GRIFT

That bothers me too -- Mostly because I rather have Billy Gunn in his Mr. Ass get up in Universe rather than his blue BG gear.

Random thought brought on by this game (and their matching costumes in it): Tensai and Brodus Clay would make a beastly chest tattoo havin' tag team.

13. Family Tradition by Hank Williams, Jr or Is it Impossible to Get Arrested in Tennessee? A Nashville Toast: Here is to the stork who brings the good looking babies. Here is to the crow who brings the ugly babies. And here is to the swallow... Who don't bring no babies at all. Nashville, Nashville, Nashville. Earlier this year while I was still on the road my traveling buddy and I (before Amanda joined us in NOLA) rolled into Nashville un-showered and wild-eyed with no prospects on a place to stay. Everyone was suspiciously nice to us—which we would soon find to be genuine Southern hospitality. I made a point of seeking out a music shop and bought two new harmonicas and a Townes Van Zandt tribute album. I picked it up on the basis that it was the only thing with his name on it that I didn’t already own. When we checked out, a clerk stopped Dylan and I, shook our hands and told us about how much he, “loves our work.” It wasn’t until we reached the car that we realized he must have thought we were in a band—something that we would experience several times throughout our trip through the south. Around 5pm, we hit the Broadway bars with a fierceness. The toast above was made by a fella who was playing at the Wagon Wheel Saloon when we walked in the door. After his set he offered to show us around a bit and introduce us to some girls. We drank from 5 until their closing time at 3am, spent a small fortune, fell in love several times, sang karaoke, and wandered back to our car intent on sleeping in it. We attempted to catch a Z in the parking lot we had left it in only for the attendant to meekly usher out onto the streets. We zipped around for a little bit before finding an overpass to park under, leaned our seats back, and cracked a final beer to cap off the night. Some short time after we dozed off a menacing maglight came knocking on the driving side window. “Licence and registration.” “Yes officer.” “Rob, the cops.” “Bummer.” A familiar conversation had invaded my dreamspace. I straightened up best as I could. Our car was full of empty bottles and I thought for certain we were headed towards a jail cell for the night but when the officer came back something unexpected happened. He apologized for waking us up. We explained that we were on a roadtrip and that we didn’t have a place to stay that night. Again he apologized for waking us and after running our IDs for warrants, told us that he knew we had been drinking, hoped we had fun in Nashville and invited us to stay where we were as long as we needed to to sleep it off. Then, after apologizing a THIRD TIME he disappeared into the ether. Southern Hospitality indeed! Next came Memphis, which was a greasy blur and if fucked us up like a month full of Mondays. We bought a joke from a homeless man. I signed Dylan up for a number of karaoke songs without his consent. We partied with a pair of Coyote Ugly gals in their empty bar. Dylan disappeared for a bit. I won a few pool games. I lost a few more. Dylan called me to ask why he was driving. I helped him find his way back to me. He had McDonalds with him. We drank more. We listened to amazing music. Got in a fight with some guys on Bourbon. Got in a fight with each other. Laughed maniacally. Blackout. Blackout. Blackout. Black. Out. Then, somehow, we woke up in Mississippi.

Grifter's Valentine's Day Gift to EWB

For comebacks, you press the button as close to the right time as possible, not spam it it, I believe. After activating the comeback state you need to position your opponent in the right place for combo to start. With Daniel Bryan, for example, after activating the comeback state you need to get your opponent in the turnbuckles to do his backflip. I think he also has that. I think the whole moveset is a sort of mock Aries moveset.

My favorite run in Universe so far has started at the Royal Rumble where I was entered as number one with a CAW and number two was Daniel Bryan. I beat the ever loving tar our of Bryan, but purposely never eliminated him from the match. At the end of the rumble we were the final two, and he hit his comeback sequence and I ended up against the ropes. I allowed him to eliminate my CAW (I didn't want this character near the world title scene). Similar to real life, Mark Henry has been my World Heavyweight Champion and has been injuring folks left and right. In the following weeks Daniel Bryan ended up being booked against increasingly larger opponents. Barrett, Sheamus, Nash, Big Show, etc... and each time would comeback and make them tap to the LaBell Lock, or score a surprise crucifix. Elimination Chamber comes around. It is the sequence of guys DB had beaten one on one and the champ. The match starts with DB out first against me as Henry. Again, Bryan takes a pillar to post beat down but picks up most of the eliminations until it is Henry, Nash, and Bryan. Bryan locked me in the LaBell and Nash broke it up, Jacknife'd him and then turned into my World Strongest Slam only to be pinned himself. Then Henry pinned the downed Bryan and retained. Next Raw we have the Champion vs Champion match and Bryan runs in and beats down Henry, triggering a rash of matches where Henry would manage Bryan's opponents, DB would win and Henry would then run in and murder him after the match. Wrestlemania is up next...

One thing that irks me a little is that they took out the option to hold onto a submission until the ref's 5 count. The immediate rope breaks are a bummer.

Ok, I know I said the next few post would be what I will come to call "The Ramonna Trilogy" but last night was too strange not to highlight immediately. 12. Car Crash by Our Lady Peace or Car Crash by Grifter and the Gang As a voting day, yesterday was one of my busiest days of the year. I went into it with very little sleep from the night before and this year had two big issues I was organizing around. One, making sure we got out the vote in support of keeping our same day voter registration rights, and two, collecting the signatures necessary to put gay marriage on the ballot in 2012. At then end of my 19 hour day, we had won on both fronts. Keeping our registration rights 60%-40% and we had collected over 35,000 petition signatures which when added to the work we'd already done totaled out to over 85,000 signatures-- well about the 57,000 it takes to get something onto the ballot. Exhausted, my fellow organizers and I were eager to get home and get some rest. Unfortunately, this was simply not in the cards. About 15 minutes into our hour long ride home my Ryan, who drove us to work that day, hit a deer at about 70 miles per hour. We hit the body as it was bounding across the highway so the head connected squarely with the driver side headlight leaving the back end to spin up towards the windshield-- just long enough for me to watch its asshole spew liquid shit and guts from the impact-- before it rolled off the driver's side. It totaled the car. The front end folded up and split the radiator. As tired as we were any adrenaline rush this might have brought about simply brought us back to baseline. We calmly called the police, made arrangements for a ride home, and called AAA for a tow. When the police officer arrived he had to shoot the deer who was somehow still holding onto life. Now, for some people, a high speed car wreck, blue lights, blood, guts, and gunshots would be the end of a night. For us, not so much. The officer asked us if we wanted to keep the deer. It was a pretty good sized doe, and while much of its body was likely no longer any good (when the organs explode from impact it contaminates much of the meat) the hind quarters (about 50 lbs each) could still be salvaged. So tired and delirious and with the officers aid, we dragged the dear deeper over the embankment and buried it under brush so no one would stop and pick it up for themselves, completed our drive home and then drove 45 minutes back with my truck to pick the animal up, hack off its hind quarters and stay up all night butchering it in my garage. DEER PENIS~!

Yeah I fought like hell with this one to get it reformatted to some semblance of legibility. If I have a bit of time I'll go back and add the requisite spaces.

I was about to come in here and sing that very album's praises! Bonfire's " 'You're my favorite rapper now!' Yeah man I better be, or you can fucking kiss my ass-- human centipede" is up there with his great line from Freaks and Geeks', "I got some pussy that was insane, so insane, it's an enemy of Batman." I am definitely going to pick up his first commercial release when it drops even though I already have a been bumping the album for free for the last two weeks. All of his previous releases and EP's are available for free, and if you grab those before you buy this it is a good way to jump into things. 30 songs for free helps to soften the blow of paying for his big commercial debut and if sales do well should ensure a lot more to come.

Sure this game looks pretty good, but until a wrestling game brings back this feature I am just not interested: But honestly, this will mark the first time I buy one of these games in ages. I suspect this and Skyrim will keep me out of the bars and help me save some money until after X-mas.

Nothing to see here.

"COME ON COME ON COME ON -- TOUCH ME BABE!" My ringtone blasted over and over again like a skipping record. I tried to ignore it and push out what felt like like the on coming rush of a level five world-ender classed hangover, but Mr. MoJo Rising's thought never completed itself over Ray Manzarek's psychedelic keys. Instead it repeated with maddening persistence until suddenly... mercifully... it stopped. Then the girl in my bed started to scream. Lets rewind, and gear up for ... 11. Touch Me by the Doors or The FIRST time Grift got chased out of California. In September of 2010, I was reaching the end of yet another political project, and was set to return home from California for a friend'swedding and to negotiate my next assignment from home. Before I left, I made up for ditching the girl I left at the bar on my "going away night" that I told you all about in 1. Possum Kingdom by The Toadies or Grifter Gets a Cigarette Put Out on his Chest (from here out to be referred to as Princeton-- where she went to college) by taking her out for dinner and spending one of my last nights at her apartment. Leading into my VERY last night in California the plan was for me to lay low, cook my roommate dinner, pack my stuff, and in the morning Princeton would swing in to give me aride to the airport for my very early flight. Well, that almost happened. After I packed all my bags andwas just about to plate up dinner for my roommate Dan (who also my boss and mentor) we had a knock at the door. Dan answered and surprisingly enough it was for me. It was the punker girl I had taken home from karaoke who had put the cigarette out on my chest, with a bottle of Maker's in hand. She said she stopped by because I hadn't returned any of her calls and she wanted to give me a gift before she left. Dan, seemingly wanting to invite trouble into my life asked her to come in and have dinner with us. As the night unfolded we all spiraled deeper and deeper into the whiskey and when the bottle kicked Dan presented a bottle of Jameson that HE had intended to give me before he disappeared to bed. The Crazy Punker and I took the bottle to my room and screwed in just about every corner before blacking out on my futon. A few short hours of sleep/time-travel later, and we caught up to the thread's opening. I had forgotten to set my alarm and Princeton was calling me from outside. When her calls went unanswered she took it on herself, being the lovely lass she is, to walk around to my window and she started to call my name. When that failed, she threw one of the pebbles that lined our walkway through the open window and the curtains only for it to land squarely on the bare thigh of the Crazy Punker. This, naturally, freaked the slumbering Punker right the fuck out. Suddenly she started screaming which sent Princeton into yelling as well. "IS THERE SOMEONE IN THERE WITH YOU?" Realizing what was going on, and quite possibly still drunk,I stumbled out of bed tripping over my own boots and rushed to put my clothing on. Soon the voices of shrieking women were joined by a low man's voice. All of this 4am commotion had woken up my roommate/boss (a man who has Arnold on speeddial) . "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?" Completed my shameful cacophony. Not satisfied to yell at me through my window Princeton tried to call me one more time, again sending John Morrison into his fractured tune. 'Where the hell was my phone? Under the bed? Fuck it.' I though before grabbing my suitcase. As I left my house the confused naked punker screamed at me until I left my room. My roommate met me at the door, yelling at me from my room to the exit, where I was met by Princeton who yelled at me from my apartment door to the airport. Yes, shockingly she still gave me a ride to the airport, presumably to insure that the entire expanse of the continental US was between us by the time she went to bed that night. Although, she did kiss me goodbye and recently asked me tospend a week with her in Tahoe when I make it that far west this winter. So deep run the charms of Grifter! Next... a trilogy of posts about the same girl that get progressivelystranger.

10. One More Chance For A Heart To Skip A Beat by The Notorious Big vs The XX I rediscovered this album in my music library today and it brought about the most unusual flood of mundane memories. It helped me relive, in surprising detail, a strange amalgamation of a months or more worth of Boston commutes; a bus from Brighton to Kenmore, The Green Line to my office near Downtown Crossing and the Boston Common. Most days, the timing would be perfect and the album would wrap just as I hit the Park Street stop. The albums "introvert-meets-extrovert" vibe really encapsulated the early morning Boston commute scene. It married the crowded claustrophobia of the boxed in book readers with the standing swaying sleepiness of Monday morning travelers gripping to the last remnants of their weekends, and laid it all under the aggressive shoving of the begrudgingly awake. More fun updates on the way over the next couple of days, including a series of posts I've been holding back on putting up, because I was pretty sure no one would believe them!

This isn't a movie, but when they wind down into One Person, it guts me every time... This is it's on air equivalent.

I'd love to see Bethesda put out an RPG based on the X-Men franchise. Destiny was such a disappointing game for me, because I've always thought a Fallout/Oblivion-esque game that starts with you getting your powers would be an incredible game to play-- and probably the only type of comic book based game that will ever rival Arkham Asylum/City.