I picked my brain just now, but the only thing that came up was how annoying I think it is that the E-surance chick is so frikking hot. She's a cartoon. It's just not right. But I guess it's not too abnormal to find a cartoon attractive, since every male over 20 years of age knows he's lusted after Jessica Rabbit at least once.
Speaking of Jessica Rabbit, I found a blog where this dude takes animated notables and uses Adobe Photoshop to manipulate and combine elements from celebrity and model photographs to recreate the toons in such a way as to portray "what they would look like if they were real."
Yeah. It's pretty freaky.
There is a graphic novel series called Flight. There are 5 isses and I want them all. Basically they are compilations of animated short stories that speak through their art more than anything. It's an amazing series to be sought out by casual readers and collectors alike. You should check it out. And then buy the books.
Ok, we're kind of on a roll now...the gears are turning, the fingers are typing...we might actually get somewhere with this post after all.
WARNING:
The rest of this blog post contains material of substance and you might have to put some of your brain cells to work, should you choose to continue. You have been warned.
I got a promotion. Instead of processing the work that the researchers send me, I'm now among the researchers that send work for the processors to do. I'm no longer on the bottom rung of the research/processing food chain. I don't think I've been this happy with my job since I coached gymnastics under Greg Schram. Those were the days.
We've moved from a throw-all-our-bills-in-a-stack-on-the-desk system to a file-them-away-in-a-3-ring-binder system. I've been making some changes in the way we budget, and am in the middle of writing a program that will import bank statements from .html, .xml, or .rtf files into an interactive spreadsheet which will log all of our previous deposits and expendatures, calculate our balances and project future spending based on our previous spending patterns, alerting us of changes we will need to make in order to achieve the most efficient debt/income ratio and build maximum savings. On the side, it will have a calculator in which you input your hours from a printed time sheet and, based on your hourly wage and income tax, it will give you the exact amount you can expect to receive in your next paycheck - to the cent. Suffice to say, we are turning over a new leaf in the financial planning slice of the priority pie chart of our lives.
I've realized that I am not a teacher. I just don't have the gift. What I teach on guitar, you can't really just pick up a book and learn in a week. In fact I haven't yet found a guitar book anywhere that uses my approach about how to learn guitar. But, it's really something that, if I walk you through it for a month or two and you practice the whole time, you'll be amazing and I will have nothing left to teach you and you won't need me anymore. So instead of teaching private lessons, I think I'm going to finally finish a project I start and write my own "how to learn how to play guitar" curriculum. Then, I can pitch it as a course to music stores and high schools and do a two-month structured weekly summer class every year and feel like I'm actually getting somewhere in teaching guitar, rather than wasting other peoples' time and money showing them how to do things they can look up on the internet for free.
If you're still reading this and you're not me, then you're either entirely too interested in my life or just ridiculously bored. Either way, I would advise you turn on your TV and watch the rest of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" because it's probably playing right now on one of the 9 channels you receive on the hand-me-down "bunny-ears" TV antenna you got from your dad when he upgraded to HD. Yeah. I'm reading your blog too.
