Yesterday, I ordered a new gadget from TigerDirect.com. the big online computer parts store. It will allow me to access an old hard drive which has a bunch of pictures I thought I'd lost, along with some stories I wrote a couple of years ago. It also houses some of the old Evil Dennis blogs from when Evil Dennis was active on MySpace. Good fun. I'm just waiting on the package to arrive. It will probably get here around Tuesday or Wednesday.

 The thing hooks up to a USB port and has a socket for each type of drive (floppys, CD-ROMS, as well as IDE hard drives.) That's not all...it comes with a seperate power supply to power whatever item it is you are hooking up to. I'll be able to quickly check the contents of multiple drives if necessary. Although I'm getting the thing just to salvage some older pics and text files, I can later use it to fix other computers. Not bad for around $25.

Let me just say it was pretty awful. Zombies everywhere. I eventually managed to get out of this mall type place and get out into a more open area with houses and roads and stuff. I found my girlfriend and a few close friends. Many of them died on the way, by getting chomped on by zombies. I must have bashed in about a hundred zombie skulls in my dream while I was armed with a baseball bat. It was all very scary and depressing. If I had managed to stay asleep through more of it, it was looking like it would have ended up like Night Of The Living Dead, where me and a handful of survivors were going to board ourselves up in a house, but I don't think I would have agreed to it. I just wanted to keep moving. I didn't recognize any of the landscape. Trust me, it was a dreadful nightmare. One moment of comic relief though: I saw this tall lurching guy in a leather trenchcoat and snuck up behind him and bashed him one time with the bat. He turned around and it turned out he was a human...claiming to know me and that we had a nasty argument in the past. Many of the zombies (especially near the end) were getting harder to kill. I'd whack 'em home run style in the skulls and they'd get back up. That's when I started waking up.

[This is something that a friend forwarded me in an email. Since I think it could be important, I repost it here. I would encourage everyone to do what is sugggested in this posting since I shall as a good example...LOL. Seriously though, consider it. ~Dennis]

ICE campaign - "In Case of Emergency"

We all carry our mobile phones with names & numbers stored in its memory but nobody, other than ourselves, knows which of these numbers belong to our closest family or friends.

If we were to be involved in an accident or were taken ill, the people attending us would have our mobile phone but wouldn't know who to call. Yes, there are hundreds of numbers stored but which one is the contact person in case of an emergency? Hence this "ICE" (In Case of Emergency) Campaign. The concept of "ICE" is catching on quickly. It is a method of contact during emergency situations. As cell phones are carried by the majority of the population, all you need to do is store the number of a contact person or persons who should be contacted during emergency under the name "ICE" (In Case Of Emergency). The idea was thought up by a paramedic who found that when he went to the scenes of accidents, there were always mobile phones with patients, but they didn't know which number to call. He therefore thought that it would be a good idea if there was a nationally recognized name for this purpose. In an emergency situation, Emergency Service personnel and hospital Staff would be able to quickly contact the right person by simply dialing the number you have stored as "ICE". For more than one contact name simply enter ICE1, ICE2 and ICE3, etc. Be sure it's in your kid's cell phones also. A great idea that will make a difference!

Please forward this. It won't take too many "forwards" before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life, or put a loved one's mind at rest . Let's spread the concept of ICE by storing an ICE number in our Mobile phones today!

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!
Spoilers occur below!
[note: I wrote this about 6 months ago, but due to a request, am only posting it now.]

If you have not seen Pan's Labyrinth, then don't read this blog entry for now. See the movie any way you can and then come back and read this. "I may not want to see that movie", you might say. Well, what if you learn something here that makes you change your mind? Then I screwed you out of some of the magic that the film delivers in abundance. I don't want to do that to you. See Pan's Labyrinth, because it's one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Reasons to see it:
-It is an awesome fantasy film, on par with the Lord of the Rings trilogy
-It has some vivid, graphic violence [OMG!]
-It has monster[s] that you will not soon forget.
-It won 3 Oscars. It won 3 Oscars. It won 3 Oscars.

Reasons not to see it:
-If you can't hang with subtitles (Spanish movie, no dubbing).
-If you can't deal with realistic [though fleeting] violence.

Mood: Constant tension, punctuated by random ultra-violent moments. This film is hard to describe in a few words. It is a fantasy film about a world inhabited by fairies and fauns and nightmarish monsters, but it is also a lesson in Spanish history (the movie is in Spanish, with English subtitles for us buffoons) and an extremely violent and cruel history at that, personified by a very malevolent, fascist military man, Captain Vidal, one of the most atrocious, psychotic onscreen villains of all time. There are two main stories unfolding in the movie: Ofelia's real world and her "fantasy world", which it turns out is not a fantasy at all (in my opinion, after much reflection, more below).

The thing that will linger with me the longest from that movie is a creature referred to in the credits as the "Pale Man". The Pale Man is an impossible, horrifying abomination with eyes in the palms of his hands who waits for untold ages for a child to happen along, which he devours. One has to ask, even in Ofelia's fantasy world, was the Pale Man even real? The Pale man was played by the same actor who played the faun, American actor Doug Jones (Abe Sapien from Hellboy, another film by Guillermo Del Toro...incidentally, Jones learned Spanish for the part of the faun, but in the end, his voice was replaced in post production by a different actor). The Pale Man kills two fairies during Ofelia's visit to his lair. (In much the same way you would dispatch a vienna sausage.) Those two fairies later accompany the faun when Ofelia is greeted in the Underworld, suggesting they weren't really killed after all, and Jones was in both costumes for more than just his incredible skill. My current opinion: The faun was creating the illusion of the Pale Man, with his fairies as accomplices, for the purpose of Ofelia's second test - dealing with temptation.

Ofelia was warned early on by Mercedes that Mercedes' mother once told her to be wary of fauns. The faun is being a trickster, but never for the reasons that seem apparent. Only at the very end, is his true role exposed. He never would have harmed the baby; he didn't really allow his precious fairies to get killed.

The Pale Man lives in a sealed-in lair. The only way in or out is apparently a magic door created with chalk supplied by the faun. It would seem at first that the faun has done this countless times to test other hopefuls, but would the faun really send all those children to their deaths? Nonsense. That would defy the philosophy of the Underworld of which he is a court member (peace and love and eternal life and happiness). Who painted the murals depicting the Pale Man's gruesome history on the ceiling? The Pale Man? The faun? I think now the whole scene was an elaborate, magical setup by the faun. Maybe I just don't want the thing to be real, even in the movie. I have to admit, that thing creeped me out more than anything I've seen in a movie in decades, and that's no bullshite.

The frog (which lives in the roots of a tree that looks vaguely like the faun's head) from the first task was probably a setup too. The Pale Man's locker key in the frog's stomach? Come On, faun! Then the faun using the Pale Man's knife, seen in the murals where he is stabbing kids, to draw the blood of an innocent? Convenient, eh?

No, the real monster in the movie is Captain Vidal (no. 39 in 100 Greatest movie villains list, btw]. What an EVIL BASTARD! Holy crap that guy is just totally evil and psychotic. It took 2 viewings to start to get a grip on that character. His psychosis is deep. He's obsessed, anally-retentive, and totally evil. Thank God he got his. I'd like to see a death match between Pale Man and Vidal. Vidal would win, of course...evil scumbag. (Captain Vidal would wipe his ass with Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth from Blue Velvet, btw.)

Supposedly, there is a comic coming out about the backstory of the Pale Man. That suggests that he was a real thing in the "fantasy world" and perhaps not an illusion by the faun. Fauns are known for being untrustworthy tricksters, so maybe Pale Man really was some goon called upon by the faun on occaision. I get ill just contemplating it.

Fantasy world not real?
-Vidal apparently cannot see the faun, while he is still there talking to Ofelia at the end...unless the faun can control who can and cannot see him...or you have to believe in fauns to see them or something.

Fantasy world real?
-Ofelia escapes from her LOCKED room - via magic chalk door?
-At the beginning (rest of movie is flashback), Ofelia's bloody nose gets unbloodied, presumably just before her father rouses her into the Underworld (at the end).
-The labyrinth is really there (acknowledged by other characters) and actually shifts/moves at end to allow Ofelia more time in her escape from Vidal (a scene very much like end of The Shining)...Vidal has to backtrack and take the long route or scale a wall or something.

What did you think of the movie?

     It's just a little annoying to me when I see certain things out there on the internet. Maybe it's in a forum (not mine, mind you) or someone's blog or something, but you probably get the picture. I'm talking about completely retarded English.

     First is the misconception of would've, could've and should've. Some folks are trying to replace them with would of, could of or should of, but I'm not going to let them. I see this quite a bit lately, especially from younger users. I think the misconception comes from simply hearing the words used and never understanding that the words are actually contractions of would have, could have and should have, and they are now trying to type these words they've been hearing all their lives without ever actually seeing them properly in print anywhere.

     I got into an argument with someone once over this. It was a verbal conversation I was having with a highschooler [or high schooler if you prefer]. He said, "It IS would of!"

     I said, "No, it isn't would OF...it's would've as in would have."

     He said, "Huh?"

     "What the Hell does would of even mean?", I said. "The only time those syllables make any sense at all next to one another is if someone were to say 'That pile of wood there belongs to me...it's wood of mine'. But that's not 'would' as in 'I would have done that'.

     He told me I was crazy.

     It's very telling of the education system in place now. This was a person in high school. I know that I learned about contractions in high school (and probably before that). I am also sure that those particular words were in the lessons. Certainly those same words are broken down in the lessons currently taught as well. Why is that particular misconception or misperception so rampant at this time. Is it because kids are now learning to type before they know a lot about the language they are speaking and typing?