His face is goofy. His Irish accent is unbearable. His American accent sucks.

We need a new genre. Most of the bands listed on iTunes as “Alternative” just don’t fit, in my opinion. When I think of alternative music, I think back to the good old days when most people were listening to bands like Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli, and the alternative bands were the ones that only the few knew about but totally rocked. Bands like The Mighty Lemon Drops and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Now for one thing, everyone is listening to so-called “alternative” bands. So they’re not really alternative, are they? iTunes even has a genre called “Alterna-pop.” What the crap is that?? An oxymoron. That’s what it is.

For another thing, the bands that aren’t being listened to are still nothing like what we used to call alternative bands. They’re all full of synth and haunting (whiny) vocals; and frankly they all sound the same to me. Alternative should be limited to bands who were making music before this century, because that was when alternative was good.

Can we get rid of the “Alternative” genre for all these new crappy bands? Something like “gargleop” or “poidlepoop”… or we could even just make it simple and change them all to “crap.” Or, we could make all the Mac users happy and call the new genre “Apple Rules” because whenever I listen to this new music misclassified as “Alternative” I always picture some schmuck in Starbucks listening to it on his iPod while tapping away at his Macbook Pro.

Any band labeled “Alternative” I find that I actually deem worthy of putting into my library, I always immediately change it to “Indie” anyway, because I don’t want to get it confused with the real alternative music in my playlists.

Alternative is dead! Long live Alternative!

Reed brought me 2 bottles of Wingers’ Amazing Sauce when he came. So tonight I cooked up a bunch of wings. I even made up some mashed potatoes with a ton of butter. Mmmmm… butter…. Better than Wingers itself! (You can’t get mashed potatoes there anymore. But they used to be really good.) So I had an awesome dinner tonight!

I know the wings don’t look so appealing here as they do at Wingers, because the sauce just slid right off them. But I just dipped them in the sauce and ranch and they were delicious.

p.s. My dipping dishes are the boxes from my business cards that I ordered a while back. Ha ha ha…

p.p.s. An empty coke bottle makes a great potato masher!

Japanese people like to sleep. Anywhere.

I took this photo in Osaka on the subway. It was night but it wasn’t THAT late. Not a rare occurrence either — I have probably seen a thousand people just like this before in Japan. But this one was definitely one of the most awesome.

Well, I had a busy day today.

I awoke from an almost nightmarish dream (as usual) and pulled myself out of bed. It was a beautiful day… not a cloud in the sky and about 95 degrees. I wanted to just hit the pool but I had too much crap on my plate for the day.

I had some work to do and luckily Ryan was still up and I was up early enough to catch him so we finally had a chance to chat after a long time. He helped me with a problem I was having with one of my sites and I uploaded it and called it a day (for web work, at least.)

I decided to use some of my cheddar cheese and taco meat I had cooked a few days before to make some wicked nachos. They were awesome. And I lucked out – Two and a Half Men was on while I ate.

I spent the next few hours polishing up my resumé and making it look really good and shiny. Now it sparkles. The only thing left to do was to get a passport photo and scan that and my diplomas (photos are required on Thai resumés, can you believe it? Also, religion, marital status, and health are also requirements.)

So I donned the top half of my suit (thanks for bringing that from Utah, Reed!) and just wore shorts since I was only shooting my head really. I planned to just mosey down to the photo shop across form 7-11 but, since it was such a nice day I knew even that short mosey was going to be brutal with a suit on. And it was. Of course, when I got to the photo shop it was closed. Shops just close randomly in Thailand. There was a guy with a food cart out front and he motioned that there was another one down the road. So I kept walking in the blistering sun already sweating up my new white shirt, and I never found it. After about 10 minutes walking I turned around and headed back home. So I ended up spending about 30 consecutive minutes out in the sun and still didn’t have my friggin’ photo. I was mad, I tell you!

When I got home I decided I didn’t actually need the physical passport photos yet, I could just take a photo myself and embed it in my resumé file (I still need some passport photos for my visa renewal, but that’s not until next week, and I don’t need to be in a suit.) So I set up a chair in front of my wall and took a timer photo. It came out good enough so I stuck it onto my resumé and was finally finished. Oh, I made sure to change out of my suit as soon as the photo was done.

Then I grabbed diplomas and stuck them in my backpack and headed for the copy shop in the mall near my house. I had them scanned so I can print them off later as needed. I also went to the supermarket next door to buy some black socks and white under-shirts.

I forgot to mention that I had also brought my suit pants with me. Why you ask? Because I’m getting fat, that’s why. All that coke I was drinking. So I headed down to Sukhumvit, where there are lots of custom tailors who are always bothering you to buy a suit. I just went into the first one I saw since they are all the same; and asked them if they could let out the pants so they weren’t so crazy tight on my belly. They said it’s no problem, and then of course tried to sell me on another suit. The alterations came to about 9 bucks and I will pick them up on Monday.

After that I took the boat down to Khao San Road (It was getting to rush hour and a taxi would have taken me like 90 min. The boat is awesome – there’s no traffic on the river and it drops you right at Khao Sarn. It took about 30 min.)

I bought a T-shirt for my buddy Chris and a present for my nephew Kaden who is turning (sigh) 16 years old next week (sorry buddy, it will probably be late.) I also bought a set of candles and had some great Indian food.

Speaking of T-shirts, I saw an awesome one. It was an apple just like the Apple logo, only there was no bite mark. Underneath it said “Fixed it.” I thought this was classic since I’ve never had anything but problems on any Apple computer I have ever used (and I’m not just talking about the old ugly blue ones, I’m including OS X machines too.)

Then I went home and started writing in my blog. But I’m done now.

Some 40-something lady was wearing this shirt in my Thai class.

Cruising around Bangkok you really see some awesome T-shirts. Especially when you look at who’s wearing them. Here are some of the favorites I have seen so far:

• A cartoon raccoon playing a drum-set made out of garbage cans.
• A fat girl on a motorbike wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt
• “My mom rules”
• A crude drawing of a toaster with two little rabbit ears sticking out of one side.
• A Thai grandma wearing a Slipknot T-shirt
• “I taught your girlfriend that thing you like”
• A 40-something lady wearing a Mars Volta tour T-shirt. What the heck??

But my all time favorite was this guy wearing a vintage He-Man shirt. It was awesome! I wanted to ask him if he would trade me for the shirt I was wearing, but I think it would have been too small anyway…

Sorry, I probably forgot more of the funny ones. I know there was more.

As Hollywood prepares to vomit out another putrid sequel to the “Twilight” series, I just have some things to get off my chest.

After being dragged to both of the stupid Twilight movies, I am still puzzled as to the casting of Kristen Stewart as the lead. I do have a lot of problems with this “saga,” but I won’t get into them all right now. But here are a few thoughts about the books/movies…

First of all, after I saw the first Twilight I felt a little bit the same way as I felt after I watched the first Harry Potter. I felt like “Who are these people and why does anyone in the world care what they are doing?” The love story between the girl and the vampire (sorry, I didn’t feel the need to find out their names. I had to hit IMDB just to find out Kristen Stewart’s real name) is completely unexplained. One minute he’s this bitter, surly, misanthropic entity and the next minute he’s got some profound love for a homely, mopey girl with absolutely no personality who just sits around making the same face all day long (I’ll get to the face again later.) Are you people actually buying this?? When did their love develop? HOW did it develop? And most importantly, WHY???? There is absolutely no explanation for it and it makes no sense whatsoever. The vampire hates everyone but suddenly he’s “in love” with – let’s face it – a boring, ugly girl.

She could have been totally hot. Like the most beautiful girl in the world… and a radiant sparkling personality that makes him think “Hey, life’s not so bad being an eternal night-walker when I have this woman around.” But sadly, this is not the case. This is my biggest beef about the movie. She’s neither hot nor interesting.

So, was she like this in the book? Did the author actually describe her to be less-than-average-looking, and completely void of any interesting personality features? Somebody let me know, please.

When I saw the first Twilight movie my very first thought was that they pulled Kristen straight out of the BYU drama program. Everything about her SCREAMS Mormon. And the author is also a Mormon… it wouldn’t be unthinkable that she would push to get one of her old chums into the movie.

So, what were the casting directors thinking when they cast Kristen Stewart as the female lead in a blockbuster movie? They must have been thinking “We need a girl who isn’t pretty, who doesn’t really need to be able to act, but just can make a 1/3rd puzzled, 1/3rd worried and 1/3rd sad face throughout out the ENTIRE MOVIE. And they found that in Kristen Stewart.

I need your help, because I’m still really confused about this. So I decided to make a poll, You guys can tell me if Kristen Stewart is hot and if she needed to be in the movie at all.

Here is the poll (don’t worry, only 2 questions.)

[polldaddy poll=3344228]

[polldaddy poll=3347125]

Lady Gaga is the Ace of Bass of this century.

Anyone who is over 30 years old will get this joke. Anyone who is under 25 will be wondering “Who the crap is Ace of Bass?” Do you see where I’m going here?

Gaga, you are no Madonna. Just wait a few years…

Today I finally went to Carrefour. It’s just a 30 minute walk from my house but in 8 months of living so close I had been too lazy to go. Boy was I missing out! I bought salsa, Heinz ketchup, potatoes, tortilla chips, avocados, sour cream, and cheddar cheese! It was awesome. I’m going to go there every day now.

So tonight I cut up some fresh tomatoes, added an avocado and a little sour cream and salsa, and had chips and guacamole for dinner! Good times…

I just saw two of the raddest lightning strikes I’ve ever seen. They were perfectly whole, no spidery tree-branches breaking off, just a single jagged line cutting the sky in half with its white purple glow. They moved slowly enough that I could see them soaring down the sky from top to bottom, then flashing a final white burst before disappearing. I love lightning..

Oh, and when I spit off of my balcony it went up, not down. Ha ha ha.