"KEEP BUSTIN'."

New Year’s Resolution

Happy new year everybody. Couldn’t be worse than the last one as far as my country is concerned. I hope.

Last year my resolution was what I called A COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE, and I guess I’m not the one to judge this but from my viewpoint I think it worked out pretty good. What I tried to do was just remember that you poor bastards out there are wasting your time reading some of this stuff so I should try to make it good. If I wrote a review and I wasn’t sure it was very interesting I wouldn’t post it right away so I could come back to it later and try to make it better. I’m sure I still put some duds up there but probaly alot less than I did prior to my Commitment.

This year though I’m not gonna renew the commitment. What I’m gonna do instead is called STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE. See, if you have a commitment to excellence, what the fuck is that, anyway? All you do is say you’re commited. It’s like saying the flag salute every morning, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna go out there and stand up for the values you just pledged allegiance to, it just means you’re there in spirit or something. The difference between striving and commitment is the difference between trying to impress your new girlfriend and laying around reading the newspaper while your wife does the dishes. You still love her, I hope, but you’re just not striving.

That’s the difference. When you’re dedicated to STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE you actually gotta put some elbow grease into it, by definition. If you just sit on your ass and/or laurels, you are not striving. My goal is to just be striving left and right, striving up and down, striving all over the place. I’m still gonna have gaps where you won’t see a review for a little while, but hopefully you will know that it is not because I am procrastinating or some shit. You will know I am out there somewhere striving.

Think of it this way. All last year, I wanted to have a fancy logo on my sight that said “A Commitment to Excellence.” It would be shiny gold cursive type letters, real elegant looking and what not. But I never got around to making a logo. You know why? Because I didn’t have to strive. I just had to be committed enough to think of the idea, but I didn’t have to strive to achieve it. You see, when Striving For Excellence, the mere achievement of excellence is not enough. You gotta have excellence and you gotta strive to get it. You gotta have both, every time. If you are the type of individual who excellence comes easy to, too bad. You still have to strive or you’re not living up to your resolution. You still gotta find some other more challenging level of excellence that requires striving.

Already today I did a whole bunch of striving. As you may have noticed, I am not a computer scientist of any kind. My web skills are primitive at best. So for a long time now my reviews page, the one that links to every review I’ve ever written, has been fucked up sixty-two ways to Easter Sunday. On my program here it looked fairly normal but then you look at it online and the fonts are all fucked up, some of the titles are randomly giant and alot of them are too small to even read. Also some of the links were to a file on the desktop of my old computer, which most of you probaly do not have access to.

I always wanted to fix this but I didn’t know how. So what I did now, by striving, was finally figure out what the problem was and learn how to straighten it out and put in the effort required to get it done. It required looking at code and finding little tags I don’t understand and what not. I now have a new respect for you computer programmers. And by “new respect” I mean “you people are fucking insane wanting to do that all day.”

So at least when I look at it now it’s all straightened out and readable. So please read my old reviews, there’s some good ones in there in my opinion.

Also, one thing I’m striving to do is make the world a better place and help people to get along. And I decided that one small way I can contribute to a better society is through my work at The Ain’t It Cool News. What I have decided to do is to Adopt a Talkbacker. I chose a guy named Goatzinger who responded to some guy’s top ten list by saying that he was a “moron” because they had differing opinions about a particular scene in WAR OF THE WORLDS.

I started by staging an intervention and declaring myself his sponsor. It’s sort of like an online version of the Big Brother program. I plan to keep an eye on Goatzinger whenever I see him in the talkbacks, and I will just try to look out for him, let him know that I have his back, but also let him know when he is out of line telling people they are stupid for liking a movie that was not mighty enough for his powerful tastes. But most of all I just hope to be a positive role model for him. Hopefully I too can live up to being a positive individual and lead by example. And I encourage everyone who frequents that kind of dangerous internet territory to pick some asshole to take under their wing and mentor. Each one teach one and all that.

Darth Vader came through in the end, if I remember right, or Lord of the Rings or one of those guys. So I don’t see why Goatzinger can’t be redeemed. And if he can then so can others. But probaly not all of them because some of those people are god damn lunatics. But I am not a coward. I’m gonna try. I’m gonna strive.

Anyway I’ll leave it at that for tonight but I promise I will STRIVE to write another column soon, probaly about the domestic spying shenanigans but let’s be honest, if I wait a couple days there could be something else. They could find slaves working in a secret underwater chamber below a pond behind Cheney’s house or it will turn out the CIA is torturing children in a secret prison on the moon or who knows what. Whatever it is it will be fucked up and I will be there to comment.

thanks friends,

–VERN

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 1st, 2006 at 4:15 am and is filed under Vern Tells It Like It Is. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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