October 2006 Archives

Or Samhain, as it were.

I don't know what made me think that coloring this strip was a good idea. The limited palette combined with my tin eye always makes the colored versions look even worse than the black-and-white versions. This strip did give me an opportunity to experiment with the amazingly awful Photo Impressions, which came with our newish computer. The fact that the new computer is more powerful than my laptop means that I managed to color the whole thing without blue-screening, but Photo Impressions is very difficult to use, and will only let you use the paint bucket tool about ten or twelve times before you have to restart the program. Very annoying. And, the end product looks like crap.

Anyway, this strip is dedicated to my wife, Dr. M, featured in the last frame in a pictoral representation of the night we met (just over five years ago). The strip is also dedicated to UC Berkeley Celtic Studies Professor Dan Melia, the most entertaining crappy professor I've ever had, who sparked my interest in Celtic history by not actually teaching me anything about it.

Enjoy your candy, you unwashed pagans.

I just got wind of a brewing controversy over at UCLA Law School involving this year's Moot Court problem. A detailed, up-to-date commentary is available here. Briefly, the Moot Court hypothetical centers around a Mexican illegal immigrant child molester named "El Guapo," and all other fictitious names in the fact pattern (including the names of judges, INS agents, and geographic locations) are named after popular brands of liquor. This was an ass-headed move on the part of the Moot Court Board.

My theory on offensive humor is that it's fine, in fact desirable, as long as the humorous content is sufficient and the offensiveness makes sense in the context of the humor. Here, by all appearances, the decision to call the Defendant "El Guapo" and to name things after alcohol appears to be devoid of any humorous context whatsoever. And while I don't believe the liquor-based nomenclature was an intentional attempt to draw a connection between Latinos and booze, absent some other explanation it certainly invites the sort of outrage that the Moot Court board has suffered at the hands of La Raza and other students. Indeed, the liquor names may have been innocuous standing alone, but use of "El Guapo" casts suspicion on the hypo's other feeble attempts at humor.

Furthermore, the overall context of the asinine non-humor is the Moot Court Program at UCLA Law School, a prestigious, highly institutionalized student activity at a nationally recognized law school. The UCLA Law Review's Sopranos-based write on packet was stupid enough without adding the specter of racial insensitivity to the mix.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the Moot Court Board should face any official retribution from the school. I just think that surprisingly little thought went into such an important aspect of the law school, and I would hope that UCLA had more to offer. Offensive I can handle. Dumb is just dumb.

Yesterday, on NPR's Morning Edition, Steven Inskeep read a brief excerpt from a letter I wrote on the air. This was very exciting, particularly in light of the fact that it was my birthday.

I sent the archive link from the NPR website to one of my NPR junkie friends today and said he didn't hear anything about me in the segment. Puzzled, I listened again and found that they had replaced my letter with a letter from someone else on the same subject. To be clear, the archived media file yesterday had my letter in it. So the media file itself has been edited and revised. The first letter is still the same. Apparently they had some buyer's remorse about my letter and decided to make it seem like their judgment was better in the first place.

So, apparently, NPR goes back and fiddles with their archived material after the fact. After some high-tech investigation, I've discovered the following additional lapses in judgment that have been corrected in the Morning Edition archives.

June 14, 2000: Renee Montagne lets one fly after coming back in from a traffic break.

April 8, 2001: Steve Inskeep drops an N-Bomb while chatting with Juan Williams.

October 1, 2002: Sound engineers mistakenly patch in 90 seconds of an intern yelling at his girlfriend over the phone.

January 23, 2003: Producers belatedly discover that a Carl Kasell segment aired that morning was actually Carl saying the word "vagina" over and over again for 72 seconds, something they hadn't been able to discern through his frothing saliva and flapping jowls.

March 17, 2004: Frank Deford commentary entitled "St. Patrick was a Moustache-Riding Drunk" is later replaced by something with a little more punch.

December 10, 2005: One solid hour of Steve and Renee playing Nerf basketball in the studio with the microphones turned on.

I've been meaning for some time to post a second volume of Sci Fi Channel Movie Reviews (a page that many a random reader has come to via errant Googling). But frankly, I've been uninspired. Certainly, in the past few months there have been some golden crappy Sci Fi movies. Android Apocalypse, starring an all-growed-up Joseph Lawrence, was stupid and wonderful. The similarly alliteratively named A.I. Assault was less good but got the job done. I also finally saw Mansquito, which can only be described as a positive experience.

But the Sci Fi Channel has been phoning it in for quite some time. My main complaint is that the weekend movies aren't science fiction movies anymore. Increasingly, they're just straight-up horror movies, relying exclusively on dismemberings for their shlock value and giving no love to my inner geek. We watched The Beast of Bray Road, a movie about a werewolf. Frankenfish was about giant killer fish with a penchant for decapitation. Rest Stop (also starring Joseph Lawrence) was about a woman, who may or may not actually be in hell, being terrorized by a deranged trucker. Haunted Prison... you get the idea. These are monster/killer/ghost stories. There's no science to them at all. And this makes me sad.

Fortunately, over the weekend we watched a movie that single-handedly restored the Sci Fi Channel to its rightful place of supreme awesomeness in the department of awful science fiction movies. The movie was Bloodsuckers, and the rest of this post is teeming with spoilers.

Bloodsuckers takes place in a distant future where humans have left Earth and traversed the universe strip-mining every planet they can find. Unfortunately they've also discovered that all intelligent life elsewhere in the universe consists exclusively of various races of vampires. In order to protect mankind's interplanetary mining industry, paramilitary organizations travel from place to place hunting down and killing alien vampires. Sound awesome? It should, because it is.

The action centers around a particular crew of vampire hunters consisting of: (1) the experienced old captain who doesn't cotton much to protocol, (2) the fresh-faced first mate, fresh out of training, a stickler for the rules after being discharged from the real military under mysterious circumstances, (3) a dopey cowboy hat-wearing sonuvabich who likes shootin', (4) a butch asian woman who takes a primal joy in killing vampires, and (5) Quintana.

I mention Quintana by name because she is the lynchpin of the story. And for that, I will describe her separately. Quintana is herself a vampire, but she hates vampires, you see, because the reason she's a vampire is that both of her parents were attacked by vampires and turned into vampires before they conceived her. She was apparently the first being born in such a way, and as such growing up was more of a science experiment than a childhood. Needless to say, she's got some attitude on her. Her vampire powers include:
-Being able to sense the presence of other vampires.
-Being able to talk to any vampire in any vampire language.
-Wearing revealing vinyl outfits regardless of the occasion.
-Making people have sex in their own minds with whomever they want.
-Being extraordinarily attractive.

I identify Quintana as the lynchpin of the film not because the plot revolves around her, but because without this crucial ancillary element the film would not be worth watching.

Here are the basic plot points, which should reveal the awesomeness of the movie:

M---- successfully defended her dissertation last week, which means that she is now a Doctor of Psychology. She will henceforth be referred to on this here blog as "Dr. M".

Dr. M started graduate school in Fall 2001. In those days, America was not yet under siege by terr'ists, and the only connection I had to Dr. M was working nextdoor to her roommate. Over the course of the next five years Dr. M would have many adventures as she worked toward her degree. She would spend a great deal of time helping the Children and the parents of the Children with their mental health issues in various facilities. She would spend a year providing therapy to heroin addicts at a methadone clinic. She would grow consistently irritated with her Social Psychology class. She would encounter a professor who graded exams based entirely on the order in which they were handed in (the first exam got the lowest grade and so on). She befriended a strikingly handsome classmate with no social skills, and forsook him for an odd-shaped fellow with a penchant for vulgarity. Her school itself moved from one inconvenient location to another just as we moved to be closer to the first inconvenient location, with the administrative tasks appurtenant to securing her degree becoming more difficult with each passing year. And all the while becoming an expert on children's books, cystic fibrosis, and family systems therapy.

Now that Dr. M is a for-reals doctor, a few changes can be expected. When we're out socializing and someone yells "Is there a doctor in the house?", Dr. M will be obliged to reply, "Yes, but probably not the kind of doctor you're looking for." Any tolerance Dr. M may have ever had for my pretensions at doctorhood (my degree has the word "Doctor" right in it, after all) has now completely dissipated. When I make up temporary nicknames for her based on her momentarily objectionable behavior, I must remember to address her appropriately: "Don't throw your apple core out the window, Ms. Litterbug" will no longer do. When we have children, our children's friends will address her as "Dr. _________," whereas I will be front-named with an unceremonious "Mister" (though our children themselves, of course, will address me as Captain Awesome). I know it's only a matter of time before one of my ass-headed relatives sends us a Christmas card addressed "Dr. and Mrs." instead of "Mr. and Dr." (using each of our first names would be far too much to ask).

All things considered, I think I'll enjoy being married to a doctor. Here we are, a doctor and a lawyer. Like the Huxtables only black.

The driver's-side headlight on M----'s CRV burned out yesterday. Being the man of the house I stopped by Kragen Auto Parts on the way home to pick up a replacement bulb, and set to work trying to solve the problem my damn self.

I approached this task knowing that, despite my healthy track record of replacing tail light bulbs and lenses, the headlight was a different beast entirely. I once helped my friend try to replace a headlight bulb on his Honda Civic and it didn't go well. There's a lot more crap to deal with in the front of the car than the back. This difficulty, I knew, would only be exacerbated by the fact that I don't own a single tool that wasn't at one time in the "hardware" aisle of a supermarket. Nonetheless, I decided to give it the old college try before overpaying some mechanic to do it for us.

It took about an hour. Though, to be fair, part of that time was wasted in trying to replace the high-beam instead of the headlight. After testing the outer limits of my spatial reasoning skills by trying to negotiate the little metal hold-in wire blindly with my right hand while holding a graphical representation of the apparatus in my left hand, encountering some strange whitish goo in the electrical connector that I was afraid might be acid (it wasn't, which I determined by poking it with my finger), using dish gloves to handle the new bulb to avoid getting oil or perspiration on it, scraping up my forearm on the various bits and pieces standing between me and the light fixture, and getting my shirt thoroughly covered with grease, I managed to get the bastard in there and get the CRV's front end back in business. I felt very pleased with myself.

And then, the goddamn hood wouldn't close. The primary latch (the one controlled by the switch inside the car) would not engage the hood at all. I got M----'s help in trying to figure out what was wrong, and after a while determined that I had no answers. This was very upsetting, being as it was that M---- was already having a profoundly stressful week which is set to culminate on Thursday when she defends her dissertation (something which will require, at the very least, a functional automobile).

The story of getting the hood fixed this morning is long and arduous, and involves one of my many ideas that was good in theory (calling the tow truck service that we bought when we bought the car) and bad in practice (the tow truck never showed up). The bottom line is that the guy at Berkeley Honda fixed the hood by whacking the metal clip with a ballpeen hammer. There's something very satisfying about auto repair using nothing but the application of pure physical force.

Anyway, M---- has her car back, I was two hours late to work today, and by the end of the week I'm going to be married to a doctor.

I've decided to start an Internet rumor that the original Blue Power Ranger was played by Alton Brown.

Please pass it along.

Be you a law geek, a grammar geek, or both, or neither, I recommend to you this article, addressing the Supreme Court's use of the additional "s" when constructing the possessive of a singular noun that ends in s. It contains such brilliant passages as this:

Whereas Thomas apparently believes that whenever a singular noun ends in s, an additional s should never be placed after the apostrophe, Souter has made equally clear his conviction that an s should always be added after the apostrophe when forming a singular possessive, regardless of whether the nonpossessive form already ends in s. With this acrimonious undercurrent simmering in the background, Souter boldly began his Marsh dissent as follows: “Kansas’s capital sentencing statute provides . . .” This dramatic and gratuitous use of the possessive was an obvious attack on Thomas, who, as one of three s-ending members of the Court, is viewed as a role model for the millions of children who grow up with the stigma of grammatical ambiguity attached to their names.

The rest of the article takes on the matter with comparable vigour. For the record, apparently the Court's view, by a 7-2 majority, is that the extra "s" should be omitted. This is my view as well. According to the article this approach, while popular, is technically incorrect.

The pumpkin thief stopped by again this morning, hoping to finish what he started. Only this time the pumpkin was closely and jealously guarded.

"And now we play... the waiting game."

Once again my shutterbugging drove him off, but not before he gave me a little stinkeye action.

Here's Pepe trying to get a good look at the squirrel scampering up the tree:

On a related note, Pepe has been sneezing a lot lately. Prolonged, adorable sneezing fits. Anyone know what that might be about?

Dear Friends,

I'd like to take this opportunity to make an important announcement regarding my career, my personal life, and the lives of my family and pets. It is with a heavy heart, and after much personal reflection, that I bring you this news.

I will not be running for President in 2008.

I came to this decision after celebrating my father's 81st birthday and taking my oldest daughter, Madison, on a college tour. I know these moments are never going to come again, but this weekend made clear what I'd been thinking about for many weeks -- that while politically this appears to be the right time for me to take the plunge, at this point I want to have a real life.

The fact is, while I know that I could lead this country effectively as President, there are certain aspects of life as a private citizen than I am unwilling to give up. I'd like to be able to eat dinner with my family most nights. I enjoy rassling with my cats without having to explain to foreign dignitaries why the hand they just shook is covered with scratches and antiseptic. I want to be able to visit a gentleman's club every now and then without the White House Press Corps crawling up my ass about it.

And so, I won't be running for President in 2008. I also won't be running for the Senate or the House of Representatives any time soon. There are a number of state and local offices which I will not seek. I have decided not to respond to that ad I saw for a new assistant manager at Applebee's, and there are probably at least forty or fifty law firms at which I will not seek employment next Fall.

I realize this is likely disappointing to many of you. And frankly, I don't care. You'll just have to find some other stooge to take charge of the Executive Branch in 2009.

After yesterday's pumpkin pilfering I thought our remaining balcony pumpkins may be in danger, and I was right. This morning I once again spotted the bastard squirrel trying to make off with one of our tiny pumpkins.

Behold!

We kept the small pumpkins on the railing, and yesterday he managed to carry the pumpkin all the way along the railing before jumping into a nearby tree. Today, he made the fatal mistake of dropping the pumpkin onto the balcony. You can see he's having trouble with it.

This was a larger pumpkin, but he still managed to carry it away. Unfortunately he made a slight miscalculation.

He's thinking, "Fuck!"

He manages to move the pumpkin, but only gets it wedged more tightly between the slats. This was the last shot I could take before he scampered off in despair.

Ruby, meanwhile, increasingly enraged at having her homestead violated by a larcenous rodent,* can only watch from behind the sliding class door.

* I don't know if a squirrel is a rodent. I'm just saying that now so no zoology geeks rake me over the coals about it.

Being that it's October and everything Dr. M bought some tiny pumpkins at the store, which we've put out on our balcony. Our balcony is also frequented by a squirrel that likes to taunt our cats and then easily escape them. This afternoon, the squirrel easily escaped with one of our tiny pumpkins.

Unfortunately the little bastard was both strong and quick, and this is the best shot I could get before he disappeared.

Here's a blurry, Bigfoot-esque detail of the squirrel.

At the prompting of Michele I'm going to lay down my thoughts on this week's season premiere of Lost. I also have another post about my thoughts on the show generally after two seasons, which will come at another time. Here's the short version of my recap: Disappointing.

Here's what happens:

The opening sequence starts with a kind-faced blonde woman (they're adding kind-faced blonde women to the cast like it's going out of style) getting up in the morning, playing a CD of "Downtown," almost crying, and then pulling herself together. We then see her hosting a book club meeting in her suburban home, in which one guest rails against the chosen book. The blonde woman says it's her favorite book and she's glad the guy hates it. The book is by Stephen King, but I couldn't make out the title ("The Stand" would be appropriate, but the books the people were holding looked a little thin for that).

The meeting is interrupted by an earthquake, after which the members go out into the street. We find them in a nice-looking suburban neighborhood where everyone is coming out of their houses to see what was up with the earthquake, including Nothenry(!), Ethan(!), and Goodwin(!). The people look up and see an airplane falling out of the sky, which promptly explodes into two pieces. Nothenry orders Goodwin and Ethan to find the respective pieces, pose as survivors, and bring back lists in three days. They scamper off, and Nothenry looks at Blondie and says coldly, "I guess I'm out of the book club," thereby planting the seed of tension between Blondie and Nothenry that will no doubt be beaten to death all season. The shot widens and we see that the quaint suburban neighborhood is actually built on a hillside on the Island.

This was one of the ass-kickingest opening sequences of the show so far.

In the rest of the episode, (surprise) not much happens.

Jack is kept in an empty aquarium and gently interrogated by Blondie (whose name is actually Juliet, and who is played by the actress who played Angela Jolie's girlfriend in Gia). Jack ends up taking Juliet hostage and trying to escape, only to be met by Nothenry. Nothenry appears to be unbothered by Jack's threats to kill Juliet, and both Juliet and Nothenry insist that the door Jack plans to open will kill them all. Jack opens the door anyway, water rushes into the corridor, and Nothenry escapes and traps Juliet and Jack in the flood. Juliet closes the door, punches out Jack, and brings him back to the aquarium. Later, Juliet reveals that she has a whole dossier on Jack's entire life, and in the end Jack submits to her and agrees to behave while she brings him food. Rather than bring him food, however, Juliet allows Nothenry to go into the cell. Nothenry tells Juliet she did a nice job breaking Jack, and Juliet coldly but respectfully thanks him.

In the flashback, meanwhile, we learn that Jack's stubbornness and obsessiveness about finding out who his wife is banging leads him to accuse his father of banging his wife, and physically attack him at an AA meeting. This results in Jack being arrested and Jack's dad falling off the wagon. So the big revelation from Jack's past this week is that Jack's dad's death was Jack's damn fault.

Meanwhile, Kate is made to shower and put on a pretty dress by Beardy, who then takes her to the beach where Nothenry is waiting with a fancy breakfast for her. Nothenry tells her that he's doing this for her because "the next two weeks are going to be very unpleasant" and he wants her to have something nice to hold on to. Kate is understandably upset by this. Nothenry also notes the fact that Kate asked about Sawyer before she asked about Jack, something nobody cares about except the Others.

The comic relief portion of the episode is provided by Sawyer, who finds himself trapped in a dilapidated outdoor bear cage with a set of switches and buttons that, when pressed in the correct sequence, promise food. As Sawyer tries to figure out the "gizmos," a teenaged Other in the opposite cage pretends to help him escape. Sawyer is re-captured by Juliet (using the stun darts from the season finale) and the teeanged Other is made to apologize to Sawyer through the blood flowing from his nose. It's not spelled out that the kid is an inside man, but come on. We know that Sawyer is as stupid as two bricks when it comes to figuring out who to trust. "What? That bitch stole my gun? Son of a bitch! I thought she just wanted to randomly have sex with me in the middle of the woods because I'm that hot. Villainy!"

Sawyer finally figures out the experiment (indicated by the sounds of Stars and Stripes Forever playing from the loudspeaker) and does a little celebratory dance. Sawyer's reward is a biscuit in the shape of a fish, a large pile of peanuts, and water. Sawyer is disappointed by this but timidly takes a few bits from the biscuit.

This leads to what may be the funniest line of the show so far.* At the end of the episode, Beardy brings Kate to the cage opposite Sawyer (recently vacated by the kid), and kindly says that he'll bring her some antiseptic for the cuts on her wrists from her handcuffs. When Sawyer cracks wise at him, Beardy supportively says, "Hey! You got yourself a fish biscuit there, didn't you? Howdja do that?" Sawyer proudly says that he figured out the gizmos, and Beardy tells him that "It only took the bears two hours." Sawyer asks how many bears they were and Beardy doesn't respond. (Sawyer actually wins this argument, I think. He clearly figured out the sequence early on, but he was too small to press everything at once, so most of his time was spent figuring out how to hold one of the switches down -- which he does by laboriously obtaining a large rock from outside the cage. Multiple bears wouldn't have had this problem.)

Once Beardy is gone, Sawyer asks Kate if she's okay and offers her his fish biscuit. Kate is very upset (presumably the conversation with Nothenry continued after the "next two weeks" comment and didn't go well from Kate's perspective), but seems happy now that she's with Sawyer (Who the fuck cares???), and accepts the fish biscuit. Personally, I thought it was shitty of Kate to take Sawyer's food after she had just been offered a full-on breakfast, but hey.

It seems that the Others are pairing Jack, Kate, and Sawyer up with people who represent their respective personal difficulties. Juliet is a proxy for Jack's wife, Beardy (who's really nice to Kate throughout the episode) is the father figure that Kate's been looking for all her life, and the kid is the child version of Sawyer that Sawyer is trying to help by killing the man who killed his parents. This may be a stretch (it seems to work best in Kate's case), but that's the sense I got. In any case it does seem that the Others are trying to build trust on the part of the prisoners in the three separate people. We still have no idea what their plans are. And we're not sure whether Juliet is really committed to the Others cause, since she's already shown plenty of signs of (1) hating the fact that she's there and (2) hating Nothenry. Also, when Jack mentions the Dharma Initiative to her, she says something like "It doesn't matter who we were..." with an air of wistfulness and regret in her voice.

Next week, the other castaways plan a daring rescue of the three main characters, and Nothenry is livid when he learns that they have a sailboat (indicating that the Others never knew about Desmond). There's also some confrontation between Jack and Nothenry which probably won't be interesting at all.

And so, here's my prediction of how this story arc will pan out:

Kate: I know it sounds crazy, but I think we can trust Beardy to help us escape.
Sawyer: Naw, fuck that. That's the son of a bitch that shot me. We can trust this kid, though. He tried to help me escape once, and this time maybe it'll work!
Jack: I say we do the opposite of whatever Sawyer says we do, because I'm a prick like that. Besides, I know Juliet betrayed me once already, but she also saved my life, and I think I may have "fixed" her and now she's with us.
Sayid: I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm here to rescue you!
Nothenry: OWNED!
Jack, Sawyer, and Kate: Betrayed!
Michael: Hay guys! I brought the boat back let's go to Hawaii LOL.

And let me also say that the Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle is the single boringest and most distracting plotline in the show. Enough already. It's the most hackneyed thing in the world. Will she go for the nuturing, stand-up, doctor-type or the scruffy dangerous outlaw? She's so conflicted!

And that's what I'm talking about.

* The previous funniest line, for my money, was from the finale of the first season where Sawyer refers to Michael and Jin as "Han" and "Chewy." Though Sayid's line in season two where he walks in on Hurley and Charlie(?) listening to a record and says, rigidly, "This music is extremely depressing" was also gold.

It's Fleet Week here in San Francisco, something I was called upon to explain to my co-clerk this morning as she noticed -- with no small amount of alarm -- the fighter jets zipping noisily around the city. I'm not sure exactly what the point of Fleet Week is, so the best explanation I could come up with is "It's our version of the Soviet military marches through Red Square. And the Blue Angels buzz San Francisco for two days for some reason."

The whole concept of these fighter jets flying around outside the window is just very bizarre. To say nothing of the noise, the extreme close-ups, the shaking of the buildings, let's for a moment just consider the fact that San Francisco is probably the most anti-military of America's large cities. And let us not also forget the gratuitous waste of jet fuel.

But still, it's kind of neat.

Which reminds me of another advantage of working in the federal building: Protests. Today there was some kind of big "This time we mean it!" anti-war demonstration that marched its way past the building on its way to some damn other place. Last week, as Congress was closing its session early to get going on campaigning, a large banner appeared outside that read: "Nancy, stop funding war." But my favorite protest so far followed this week's DEA raid of a California medical marijuana facility, which invited a small group of extremely mellow demonstrators chanting "Heyyy heyyy... Hoo Hoooo... The DEA has got to go... Man."

Hearty congrats to UC Berkeley Professor George F. Smoot for winning this year's Nobel Prize in Physics (along with some other dude). Professor Smoot will be enjoying a nice chunk of change from the Nobel Foundation, and will be entitled to park in the specially designated Nobel Laureate parking spaces on campus.*

With a name like "Smoot," he has to be good.

* Seriously. Next time you're on the Berkeley campus look for spaces marked "NL." Those are reserved for Nobel Laureates.

EDIT: Link now points to UC Berkeley news story.

Molly and I were sound asleep just now when I was awakened by the sound of large quantities of water dripping onto linoleum. At first I thought our cat was taking a giant piss on the bathroom floor. I bound out of bed to investigate and found....

Water! Dripping out of the light fixture in my bathroom! No, really! Look!

I scrambled to find the largest container I could find, and settled on our largest soup pot (which still isn't very big). As I prepared the arrangement of pot-and-towels, I came into contact with the water and found it to be warm and slightly shampoo-smelling. The suds in the pot confirmed it.

Bath water.

Someone else's. In my soup pot. This does not make me happy.

Here's what we're dealing with while we wait for the emergency maintenance guy.

How can I ever eat soup in this house again?

Note 1: The maintenance guy made it stop. But we still have a soaking wet overhead light, and that's no good.

Note 2: I don't want to hear about the cat litter on the floor.

Note 3: The guys at the SA Forums are telling me I'm going to get mold. Rad!