I’m horrible at remembering birthdays, but there are 3 that I never forget: my mother’s, my sister Elizabeth’s, and my grandmother Marva’s. Sadly, she passed away in late 2002. Instead of being sorrowful and depressed that she’s no longer here, I’m going to post YouTube links to three of the songs that she enjoyed. I’ve done this before and I may have linked to the same song last time, but these are there are some fun memories tied into these:

the Gap Band - Party Train
Whenever there was a family trip in her car and the radio failed to play anything good, she’d pop in her Gap Band tape and everything was right again. I liked seeing the fun video in the brief time that we had BET in our area before it replaced by a second country music channel. Long after her tape snapped she got the same Greatest Hits CD that I had and played the songs all over again.

Maze ft. Frankie Beverly - Golden Time of Day
Another Greatest Hits CD I had then was from Maze and I eventually found out that me and Grandma thought this was their best song. Most people like “Joy and Pain” and the usual hits, but this one starts with strong funk and flows right into some beautifully moving soul music. The YouTube link isn’t a music video but the song and the album cover are good enough in my opinion.

Looney Tunes - Three Little Bops
As a kid, I’d watch cartoons from either the couch but I’d flop on the floor a few feet from the TV if something good came on. This was an instant floor-flop cartoon not just because it was good but because Grandma and Great-Grandma Nee would want the volume turned up. Everybody loved that cartoon just as much.

I’m waiting for RapidShare to give me more minutes so I can download something and I’m too tired to draw or work on sprites. So I’ll tell you about more technofail.

1.) Right now, our cable system is freaking the hell out. Channels keep flipping between states of silent frozen images, frozen images with audio and static. Sadly, none of the frozen pics had audio that was inappropriate. I was hoping to catch a still picture of a mudslide while listening to a man talk about diarrhea, but no such luck. Even worse, no HARD jarring was nowhere to be found.

2.) I picked up a Ground Zero DVD of “Midnight Angels 3″ at Big Lots for two reasons. For one, it had a cute actress holding a pair of nunchaku (also known as “NUMBCHUKS”) standing in front of a Wu-Tang Clan logo. That’s three of my weaknesses right there on the cover. Then I find out that Lo Lieh is in it. Finally, it was only $3 so I give it a shot. A bit of a mistake here. The movie was hard to watch whenever it wasn’t an action scene. Those were pretty good. The rest was poot butt at best. In the beginning you could tell it was made from a tape. A bad, bad tape. Whoever made the master DVD for this didn’t even bother to stop recording when the movie was over because the end credits are followed by minutes of static. For the final touch, they didn’t even bother to print anything on the DVD. Except for the name of the movie being on the center ring, it just looks like a plain DVD that some dude down the street burned. Even those $1 Brentwood DVD’s have full color printing on them. They did a nice job on the cover, so I’m shocked that they lamed out on the disc itself. Really, it’s sad to see something with the Wu-Tang logo have such poor quality. But in the end, the Wu save this DVD because it also features a crystal clear music video for Ghostface Killah’s “Cherchez la Ghost” as an extra. Hot damn. In other words, I’ll take a chance on more of these DVDs hoping to luck up on more Wu Videos.

Thanks to mysterious forces beyond my control, the following image will be stuck in my head for years.

If you live in Warren, Ohio and have Time Warner Cable, you may already know what this is. It all began on around the time that TWC replaced our second TV guide channel (comically 6 spots away from the first one) with a second slot of it’s digital preview channel. At some point in the evening that I’m usually at work or not paying attention during the weekend, the channel freezes on that image up there. For hours. This poor woman is stuck in an unflattering mid-sentence mouth pose along with a phrase that has some of the weirdest capital letter emphasis I’ve seen in a long time. For added laughs, it’s an interlaced image that flickers back and forth between two nearly identical frames in a way that’s hard JARRING like a MF’er. The jerkiness is subtle on some nights while other evenings look like a scene from Herbie Hancock’s Rock It. I tried to take a vidcap of the flicker, but the hard JARRING wasn’t trying to hear that noise. It’s cute and all, but I’m sure I’ll be wanting to dropkick somebody in the neck when they preview the Boomerang channel and I’m stuck with watching Kissyface Infomercial Lady instead of Frankenstein Jr., the Superfriends or the Herculoids.