The Friday Hot Sheet

Dragging today. It's been a long, strange trip of a week capped off by a marathon Thursday that I can still sorta taste in the back of my throat. Cocktails and funny stories with a pretty girl in Ponte Vedra followed by a trek across town to hook up with Lord Swift and my boys in Vendetta Nation at Endo for their regular Thursday Night blowout -- which got all kinds of loose. Ran into some old friends, threw back a bunch of Jäger shots with new friends Mia and Lucy, got some digits, danced to the beat -- I'm not even really sure what time I got out of there, but it was definitely a good time.

But like all late night good times, you end up paying for it the next day, and this morning's karmic banker came equipped with a beautiful, yet unbelievably sunny day that has got me squinting and shading my eyes like I'm a character in some early McInerney Novel. All I need now is for some guy to walk up to me on the street and offer to sell me a ferret.

Speaking of Jay McInerney -- you know that former John Edwards mistress that's been making the media rounds, Rielle Hunter? The woman Edwards was cheating with when his wife had cancer? Back in the day she used to run around with McInerney, who used her personality as the basis for Allison Poole, the lead character in a book he wrote called Story of My Life (and believe me, it wasn't a compliment) -- and then later turned up in two Bret Easton Ellis novels, including American Psycho -- where she had a less than pleasant run-in with Patrick Bateman.

I can't tell you how weird it is to sort of see this character on all the news sites, talking to Oprah, or whatever. Maybe it's just because I've read those books so many times, but it's sorta like a real life Purple Rose of Cairo --

Except instead of an charmingly befuddled archaeologist finding his way off the screen and into the real world, we get this skank.

Life is weird like that sometimes -- you hang around long enough and you start to see the airplane flying from left to right instead of imagining someone taking a white magic marker and dragging it across the sky. Characters come to life. You step into the books you read, the music you listen to, or the daydreams that fill the moments of an otherwise lackluster corporate day.

So before I start wanting Bolivian Marching Powder -- here are this weeks risers and fallers and the buzz as it looks from here.

	The Washington Capitals	It's one thing to lose a game 7. Pucks bounce where you don't expect them to, referees wave off goals on technicalities -- these are all reasons you why don't really want to play a seven-game series all the way to the end. But for the Caps to go into the playoffs with the best record in the league and one of the hottest players in the entire sport who leads them to a 3-1 series lead and then lose the next four games in a row to anovermatched Montreal team is just redonkulous. Seriously, who do you think you are -- the Dallas Mavericks?
	Thai Cinema	As much as I'd like to believe that I'm a fan of foreign films, the truth of the matter is that I only really know so much about them. There are so many countries that make movies, and each has it's own unique cultural touch. Whether it be Bollywood or Hong Kong, there's tons of fascinating things to discover. Unfortunately when you're browsing through shelves at video stores or the little stacks of DVDs you find at Oriental Supermarkets what you don't know usually ends up hurting you. Truth is, half the time I just end up choosing the DVD with the most interesting cover art. However, Since getting Netflix I've been able to browse and search a little more effectively -- and it's gotten me on this increasingly interesting tangent involving movies made in Thailand. I'll fully admit that I came in through the martial arts door with Tony Jaa, (who is just a complete badass), but there's actually a lot more going on there than I first realized -- and it's been a pretty cool experience to see what's there. I'm largely sticking to action titles at this point -- but what I'm finding is that aside from the inherent awesomeness of Muay-Thai as a fighting style -- there's also sort of a catty, ridiculous sense of humor that seems to be a part of a lot of their films. For example, apparently there's this whole thing going on in Thailand where even though transgenders and overly effeminate gay men (collectively known as "Kathoey") are generally accepted in their day to day culture -- they still frequently turn up in their movies as villains. Like the other night while I was watching this cheeky rip-off of Charlie's Angels called Chai Lai (Dangerous Flowers) which seemed pretty straightforward and fun at first, but then just went out the window faaabulous in the second half and became this bizarre series of Boss Battles between these Thai hottie crime fighters and what seemed to be just wave after wave of drag queens. No real warning, not much setup -- just one minute it's a normal cop film with girls and the next it was as if RuPaul had declared war on Thailand. I'm still laughing just thinking about it.
	Magic 8 Ball: The Motion Picture	Perhaps you've already heard the news that Paramount Pictures has started pre-production work on a movie based on this kids toy. But what you might not know is that they're doing the world a favor. Apparently the original rights to this piece of crap were originally owned by the now gone Universal Pictures -- who wanted to make a romantic comedy out of it. Can you imagine just how awful that would be? How utterly Kate Hudson Katherine Heigl Jennifer fucking Aniston horrible something like that even existing would say about us as a society? Like if you looked at it your face would melt. What I mean is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor -- real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky, rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifices, dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!! Well fear not. Because Paramount Pictures has thankfully scrapped this whole preposterous romantic comedy idea nonsense ..in order to make a National Treasure styled action film about it instead.
	The War on Terror	I'm not trying to knock the efforts of the men and women who are putting their lives at risk in order to find and stop the threat of terror attacks by extremist groups -- but am I understanding this right? Terrorists have enough free time to watch South Park on a regular basis? Look, I'm not trying to tell you guys how to do your jobs, but I'm sorta thinking that there can't really be that many homes in Afghanistan who's cable package includes a subscription to Comedy Central. You want to find Osama Bin Laden? Screw the CIA, get Comcast on the phone. How hard is this?
	The Kentucky Derby	The Derby is this weekend. Essentially it's the only two or three hours of horse racing that most of us ever pay attention to all year unless we're compulsive gamblers or just really into horses. I grew up in Colorado -- where tons of people are really, really, really into horses and although I enjoy the occasional horse ride or memory about that one scene in that old movie Private School where Betsey Russel rides a horse topless in slow motion for some reason or another that I didn't really care about -- horse racing isn't really that exciting to me. And yet, I watch the derby every year -- and for the life of me I don't really know why. NBC never shows the infield partying (which is rumored to be epic) instead choosing to focus on the rich ladies in hats and the animals themselves -- it's actually a really boring thing to watch on TV, until the race starts. Maybe it's the announcer guy screaming his head off, or just the raw power of the animals thundering down the track (which is pretty cool), but then the next time a horse race comes on TV I'll tune in for like a second and then realize I really don't care and switch to something else. Is it just the hype? What makes me watch this?
	Guitar Video Awesomeness Rebuttal	One of my favorite things on the web is Viral Video Film School. It's a weekly show that examines the bizarre trends that exists on video sites like Youtube to see if there's any sort of underlying explanation for why that site can be so addicting. Well as I've written many times about on this site, I'm no stranger to that addiction -- hell, I've even been contributing to it a little lately myself. So lets see if Brett Erlich has any feelings about all the friggin' guitarists on YouTube? Well whaddaya know, he does!

[Listening to:  Kelis - "Young, Fresh, n' New" ]