Saturday, April 30, 2005

Our Bad Boy from Brooklyn


willycone, originally uploaded by C.B. Cebulski.

Here's the last of our kool kitties, the powerhouse from Prospect Park, Willy! Having been born and bred in the wilds of Brooklyn before we got him, Willy prefers outdoor living to being cramped up in our small New York apartment. He made his desires to get out of the city and back into the country very clear (I still have the scars to prove it!) and now lives with my parents in CT.

Last month Willy found out the hard way that he's not the baddest bruiser on the block after he had a run-in with some animal that was obviously bigger than he is. He came home in pain with bite marks in his legs and was rushed right to vet. The doc stitched him up and sent him home, but he had to wear the crazy cone seen in this pic so he couldn't scratch and reopen the wound.

Whenever I see this shot, I think back to that movie One Crazy Summer... "Cat from Mars! Cat from Mars!!"

Sex sells... Pocky?!

Here's your crazy Japanese link of the day...

Who wouldn't buy chocolate from these girls?!

Thanks to Mark Beazley for sending this one over.

How To Draw Spider-Man

This cracks me up...

How To Draw Spider-Man!

Scott Kurtz is a riot! Be sure to check out PVP whenever you can.

Movie Review - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This one's easy.

Two words: Skip it.

Really.

Read the book and let your imagination be your guide.

DVD of the Day - Resident Evil 2

I'll be changing my DVD of the Day reviews from an e-mail list to posts here. So here's the last one I sent out to get the ball rolling...

Today's gem was Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I would recommend you never let this DVD poison your player.

Yes, it has Milla. No, it's not worth the pain.

Number of hot chicks in the movie - Three
Number of these hot chicks who can act - One (Milla)
Number of hot chicks they would have needed to fix this movie - There are not enough.

The story - Unintelligible
The plot holes - Too numerous to count
The acting - Piss poor (save Milla)
The cinematography - Made me nauseous
The action choreography - Undecipherable
The special effects - Deplorable

The number of ideas that they could have made into something cool - Quite a few
The number of those ideas that ended up being cool - None
The number of dumb ideas that they tried to make cool, clever or funny - Too many
The number of those dumb ideas that were actually cool, clever or funny - None

The movie as a whole - UNWATCHABLE

I still have no idea what I just saw.

Heeeerrrreee's Lotto...


lottoball, originally uploaded by C.B. Cebulski.

Here's our other furball, Lotto. She was our first cat actually, who we got from a donut shop in Connecticut that was giving away kittens. (My sister actually got Lotto's sister, Jaegermeister.) Lotto also has several middle names but I'll have to ask Mutsumi for them all.

As you can see from this shot, she looks like a soccer ball. That's actually part of the reason we named her Lotto, after the company that makes the soccer shoes and balls. The other reason is that when we tried to count all her spots, we kept getting a different number depending on how she moved and stretched. She reminded us of those white balls with the black numbers they use to call the Lotto. So we figured maybe it would bring us luck.

Well, we're not millionaires yet, but Lotto's still young...

My boy, Clyde


clydeface, originally uploaded by C.B. Cebulski.

Here he is, my boy, my pride and joy... Clyde Koala Skark Bond Wallaby Dragon Zip Greato Cebulski.

Yes, my cat has seven middle names, and I can assure you that there's a good story behind every one. (And yes, cat owners are weird.)

For example, he got the "Dragon" name one night after we finished watching Reign of Fire. Clyde was sitting on the table watching the movie with me and his head would move this way and that as he watched the dragon action on the screen. When the movie ended I turned off the DVD and walked down the hall to the bathroom without turning on the lights. When I got back into the living room, it was dark but I noticed Clyde wasn't on the table where I'd left him only minutes earlier. No sooner could I wonder where he'd gone then there's this blood-curdling cross between a howl and a meow and he jumps off my desk and attacks me, sinking his claws into my arm. The cat was so affected by the movie he actually thought he was a dragon! I'm not making this shit up!

The next day I told the story at work and showed them my scars. They couldn't believe it either. Then Ralph Macchio turns to me and comments, "You better not watch the Sopranos with that cat or he'll put a hit out on you!"

Ahhhh, Clyde...

Why "ChesterFest"?

The first thing you need to know is that C.B. stands for Chester Bror. Hence, ChesterFest.

As best I can remember, the term "ChesterFest" was coined by my buddy Brian Murray back in 1999. We were working at Central Park Media and I'd decided I was going to leave the company. Usually when something like this happened and an employee was leaving on good terms, CPM always threw them a going away party. But Brian deemed that I had worked there too long and too hard to be sent off with just a single night of drinking, so he took it upon himself to organize an entire week of drunken debauchery. He dubbed this week of getting wasted "ChesterFest" and from what we can remember, it went down in the books as a historical event that CPMers still love to talk about.

Fast forward to April 2005 when I made the decision to quit Marvel. I began telling people I was leaving and everyone immediately started asking about the farewell bash. So the planning committee was put into action. Then Brian Murray gets wind of the news and his immediate reaction was "Dude, when's ChesterFest 2"? I'd forgotten all about the term at this point but the Marvel guys loved it and decided it was a go. We just needed a subtitle for it, like Electric Boogaloo, and sitting at Mulligan's over beers one night Andy Schmidt blurted out "The Bror Uproar", so there it was: ChesterFest 2: The Bror Uproar. Over the course of my last week at Marvel, we ate and drank and danced and partied. (Well, some people danced.) And when it was all over, I thought I wouldn't hear the name again for at least another five years.

Then I started my self-imposed term of unemployment. Everyone kept calling to check in and ask how I was doing, which I appreciated. They wanted to know what I was up to, how was I spending my days. I found I kept telling the same stories over and over. Finally someone said "You must get sick of repeating yourself all day. Why not start a blog?". So I did. But as I researched blogs and spoke with friends about them (Thanks for all the help, Layman!), I realized that most of the ones I visited had clever names - The Beat, Gelomatti, Channel Surfing... so calling mine The C.B. Cebulski Blog seemed pretty lame. The brainstorming began and I came up with all kinds of crazy names for mine, trying to play with variations of C.B. or something that rhymed with "ski", but nothing worked. Then one day, Mutsumi, my wife, finally downloads the pictures from her digital camera and there were a bunch of shots from my final going away party at the Irish Rogue. She sends me over one of me, MacKenzie Cadenhead and Mike Marts and they're both wearing these custom ChesterFest T-shirts they had made. (Maybe one day I'll post it but I have to make sure they're cool with it first.) Upon seeing that pic, something just clicked. Without sounding too self-absorbed here, ChesterFest was a week that was all about me, and I figured that this blog was pretty much gonna be all about me, right? The name made sense. So right then and there the ChesterFest blog was named and born!

Bored yet?

Thursday, April 28, 2005

What better way...


cocktails, originally uploaded by C.B. Cebulski.

...to test posting pictures to my blog than with a shot of me living the high life in Waikiki?

So I hit this button here and it's supposed to automatically post it to my blog?

Here goes...

Computer Illiteracy

I'm trying to make this work and it's not easy. How can something so simple that any 10 year old kid can do it be giving me such a hard time? Arrrggghhhh!