I really need a new computer. I bought this computer so long ago that I regularly receive phone calls from paleontologists who want to excavate the data buried deep within its boring beige exterior. How can I be Mighty when I can read War and Peace before my computer finishes booting? Every time I double-click, the hard drive spends the next couple of minutes protesting so loudly that the garbage men knocked on my door and asked me to keep the noise down. Just yesterday, while waiting for PhotoShop to load, I was able to make a life-sized llama out of duct tape, a few coat hangers and some old socks.

I sold it on ebay for $135.

Don’t get me wrong, I really love this computer and it’s served me well over the last few *coughfivecough* years, but I think it’s high-time I got me a new one. Especially since I make my living with it. There comes a time when even old reliable becomes just plain old and not worth upgrading. Why, I bet that if I hadn’t found that book of ‘Ancient Computer Resurrection Rites and Other Satanic Rituals of Evil’ it would have died long ago. So even though I enjoy painting ‘abort, retry, fail’ on my nekkid body while chanting the entire text to The Road Ahead in C++ and dancing to the windows startup song, I think it’s time I broke open the old wallet and bought a new computer. I’m really tired of the strange looks I get from my neighbors the next day. Especially when they shield the eyes of their children and whisper, “Don’t look at the crazy-man, Tommy. He’ll eat your fingers.”

In my defense, it was only one finger and the doctor says the operation was successful so it should heal fine. If the little brat had only let me see his limited edition, gold-foil Pikachu card… bastard.

Anywaste, I’m a busy little Geek today because I’m having a Monday Night Football gathering tonight and I have to get ready. I’m making Cream of Pumpkin Curry Soup, Filet De Tofu with Apricot Dijon Sauce and baklava for dessert. I’ve even made fondue for a snack during the game because nothing says ‘Guys Football Night’ like fondue.

Yeah. Right.

Actually, I’ll probably be making seven-digit pizza or, if I must cook, tacos. Hot, spicy, death-to-your-colon, my-anus-is-bleeding-lava tacos. I think my tacos are really good and a recent survey of prison inmates on death row agrees. According to the study, the inmates preferred eating my tacos to a lethal injection almost 2 to 1!

Wow. If that’s not a ringing endorsement, then I don’t know what is.

HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I might be on TV. Oh yeah, you heard me llama-breath, The Mighty Geek might be coming to a small screen near you.

Yesterday HoBiscuit my girlfriend got wind of a special taping of Inside the Actors Studio starring Will Ferrell of SNL fame. For those of you who don’t know about Will, he does a hilarious impersonation of the host of Inside, whose name is James Lipton. With his makeup on, he even looks like him. So we decided to go over to the New School and see if we could be part of the live audience. Expecting a long line of students and faculty waiting to get inside because every episode I’ve ever seen has a packed audience in attendance, I arrived at the theater two hours early in order to guarantee seats for myself and HoBiscuit my girlfriend.

What can I say, I always try to be early.

When I arrived at the school I politely asked the security guards checking student id’s where I should wait in line for seats. The guards asked me where my id was and I patiently explained that I was not a student and merely wanted to see the performance and would they please tell me where to stand in line. They stood there like cud-chewing cows and blinked at me.

Moments pass.

Trying not to sigh in exasperation, I looked deep into their glassy, uninterested-in-life eyes and tried to make contact with whatever shred of intelligence might have once lived within the confines of their hollow skulls. I reiterated to them that I wasn’t a student and was only there for the show. The guards then explained to me, in small monosyllabic words, that they were clueless, minimum wage morons who were barely able to work up the mental strength to remember how to swallow their own spit and they again asked me for my id.

Lord, give me strength.

After ratcheting down my intelligence to the level of your standard pile of steaming broccoli, I managed to fight through their intellectual deficiencies and finally found myself standing alone outside the main entrance to the theater. Two hours later I could still be found standing there with only HoBiscuit my girlfriend and a grandmother-type woman as company. Apparently, no one at the school or the show bothered to promote this meeting of the minds and therefore no one knew it was taking place except your friendly neighborhood Geek and his HoBiscuit girlfriend.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the old lady was Will Ferrell’s mother.

She spent the time ignoring us completely and simply stood there with a bag of knitting supplies as her only companion and knitted. By the time we got inside she had knitted a pullover, a pair of mittens, two sweaters, a few hats and some square things that looked like mutant red and yellow doilies.

Really, this woman should be on the Team USA Olympic Knitting Brigade.

Anyway, we really enjoyed ourselves because Will was super funny and we laughed like crazy. Even James was funny, which surprised us since he seems so pompous and arrogant on TV. In person though, he was a pretty cool guy who wasn’t at all afraid to poke fun at himself. It took a while for everything to get set up once we were inside and a few students showed up while we waited, so all in all about 40 people were in attendance. We got lucky and sat in the center of the second row, so we have a good chance of being caught on camera.

The show should air October 14th on Bravo as some sort of special intro to the Gene Hackman show, which is also the 100th episode of Inside. If they have any audience shots with us in them I’ll be sure to point it out here. Especially if I’m picking my nose, cause that’s real entertainment for the masses. Nothing like a Geek picking a winner on national television to brighten your day. Only thing more entertaining than that would be watching a seniors bowling competition on widescreen HDTV complete with Dolby Digital sound.

You wouldn’t want to miss it when Old Man Johnson throws his back out shooting for the seven ten split now, would ya’?

Yeah, so I didn’t get to go fishing while I was away. Apparently most ‘normal’ people don’t like to go out into the middle of the ocean on a small boat when it’s raining so hard you can’t see anything five feet in front of your face. Something to do with a ‘Perfect Storm’ or some such nonsense.

Wimps.

HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I woke up at 4:45am to drive for an hour to get to the docks where we were told by a rugged, squinty-eyed, rough-bearded sailor-man that there would be no fishing that day. HoBiscuit my girlfriend thought he was ‘hunky’. He (hunky) explained that even though there were eight of us willing to brave the storm in search of striper, he just couldn’t go out unless he had 14 paying customers so the fishing tour was cancelled. I expressed my understanding by shouting profanities at the heavens while jumping up and down in a large puddle of water. I may have also thrown down and stomped on my hat.

HoBiscuit my girlfriend expressed her embarrassment by shielding her eyes, mumbling apologies to the sailor-man and walking away from me as quickly as she could.

Another highlight of this weekend was being awoken at 4:30 in the morning with the fire alarms blaring because our Inn had been struck by lightening. HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I grabbed our stuff and booked (ran really, really fast for you non-urbanites out there) to the car. Ready to drive off should the building burst into flames, we sat in the car in the rain and watched the drama unfold. It seemed to me that every fire truck and fireman in the area came out and surrounded the place as if they were hordes of starving ants that had stumbled upon a giant Twinkie.

I swear I thought I saw a few of those guys salivating.

Luckily, we were given the all clear after only 20 minutes and everyone was allowed back into the building. It turns out that the lightening had struck the telephone switchboard and fried all the lines in the building and everything attached to them. It was a good thing that I hadn’t set up and connected my laptop yet. I don’t know what I would have done if lightening had fried Alita, but I bet it would have involved a lot of crying and cursing on my part.

I might even have thrown down and stomped on my hat.

My family is insane.

No. You don’t understand. Each and every member of my family should be strapped down to a bed in a white padded room under constant, fully armed observation at a mental institution. Then they should be heavily medicated to the point where they are unable to do anything but drool, which would necessitate the use of anti-tongue-swallowing mouth guards and Depends adult diapers. You may think your family is crazy, but my family will take on all comers in a Cage of Rage Worldwide Wrestling Federation Family Smackdown. We’ll even let you have the breakaway chairs.

It’s a matter of pride for us, be-yeetch.

This year my trip to the Fright Fantastic that I call a ‘reunion’ was for the celebration of my Grandpa’s one-millionth birthday. Now, my Grandma and Grandpa are lovable, sweet and charming people but they are quite insane. They’ve been married for about 1,000 years and are constantly bickering over everything and anything ever read, seen, heard, spoken of, listened to, done together, done apart, invented or discovered since someone said, “Let there be Light”. Grandma and Grandpa are always easy to find at any gathering because they’re usually shouting each other’s name loud enough to register on the Richter scale. This is usually followed by some amazingly quick, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it argument like the following gem;

“Where’s my glasses?”

“How should I know!”

“You should know! They were right here!”

“Idiot! They’re on your head!”

“Oh. Who put my glasses on my head?”

“Your Grandfather, he’s driving me crazy!”

“Your Grandmother, she’s driven me crazy!”

On another note, I’m headed to Massachusetts for a wedding this weekend so the Candlelight Vigil pictures will have to wait until I get back. I know you’re heartbroken but try to hold back the tears for a few days, ok? The people getting married are friends of HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I don’t know them very well, but that doesn’t really matter since this is all just one big excuse for me to go fishing.

That’s right, The Mighty Geek likes to fish.

Well, actually I don’t just like fishing, I love it, which is really strange since I hate fish. Fish smell, they’re slimey, they’re ugly and they always look so reproachful when they’re sitting on your plate. It’s like they can’t believe anyone would ever do something so barbaric as rip off their scales, hold them over an open flame, cover them with white sauce and eat them. Their big, film-covered eyes searching your soul for a shred of pity as you sit there salivating. Gaping, open mouths frozen in a silent scream of agony while you carefully remove all of their teeny, tiny bones so you don’t choke.

Now doesn’t that sound just yummy?

I just like to catch fish. There’s something about sitting in a boat in the middle of the ocean or a lake or stream catching fish that I just really, truly enjoy. It’s not only the sport of catching them that I like either because throwing them back afterwards can be even more fun than catching them. It’s not for any humane reasons that I like throwing them back. Quite the opposite since I actually feel like I’m messing with their tiny, fishy minds. Can you imagine what it must be like for the fish to be captured, photographed and released? It must be similar to what an abductee feels like after being dropped back on earth. Try to picture the conversation (if fish actually talk to each other) the fish would have when he gets back to his school and tries to tell all his friends what happened.

“Dave! You’ll never believe what just happened to me! I was abducted by an alien!”

“Sure, Frank. Have you been drinking the fresh water again?”

“No! Dave I’m telling you I was abducted by an Unidentified Floating Object! One minute I’m trying to eat this delicious looking fluorescent yellow worm and the next I’m being pulled by some unseen force into the sky! There were these huge alien creatures that performed strange and painful experiments on me. They stuck sharp metal objects into me, they flashed bright lights at me, they measured and weighed me and then they put me back here! And the whole time I was with them I couldn’t even breathe!”

“Right, Frank. And where’s this UFO now?”

“Well, uh, I can’t remember. We fish don’t have a good memory, y’know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oooo! Look over there! A delicious looking fluorescent yellow worm!”

“I call dibs!”

Hey, everyone needs a hobby.

Well, that didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would.

Yes, I’m back and I’ve found my funny. In case you’re wondering, my funny was hiding under the second cushion of my couch with $2.57 in loose change and the squishy, jello-like remains of my spine. In a related story, my spine was almost immediately removed by HoBiscuit my girlfriend when she decided we would spend the weekend at her place in the city even though I really, really wanted to stay in Brooklyn. If anyone sees my spine please tell it I miss it dearly and am finding it very hard to walk without it. Also, if anyone has a working number for the Wizard, please tell him I’m very unhappy with my recent purchases of courage, self-respect and dignity and I want my money back.

HoBiscuit my girlfriend isn’t really as bad as I let on here, y’know. I poke fun because she’s so cool and I really like it when she gives me the “I’m not really like that, am I?” look. See? She’s doing it right now. How cute.

I managed to tell my first joke since the WTC incident on Thursday and I told my first funny joke about an hour ago. Since there was no one around me at the time, I told the joke to myself and laughed out loud because I think I’m so funny like that. I also found out that it’s very easy to get a seat on a crowded train if you walk in laughing like a maniac and congratulating yourself for being such a witty and clever individual. It also helps if you twitch.

In non-funny news, I walked around the city Friday, taking pictures at the makeshift memorial at Union Square and some other stuff I found. I also went to the candlelight vigil at Union Square that evening, so I’ll be posting all these pictures in the very near future. Probably tomorrow or Wednesday because I’m still a lazy bastard and I’ve got over 250 pictures to sort through.

I want to take this opportunity to say that my camera rocks! If anyone is looking for a good, relatively cheap digital camera, I highly recommend the Sony P50. Of course, I also once recommended using old vinyl records as siding for a friend’s house, so what do I know?

I should have just stayed in bed.

Friday, I went out to celebrate a friends’ birthday. Usually this would be a lot of fun because my friends and I are a wild and crazy bunch who like to have a good time. However, some of us don’t seem to understand that we are no longer as young as we once were and that certain things that used to be so insanely dumb that they were fun have instead become just plain stupid. Things like chugging beer, eating live goldfish, spur-of-the-moment road trips and going to bars whose claim to fame is having scantily clad women serve you overpriced bar food and watered down beer should have been left behind when we all graduated college. I will now suggest a new law that my friends and I should adopt in order to save us from future mistakes of such immensely moronic magnitude as what transpired this weekend.

When trying to find a restaurant at which to celebrate anything, anyone who suggests Hooters will be immediately flogged to within an inch of their life and then dipped into a lemon juice and salt solution to soak in for the rest of the night.

I won’t even get into the gory details now because I’m so ashamed of our complete lack of good taste that writing about my evening here would only force me remove my eyelids and watch Susan Serandon movies until I honestly believed she had talent.

Trust me, I would die first.

Saturday I got to find out just how old and out of shape I was when I went to the park with my younger brother and his friends to play Ultimate. If you don’t know what Ultimate is let me explain by humming the National Anthem while eating a Shepard’s Pie and skinning a live llama in my pajamas.

How the llama got in my pajamas, I’ll never know. [baduhmp-buhmp]

Seriously, Ultimate (also known as Frisbee football) can be best described as a form of cardio-vascular torture devised by some ancient god of sadistic pleasure who really hated human beings. In Ultimate, there is no time to stop and catch your breath, there are no time outs and the action doesn’t stop until someone scores a touchdown. Originally, we were going to play until one team scored 11 touchdowns but after we realized how amazingly, impossibly, almost freakishly out of shape we all were, we concluded that 5 touchdowns would be more than enough to fulfill our manly quota of testosterone-filled summer sports.

We arrived at this conclusion after the first ambulance left but before the “My god, your eyes are bleeding!” fiasco.

If anyone really wants to know, my team lost in a most spectacularly pathetic fashion. It took about an hour for the game to end and the final score was 5-2 but I don’t think any of us cared who won as long as we could stop running around pretending we were still in college. Hell, I never ran around that much when I was in college.

So, did anyone else try to relive their youth this weekend and get hit upside the head by the Louisville Slugger of Truth and Crushed Dreams?

Ah-Freakin-Choo.

I just can’t seem to shake this stupid cold. Yesterday, HoBiscuit my girlfriend and I went for a walk around the city for no reason other than it was a beautiful day. Within a few blocks I was sweating as if I had been running a marathon through the Amazon jungle wearing a fur-lined, full body rubber suit. Naturally, being a card-carrying, certified macho man (without the Village People mustache, thank you), I ignored my quickly deteriorating condition until HoBiscuit my girlfriend tried to hug me and became repulsed by the sweat she squeezed from my clothing like dirty dishwater from a sponge. Of course, I told her I was fine and only needed a drink of water to recharge my batteries and even though I was obviously lying, she took what I said at face value because there was a great shoe sale going on a few blocks away.

Not really, but it does sound plausible, doesn’t it?

Actually, we headed back home where I proceeded to collapse into a pathetic, jiggling mass of wimp flavored jelly. HoBiscuit my girlfriend helped pour me into bed and the rest of the night is a blur of fevered nightmares and really, really bad Steven Seagal movies.

Yeah, that’s right, Steven Seagal movies.

Y’see, instead of being a smart Geek and going right to sleep, I somehow managed to stay awake and watch The Glimmer Man on TNT’s Movies for Guys Who Like Movies crapfest. In my defense I want it to be known that in my delirious state I must have been trying to frighten the cold away by subjecting it to the worst movie I could find on such short notice. By definition, any Seagal movie is bad, but The Glimmer Man goes above and beyond the call of duty by being so bad that the roaches in HoBiscuits my girlfriends apartment came out of hiding and demanded to be sprayed with Raid to end their suffering. I actually sat there, like some fungal growth that lacked the brainpower to use its newly formed, Darwinian granted appendages, and watched that entire putrid excuse for a movie while the remote control sat on the couch right next to me. Every five minutes HoBiscuit my girlfriend would ask me if I wanted to watch something else or go to sleep and I don’t think I ever answered her coherently.

I must have been in some cold-induced brain fog because for the life of me I swear I don’t know why I didn’t change the channel or at least use the remote to slit my wrists and end the agony.

Although I am still sick fear not dear reader, because the Mighty Geek is feeling better today and has decided to take it easy for the next few days. My goal this week is to surgically fuse my skinny, hairy ass to the Comfy-Couch of Super-Sleep and eat my body weight in Cup-O-Ramen soup. I figure that if I don’t recover by Friday then I might actually need to see a doctor. And as any guy knows, seeing a doctor is tantamount to admitting that you might not be an indestructible, costumed superhero in disguise. We all know that every man in the world believes deep down in his secret, hidden soul that he is either a rock star or a superhero. I know I can’t sing, as the many restraining orders against me from karaoke bars attest, so it stands to reason that I must be a superhero who has some sort of amnesia.

No doubt my pathetic life is nothing less than a plot to destroy me masterminded by my archenemy, whose name escapes me right now but who will make his evil plans known to me at some future date. Oh, the humanity.

Well, I’m off to the CCoSS to watch The Great Muppet Caper now. And to help keep everyone happy while I’m laughing so hard my snot hits my tv, here’s the first and only picture of me I’ve ever posted. Enjoy.

Well, I’m back. There will be no apologies made for my lack of posting while I was away because I had no internet connection while on board the ship. Even worse, after my last post from Puerto Rico the cruise only stopped at one more island (St. Thomas). That’s right, I didn’t get to see St. Maarten or Bermuda due to another hurricane (Dean). So all in all, I didn’t get to go where I wanted to go and I didn’t get to go where I didn’t want to go either.

Sometimes life can be really cruel.

We were stuck on the ship so long that my girlfriend actually got a shuffleboard-related injury. She insists that her left buttock is in considerable pain due to too much shuffleboard. Don’t let the innocent almost slow-motion-like movements fool you. Shuffleboard is a full contact sport only to be played by professionals or the very elderly.

She is soooooo out of shape. And I am sooooo dead.

I’ll be posting a full story complete with pictures about my Cruise From Hell later today or tomorrow. Some highlights will be finding out our itinerary had changed, things to do while stuck on board a ship, pictures of fabulous water ripples and don’t miss the mutiny on board by unhappy passengers. Yes, there was an actual ”mutiny” of about 500 passengers who were even more upset than I was about the horrible cruise. By the last day they were talking about calling their lawyers and some were even talking about calling the media.

As if the media doesn’t have anything better to do with their time than listen to a bunch of overwieght, buffet-loving old ladies and trailer-trash bitch and moan because they didn’t enjoy their cruise. I can understand being upset about the situation, but some of these people needed to relax and get a life that doesn’t include Jerry Springer or Cheeto’s. Getting riled up while still on board is only going to make a bad situation worse.

Until I post the full story later, let me sum up my experience on board the ship by saying that if it wasn’t for the wonderful people my girlfriend and I sat with at our dinner table, the entire cruise would have been a complete waste of time and money. Don’t get me wrong, every other cruise I’ve been on has been wonderful to the extreme. This one just seemed to be bad from the moment we set foot on board.

You know, I should have known it would be bad when we got on board and I saw rats with little suitcases and worried expressions getting off.

Now that that’s over with, let me tell you about the lovely head cold I’ve developed. I’m leaking fluids from every orifice, my ears are stuffed with cotton and my bones ache so badly I think I’d start crying if I so much as farted. Right now I’m going to take some drugs, go lie down on my Comfy-Couch of Super-Sleep and think mean and spiteful things about everyone in the cruise line business.

Who knows, I might even feel well enough later to post something funny.

Tomorrow I am leaving on a well-deserved vacation. I’ll soon be lying in the sun on Lido Deck, sipping the Cruise Special Drink whilst vestigial virgins massage my tired feet. Yes, dear reader, The Geek is going on a cruise. Pay no heed to the fact that it’s the height of hurricane season and that I might wind up like Leo. Nevermind that the Weather Channel thinks a tropical storm is headed directly towards my travel route. Forget that I could wind up as the main course in Feast of the Giant Sharks. This is my first vacation in four years and I’m not going to let a few minor annoyances like weather or death deter me from enjoying myself. I’m going to soak in hot water till my muscles ooze off my body and form puddles of super-relaxed goo at my feet. I’m gonna bet the deed to my llama on a single roll of the dice at Mr. Evil Casino’s Crap Game of Shame and Destitution. And I’m going to eat my own body weight in lard at the midnight buffet.

I might die, but I’ll die happy dammit.

I’ve begun packing the essentials (One bottle Insta-Tan Lotion. Check. One muscle T-shirt to show off ‘bod’. Check. One pair Danger Flip-Flops. Check) and tidying up my apartment in preparation for my exodus to the Vacationland of Fun and Relaxation. For me, leaving on a vacation is very different from leaving on a business trip. Packing wise, on a business trip I know exactly what I’ll need. Warm, long-sleeve shirts and dress pants. Even if I’m going to be in Brazil during July, I’ll still need warm clothes because all I’ll ever see is the inside of a dark and FREEZING COLD ballroom. That’s right, no sun for our favorite Geek when he’s working. Hell, I’m lucky if I get to eat twice a day with some of these people. But when I’m packing for a vacation, which I haven’t done in years, I find myself looking over a huge pile of clothes and muttering things like,

“You know, I don’t think I’ll need four suits for a 7 day cruise. Maybe I’ll just take three.”

“Do black socks go with sandals?”

“I wonder if I’ll actually wear shorts this time? Maybe I should pack an extra pair of pants, just in case.”

“Will my girlfriend find my tighty-whities sexy, or should I pack my thongs too?”

“Waitaminute! How will I check my email?!?”

At least I know I’ll be able to get the internet while I’m on board. I’m bringing Gunm (my favorite laptop) with me and I’ll have a satellite connection from my stateroom. Of course, that means I’ll be posting from the ship, which I think will be really cool. How many people out there can say they’ve posted an entry from 150 miles out at sea? And if the storm gets me, how many could say they’ve posted from the stomach of a shark?

Now it’s time to get back to packing. I have to be at the airport at 4:45am tomorrow because I’m out of my frigging mind. Why would any sane person choose to leave at that ungodly hour unless it was some kind of life or death emergency? No one, that’s who.

I must really need this vacation.