I know, you’re all excited about the Casey Anthony trial and the probable announcement by Congressman Weiner that he’s gonna step down, but I have my own shit going on. Shit that doesn’t involve me sexting or Tweeting photos of my penis.

In one week, I’ll be entering an MRI unit for my first time. They screened me like I was rejoining the military. Do you have metal fragments in your eyes? Do you have a pacemaker? Stents? Infusion pumps? Are you claustrophobic? Do you believe in God?

OK, maybe not that last question, but they asked all the other ones, and more.

All so I can get inside this contraption that is going to make me FEEL claustrophobic (even though I’m not), so they can get a good look at my fucked up shoulder. The rotator cuff is torn – the orthopedist said he’s fairly certain – but we have to be sure.

According to the Matrix Therapist, who I saw yesterday, they give you headphones to wear because it’s so freaking loud with the clanging of the magnets. And there’s a magic button that, when pressed, says, “GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE NOW!” She explained the process to me, which was somewhat comforting, though I’m still hoping I can bring a teddy bear or something to soothe me while I’m in the MRI. Or perhaps someone will be kind enough to rub my feet. Yeah, probably not. Nothing to be afraid about. Right?

Yet I have a lot of apprehension about the whole thing, particularly the (likely) surgery to follow. I’m allergic to pain, though the Matrix Therapist was quick to point out that I’ve been living with this pain now for a long time. I neglected the needs of my body.

MT: “Do you think you’re worth surgery?”

Um, what? I answered “yes,” but inside I’m not sure of the answer. I don’t FEEL worthy much of the time.

MT: “The post-surgery pain may be less than what you’re experiencing now.”

Me: “I’m thinking more about the physical therapy, where some sadomasochist is gonna put my poor shoulder through hell and back.”

MT: “Well, you don’t HAVE to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Me: “I do if I want to recover fully.”

Then we talked more about the physical therapy, and how I can’t possibly be expected to drive to Tampa and back three times a week for P.T. She reassured me – as she did on my blog (yes, my therapist reads my blog!) – that they could set up something local for me. “Taxing circumstances,” they call it.

Then there’s the whole gimp factor, where I’ll likely be one-handed for a while post surgery. I’m a touch typist, that’s gonna be a bitch. How will I play my beloved Tiny Wings on my iPhone, or text? One finger at a time? That’s crazy talk. But hey, I’m all about the crazy, apparently.

More topics we covered in therapy: my blog, getting out of the house, connecting with friends, and naturally, my relationship with my mother. Paging Dr. Freud.

Onto a couple of apps I recently downloaded for my iPhone that I thought I’d share with you.

Tiny Wings is my current game addiction. It’s simple, beautiful to look at, requires only one finger to play, and yet I can’t put it down. The trailer below is best at showing the gameplay.

Basically, you use the hills as jumps so you can soar through the air, collecting coins along the way, touching clouds, and island jumping. I finally was able to complete my first nest by getting to the damned fourth island. The graphics are always evolving and changing, so it always looks fresh. A few screenshots below, but it’s hard to grab shots while playing this game.

99 cents is a steal for this game. Go now…download. And curse me later for getting you hooked.

Another game I’m currently playing is Hangman RSS. It pulls in current news story headlines and makes puzzles out of them for you to solve. It’s free, but there’s a 99-cent version that’s ad-free.

You get one hint letter per puzzle, so if you get stuck, you can click it and it’ll show you one of the letters. And at the bottom of the screen, there’s a brief glimpse at the redacted news story Hangman RSS is pulling the headline from.

Since Hangman is only limited by the number of news stories out there, which is, like, infinite, there’s a lot of playability. Whenever you’re connected via wifi or 3G or whatever, Hangman pulls news stories and headlines.

The cool part is when you finish a puzzle, you can press DIG and see the actual story, clicking through to read the entire article, all within the app.

Highly recommended if you like playing Hangman. It’s a refreshing spin on the game, and you might just learn something in the process.

--- Thanks for reading! SecondHand Tryptophan

So yesterday, I went to see Hot Tub Time Machine with a bud. I have a weakness for time travel stories. If I had to pick a favorite time travel movie, it’d be Back to the Future, naturally…love that shit. But I also have a fondness for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Time Cop, and the Butterfly Effect.

Hot Tub? Was so-so. It brought some laughs, many of them were gross-out laughs involving bodily fluids, but whatever. Not Hangover funny, but not a total loss. It’s just that, well, when you have a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine, can you be all that shocked at what kind of a movie it is? It’s a hot tub with a built-in time machine; there’s really not a lot of plot going on.

I’m an 80’s kid…graduated in 1984, so this was prime pickings for me. I LIVED in the time of jeri-curls and Miami Vice. Hell, I wore a linen jacket myself with pastel-colored t-shirts.

Bottom line: worth a rental, perhaps a matinee. Definitely NOT worth full night-time prices at the movies.

The premise that always interests me with time-travel tales is changing the future. If I went back in time, and I had my 2010 brain in my teenage body, what would I do? First off, I’d be getting laid like there was no tomorrow. I know stuff now that I didn’t know then. How to kiss a girl, for instance. Better yet, I know where the G-spot is. I’d be the most popular guy in school! My street cred would zoom through the roof!

Things I’d Do If I Went Back in Time

1. I’d totally make it with Janeen Heaney in 9th grade. James Bonner may have gotten the girl back then, but he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. I’d say screw the anonymous love letters I left in Janeen’s locker for two years. I’d go right to her face, bring her flowers, whisper sweet nothings in her ear, and make her cum so hard her toes would curl…maybe even pop off. She’d tell her girlfriends and pretty soon every girl in school would want to fuck me. Karl 2.0, yeah, baby.
2. Buy stock in Apple. In the 80’s. I had an Apple IIc back then. Perhaps now I’d easily afford a new MacBook.
3. Punch Kevin Ferrick in the mouth. 8th grade. Schoolmate and next-door neighbor. Him and the *other* Kevin (Downs) were merciless. I wouldn’t save their asses if I had another shot.
4. I’d preinvent the fucking Snuggie. I hate them, but I’m not an idiot. If morons are willing to buy tons of backwards robes, I’ll be happy to sell them.
5. I’d stop Michael Hutchence from killing himself. Love INXS and miss him a lot. The new singer, J.D. Fortune, just ain’t doing it for me.
6. I’d actually get fashionable haircuts. And clothes.
7. I would start going to therapy right after my folks got divorced. Who KNOWS where I’d be now if I had been enlightened decades ago?
8. I’d totally ace school, be friends with the geeks, the jocks, and the outcasts alike. The teachers would all love me, so would the girls. And the guys would all want to be me.
9. I’d steal all of our stuff out of storage when we moved from New York to New Mexico. Lost virtually everything we had when I was 15…heirlooms, photos, games. All of it.
10. I’d totally sleep with my first girlfriend. I was inexperienced and a goody-goody. Fuck that.
11. Stop Coca Cola from making the dreadful New Coke in the 80’s. ‘Nuff said.
12. Prevent Poison from ever becoming a band. I know, the history books would thank me forever. Oddly, the stupid band is in the Hot Tub movie.

I’d still prefer the Delorean vs. the Hot Tub Time Machine, don’t get me wrong. But I’d make it work however I had to.

Now, a little meme, courtesy of Dave2.

1. Go to your first photo file and pick the 10th photo in it.
2. Tell the story behind the photo.
3. Tag 5 other people to do likewise.

My first photo file is random Karl photos from the past. And here’s #10:

That’s me, circa February, 1987. Air Force Basic Training, Lackland AFB, Texas. Silly photo booth shot that I took for  my (then) wife. Let me tell you, when you’re away from the woman you’re madly in love with for MONTHS, you LIVE for mail call every day.

I remember that my ex told me she didn’t recognize the guy in that photo until her mom pointed out that it was me. Then, she cried. “What have they done to him?”

What, indeed.

I don’t tag people, but feel free to try this yourself.

--- Thanks for reading! SecondHand Tryptophan

I love music. I don’t know where I’d be without it, honestly. One thing the iPhone (iPod) does really well is music. I use Smart Playlists to sync songs all the time, love my iPod.

And there are some great music apps for the iPhone, too. Thought I’d share a handful of my favorites with you.

Moodagent – FREE

Moodagent is a really cool app I discovered not long ago, and best of all, it’s FREE. It profiles the music you have on your iPod and then lets you automagically create playlists based on your mood. Yes, your mood. You move five different sliders around. Based on the five sliders – Sensual, Tender, Joy, Aggressive, and Tempo – you figure out how you’re feeling, make the adjustments and then Moodagent does the rest.

The result is a playlist of 25 songs that all match your mood, like so.

You can also save and load playlists you’ve created with Moodagent. And if you’re not feeling the slider thing at the moment, you can click on the Search (magnifying glass) icon and hand-select any song on your iPod. Moodagent will then adjust the sliders accordingly for that song and create your playlist based on the song.

Very, very cool. Plus, it integrates with your iPod, so you can start a playlist, then exit Moodagent, and have your music still playing. (Unlike most music apps. At least, until Apple allows multitasking.)

Last.fm – FREE

Been using Last.fm for years now. It came before Pandora did. It’s a social music site. You sign up, create a profile, and it keeps track of your favorite music for you. That’s the basics. You can also use it like Pandora…enter an artist or song, and Last.fm will create a custom music station based on your selection.

Last.fm tracks all the songs you listen to. In fact, my favorite thing about Last.fm is what they call “scrobbling.” Thanks to a small download, every time I sync my iPhone through iTunes, Last.fm scrobbles all the songs I’ve played and uploads them to my account. It organizes everything…how often I’ve played each song, etc.

And my “neighbors” (friends) on Last.fm have access to my library, too. They can  listen to MY “station,” which is a great way to find great music. Another great way is to listen to your “recommended” music. Based on the music you’ve scrobbled so far, Last.fm finds recommended artists and puts them into a special station for you. Rocking service that I think everyone should be using.

Simplify Music 2 – $7.99

Simplify Music 2 is another great app. I got it for free a while back; now it’s $7.99, but it’s worth every penny.

Simply put, Simplify 2 lets you stream all the music in your iTunes to your iPod/iPhone. Now you don’t have to worry that you can’t fit all your music into that phone of yours…you have access to your entire music library. Provided you have iTunes up and running, of course. It forms a network connection between the Simplify app on your phone and the Simplify app on your computer.

Works fantastically.

Slacker Radio – FREE

Don’t get me wrong, I love Pandora, but rarely use it these days, thanks to Last.fm and Slacker Radio. Slacker is very similar to Pandora – you create custom music stations based on songs/artists you like. Again, it’s a great way to find new artists.

The difference, to  me, is that I think Slacker puts together a more organic sounding mix based on my selection. They put songs together that I’d never think to put together, but once I hear them together they click and make sense. Love, love, love.

Plus, I can select from musical genre stations. Sure, there’s your typical “80’s, 90’s, and Today” station, but I can choose from Reggae or Blues or any number of genres I want to hear. The only caveat is the occasional 15-second commercial (unless you buy the premium subscription, but it’s not required).

I can even listen to stand-up comedy. For instance, Steven Wright. Creates a comedy station just for me. Nice.

Great sound that streams via WiFi.

SoundHound – $4.99

How many times have you heard a song on the radio, or in someone’s car, and wondered who sings it? Look no further.

Load up SoundHound, tap the TAP HERE button, and let your phone listen to that song. SoundHound is remarkably accurate and should have your song for you in a matter of seconds. You can even hum or sing a song yourself and get results!

From there, you can Bookmark a song, Share it (Email, Twitter, Facebook), and even Buy it. It also looks up the lyrics for you, and corresponding Youtube videos.

GREAT app that will never leave my iPhone. I was lucky enough to get it for free way back when, but again…worth every penny.

Wunder Radio – $6.99

Listen to most any radio station around the world, people. Add in Weather radio, police and fire rescue scanners, accessibility for subscription satellite radio (Sirius/XM), and you have Wunder Radio. Damn cool app.

Find stations based on genre (talk, sports, pop music, new age, rap, etc.) or location (Great Britain, Australia, wherever). Listen to police scanners from your old neck of the woods (provided they’re in the list). Sometimes I tune in to some Dallas radio stations, just to hear the ads for my old hometown. Or British radio, same reason.

Streams great over 3G or WiFi.

There you have it…great apps to help you stay in touch with your favorite music, maybe even find some amazing NEW stuff to listen to.

You’re welcome. How about you? Have any fave music apps on your iPhone or iPod Touch?

--- Thanks for reading! SecondHand Tryptophan

A few friends on Twitter have mentioned recently getting iPhones and iPod Touches. Thought I’d review a few of the apps I use, most of them for entertainment.

1. iMob Online. This is a FREE game, similar to Mafia Wars on Facebook (FREE app here). You start out as a lowly mobber and slowly build your mob by performing missions and buying properties that yield hourly incomes. I spend way too much time on this game.

Add me, my iMob family code is 144-886-434. My name is Don Karlione.

2. Mafia Live. On sale right now for 99 cents. Same game, basically, with a different name. Yeah, I’m hooked on two of these games. Build your mob, buy new weapons and vehicles, etc. etc.

My Mafia Live family code is 194-000-323. Again, name is Don Karlione.

3. MMS Buddy. $4.99. Yes, MMS is coming to the iPhone this summer in OS 3.0, but for now there’s not a lot you can do with those occasional MMS messages sent to your phone. Unless you use MMS Buddy.

Basically, you look in your text messages, scroll til you find the MMS message with username and password. Then do a screen capture of your iPhone or iPod Touch. Load MMS Buddy, have it fetch the screen cap, it’ll run character recognition on the screen cap – pretty accurately – then fetch the MMS message.

I don’t get MMS very often, but this app is invaluable if you get any at all.

4. Tweetie. $2.99. My favorite Twitter app by far.

Streamlined interface, very intuitive. Click the TWEETS button on bottom, go to a window full of all of your followers. Click REPLIES, see all of the Tweets that @ your name. Click MESSAGES for your direct messages. FAVORITES, obviously show you your favorites.

Then there are other features in the MORE tab. My favorite allows you to search for Twitterers that are close by you.

Runner-up Twitter app, and FREE: TwitterFon

UPDATE (January, 2010):

These days, my number 1 Twitter app is Twittelator Pro.

Close 2nd is Tweetdeck.

5. Zombieville USA. $1.99 for the full version. FREE lite version here.

Nothing more than a very fun shoot-em-up. You against the zombies that pop up out of the ground and lurch in your brainy direction.

Side-scroller where you walk to the right, occasionally going inside houses for money and bullets, all the while blasting zombies brains all over the pavement.

Try it out for free on the Lite version, which gives you a feel for the game with one level. The full game gives you more than 15 different weapons to choose from, multiple zombie types, and different difficulty levels.

UPDATE (January, 2010): There’s a brand new update to Zombieville and it adds a slew of new characters you can play as. This game is still on my iPhone’s home page. Will review again soon, more in depth.

6. Distant Shore. 99 cents.

Purely pointless app that is kind of hard to describe. Most of what you do in this app is “walk the beach shore,” looking for shells and bottles. Collect 5 shells and get yourself an empty bottle. The bottles you find on the shore contain messages to read.

You can read the messages you find, reply to them, and then toss the bottle back into the ocean for them to find on THEIR beach. Use empty bottles to pen messages and then throw the bottle into the water for some random stranger to find on their beach.

And that’s pretty much it. Think of it as Twitter, except that instead of throwing out messages to people following you, you’re throwing out random messages to random strangers.

--- Thanks for reading! SecondHand Tryptophan

Thanks again to John for guest blogging for me yesterday in the Summer of Love. We’re down to our final weeks and I still have plenty of great bloggers posting here at 2HT, so keep your eyes out for them. This week we have:

Tuesday: Jester of Jestertunes

Thursday: Monty of The Daily Bitch

Saturday: Poppy of Poppy Cedes

Next up, it’s time to formally announce the new timeslot for SecondHand Radio. Some of you may already have seen the new banner in my sidebar. I’m moving to Thursday nights at 10pm Eastern on Talkshoe. I’ve decided to move from Sundays for several reasons. First of all, 5pm on Sunday was simply not a great timeslot as far as reaching more listeners. Many people are busy on Sundays, doing family things and whatnot. It was also nearly impossible for my friends in Europe to listen, since that came out to around 1 or 2 in the morning over there.

I think 10pm will be much more doable. It’s still way early in Europe, but the comments I got from my American and Canadian friends said that a weeknight would be better, so I took all of that into consideration and decided on Thursdays at 10.

I’ll be running a test show in the next couple of days and will announce it on Twitter. Not a long show, just want to get a feel for the Talkshoe interface before I start the regular show on Thursday night. I’ve sent out an email to a group of potential guests and I hope to hear back from them in the next couple of days.

What you may want to do before Thursday is download the Talkshoe Pro client. It’s not required - you can listen through the web interface at Talkshoe, but the client allows for a much cooler chat experience. More about that in the coming days.

I’ve been hanging around Talkshoe for the last couple of months or so, ever since Jester switched from BTR to Talkshoe and it’s generally far less fraught with technical problems. True, they don’t currently allow for music or soundbytes to be played, but that’s not a huge issue for me. There’s much more control for recording the shows and I can have hundreds of people on the line at one time. Granted, that’s not likely to happen, but it’s far better than BTR’s limit of five people plus the host.

So a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Angelo, who is some marketing guy from Schick. You know, the razor people. He offered me a free Schick Quattro Titanium Trimmer – which I found on the web for $14 – in exchange for me writing a review of it. I’m all about free stuff, so of course I said yes. And sure enough, it was waiting for me (along with gobs of other mail) when I got back from Karlifornia.

Here’s what Angelo told me about the Titanium Trimmer in his email:

As someone with complicated facial hair and a love of gadgetry – I find this thing incredibly cool and useful.  It has a four blade razor and an edging blade on one end, and a trimmer on the other.  It’s the Swiss Army knife of razors.

Now that’s a tall order. I’m here to tell you right now that the SQTT does NOT comes with a built-in compass or nail clippers or even a machete like Swiss Army knives do. But it is pretty cool.

As someone that usually uses an electric razor (Norelco, if you must know), I waited a few days between shaves to be sure to give the Quattro a workout. My stubble is pretty thick stuff…I come from Italian stock, after all. Granted, I didn’t get the olive skin complexion of native Italians, but hey, why bitch about that now? I do plenty of bitching when I get sunburned on my ghost-white alabaster skin.

What I *do* like about shaving with a blade – or in this case, four – is the baby-smooth skin I get afterward. And if I go for four or five days without a shave (not that uncommon an occurrence) using the electric razor almost kills me. It’s like a thousand tiny little Amazons pulling my facial hair out in tiny little increments. Owch!

I don’t know about you other dudes out there, but if I’m shaving with a razor cartridge (as opposed to the electric razor) I shower first to soften up my whiskers, and then I shave when I get out of the shower. I realize that some guys shave IN the shower, but I’ve never gotten into that habit. Besides, I’d need a fog-proof mirror for the shower and I’m too lazy to find one.

I got out of the habit of using razors (for the most part) because of the obscene amount of money it costs to buy cartridges. I’ve never counted, but I probably only get around four or five shaves out of a cartridge before having to throw it out and move on to the next one. And I hate paying $350,000 for four cartridges. It’s insane. Sure, I’m probably paying for it regardless by buying an electric razor (and you still have to replace the razor discy things once a year), but oh well.

Now get our NEWEST razor with our NEWEST cartridge that has EIGHT blades!

At some point, they’re going to hit the razor blade ceiling and top out somewhere, but it hasn’t happened yet. For me, 3 blades work fine. Four blades are good, too.

The Shick Quattro Titanium Trimmer uses the four-blade Quattro cartridges, which I found online. They run $7.99 for four cartridges. That’s about par for the course these days. The trimmer they sent me came with just the one cartridge, which serves fine for the purpose of this review. And the difference is that on the OTHER end, there’s a battery-operated trimmer (battery included…one AA).

So I thought I’d get a good shave and also trim up my sideburns, which are coming in pretty thick. I haven’t had a haircut since I shaved my head last month, but it’s about time to get one.

I looked at the Quattro and started with the proper shave. A little Barbasol shaving cream slathered over my face, and a short 30-second wait to let it soak in. Then I went to town.

You can see the Trimmer above. The second photo shows the Power button – it’s the silver oval down near the trimmer end.

I found the shave to be really, really good. Nice and close and the lubricated strip really helped the blades to glide across my face. I’m a fairly quick shaver and I didn’t have any problems. When I’m using a blade razor, I have been using the Gillette Mach 3 Turbo. Yeah, I totally bought into the “Turbo” thing, what can I say? Anyway, I will say that I found the Quattro to be a superior shave to the Mach 3.

Then it was time to try the trimmer function. Again, this is something I normally do with the trimmer attachment on my Norelco electric. I turned the power on and felt the familiar hum of, well, trimmers. Then I started with the left sideburn. Honestly? Meh. It works, but it doesn’t work as well as I’d like it to.

It did, in fact, trim my sideburns, but it’s not good at leaving a nice clean cut edge. For example, I wanted to shorten my sideburns and deliberately didn’t do that with the razor. The Trimmer doesn’t trim down to the skin – it does, indeed, shorten the sideburn hairs. But it won’t leave a clean line like a razor will or my electric razor trimmer.

EDIT: My goof. There is also a one-blade trimmer on the flip side of the four-blade cartridge. This blade is used for cutting sideburns. The trimmer is just for trimming the hair. That totally changes how I feel about the trimming aspects. It rocks.

So here you’ll see the finished effect:

See what I mean? I’m sure the razor will shorten them just the way I wanted, but the trimmer? Not so much. I’ll be sticking to my electric for my trimming needs. I use it also for trimming over my ears between haircuts.

And me after my complete shave?

Yeah, I cut myself a little on the chin, which typically happens. That’s because I’m a bad boy and don’t follow the Professional Shavers Advice. They recommend only shaving in a downward direction. I shave down, then UP for a really close shave. You’re really not supposed to shave against the grain of your whiskers.

Overall, I recommend the Schick Quattro razor. Great shave. I don’t think I’d spend the $14 on the Titanium Trimmer, though. Just didn’t do the job for me.

Thanks to Angelo for thinking of me. I’ll definitely be buying Quattro blades in the future for the rare occasions when I do the “real shave” thing.

But here’s the beautiful thing…you can get a Schick Quattro Titanium Trimmer to try it out for yourself – for FREE! All you have to do is go to Trim Flixx and create your own little film. It’s fun and you can sign up for a free sample. Here’s my video:

--- Thanks for reading! SecondHand Tryptophan