CDs sent: 26

CDs still to send: 32

Can I tell you how awesome it was to have an excuse to go to Fry's and go buy a bunch of new blank CD-Rs, envelopes and DiscSavers cases? Woo! Shopping goodness!

This is, perhaps, the best audio clip I've ever encountered on the Web. (Warning: not safe for work.)

It's better than the old Christopher Walken "God and Devil Show" clips and almost as good as Pat O'Brien's sex messages.

The clip is Rev. Willie F. Wilson of Union Temple Baptist Church and it's been played on Stern quite a lot lately. Last I heard, they're trying to book him as a guest.

Man. How is that not the funniest thing ever? "You got BLOOD VESSELS and MEMBRANES in your behind!"

(Link courtesy Screenhead.com. Gracias, Screenhead!)

Edited to add: Link to straight-up MP3 version if you have trouble seeing the above sound file on a Mac.

First, thank you. To those who Paypal'd early, to those who've already sent SASEs, to those overseas who can't Paypal, but sent nice notes politely asking for a Terribly Happy Best of '05 CD anyway (you're on the list), thanks. And to those few who actually sent a few extra bucks to cover other folks and postage (87 cents per envelope, I learned today), thank you thank you.

Now, those of you who have a little extra Paypal money, do me a favor and send some of it in the direction of my friend Rob, all right? He's had a rough couple of weeks.

So, the update: today, I sent the first 10 CDs to the first 10 people who sent $1 via Paypal. I went to the Post Office (where absolutely identical envelopes containing identical CDs varied from 63 to 87 cents first class) and stocked up on stamps. I'm glad I did because the downtown post office was nuts. There were two different guys in line who looked like they were trying to mail their house via the U.S Postal Service. One guy was successful, but the other poor schmoe had seven giant Dell boxes that the post office said were oversized. I think he was sending whole walls in each box. I'm glad I got the stamps and won't have to fight lines anymore.

Tomorrow, I'm sending out the second 10 CDs and so on until I reach the end of my list, which is about 60 names long at present. When I'm brave enough to face the post office again, I'll mail out CDs that need custom forms and extra postage (got a few from Canada and one from Hong Kong to send). After that, I'll burn a few more to send to a few friends. And that'll be that.

For those of you who don't get the CD, the process involves burning out of Nero (I encode everything as 48k WAV files in Soundforge 8.0, not MP3s if I can help it) and this time I had to re-encode some songs and clean up some audio patches that just didn't transfer well to CD at first.

The CDs get burned, stickered, Sharpied and then put in DiscSavers CD cases. They're made of soft plastic and are rubbery, so they don't break in the mail like regular thin jewel boxes would without padding. Last year, I went all over town looking for these cases and finally found them at Fry's. The CDs go in plain brown envelopes and viola, CD project ready to mail.

Quick thing -- if any of you are planning to get the '05 CD but missed the '04 CD last year, you can still get both. Just Paypal me twice or send me an e-mail. I'm making a special batch of them this weekend for a few people who've asked for both.

When I see a headline like this that says:

Glenn Close and Former Biotech Exec Marry

... my eyes just automatically form the word "BIOTCH!" in the middle there.

New Smallville recap is up:

She's no angel -- BatChica, a vigilante who restores order in Metropolis by swooping around and making mostly hollow threats, shows what it might have been like if they'd let Bruce Wayne on this show. If Bruce Wayne were a former Miss Universe.

Did you get the long, rambly, but genuinely warm-hearted notify e-mail I sent out last week for Terribly Happy readers?

No? Dude, what happened? Is your ISP all fucked up?

Ohhhh. You're not on the notify list. I see. Well. Huh.

Do you, ah... Should I...? Wanna get on it?

You do? Well, just hit me up with an e-mail. Wow, glad we got that sorted out. It was getting to be a bit awkward.

We went to see Brokeback Mountain tonight.

We didn't last very long.

At the normally very nice theater in New Braunfels, the movie was badly framed by the projectionist. The film was too low in the frame, so you could see all the boom mikes in every shot and all the close-ups showed the actors from the nose up.

I was about to go tell someone about five minutes into the movie, but something else happened first. An older couple behind and to the right of us mistook the theater for their own living room with a constant stream of dialogue that was much louder than anything out of Heath Ledger's mouth. "Is that... wait... no that's Randy Quaid!" "Wow, he got big."

We put up with it as long as we could. It kept happening.

We each did the angry turn-and-stare. Didn't work. Their conversation was too engrossing.

"He's living with the sheep." "Yeah, he's going to sleep out there."

Finally, the husband started to say something else and I turned before he could get going. The wife was closest to me.

"Have you seen this movie before?" I asked, a bit loudly.

Gaping stare. "Wha... what?" she asked.

"Have you seen this movie before?"

"No. I haven't," she said.

"Neither have I, so could you please keep it down over there?"

She stared some more, open mouthed. Just as I said what I said, the lights came up in the theater. They had stopped the movie to fix the projection. Dramatic timing, that.

"Let's go," Rebecca said.

And we did. We got our money back and told the management about our rear-row conversationalists and we got the Hell out of there before the movie started up again. The theater employees were very sweet. They apologized profusely and we assured them that the fouled projection wasn't the main reason we were leaving. They said they hoped it didn't spoil us on coming back to the theater. We've had good experiences there every other time we've been, so we'll be back.

We went to Hastings and rented Wedding Crashers, which was less than fantastic.

That was our night at the movies.