(no subject)

Gahhh, flashback! Does anyone remember a show on TBS in the early '80s that featured people playing video games against one another?! Pengo, Sinistar, Defender, Frogger, Time Pilot, all that shit. I used to watch that show all the time!

(no subject)

I found it--STARCADE! Check out the website, yo!







Remember that Journey game?!? And I had totally forgotten that there was a video game called Pooyan. Sounds like a euphemism for a cooter. "He grabbed her right in the pooyan, he did."

(no subject)

All right, here's another TV show that I can't remember the name of. It also came on TBS, but it was even further back, like probably '78 or so. It was this Japanese show that featured these guys--maybe even robots--who could turn themselves into these bad-ass rocket jet plane kind of deals, and they'd fly all over the place and . . . I dunno, like fight evil or something. And there was a mountain or volcano or some shit that they lived in--Mount Olympus, maybe?!? The robot guys wore different colors, and the rocket ships they turned into were the same colors. . . . I think there were three of them--gold, red, and something else. And I think one of them was the leader and turned into the biggest rocket ship while the other ones had like rocket envy and stuff. I guess it was sort of like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, but it was way before that. And it was like hardcore and shit. Does anyone remember that?!?

(no subject)

I found it! SPACE GIANTS. And it looks even cheesier than I remembered it. I'd forgotten about the little kid with the antennae hat! And look at the villains!







Here's the message-board thread where I found it. I know nobody else remembers the show, but this is a huge load off my mind. You have no idea how long this has been bugging me. I was beginning to wonder if Jason, Wes, and I had made the whole thing up in our minds.

lj-cut? what's that?

Well, I'm damned glad this week is over--except for the fact that next week follows it. The strike is going to start Monday. They're going out from Monday through Friday, then coming back to work until the students come back from spring break on the 24th. And then they might go back out if negotiations haven't progressed.

I'm about 90% sure that I'm not going to strike. (How can you be 90% sure of anything? I dunno, but that's about how I feel.) I just don't feel like the union is being straight with what they're telling me--not that they're telling me a whole hell of a fucking lot. The biggest bone of contention between the union and the university seems to be the union's support of the graduate students who are trying to form their own union. My issue is not so much with the graduate students' desire to form a union as it is with the fact that full-time employees are being held over a barrel for something that's not any of their concern. (And truth be told, I do wonder a little bit about how dire these students' situations are. They get paid a HELL of a lot more than I did as a T.A., AND they're getting Yale degrees. And isn't being poor while you're in school just part of the goddamn process? I always thought it was sort of a rite of passage. But anyway.)

While I know that Yale is really hard-ass in these negotiations and probably takes advantage of a lot of its employees, the way the union does business also really rubs me the wrong way. Honestly, I don't feel like a part of the university anyway. The press is its own entity in most respects; we just happen to be bound in certain ways by the university and the union. So I already feel that way, and while negotations have been going on for the last freaking YEAR, the union has basically TOLD me that I'm not an important part of the university OR the union by not telling ANY of us here at the press what's going on. (Some of the acquisitions assistants and I did finally have lunch with some union reps (volunteers, not even paid reps) on Wednesday, but in my book that's too little too late. And would you believe that one of them actually got all huffy when we asked them pointed questions and eventually walked out, saying "I can't do this anymore"?!?)

So I don't feel particularly bound to the union. I didn't pull up stakes and move to Connecticut to join the union; I pulled up stakes to work at Yale University Press. I knew the pay sucked, but what the hell? I don't plan to be in this position for the rest of my life, and I'm damn sure not putting all my hopes on the one or two percent per year that the union might be able to get me. So, not feeling all that aligned with either side, what do I do? After the union people left the other day, someone compared our situation to the 2000 presidential election--the lesser-of-two-evils thing. I joked, "Yeah, where the fuck is RALPH NADER when you need him?" Really, if there were a good way to voice my displeasure with the establishment AND the anti-establishment that has become its own establishment, I might consider that. Maybe I could skip work and start a protest of one. I could wander around campus with a sign reading "fuck all y'all" or something.

I dunno. But unless I have a real change of heart Monday morning, I'm coming to work. I don't know how many other C&Ts will be here. I know of three besides myself. Another person (the one who brought up the Bush/Gore thing) is going to stay home Monday and work the rest of the week. And I've heard some people say that they'll probably strike for a week but not for any longer. I've thought about doing that, but what would be the point? If I'm not down with the strike, I'm not down with it--and if I am, I should be prepared to stay out as long as necessary, right right? Right right. Some people might call me a wuss (or worse) for not striking, but I think it would be even wussier to go out and then come back when the going got tough.

I feel like such an obsessive psychopath going on and on about this. If I were reading someone else go on and on like this, I might think, "Christ, decide what you're going to do and fucking get OVER it already!" But I guess that I just need to get some of these thoughts out--and it is my journal, after all.

(no subject)

In the tenth grade I made a button with Cliff Burton's face on it. Basically I cut the picture below out of a magazine and somehow fastened it onto a button that I already had. Anyway, one day in French class, Michelle Capella asked me, "Is that Jesus?"

"Yes," I replied. "Yes it is. It's a photograph of Jesus."