SleepingPoliceman

Hi everyone.

So let’s talk about us for a few minutes. I know, you’ve been patiently waiting for some more delicious SP goodness to distract you however-briefly from the doldrums of your regular life. I hear you. It’s an important service we provide, and we’ve been dropping the ball.

Part of the reason for that is, as always, jz’s continued desire to improve his life and the animal population of the world by diligently pursuing his veterinary career. All the while ignoring the damage done to the interwebs. Selfish, I know.

While he’s being self-centered, I’ve been committing blogging bigamy. For the past few months, I’ve been putting my thoughts up on a new site: Why I Am Awesome and Not Awesome. The conceit of this site is pretty self explanatory. I would recommend any and all regular readers of this site head over there to see what I’ve been up to, thinking about, and how that’s affected my abnormally high/low self regard.

Where does that leave us? Well, there’s more to say over here. I won’t get into what exactly we want to do, because the potential plan-shifting and time-delays could lead to further accusations of being a tease. But ideas are floating around. More content will be done here. Don’t delete those links and RSS feeds just yet.

And if you’re new here, having just come over from Awesome/Not Awesome, or through some sort of random online browsing, then welcome. Peruse the archives. Enjoy yourself and stay a while.

Thank you again for your continued patience. Sincerely,
The MGMT*

(*meaning us, not the band.)

Not that this will come as much of a surprise to anyone who comes by these here parts regularly, but we’re officially announcing that SleepingPoliceman is going on hiatus for a while.

Will this be different than the “four posts in five months” hiatus that it’s been on recently? Not really. But, you know, it’ll be “official.”

Don’t delete the bookmarks, though. We’ll have something going on this site again in the future. We just have to take care of other endeavors at present. Updates on those will come as we feel comfortable publicizing them.

If you are new here, take a look through the ol’ archives…you can see what jz and myself were thinking/talking about for the past few years. Hopefully some of it comes across as mildly entertaining.

Thanks for the attention and your continued patience. We shall return.

IMDB.com: Oscar nominations

I had no idea that anyone gave a shit about The Reader…that taking the place of The Dark Knight is the other big surprise for me. Not that I think TDK needed to be nominated…I just sort of thought it would be, despite all the backlash. I would have liked to see The Wrestler get a nod too. I’ll have to wait until I see The Reader, Frost/Nixon and Milk before I decide which ones needed to be booted for the two guys in tights.

The other immediate craziness: no nomination for Springsteen. I’m fine with that, since he won for Philadelphia. I respect the man, but don’t really care about him. Nevertheless, I figured that he would get some love. Slumdog is great, but two songs from it? Whatever, the good part in all that is hopefully this creates a clear path for my boy Peter to win a statue.

Good to see the Downey love, even though on the whole Tropic Thunder was a letdown for me.

This year’s Norbitaward: the DVDs for Wanted can now tout is an Oscar nominated picture. Huh.

My unofficial early predictions after the jump.

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So we’ve been meaning to reboot this site (which has, as you might be aware, been dormant for a couple of months) since the start of the new year. Well, what better time to do that than on this historic day? None…none better time.

That being said, I was up early on the west coast to watch the inauguration events unfold. And I kept a little live diary of it. It’s after the fold. I will come back and edit it later, but as of this posting (9:46am PST) I’m just putting up what came out in real time. Welcome back, SP readers.

(Reuters/Brian Snyder)

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I don’t know if anything else needs to be said. Congratulations, America.

OK, yeah, again, it’s been a while. The Red Sox didn’t make it happen, which is oddly fine. (What a strange world we live in.) Lisa came out for a very fun visit to L.A. School has been progressing nicely, with a lot of work mixed in with a bit of fun.

But there’s no time for all that now. No, now it’s time to do the democracy thing. And, yeah, I know what you’re thinking: this election isn’t really that big a deal. I mean, our secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin isn’t even on the ballot this year. If you can’t vote for him, then why even bother showing up?

I hear you. And the answer, of course, is simple: you have to go and vote so you can make sure weed and gayness stay illegal. Isn’t that what’s important?

Now…not enough time has been spent in this space talking about this election. I can’t explain why. So much has happened, almost all of it worth commenting on. What can I say? There’s no excuse. We dropped the ball. Hopefully you’ll forgive us.

I’ve wanted to write more in the past week or two, but frankly, I’ve been nervous. I don’t like being in the position where the side I’m pulling for has a comfortable lead. Right now, I feel the same way I did during game 4 against St. Louis in ‘04: the score is 3-0 in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, the Sox have a three games to none lead in the Series, and I can think of is, “there’s a runner on base; if Renteria gets a hit, the next guy can hit a homer to tie it, and we could have this all swept out from under us.” I don’t know if I’m a pessimist with a thin shell of optimism, or the other way around. Either way, I get scared when I’m excited, and I’m excited. And scared.

Anyway, the takeaway message is this: even if you can’t vote for William Galvin, you should still get out there and vote. I already have, because I cheated and voted early via absentee ballot. I’m hoping that this will be the first time since 1996 that my Presidential vote in either a primary or general election has gone to the eventual winner. I’m also going to try to vote again tomorrow under the name Mickey Mouse…but that’s only if I can follow the complicated instructions my new ACORN friends have given me.

I’m rambling. Go vote. Vote for change. Don’t let this all get swept out from under us. Can we do this?

…I think you know the answer.

Vote For Change: find your polling location

I wanted more time to write a little eloquently and/or ramble haphazardly about how lucky I feel to be a Red Sox fan now. If I had told you in 2003 that that would be the first of five trips to the playoffs in six years, and that at least two titles would come out of that stretch…I would have punched you in the neck for lying to me. And then cried. I was very emotional and volatile in 2003.

But the point stands: these are the golden days. And here’s hoping for 11 more wins and a third title. Not because we’re greedy, or because we deserve it, or because we’re entitled to it. But because…it would be awesome. And maybe we’re a little greedy. Come on, Sox…let’s get down to it.

And, yes, I love being in school. It’s going great. But I’m really, really unsatisfied that I will be in class from 7-9:40pm PST tonight. I guess that means I could catch the final inning or two somewhere on campus. Hopefully, when I get in front of the TV, Delcarmen will be pitching with an eight run lead. That would be nice.

Go Sox! It’s on, it’s on, it’s on.

Two quick Palin-related things:

1. boston.com: Hackers break into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account

It wasn’t immediately clear how hackers broke into Palin’s Yahoo! account … A hacker also might have sent a forged e-mail to her account tricking her into revealing her own password.

I am having a love affair with the idea that Sarah Palin fell for a phishing scam, and now her personal emails are circulating the internet. “@Hello, S. Palin – you may have already won a prize!!!@”

2. This was the main story/image and sub-story on CNN.com just now:

I’m assuming no one asked, “Why are you and your staff refusing to comply with a legal court order?” Although, sadly, that might not have really stumped her, since “I’m above the law” seems to be a valid answer for her.

I know, we’ve fallen behind here again. The rigors of graduate life lend one to less free time than I had imagined. We’ll try to turn it around in the near future…bear with us here.

But now, this is just a short ad: as jz pointed out to me, Amazon.com apparently now does this thing where they offer daily specials on mp3 downloads of albums. Instead of $8-$10, it’s a couple of bucks. Maybe they aren’t just “now” doing this…they could have been doing this for two years, but I never knew about it. Since my perception is all that matters, I’ll go ahead and say that they just started doing it today, around ten minutes ago when I got jz’s email.

Anyway, today’s album is Elbow’s The Seldom Seen Kid. It just won a huge award over in England called the Mercury Prize. Which I guess is a big deal. Regardless of that, you have my seal of approval on it: this is a brilliant, brilliant album that everyone should have. So pop down the two bucks and enjoy it.

Amazon’s mp3 page

It’s up in the top left corner. I assume it’s going until midnight PST, so you have another 13.5 hours to get it done. So what are you waiting for? Go. GO!

No, seriously, go.

I know, there’s been some more slacking on the site here. But give me a break…I started classes this week and was on the hunt for an apartment. I’d tell you that I’ll be giving you more info over the weekend, but that would be a lie. I’m in San Francisco for the next few days, and will be enjoying the glorious Bay Area instead of, you know, wasting time on the internet. Sadly.

More to come early next week. Enjoy the holiday weekend, everybody.