Look at what I did!

Okay, it’s probably not NEARLY as exciting to you as it is to me, but I installed a theme!  By myself!  And tweaked it!!

Now, granted, it’s far from perfect.  I’m having trouble with my Flickr plugin, and I can’t get things to line up right, my “Asides” are all scrunched up, but I think I did pretty well, considering that I’m a techological idiot.

I realized last night that I really am a wannabe programmer, and I had the realization in the most unlikely of places: Chuck E. Cheese’s.  I know, I know.

Okay, sidenote.. have you BEEN to Chuck E. Cheese’s lately?  I know that I personally have not paid the mouse a visit since I was young enough to actually have a birthday party there in my honor.  IT IS DIFFERENT.  Sadly, for the worse.. it’s sterile.

The ball pit?  Gone.  The tubular climbing device that takes up half the establishment?  Gone.  The normal sized air-hockey table?  GONE.  Yes, there’s a row of skeeball, but you can find more arcade goodness at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in Gatlinburg.

But what caused me to have this realization was watching the “floor show”.  You know I have a slight obsession with puppets (I LOVE PUPPETS!), and the floor show always constituted (to me) as a puppet show. (Except when they were immobile.. then it REALLY freaked me out.) Last night, the bird-girl (Birdie?  Maybe?) had a twitch in one of her pigtails.  It was driving me batty.  And I actually thought, “Some code needs to be fixed.”  I’m not naive enough to think that it’s actually that simple, but the sheer fact that I wandered to lines of code in a Chuck E. Cheese startled me.

Anyway, enough of me blabbering.  So, to sum up: I installed my first theme all by myself, and I did some tweaking.  I still need to tweak some more.  But look at what I can do!  And Chuck E. Cheese is sad now. (But they do serve wine.)

Because I don’t believe in scheduled art, I have been following this story for a couple of days.  I emailed it to Bryan last night, because we adore Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the Mooninites being particular favorites of ours.

I heard the story mentioned this morning on the Mojo Radio Show (y’all know how I adore morning talk radio in Huntsville), and not only did they incorrectly state that this was a planned publicity stunt by Turner Broadcasting (it had been released yesterday afternoon that it was artist Peter Berdovsky, and NOT a campaign for Cartoon Network), but when on to pontificate how they don’t know the show because it’s on Cartoon Network.

First of all, know your audience.  You just made yourself FAR less cool to half of them because you missed an opportunity to open up the phone lines.  It would’ve taken five seconds to do a quick Google on “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, and you could’ve appeared in the know.

Then again, if you had gone to that much trouble in the first place, you may have been able to adequately report the story.

Second of all, don’t talk down to the supposed campaign and say that it instilled fear in the heart of the city.  It was 10 LED-lit Lite Brites, dearhearts.  And they had this guy on them:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And perhaps even more disturbing is that, yes, the media actually blurred out the three LEDs that created a middle finger. 

Those poor people! the djs said.  They were probably terrified. Yes, I know that if I left an Urban Outfitters and saw this thing, I would immediately cry “Terrorism!” and call 911.  Or perhaps, just perhaps, I would’ve stopped and thought about it.

But seeing as how I’m already ahead of the curve here (knowing the character and the show), I’m going to be quite confident in saying: Been There, Done That, and Got the T-Shirt.

Edit – From CNN:
Two men pleaded not guilty today to charges they created panic by placing “bomblike” electronic light boards displaying a cartoon character with an upraised middle finger throughout Boston. Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards “bomblike” devices and said that if they had been explosive they could have damaged infrastructure and transportation in the city.

Um, so would pigeons.  If pigeons were explosive, they could damage infrastructure and transportation in the city. 

Anyone else catch, in the midst of all of the business closings, that the Michael Jackson School was closed today?  The Daycare, though, is still open.. should you be concerned.