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Apropos of nothing: my favorite actors, in no particular order:

• Edward Norton
  He’s been my favorite actor for a looong time now. Obviously I loved him in Fight Club, but his characters in The 25th Hour, Death to Smoochy, and Primal Fear are what made me really appreciate his acting. He makes such a great magician in The Illusionist; I found him terrifying in American History X; and yet somehow he is totally believable as an over-enthusiastic children’s TV show host with a myriad of dietary oddities in Death to Smoochy.
• Ewan McGregor
  This is a fairly new development, but after watching him in Moulin Rouge and Big Fish I just found him so endearing. One of my favorite things about him is how genuinely happy he looks when he sings. I put the movie Emma on our Netflix list a while back and was pleased to discover that he sings in that movie too!
• Martin Freeman
  Tim from The Office! The cute fiancé in Confetti! The Shaun look-alike Declan in Shaun of the Dead! ARTHUR DENT! At first when I heard The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was being made into a movie, I was scared, because the TV version of Arthur Dent was PERFECT. He embodied everything that Arthur Dent was in the books and I wasn’t sure anybody else would work, but once I found out it was Martin Freeman, I had confidence that it would all turn out all right, and it did.
• Cary Elwes
  BEFORE YOU SAY ANYTHING, I am speaking of the young Cary Elwes, circa The Princess Bride and Robin Hood: Men In Tights. These are two of my most favorite movies ever. He starts to go downhill after Liar Liar, and lately he’s managed to get himself into crap like The Saw, BUT! Young Cary Elwes is so quirky and cute, and I just can’t help but like him.
• John Cusack
  The first movie I saw that I really got into John Cusack was Better Off Dead. It was one of his first movies and he plays a young man who has just been dumped for the star of the Ski Club at his high school. His suicide attempts are continually unsuccessful and hilarity ensues.

What are some of your favorite actors?

This article by George Saunders had me in hysterics at work:

“Where was I? Ah, yes: I hate Élites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.”

The cadence and the stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences and political commentary just kill me.

This is my second installment of Why I Find the Republican Ticket Terrifying and Why I Think the Democratic Ticket Is Awesome. If you missed Part I, I recommend reading that first.

Onward!
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If you are currently undecided who you are voting for in this year’s US Presidential election, or if you are planning on voting for the McCain/Palin ticket, I implore you to read this post. I am going to try to be as respectful as I can while outlining why I find the McCain/Palin ticket objectionable and why I think you should vote for Obama/Biden.

Part I will discuss the McCain/Palin issues, and Part II will discuss the Obama/Biden issues.

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I technically have two computers – I have my faithful old desktop, a Dell Dimension 8300 that was purchased in 2003 and includes a floppy disk drive AND a ZIP disk drive (woo! Old-school!), and I have my work laptop which is a Sony VAIO thingybob that seems nice. It even has the fancy fingerprint scanner that you can use instead of a password.

Problem is, my desktop has been getting progressively slower and sadder as the years pass. Just recently, it has had some kind of awful spyware-malware-bad thing happen and my Google search results started being redirected and I haven’t been able to access DasBecca which makes me sad (it redirects to an XAMPP splash page for no discernable reason – my hosts file looks normal), and it’s been paralyzingly slow. I ran some spyware controls which got rid of some stuff but it’s still super slow and just… ugh. Nevermind the fact that Firefox 3 never manages to successfully close – I keep trying to open it and it’ll pop up and say “Firefox is already running. Please close down that process or blah blah blah” and I have to open the task manager and shut down the process so I can start it up again. BLEH.

It’s old enough that I’m seriously thinking about replacing it with something shinier and fancier just so I don’t have to deal with it, but I can’t quite convince myself to do it because it would be a pretty hefty investment. I could afford a new computer, I am just not sure if I want to give up on this one yet.

I haven’t reformatted in a while, so as long as I made sure to back up my programs and files I could probably wipe my windows partition, reinstall, and be okay, but is it worth it to try to resurrect a 5 year old computer? Should I give in and get something nicer (like a refurbished Macbook Pro)?

Edited to add: Whoops – by “Dell Inspiron” I actually meant “Dell Dimension” (fixed now) and it turns out that DasBecca is fine in Safari (for PC), so it is just Firefox that is tweaking out on it. Also, my site is back to looking crap on my computer because of some spyware thing – it spaces my comments out by about 600px vertically for no good reason. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Also – I have been instructed to reformat and reinstall Windows. This is probably fine; I have done it a few times in the past. However, I have also been told that I should put the Service Pack updates on CD so when I reinstall Windows I can update it first thing off a CD, not the Internet, because my computer will go down in a fiery mess of malware if I wait for the computer to do its automatic update thing. I find it difficult to believe that my computer would be compromised if the very first thing I did was do all the automatic updates and installed an antivirus program, but please correct me if I’m wrong. Do I need to back up SP2 onto disc? If so, um, how do I do that?