Author: Jefe

On Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow

or,

You can find me in da club, bottle full of bub, mamma I got whatcha need if ya need ta feel a buzz. Or so it would seem.

Shane Bartell sang the Meow Mix tune at 20X2 the first year, and it stuck in everyone’s head for a little bit. Later I learned that the tune is a great tool for getting rid of other mental detritus. Got the new Madonna track in your melon and need it removed? Meow Mix. Really, it replaces whatever is in there, like a little mental chemical fire extinguisher. The program director at you personal mental radio station playing the local auto dealer’s commercial jingle over and over? Meow Mix. It works, really. Take it from a guy who is subjected to piano bar covers of songs that you were sick of 17 years ago, it works.

On almost everything.

50 Cent is just too strong for The Meow Mix tune. He inta havin’ sex, he ain’t inta makin’ love. A few months ago, I had never even heard of this guy. I like hip-hop just fine, but my tastes run to the experimantal and the old school. I like J-5, bought the new record. I was really upset when Jam Master J got murdered. I wore My addidas, both the shoes and the record, completely to shreds. Hommie, ain’t nothin’ changed, Ho’s down, G’s up. I’m a skinny white-boy, but I got a little street cred, at least on 6th street. N.W.A. ‘s Strait Outta Compton and Public Enemy’s Nation of Millions are two of my all time favorite records, of any genre. 50 Cent is that cat by the bar toastin’ to da Good Life. Kevin was talking about spending some time with a bunch of teenagers doing focus groups in Houston, and how they were all little 50 Cent disciples. So the other day, bored with my CD’s, I foolishly switched to the radio and began surfing through the channels. The DJ announces that 50 Cent is next, and I think, Ok, I guess this is that guy the kids all like, one quick listen won’t kill me. After all, in tha Hood and in L.A., they sayin’, “50, you hot.” I pretty much think that everybody deserves the fifteen minutes Mr. Warhol promised us, so what can it hurt? At worst, I’ll hate it and change the channel. If they hate, then let ’em hate and watch tha money pile up. So the song comes on and, first impression, this guy has got to be on Aftermath Records, ’cause this has got to be a Dr. Dre produced beat. Good Base line, a nice little groove to it. Then he starts rapping. A pretty smooth lyrical style, reminds me a little of Tupac, who I like a lot. His flow, his show, brought him da dough, that bought him all his fancy things. His Crib, his cars, his clothes, his jewels, look homie, he done came up and he ain’t changed. Before I know whats happening to me, I’m digging this song. Thing is, while Chuck D had things to say, this guy doesn’t seem to be rapping about anything other than being a rap artist. He’s obviously one of these lifestyle rap guys like Puffy that turned me off of rap a while ago. Yet, I’m sitting a little lower in my seat, and that hip-hop head nod has started, rhythmically up and down subtly with the beat. If you watch how I move, you mistake me fo a playa or pimp. Both me and 50 are fulla focsed, man, our money on our minds. Before you know it, the song is permanently stuck in my head. After it ends, I’m still humming it, feeling the beat, I even look for it on other radio staions. I realize now that it has happened, much like a thousand times at work. I’ve got that song stuck in my head, and I cain’t ack like I don’ know who he be, nietha. So I pull out my secret weapon.

Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow.

Thing is, it doesn’t work. When 50 rolls twenty deep, there’s always drama in da club. My seemingly infallible escape tactic has failed me. 50 Cent is a more formidable foe than I had antcipated. He been hit wit a few shells, but he don’ walk wit a limp. His plan is ta put tha rap game inna chokehold. He seems to have done it to my brain as well.

That was a week ago. It’s still IN THERE! Nothing I do will get rid of it! I could understand it if it were a day or two. I mean, after all, he got a mil out tha deal, and he’s still in da grind. He must have some talent or Dre, who I learned did in fact get a production credit on the record, as did Eminem, wouldn’t have signed the guy. And shorty’s say she feelin’ his stash, she feelin’ his flow. I downloaded a free mp3 of the tune hoping against hope to just play it to death. It’s all I listen to while I’m at my computer now, over and over, hoping it will wear out. Like when you repaet the same word over and over until it loses all menaing for a little while. If it doesn’t I don’t know what the hell I’m gon do.

Oh well.

(the beat starts right now)

Go shorty, it’s ya birthday!

We gon’ party like it’s birthday!

Sip Bacardi Likes its ya birthday……….

On something funny that Erica reminded me of

or,

I’m struggling with writing something serious, so here’s something funny.

The last credit I took in college was Bowling. I graduated from Texas Tech in August of 1996. I walked in May with everyone else, largely because my mother wanted to see it. I would gladly have ditched the whole cap and gown thing and just accepted my diploma in the mail, but she and Ron paid for four years of school, and if they wanted a show, I figured they deserved to get it. I hope they didn’t see me nodding off during the three hour ceremony, but oh well.

Anyway, I had three classes left to take in summer school that year, and I was staying in the dorms for the summer again which was loads of fun. The dorms during the year were kind of a drag, lots of people eating crummy food, never much privacy, guys stealing my beer out of my little mini-fridge. Plus, the dorm I lived in sophmore-junior years was haunted. But whatever. Summer dorm was cool, mostly because there was only one on campus that was open. It was like going to one of those really small local colleges you see on WB television shows, where you know everyone and friends drop by all the time just to say hi. First summer session I took Spanish, a class I was being forced to repeat ( I still can’t hardly speak Spanish. It is a detestable, ugly language in my ears, not poetic to me at all, and I just can’t get my head around it. This is in no way intended to insult Spanish speaking peoples or Latinos. just a matter of personal taste. Everyone knows how much I despise racism in any form. I wish I liked Spanish, but it’s nails on the chalkboard to me. Sorry.) I think I also took a lab over again, geology. I aced the class but was forced to drop lab or fail it, largely because I skipped it almost every week. The reason for ditching lab during that specific hour of my week can not be disclosed, as she had a serious boyfriend at the time. Oops! Pretty sure he never found out. Ahh, college. Anyway……

Second summer session, I took Bowling.

That was it. Just Bowling. Two hours a day, four days a week. The class was taught by a Teacher’s Assistant, a girl working on her M.S. in Sports Sciences, essentially a Masters in Coaching. Melissa was her name. She was only a year older than I was. I made it a habit to tell her, regularly, that if she failed me in Bowling, I wouldn’t graduate. Tech required PE credits then, I think they have since abandoned it. Every day, it was the first thing I said every time I saw her, in this depserate frantic voice and with fear all over my face. I would corner Melissa, grab her by both elbows and beg, “Melissa, please, if you fail me in this class, I WON’T GRADUATE!”

She thought it was funny. At first.

Melissa began readily assuring me that no one, and I mean no one, failed bowling. Secure in the knowledge that my diploma was safe and my parents would not have to bask in the shame of a child that took more than 4 years to finish college (the horror!), we went to the bowling alley bar and ordered a beer. By the end of the summer session, we were good buddies, Melissa and I. She even dated a friend of mine. The two of us, and the other two guys on my “bowling team” within the class, which was divided into 12 teams of three, were the only people in the class old enough to drink. We drank beer in the bowling alley every day, noon to two. Everyone else in the class hated us. The final test was the tenth frame of our last game. If you bowled a strike with the first ball, you got 100 on the final. A spare got you a 95, nine pins a 90, eight pins and 80, and so on.

I bowled three straight stikes on my final. Who wants another beer?

On Please Please Please DON’T Send in the Clowns

or

How Friday the 13th, the full moon, and Clowns Local 442 ruined my weekend.

The initial conversation was taken lightly. “I have a large group of ….. performers….. all of us a part of a local orginization that are going on a pub crawl next week, and we’d like to come by your place for about a half hour or so.” He wished to pay cover for the entire group in advance. He wanted to limit any hassle that his large group would create for me and my staff. He wanted to be a courteous customer. Then he dropped the other hideously large red shoe on me.

“We’re an orginization of Clowns.”

He was serious.

Two weeks later (clowns have calendar problems, apparently) they Showed Up. 47 clowns in full makeup and gear. No kidding. Literally. None of them were “being” clowns. No flowers squirting. No happy banter. No prat falls. They were REALLY falling down, drunk as skunks most of them. Bad dancing. I asked three of them at the bar, with a big shit eating grin on my face, “So you guys are what? Bankers?” I got back three blank stares. This is what happens when clowns drink. I asked one guy later, “So, ya’ll all came in the same volskwagon?” He stared blankly back and said, slightly confused, “Um, no, we came in a bus.” This is what happens when clowns drink. One of them handed me a twisted mulitcolored construction of balloons that only bore a resemblance to an animal if it were part of said animals DNA chain. I asked him, “Is it abstract?” This is what happens when clowns drink. Later I had to eject one of them because he was geting undressed. In the CLUB! He had his shirt off and was going for his pants when I asked him why, and he responded that, “she wanted me to.” There wasn’t a woman within 20 feet of him.

I kept thinking, “Who are these clowns?”

O Some Things that Never Change

Just because a new contest has started, doesn’t mean the old one has gone the way of the dodo. THe Pez COntest is alive and well, and always will be, Blessed Reader, so send in those Pez now. Leia is our latest winner. She sent me Leia. Cool, huh?

On some thoughts. Of mine. Kinda.

Ok, first, I put up a section with photos from the Chicago trip. This is a really poor way to build a site for pics, I know, and it probably looks awful to all you Mac users, but I DON’T KNOW SQUAT ABOUT DESIGN! In case you didn’t already know that. This site has never been about design, but about content. That it falls short in that area as well, I take full responsibility for. That the rest of it stinks is, well, Kevin’s fault. Not really.

So, here is a thought. Kevin built this page for me and has an idea for a redesign that we have been talking about for, oh, I don’t know, about a year. Anyone who knows Newsums knows that they are slow, not mentally of course, but in most other ways. They take forever to get anything done. This is not a character flaw on their part, just a genetic predisposition, and you learn to love it about them. My favorite Newsum is, in fact, the slowest.

Anyway, back to my thought. (Thank God I only have a few, anyone who knows Jefes knows that they love the sound of their own voice and like to tell long rambling stories that wander all over the place before getting to the point. Thankfully they are usually really good stories.) Alison is working on yet another redsign, all of ’em great, and Karen just had her site redesigned by someone else, the lovely and talented Leia.

I can’t decide if I want my site fixed, expanded, or redesigned fully. So here’s the deal.

Recently, I started the Official Cloudwrangler Softball and Cricket Team. (See, I told you my stories wandered all over the place) Attention all current Team members, both of you, we are now also a Cricket team, better learn to play cricket. It involves wearing white and drinking tea. Anyway, so far there are only three members of the team, myself, Billy, and Jess. They earned their way onto the team as Grand Champions of the Pez Contest for 2002 and Pez of the Month Winners for Jan-April of 2003. You can see the new and fully updated rules of the contest here.

Or, to get onto the team (which doesn’t really play anything, yet) and score yourself a free Jersey like this, here’s what you gotta do. Anyone who can pull these off will recieve unfettered acces to all the relevant server/administrator/hostng/password type areas they might need.

1) I need my positioning fixed for these damn buttons, and any other Mac related viewing problems sorted out. First person to do it gets on the team.

2) I want a comment system for this design. I have tried to half ass one myself several times, all miserable failures. Build me one that uses the pop up windows, and make it look as cool as possible. First person to do it gets on the team.

3) Build and teach me to use a photo gallery type viewing section so I can post my photos within the parameters of the current design and not have to build those lame ass pages like the one I got. First person to do it gets on the team.

4) Submit a redesign for this site. I’ll let you use my webspace if need be, give you complete access to my hosting stuff, all that good crap. It can be Blogger or MoveableType (which I would prefer and am really anxious to use). I want to keep the logo design (the cloudwrangler chopped off font and probably the three cloud square design) in some form, but feel free to play with the colors, whatever you want. Go nuts. Anyone who submits a design, whether it gets used or not, gets on the team.

So I guess this is now officially the Third Cloudwrangler Contest, The Cloudwrangler Redesign Contest. As anyone who particiapted int he first two contests (The Pez Contest and The Chinese Swimmer Haiku Contest) knows, you really can win here at Cloudwrangler.

Easy, right?

On many goings on

Ok, just got back from Chicago, and lots to talk about there personally. Going to see the Matrix in less than two hours, so very excited about that. Lots to do around the House to get ready for SummerBash II: Son of SummerBash. If you aren’t on the E-vite yet, and think you should be, send me a line at jefe@cloudwrangler.com. An all new section of the ‘wranlger comin’ soon, when I figure out how to put up photo sets of my trip pictures, including one of me taking on the most feared predator that ever lived with my bare hands. It looks slightly bemused while I am doing it. Ok, see ya soon, true believers!

On Summer Movies

It’s that time again, everyone. Summer blockbuster season is almost better than Christmas. I am such a geek for this stuff. I like good film too, I love the art in all its forms, but summer movies, I just gotta tell ya, I love ’em. Review for X2 is up in the film section, with many more to come. I promise to keep up this summer. Gonna try to catch Identity this week, and maybe Confidence as well. Plus, only a little over a week until Matrix. I already got my tickets. See ya at the movies!

X-Men 2: X-Men United

Starring Hugh Jackman, Sir Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin, Brain Cox, Alan Cumming, Famke Jansen, James Marsden and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (whew!)

Directed by Bryan Singer

I really do see movies that aren’t based on the comics I read as a kid, I swear. The thing is, none of them are nearly this fun. This sucker is a thrill ride from beginning to end, a great action flick, an honest statement about bigotry, a morality tale, a character study, it’s all there. In the latest installment, The X-Men are hunted by a very human villian, the anti-mutant bigot Col. William Stryker. This provides Singer with the oppurtunity to more fully explore what it means to be a mutant, and on the large metaphorical scale, what it means to be different. Another critic recently wrote that X-Men is about being gay, and he was correct to the extent that X-Men is about being black (which Halle Berry is) or being Jewish (which Magneto is, and Sir McKellen is an openly gay man to boot). This has always been the underlying message in the comic, and Singer (also a gay man) is the perfect director to pay homage to that tradition. He also pays homage to the traditions that the comic hordes demand, keeping the characters true to their roots, and developing persoanl relationships between them that are complex and very real, which is the other reason we love X-Men (When I say we, I mean me). Here, we get a more thourogh picture of Wolverine’s rage at his victimhood, his love for Jean Grey, Storm’s anger at a world that hates her for being different, Nightcrawler’s nobility, here to the point of piety, in accepting his extreme physical differences as a blessing instead of a curse, and Magneto’s deep hatred for those that would persecute him and his people. Here, my only wish is that the deeply passionate side of Magneto were more fully explored. He is a great deal more evil here than when last we saw him, commiting one very painful on-screen murder (and man it was cool looking), and attempting to murder nearly everyone on the planet. The extensive addition of new characters allows what the story telling in the comics allowed for, the ability to see diversity from multiple points of view. Mystique, more fully realized this time and well played by Romijn-Stamos (and hot a fire to boot), carries an indignant anger towards people who presecute her because while she can look like whomever she wants, she choses to look horrific, as is her right. Her anger matches well with Nightcrawler’s noble acceptance. Logan continues to question who he is, the ulitmate self expression everyone goes through, minority or no. Rouge, Pyro and Iceman provide the unique perspective of teens, struggling to define themselves and seeking acceptance from their families and from each other in a world that has defined them as different, the one thing few teenagers want to be.

Ok, and then the MOVIE KICKS ASS! Wolverine must have killed 30 people on screen, no holds barred for him this go-round. Seriously, the first big summer movie blockbuster has nailed it right on the head. 5 Cell phones, but still not as good as the script that I wrote. Thankfully, most elements of that can be translated into a script for the next installment. Look for X3: Rise of the Pheonix in about 2005. Gotta go, lots of writing to do. Excelsior!

On Manipulation, baby

New games are fun. I now own shares of this,this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. Also, in me.

So, will it drive the prices in unusual ways if I say that I own shares of this,this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, and also, in me.

Is this cheating? If so, perhaps I should stop telling everyone that I own shares of this,this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, and also, in me.

I certainly shouldn’t keep writing that I own shares of this,this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, and also, in me.

Should I? If you think I should stop talking about the fact that I own shares of this,this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, and also, in me, then write about it and say so.

Just do it on your page, buddy, I need all the help I can get.

On Creating New Verbs

I’ve often said that my degree in Creative Writing allows me to create my own words at will. Lots of people try this, but their words aren’t REAL words, since they don’t have the certification and training that I and others with similar degrees (comparitive literature, English as a second language, engineering, and well, like word-rendering I guess) have got. So my new verb is Enroning.

I recently got listed on Blogshares, the beta version of an online stock trading game in which other people’s blogs are the stocks.

I have been intentionally trying to sabotage my own stock price.

This ought to prove a good indicator of whether or not the blogshares market functions like the real market. I am Enroning myself in every way I can think of. I recently performed a leveraged buyout of my own stock and then dumped it back onto the market only a few hours later. ALL of it. This drove my stock price down to 1 cent. HA! If, through creative internet accoutning, aka Enroning, my blog I can crash it’s value, I can help the folks at Blogshares perfect their market.

Right?