultimately, I'd like to be below 195 pounds, so any day I can be beneath that number is a good day.  If I can get below 190, it's a fantastic day.  If you look at my weigh ins for 2013, it doesn't look like there's any struggle at all.  It's all mostly good news.  But I have to work hard to keep it looking like that.  There was a spell when I felt like just throwing in the towel recently.  I think lack of sleep contributed to that, but I was just so fucking sick of having to push myself as hard as I do to maintain my weight.  I'm mostly over that (for now) and it's a good thing.  I still hate that I have to work this hard, but I abused myself for so long that this is a small price to pay.

That's enough random rantings for one night.