Monthly Archives: May 2007

Opie and Anthony in trouble (again)

You know what grinds my gears?

Going on 2 weeks ago, Opie and Anthony had a guest on the show. “Homeless Charlie” told sorid tales from the streets of NYC using colorful language. It was on the XM portion of the show, so it all went over the air like it should of. He turned out to be a great guest, he was really funny and added a great portion to the show. So much so, that he was given an open invite to come back whenever he wanted to.

During the conversation, he said he wanted to have sex with Queen Elizibeth, Condoleeza Rice and one other broad. He used some colorful language and the boys riffed on that for a bit. The show went on as usual. Turns out that XM didn’t like what was said and freaked out. Opie and Anthony made a canned apology at the start of that Fridays show for it. Then on Monday, they talked about it more and said it was pretty much bullshit.

Cue XM freaking out again. They suspended the show for 30 days, taken the program off channel 202 entirely, making it 24/7 Ron and Fez. A tidal wave of cancellations came into XM for it, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-40,000 (me being one of them). This is something that we’d expect from CBS, not XM.

So the big fuss is really over the potential XM/Sirius merger. They don’t want any negative attention, they don’t want regulatory hearings to happen, they want the merger to go through ASAP. O and A were seen by the company as a liability in this regard and made them shut up, it just so happens that it was in the worst way possible. So an XM show was censored. The whole reason for sat radio flew out the window. The whole reason I was paying for radio flew out the window.

Now the boys may be back on XM after the 30 days, but they’re CBS show has taken a noticeable downward shift. Opie and Anthony now aren’t sure what they can even say, would they want to go back to XM? Would they be allowed to say what they want or would they be put on lock down, completely neutering the show? The big rumor is that they will in fact be let go, leaving the 100 million dollar Stern to be the talk “entertainer” on the merged satellite radio company. Just the thought of that makes me sick.

The Red Ring of Death

Games

Thursday night, after playing some Dreamfall, my 360 gave me the ring of death after shutting it off. With no warning, no other errors my box just went up and died on me. Bought it on April 18, 2006 (MFR date was 3-3-06) and thankfully I was smart enough to get a waranty from Best Buy when I bought it.

Good news is, I was able to make a quick swap at best buy for a new one. Bad news was I had to go way the fuck to Secaucus to get to a BB that had one. With the new content for Crackdown hitting the next day and the Halo 3 beta less than a week to go, it was shitty timing. Microsoft says the failure rate is 3-5% but it seriously looks like it’s at 50%. There are stories all over the place a dead 360’s some on their 3rd or 4th one! How you could make something with such a fatal flaw is beyond me. Really sucks because besides that it’s a fantastic machine.

Dads knee surgery

Life

Dad has been bopping along with a bad knee for about 2 months now due to some torn cartilage. He went in for 45 min outpatient procedure today to clean up the damage and it looks like it went quite well. He’ll work from home for the next few days with his knee wrapped up. They have a wacky cooling system for the surgical area now that uses distilled water and some tubes to keep swelling down. He should be much better in a week, he bounced back from his last knee surgery (other knee, same problem) quickly.

It’s been a car maintanence month! After breaking one of the windshield wipers in the last snow storm we had, I got a blown tire. I mentioned that a few posts below so I’ve got my full sized spare on the rear right (never used so it’s brand new) and the new one on the left rear. The tire that was on the left rear is now the spare tire. Since we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately I noticed that my rear wiper blade was shot. It just smeared things around and I think the rubber on the blade was actually coming off of the assembly near the bottom. That was a cheap an easy fix though, I also got the info on how to turn off the maintenance light since I forgot how.

I bought the car 3 years ago today and I’m at about 39,500 miles. Since then I’ve just had regular maintenance done to it, nothing has gone wrong with the car in typical Toyota fashion. I change the oil every 4-5,000 miles, had the tires rotated on schedule (along with the 30k mile tune up), bought one new tire, 3 wiper blades and a cabin air filter (or two). Not bad at all. I have 2 more years of payments to go and I plan on driving this car until it can’t go any further. At the very least I’m going to have it until 2010, probably keep it as a backup car no matter what. I’ll probably stick with Toyota, thinking about getting a hybrid the tech should be really good in another 4 years or so. Out of everything I wish my car got better mileage (23-26).