Formerly Painful Brain Surgury

I assume without checking that the HBO show Rome is historically accurate. I find it surprising, therefore, that they performed brain surgery in ancient Rome. And I find it disturbing that they did it with no apparent anesthetic. Most disturbing of all is that they actually show it graphically on HBO. Who wants to see glass bits pulled from a brain and a metal plate inserted below a man's head flesh? Not me.

Luckily the show provides much more graphic sex than brain surgery; I don't mind that so much. I guess I'll keep watching.

UPDATE: Liepa found out that the brain surgery was authentic.

The View from the Glasgow Tour Bus

Can't tell what this lovely scene is? Here's a closer up look:

Real Pain

If youve never picked up a bed by accident when you were trying to just lift up the matress and dropped the whole wooden thing on your foot, you've never felt real pain!

Strategic Command (1997) is the most ridiculous rip off ever. The Imdb comment states it's a rip off of Air Force One and Executive Decision, which I haven't seen. What I have seen, one of the most watchable movies ever (you can watch it once a month, it doesn't get old), is The Rock (1996). Let's see if I can remember all the matching plot points:

• renegade soldiers break into a facility and steal chemical weapons
• one soldier drops one and is sealed in the chamber to his doom
• a chemical expert is dispached with U.S. soldiers to neutralize the threat
• the soldiers resent being accompanied by an amateur and the one assaigned to watch him gives him a talking to about it
• his fiance/wife, who has just become pregnant, is in harm's way
• a city in California is being held hostage in return for exactly $100,000,000
• only two good guys, the chemical expert and one soldier, make it to the final battle
• the chemical expert defeats the bad guy by smearing him with the chemical, which eats his lungs from the inside
• the expert then has to inject himself in the spine with the anditode (i guess in the rock it's in the heart, so that's actually a big difference)

Real Pain

You never felt real pain unless you've felt this: my special lady gave me a bite of a breadstick on Saturday, and I bit off enough of it that she had to regrip it before pulling it back. She accidentally got a bunch of my whiskers under her thumb when she regripped, and tore half my lip off trying to get her bread stick back. Well, that's what it felt like, though there wasn't acually any blood or tearing of anything...besides breadstick.

I'd get a cat, but she'd probably eat more than the mice

I got these two mousetraps set, with cheese. However, the mice don't go for the cheese, they climb all the way to the stove top and eat the top off the whole leftover meatloaf I forgot to put in the fridge. (I tend to forget because the kitchen's freezing cold, so it barely makes a difference for freshness where things are left) Goddam! If I didn't have a kid, I'd just cut off the chewed part and eat it anyway. I don't think that's risk-free enough to put my special baby through. I'd get a cat to eat the mice, but I'm fairly certain she'd fill up on the meatloaf and have a fifty fifty shot of sleeping through the mouse pillage.

Idiot

History's greatest monster also has history's dirtiest mouth: Jimmy Carter.

Galas, who the fuck is Galas?

At first, when Living Next Door to Alice came on the radio in Lithuanian, quietly cause it's at work, I couldn't really hear the words, but I sang along the "Alice, who the fuck is Alice" part anyway. When my colleagues, and one student who was with the dean's secretary, looked at me funny, I thought I'd better listen up...turns out in the Lithuanian version, they don't sing about Alice at all, but rather Galas, mano meiles galas... (End, the end of my love) Much More Fun in English!

$90 for a book?!

My father had the tremendous wisdom to know that I would love nothing more for Christmas than to get as a gift all the episodes of The State. I don't remember praising the show as much as loving it on the inside of my head, so, I was excited when he checked to make sure I'd really appreciate it. A month later, I was devastated when he told me it was not going to be for sale, contrary to previous advertisements, MTV had sued somebody for some kind of rights or something, and the issue was not yet resolved. So, now, I thought, my birthday is about a month past Christmas, so maybe the dispute has been resolved, and I should inform my father that he can now get me the gift that will be so good it just might make me ignore the rest of my life until I finish watching it ten billion times in a row. so I put it in Amazon, I’m looking for it, and last but not least, I thought I had it, but instead this book pops up, for ninety fuckin dollars! WTF???

I always thought bombing Iran would be a good idea, but now I know it

Like any good American, when I have to do something I have no interest in doing, I only read the Onion for two hours; after that, I read something more academic. That way, I don't feel bad, because I'm not wasting time, but rather bettering myself. Roaming around political websites because of Iowa yesterday (thrilling!) I happened to read The Case for Bombing Iran because of its interesting title, and I found it to be very interesting indeed.

A little less academic but much funnier than that was another article you should read, Crybaby Kerry.

Eggnut

I made Eggnog 6 times in December, it was so good. It was so fantastically delicious I just couldn't stop making it for every occasion.

1. December 1, Test run (hadn't made it for 11 months, had to make sure it was as good as I remembered it)
2. December 21, Office Party, almost everybody drank it, and more people raved about it than declined to finish, a surprise, since so many middle aged Lithuanian women (90% of my colleagues) are obsessed with no sugar/no fat diets; when I introduced the drink as Eggnog, one of our English language specialists told people around her in Lithuanian "He said it's called an egg's nut."
3. December 22, special wife's Office Party, but I took a bit of it to work myself as thanks to those whose praise was so bountiful
4. December 24, Christmas Eve, Lithuanians for the most part don't drink on this day, so we had to kill the 28 drinks one recipe makes on our own
5. December 26, Christmas Day II, a bunch of relatives came over to help us with the fresh Big Ass Ham we made the day before
6. December 29, Pizza party at Egle and Mindaugo place, including a Speed Quarters Death Match (we pretty much all died, count that as winning or losing, as you wish), during which I had to take six penalty shots of Green 999 back to back as Mindaugas and my special wife kept skipping me back and forth; that's cause I had to keep pouring the drinks myself, I didn't ahve a chance to get out of the loop!

Dos and Don'ts of a trip to Greece

• Do bring your wife!
• Don't have your heart set on your plans: the Greeks might have a national strike, but announce it so late you can't change your flight
• Do spend your now 17 hour layover (due to the strike) in Prague site seeing and buying souvenirs; get on the bus tour, it's a great deal and you can sleep on it if you already know the city well enough
• Don't spring for a nice hotel for the night you now have to spend in Athens (due to the strike); it won't be long enough for you to enjoy it, and the breakfast isn't work 80 euros
• Do pack everything you need for three days into your carry on, because your bags won't be arriving the same day as you
• Don't pay the surprise gratuity they try to force on you in Prague or Ioannina (or anywhere), they're tricky asshole waiters, but you just have to refuse
• Do shotgun beers behind the museum in the dark
• Don't let your digital camera, which has been having problems, freeze (it won't take pictures anymore)
• Do expect snow in the winter, not a tan
• Don't dress warm if you smoke, you can smoke inside everywhere, even the airport
• Do dress warm if you don't smoke, we had to eat outside with our gloves on to avoid you, your clothes, and hair reeking of cigarette smoke from every singe cafe/restaurant/bar.