Yes, that’s the title today. And look inside your heart, you know it to be true. There is nothing so wondrous, so magical, so hilarious in a vengeful spiteful kind of way than a Roger Ebert Bad Review. When The Ebert hates a movie, he lets you know — and manages to say things about it that almost, ALMOST make you want to see it just because nothing can be THAT bad.

When I read a particularly mean one, I always bookmark it into my “The Ebert Is Bad Ass” bookmark folder in Firefox. This way, when I’m feeling sad or depressed, I can go read them again and be guaranteed to laugh and feel better about myself.

He’s had some doozies. Like the Deuce Bigalow 2 review. Ouch.

Turns out John was there when the CD was “stolen” from me and played for the world to hear. Dammit. And here I thought no one remembered that show, or worse yet, remembered hearing any of it. But on the bright side, maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remember it…

Dammit. He remembers everything, that guy. See, that mix tape thing was just me being bored and taking a microphone and trying, in secret, to reprise my role. Except I couldn’t stop laughing at myself when I’d listen to it. I’m such a dork sometimes. Wait, wait, no I’m Awesome. I’m Awesome!

You bet.

Another blog project that I’m involved with is considering producing regular podcasts for its readers, in which news and topical discussions of graphic design issues would be presented. Podcasts, if you’re just an absolute piece of wood and don’t know, are like radio programs distributed in MP3 format for playback on iPods — hence the name Podcast. Its probably short for iPod Broadcast, or something, but I’m not sure about that.

The two guys who started that blog and turned it into one of the four or five best design blogs online are, quite frankly, two of the quietest people in the history of the world. Put them in front of a keyboard, and they’re flamboyant like Chef Boyardee on a can of Spaghettios. Put them on a radio show, like their guest appearance as panelists on “Design Matters” a month ago, and they’re soft-spoken, shy and quiet. So if a podcast from that website is going to happen, they would have to be behind the scenes while someone else gets behind the mic. Luckily, there’s some other authors on the site who are outgoing enough and have strong voices — verbally, not just typographically — to host the podcast. The tentative plan has Cliff hosting it, because it was his idea and he’s the one pushing for it to happen. If he ever gets tired of hosting it, there’s another author on that site who would kick ass and take no prisoners…

Namely, me. You bet. I’ve even got experience on radio, believe it or not. Pisses me off I didn’t think of this podcast idea. I’d like to be on that thing. But alas.

Friday, AIGA Nebraska hosted an Adobe InDesign training seminar all-day. Among other things, I left pissed off because I’m stuck using Quark at work. We just have way too many Quark files that won’t open in InDesign to change programs; we don’t have enough help or time to do the work we already have to do without having to convert files every time we open a file — and deal with the resulting text reflow issues and stuff. Sucks to be me.

Somewhere at the seminar, an evil evil person (or a good person who simply had an evil, evil moment) coated my AIGA nametag in permanent ink, and then put it back on top of my papers. Not realizing this, when I picked it up at the end of the day, I got ink all over me. I’d walked all the way to The Colorado before realizing it — I looked down and noticed that several of my fingers were black. There were spots on my dress shirt. I was steamed.

I don’t know who did it, I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but it was not cool.

One of the things we did while we were in Minneapolis was tour a design studio where two of Cliff’s college buddies work. During this late night tour in between dinner and the bars, I noticed something peculiar on the shelves above one of the dude’s desk. A smallish-poster of Lando Calrissian, his blaster guns replaced with cans of Colt 45. (Remember Billy Dee’s “Works Every Time” commercials for the Colt in the 80s?)

You’d think this simple act of Photoshop would be great on its own, and it was. (Why didn’t I think of that? So many questions.) But what really floored me was the caption.

“William Dee Williams”.

As observant as I am, and as much as I love those old Colt 45 spots, and despite Lando being my favorite Star Wars character, it never once occurred to me that his given name could actually be William Williams. Bill or Billy is short for William, so it makes sense that his name would be William Williams. Why had this never occurred to me? I was steamed.

But the more I thought about it, the more it continued to crack me up. Just the sound of it is so utterly ridiculous, and that makes it the badassiest name ever. I was on the elevator in the hotel by myself Sunday morning, and it popped into my head, and I started laughing. The older couple standing there with me were disturbed. Although, to be fair, seeing a young man in an Italian Stallion t-shirt laughing to himself early in the morning could feasibly be construed as disturbing.