Category: Life

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A few weeks ago I was looking at the website error logs and noticed some attempts to access images with names like /flash/images/%20%20%20%20%20%20%20ans3.jpg. I got around to looking at it today, and all of them are the same name, all of them from browsers looking at my profile of the Teen Titans, which includes an image called teentitans3.jpg.

I finally realized what’s going on. Some moronic filter has broken up the name not as “teen titans” but as “teen tit ans,” decided it must be porn, and replaced the “offending” words with spaces (%20 is the code for a space in a URL).

It really makes me wonder how badly mangled the page looks to these people, especially if it turns out that every instance of the team’s name gets pointlessly erased.

Further reading: The Censorware Project, Peacefire, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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We got home tonight, after a good round of beer therapy and poking fun at the evil that is casual dinnerware, and found that we now live in Aliso Springs. They didn’t change the city name, mind you, just the name of our apartment “village.” We’d been wondering how they were going to handle having painted over the metal number plates affixed to our doors. Now we know: artsy little ceramic number plates affixed to the stucco, using slightly eastern script for the “Aliso Springs” and that much-too-popular raggedy calligraphy one for the numbers.

Gag me. These people need to get a clue. This place was never high-class and it’s never going to be. And, considering how frelling expensive it is to live in the kind of place they want to turn this into, it shouldn’t be, not in this area.

I think I need more beer therapy.

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For those who are wondering, we’re still in the process of registering. We’ve got a partial registry at Target so far, and by the end of the week, we’ll also be registered at Robinsons-May.

(It’s been kind of tricky, since we already have a lot of the things people tend to register for. You know, toasters and stuff. So we’re trying to choose things we haven’t gotten around to picking up, or things that are worth replacing with newer/better equivalents.)

We keep talking about registering at Fry’s, but we’re not sure they’d even have a wedding registry!

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Remember the song “How’s it Gonna Be” by Third Eye Blind? When it was new, a lot of high schools apparently chose it for the prom theme, proving that teenagers don’t actually listen to the lyrics (it’s a breakup song), which should mitigate parental concerns about explicit lyrics.

Anyway, Katie and I were talking about this the other day and started tossing around titles of songs that would be just plain wrong to play at a wedding reception.

  • You Oughta Know (Alanis Morissette)
  • Paradise by the Dashboard Light (Meat Loaf)
  • Song for the Dumped (Ben Folds)
  • Closer (Nine Inch Nails)
  • Brick (Ben Folds Five)
  • Playboy Mommy (Tori Amos)
  • Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Deep Blue Something)
  • Anything But Down (Sheryl Crow)
  • Back to Good (Matchbox 20)
  • Me and a Gun (Tori Amos)
  • Anything by Liz Phair
  • Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning) (Vertical Horizon)
  • Guys Like Me (Aimee Mann)
  • Anything by Evanescence or Linkin Park
  • Melanie (“Weird Al” Yankovic)
  • Almost anything by They Might Be Giants
  • Don’t Stand So Close to Me (The Police)
  • Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles)
  • I Touch Myself (The Divinyls)
  • Anything by Rammstein
  • Gollum’s Song
  • Anything by the Chipmunks
  • I Don’t Like Mondays (Boomtown Rats)
  • Anything by Nirvana
  • I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying (Sting)
  • King of Pain (The Police)
  • I’m Still Remembering (Cranberries)
  • One More Minute (“Weird Al” Yankovic)
  • If I Were Brave (Shawn Colvin)
  • Jumper (Third Eye Blind)
  • Yesterday (The Beatles)
  • Roxanne (The Police)
  • I’ll Never Tell (Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling)
  • Anything by Garbage
  • Positively Fourth Street (Bob Dylan)
  • Torn (Natalie Imbruglia)
  • Taxi (Harry Chapin)
  • The Freshmen (Verve Pipe)
  • Power of Goodbye (Madonna)
  • Waitress (Tori Amos)
  • Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler)
  • Uninvited (Alanis Morissette)
  • Unsent (Alanis Morissette)

We’re not sure about The Highwayman and Lady of Shalott (Loreena McKennit), since the subject matter is wrong, but they’re quiet and unobtrusive.

This is an open list – feel free to add your suggestions! The idea is not just to get something that isn’t appropriate, but something that’s especially inappropriate (breakup songs, twisted relationships, put-down songs, etc.)

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Well, not often, anyway. But occasionally, twice in one night.

Last night, Indie 103.1 (yes, they’re still on the air) played a listener request for “Bohemian Rhapsody” – and then didn’t play the song.

Later on, they played a string of people calling in and saying things like “You guys suck!” and “Why don’t you play a little trance and techno while you’re at it!”

At least they’ve got an attitude.

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I am honestly in complete confusion as to why all wedding vendors and personnel seem to feel it’s necessary to rebuke us for not arranging everything a year in advance. Sure, we procrastinated like nobody’s business, but we were already getting this at T minus 6 months. What do they do with people who have 6-month engagements, tell them they’re really getting off to a bad start planning their lives together? It’s not like we can say, “Oops, my bad, we’ll remember that for next time.” This is a field where what everyone says doesn’t always go, and the 10% who don’t follow the rules seem to have the best time and come out the least scathed. So it’s natural that I, as one of the 10% in most other arenas, would attempt to bull my way through this. In retrospect, that was a bad move, if only for the flood tide of social censure I’m enduring just because bouncy people make me nuts and I like to avoid them.

But anyway. Do these people not talk to each other? Do cake decorators never speak with dress shop attendants and find out that all their wedding planners give people the same advice? More importantly, do they think this is in any way endearing to the customer, or that it’ll make them want to recommend the facility to someone with better planning skills? Especially when the customer is sick to death of being told how insufficient she is and just wants the thing around the corner to knock her cold when it comes at her out of the promised nowhere so she can wake up after the wedding and go on with her life.

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