Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is that I found my mysteriously missing remote control. After getting Nichole to play "Runaway Train" on Radio K for my runaway remote, I dug really deeply into the deepest recesses of my couch and pulled it out. I wanted to then call in and request Falco's "Coming Home," but there are two problems: 1) any other dj would think I'm crazy and refuse to play the request, and 2) I seriously doubt a station which doesn't even have any Rick Springfield would have Falco's "Emotional" album (or any Falco for that matter). The bad news is that we're kind of fucked at the film society. I went into the office this afternoon to do the mailing only to find that the membership computer is kaputt. I played around with, pulled it apart, put it back together, and played with it some more, but nothing doing. We took over to UCS, but I have this gut feeling that we can put a fork in that computer and all of our memberships are lost. Now, we do still have the paper forms which the people fill out when signing up for memberships, but before I really took over majority duties on memberships, nobody bothered to write on them when the person's membership expires and the membership number had nothing to do with it either. So, any of the one's I've done in recent months will be easy to figure out, but we're completely screwed on any others. Yep, we're fucked.

*POOF!* Gone.

There's some crazy-ass shit going on here lately. A couple days ago I woke up in the morning and found my tv remote lying on the floor in 3 pieces. Nothing major and I had it fixed pretty quickly. Yesterday, while sitting here at the computer bare-footed, I felt something touch my toes. I quickly recoiled, looked down, and grabbed a flashlight to see what it was, but couldn't find anything. I put on a pair of shoes anyway before returning to the computer. Now the latest, I woke up this morning and the tv remote is gone. Poof - gone. I don't have a clue where it is. I know it was near me when I fell asleep on the couch last night, because I had been flipping through the channels, and I was watching Dave while eagerly waiting to switch to NBC for Conan when I fell asleep. I actually thought I had flipped over to NBC until I realized the tv was still on CBS when I woke up this morning. I pulled the couch apart, digging under the cushions and into the cracks, but I can't find it anywhere. I looked under the couch and all over my apartment, but I don't see it anywhere. I don't know what to do next. I want my remote back, damn it.

I should have left for work an hour or more ago, but I got too caught up in other pursuits. Since I'm planning on beginning work on another site redesign soon, I started out by surfing around and checking out page layouts and such of other people. It didn't help much since I already have a good idea of what I want to do anyway, but that killed a lot of time. I then got inspired to search out as many of my old pages and designs as I could find so I can "archive" them. Think of it as a project to preserve old screenshots. Many of my old pages are lost, but I still managed to find more than enough nostalgic old sites. Then, just as I was finishing that up, I happened to check a list of recent referers to my site, and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the rather normal searches that have brought people here. While most people get weird visitors in search of sex sites, I get people genuinely in search of real information. Some of my most recent visitors have come searching for:

• love myself
• civic window crank
• "koroch"
• mother anglica
• high school girls teams height weight
• abdominizer

I was actually a little disappointed by the one for Mother Angelica, because not only did the person misspell her name, but it also showed me that I had misspelled it as well. Oops. Oh well, I don't know how much longer that part of the site is going to exist anyway.

How did it get to be Monday again already? Oh yeah, that's right... nevermind. It shouldn't be such a bad week. Tom's in Cali, so we don't have class Wednesday night. I don't have to work next Sunday, as Nicole signed up for my shift. I could use the hours, but it'll also be nice to have a Sunday off. I have to work today, but hopefully it won't be too bad. We had 175 people show up for Love Letter from Somalia yesterday, which was followed by having to cancel the next show because only 2 people showed up. Ah, the contrasts. Even those two only came because they had originally showed up on Saturday, but arrive late and didn't want to enter late. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had anybody show up. Al was there and he freaked out when those two told him they never see posters in Folwell anymore. I tried to explain to him how since the beginning of last Summer they've been tearing down our posters in Folwell faster than I can hang them up, but he was having none of it. A high school girl from one of the suburbs was writing a story on local movie theaters, so she interviewed me about the film society. I think I helped her out - I think. I returned home last night, watched the closing ceremony of the Olympics, and then I watched some show on PBS about Octopusses. I wanted to watch the show about Dillinger, but the replay didn't come on until 2, and I fell asleep about that same time. You know how it goes.

Interesting...

Apparently, if one enters "bible trivia questions for 2002" into Lycos, the TMTitP website comes up #10 out of over 4,000 web search results. I guess we're big in the Bible Belt. We also got a recent visitor from Case Western searching for "booty pants photos" on Google. In fact, running a search on Google, I see we are the #1 web result when searching for booty pants photos. So, for now on Too Much Trivia in the Pants shall be your one-stop booty pants photo center. It's not quite the same as the person who found us while searching for herbal hangover cures a month ago, but "booty" is quickly becoming one of our most popular search keywords again.

I tried really hard to keep Friday as uneventful as possible, and it would seem that I succeeded in that endeavor. I did walk over to Nicollet Village Video and rent The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, but I haven't gotten a chance to watch either one yet. They're the next two I need to watch and write short papers on for the Bergman class. I just finished the assignment for the first film, so now I can move on. As a note to myself and anyone else who might go there, if you ever rent movies from Nicollet Village Video, always get 4 movies. Everyone knows of their deal of 4 moves 4 days 5 bucks thanks to the commercials with everyones favorite endorser Fancy Ray. Well, it cost me almost $5 just for the 2, so it would have been economically much smarter for me to just get 2 more right away. Although I should spend this afternoon working on homework, I'm really tempted to go out and enjoy this afternoon's beautiful weather before it gets cold again over the next few days. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

I don't actually know if any of the members of Too Much Trivia in the Pants ever read what I post here, but if you're interested, I happened to come across the score sheets today from the 2001 contest. I was asked several times over the course of the weekend this year how our score compared with the previous year, and I never had an answer, but now I can tell you definitively that the big difference between 2001 and 2002 was our Sunday performance. At question 50, we had 220 points in 2001 and only 175 in 2002. As of question 200 (about halfway) in 2001, we had 495 points, while at question 200 in 2002 we had 490. The second half of the contest is where we really made a good run in 2002, and of course everyone knows that we finished with 770 points in 2001 as compared with 1005 in 2002. I suppose that means that everyone didn't tire out and go home in 2002, as we kept up the pace. Well, just thought I'd mention all of that for anyone who cares.

I got an email from Frank Springer today. I don't think he remembers me, but he thanked me anyway for supporting him. I also finally checked my email from my mom, and as expected, she bitched me out for swearing so much. Then she offered up the excuse for me that Mike has been leaving the computer signed on all night downloading because he doesn't have school. What? Sometimes my mom can be really nice, and sometimes she can be a complete idiot. This was an idiot time.

Boy, does time ever fly! Frank Springer is up for re-election again already for 1. Bürgermeister Neuötting. I just left a message on his guestbook, but I haven't seen him in almost 3 years, so who knows if he even remembers who I am. Looks like Phisch's dad is up for Stadtsrat as well. So, good luck to both of them in their upcoming elections!

I'm such a wuss.

I haven't checked my main email address since sending my mom that last email. I know there's going to be a message from my mom chastizing me for all the swearing in my last email. I don't really want to deal with it, even know I know I'm the one who sent the stupid email in the first place. Poop.

I did end up going in to work early on Monday after I realized I had nothing better to do than watch the Minnesota Senate on tv. After work I made the run around to three area video stores before finally finding a copy of Sawdust and Tinsel at World Beat. I brought it home and watched it right away. It's the first film I need to watch for my IDL Bergman class. I dubbed it as well, as I will probably do with all the films I need for that class. Then I fell asleep with the tv and lights on again.

I walked in to class on Tuesday right as the prof was taking attendance. There weren't many seats left, and it didn't help any that this dumb chick was taking up three seats herself. She reeked like moth balls also, but I ended up having to sit next to her anyway. Two seats in the other direction, a guy had a Thermos of some coffee-drink, the smell of which was competing with moth ball girl for attention from my sense of smell. Needless to say, I was happy when class was over. There wasn't a whole lot to do back at work. Shit, there was nothing to do, which is why I probably won't even bother trying to go in on Wednesday. Al's back from Berlin. He, Kyle, and Adam spent the afternoon "debriefing," so I spent the time answering the phone. Trained the new girl again tonight. She's a little forgetful, but she's new and probably nervous - I think she'll be fine once she gets the hang of it. I tried to get her to come into the office and meet Al tonight, but she didn't think she was ready for that yet.

I'm kind of hungry, but I shouldn't be snacking, and I don't really have any decent snack food anyway. I should go to bed instead of eating. I first went online hours ago with the purpose of doing my German web entry, but never signed off again after finishing it. I guess this is just something to help keep me awake while I listen to Al Malmberg.

I'm hoping my car doesn't die before summer. I noticed a few days ago that an extant part of my rear bumper seems to be rusting. I had to pour power steering fluid in again today, the second time in recent months I've had to do that. We had major problems with that when we first got the car, but it hadn't really caused problems in probably 4 years. I just hope I don't have a big leak again.

All I can think about is how hungry I am. And that I need to fold my laundry and put it away. And that I should probably be sleeping instead of listening to Al Malmberg and making pointless blog entries.

Doing my laundry right now. I also just sent my mom a really bitchy, profanity-laden email about my brother, who lately has been leaving the family computer signed on to AOL almost 24 hours a day so he can download shit. There's no need for that. We also can't go on the computer and sign him off, because he password-protected his log-on on XP, so the only wat we can get around it is just to reset the computer (which I've done to him before, but it's kind of hard to do that from 300+ miles away). I didn't end up accomplishing as much yesterday as I had hoped. I showed up at the Bell, and Anna the new girl was there. Apparently Adam was supposed to tell me she was coming on Sunday instead of Monday, but he never got me the message. So, I trained her in as much as possible, and now she's going to return on Tuesday night to finish training. I was really antsy to get home, but when I did return home, I wasn't up long and I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up at 2 and shifted over to my bed - the first time I've slept there since the night I returned here with my parents after winter break. I was so wide awake at that point that it took me another 2 hours to fall back asleep, but eventually I did, and I woke up again 8. I'm getting kind of hungry, so I might start making lunch soon. I think I'm going to go in to work early for lack of anything better to do (other than homework, of course).

Yay me! I finally typed up my first assignment for my IDL class. Now only 8 more to go. At least the other 8 are all on films and not just some crazy French guy's rambling and barely-coherent theories.

Sheesh - it's not even 6:30 and here I am falling asleep. I vowed not to do any homework yesterday, and I kept that vow. Unfortunately, that means I have to make up for it today by doing homework, which I am still yet to touch. I've pulled the books out, but haven't begun to start reading. Also, after talking to Molly yesterday, it occured to me that I really should start turning in my IDL class assignments. Time is ticking on the semester, and I haven't been doing any work on the IDL class or my paper. If I want to graduate, I have to finish both of those as well. Oh poop.

Well, I guess the good news is that I'm feeling a little better than I was last night. A good night's sleep has calmed me down somewhat. I'm still a little mad about what transpired last night, but at least I'm not completely upset about it anymore. I was going to spend all day working on homework today, but now I'm thinking that maybe I'll just take it easy and go for a walk or something. Anything to calm myself down farther and try to forget about these last couple weeks. I think my homework load is going to start dropping a little now, so that should help decrease some of the stress I've been under lately as well.

Happy... uhhh... Valentine's Day. And stuff.

It was aweful. My presentation tonight went absolutely horribly. Most of that blame can be put on the fucking jackass grad student Constantin. First, we were supposed to meet as a group at 5. The other member of the group showed up, but the cocksucking grad student didn't bother showing up until 5 minutes before class started. When we went to do our presentation, Constantin just sat in his seat and told me to do his presentation for him! What the fuck?! Okay, if he wanted me to present his part, that might have been okay had he showed up at the meeting like he was supposed to and told me he was going to pull that shit, but it's definitely not okay to pull that when I'm up in front of the class. I just got so completely flustered that I completely flubbed the presentation as I stumbled over my own words and skipped over points I wanted to make. I looked like a complete jackass up in front of the class, and it was all Constantin's fault. I'm not usually a violent person, but I wanted nothing more than to kick that shit out of him at that moment. I still feel that way. Let's just say he'd better not encounter me in a dark alley, or he may not leave that alley in a whole world of pain. I was just so emabarrassed tonight. Actually on the way home I just wanted to cry. Ugh - I'm so frustrated right now. These last few weeks have been a living hell, and I'm just drained physically, mentally, and emotionally. More simply said, I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I'm really in no shape to deal with much of anyone right now. I don't know.

Fuck McLeod, Hello Qwest

I didn't have a good day yesterday. In fact, my day was down right lousy. I'm working on turning that around though. I spent the early part of the day doing homework, but it began to turn ugly when I was leaving for the day and I checked my mail. My first phone bill from McLeod had come, in addition to a postcard from Qwest begging me to come back. Of course, I was most interested in the phone bill, so I pulled it out, and how much did those bastards want from me? $46.22! I should mention that that actually covers almost 2 months, so it's not that outrageous. What I was most upset by is when I saw how much the basic monthly phone service was running me - $18.67. The con-artist who convinced me to switch over claimed he could save me money even after I told him I had a basic phone line and was only paying $14.90 a month to Qwest. So, of course I was pissed off, and my day didn't start well. My time at work wasn't all bad - I finally got Lindsey to sign the student group thing, so I got that taken care of, and I got my certification letter from the registrar's office so we can prove to the insurance company that I'm still a student here. Back in the office, I did the deposit, and they hired a new guy to take Adam's box office shifts. The box office last night went smoothly as well. Things started to turn again on my way home. Being rather hungry, I first stopped at Big Ten to pick up a sandwich and fries on my way home. The sandwich was done right away, but it took an additional 15 fucking minutes for the fries. Of course, by then the sandwich was starting to get cold, and the fries were very overdone. And to think I was starting to assume they had to go out back and grow the fucking potatoes first! I went home and ate, and then I decided immediately to call McLeod and tell them I wanted to switch back to Qwest. I had to wait on hold for 15 minutes before I got to talk to the first operator. After telling her I wanted to switch back to my old provider, she said she had to transfer me to another operator. I was on hold waiting for that operator for over another half hour. After talking to her, she basically couldn't do anything for me either, but told me a rep would call me in the next few days to straighten out the details of my switch. Goddamnit. By this point I was just pissed off and no longer had any interest in working on homework, so I plopped down on the couch and fell asleep watching tv. I called Qwest this morning about making the switch, and they told me not only would they deal with McLeod for me, but they would also credit me $35 (which amounts to nearly 2 free months of phone service after taxes and surcharges).

I also got an email this morning from "the grad student." He once again proved to me how useless grad student are. He tried telling me that, well, here, I'll just quote him, "Regarding the handout, it is not absolutely necessary to have one. So we can spare our energies...". Yep, his exact words. Now, if I may redirect you to our syllabus, point #4 under "Guidelines for Class Presentations" quite clearly states, "The group should prepare a one-page summary in prose or outline form as a handout for the class." Grad students are such fucking idiots. He also told me that if I really wanted to do one anyway, he'd be willing to email me his part of the presentation, so I could put together the outline. He also wanted me to do post the question on WebTC for the class discussion, which I did quite aptly on Thursday night thank you very much. You can bet I'll be talking with Rick to let him know how I did the majority of the work on this fucking presentation, while those lazy fucks (or more specifically just Constantin) rode on my shirt tails. Man, am I pissed off. I have so much shit to do, I don't really need this in my life. I'll be so happy when this is all over with. I just keep repeating to myself, "May 19th, 7pm. May 19th, 7pm. May 19th, 7pm...."

Oscar nominations are out, so I guess it's now time for my annual bitch session. Let's just work right on down the list, shall we?

Best Picture: Actually no real surprises here. Admittedly I've only seen one of these films, but from what I've read and heard from others, all 5 were to be expected. The nom given to Gosford Park could have gone to several other films as well, such as Memento, but that's not to say Gosford Park didn't deserve the recognition.

Best Actor: The big surprise of the group, although some might claim they saw it coming, has to be Sean Penn. On the other hand, the glaringly missing include Billy Bob Thornton and Gene Hackman.

Best Actress: The only real surprise here is Judi Dench for Iris. I've never even heard of the film, have you?

Best Supporting Actor: Surprises here? Everyone but Ian McKellen and Ben Kingsley. I'm especially left asking, "Where the fuck is Steve Buscemi's name on that list?!" JonVoightEthanHawkeJimBroadbent?! That's a funny way of spelling his Steve Buscemi.

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Connelly is probably going to win anyway, so I won't even bother with the other four.

Best Director: I've heard some tv people already comment on Ron Howard being the surprise, but I think the real surprise is Ridley Scott getting the nomination over Baz Luhrman. Of the major categories, this is the one that could possibly be the most wide open.

Best Original Screenplay: Memento got nominated in the wrong category - it's based on a previously written story. Apparently that didn't deter anyone from giving it the nomination here. No surprise among Gosford Park or Monster's Ball. Nice to see The Royal Tennenbaums and Amélie get some recognition.

Best Adapted Screenplay: The biggest surprises here were Shrek and Ghost World. I loved Ghost World (my personal favorite film of the year), but since it got snubbed everywhere else (and it's not going to win here), I'm really surprised that Oscar voters even saw fit to give it a nomination.

The Rest and Miscellaneous: Amélie picked up 5 nominations in total, but will probably only one - Americans don't like foreign films. The Man Who Wasn't There picked up one nomination - Best Cinematography. Oscar people don't like the Coen's, so every year they nominate their current film for Best Cinematography and push it aside. Is anyone really surprised that Lord of the Rings picked up the motherload of technical nominations? This year's categorical battle between shitty films? Best Visual Effects - nominees include A.I. and Pearl Harbor. Oh, Lord of the Rings got nominated there also. Vanilla Sky got mostly pushed aside as well, but there really was some stiff competition this year. Paul McCartney got the film's one nomination for Best Song. Woowoo. Although I think it's of the utmost importance that the Academy recognize achievements in technical categories, it seems every year some piece-of-shit film wins for a technical category and then we forever have to refer to that film as an Oscar winner. That's kind of like the sour taste left in your mouth after having to say, "Trent Dilfer - Super Bowl Champion Quarterback." Pearl Harbor and A.I. picked up 6 nominations between the two of them, so who knows what may happen. Of the five categories better known as Films of Which You've Never Heard, Promises (nominated for Best Documentary Feature) screened here at the film society last fall during the Jewish Festival, while Amélie is this year's virtual lock for Best Foreign Language Film.

Apparently this big snowstorm we were supposed to get never panned out. It rained for a large chunk of the day yesterday, but the precipitation never managed to materialize into snow. Stayed too warm. So, looking out the window, everything got wet, but there is no snow cover. It cleaned my car too, so that was nice. I'm not certain how slippery it is outside, but the sidewalks were a little slick when I walked to the store last night. Hopefully some people got out and put salt down on the sidewalks. I'm sure the city did, so even though my car got cleaned by the rain yesterday, it'll be covered in salt again soon enough.

I should point out to all of you who read this and may try calling me that I now screen all of my phone calls. Telemarketers don't leave messages, if you know what I mean. So if you're calling me, I may in fact be here, but I don't answer until you've begun leaving a message. If it's not important enough to leave me a message, then the phone call must not really be all that important, now is it? Anyway, so if you want to talk to me, now you know to leave me a message. That is all.

It seems I can have nothing but problems with my German class tonight. First I got the idiotic email from the grad student, and now when I'm trying to post my weekly response to the readings, I've tried atleast 7 times, and every time it fails to work. Luckily I remembered to copy and paste it this time so I didn't lose all of my work. I saved the response on my computer and I also emailed it to the professor. Sometimes I just hate technology - like when it fails to work properly.

Wonderful. Just what I need. I sent an email to my presentation group today trying to organize us a little bit, and the grad student in the group sent back an email with completely different ideas, demonstrating once again why I can't stand grad students. When the prof organized the groups, he made sure that there was atleast one grad student in each group, thinking that they might have more experience in giving in-class presentations than the rest of us. Of course, I've had two previous classes with this prof, including what was essentially the same class with the same assignment, except we had to do it twice during the semester instead of only once (since there were half as many students in that class as there are in this one). It's not that I'm against using other people's ideas, but his email demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the assignment. It seems it may turn out that the biggest difficulty in this assignment won't necessarily be the assignment itself, but rather dealing with the other members of my group. Why do grad students have to be such cluelessly know-it-all snobs? Geez - makes me think twice about whether I really want to go to grad school or not.

I'm about to go to bed, but before I do, I want to give a big "Hola!" to everyone in the great state of Canadia. Hola!

As of 5pm this afternoon, I posted the redesigned Too Much Trivia in the Pants website. Since I'm going to be re-creating the team's user interface for the contest, the page itself was now open to be more of a public display. It's really nothing special, just the old page slightly spiffier. I needed something to do as a break from doing homework, but now it's time to get back to the homework.

I just finished posting the pictures from the 2002 trivia contest on the website. I started with 79 pictures from the contest and 25 from the trip back to Minneapolis, and I narrowed it down to 32 pictures which I posted. Most of the pictures turned out much darker than I had expected, but I suppose that's what happens when you're shooting on the fly instead of taking the time to make sure the lighting and flash were right on all of them. Oh well, I think the 32 I posted are good enough. I tried to find enough to get atleast one picture of as many people as possible, but I guess some people I never snapped photos of. Well, atleast that's done.

Looking for a job sucks ass.